The thing that amazes me is that this could have been prevented with a decent UPS system in place, but they don’t have one. At the very least I’d expect them to have one in the server room, but the company doesn’t want to spend the money. We could have been back up and running within 20 minutes of the original brownout had we had a UPS in the server room as the database corruption has been the source of our downtime. Instead we’ve lost two and a half days worth of work.

Sometimes I just don’t understand how upper management in even the brightest companies think.

I’ve not been keeping up with my RSS feeds so I have a couple of thousand entries spread across the blogroll to dig through which should occupy some of the downtime today. We’re surprisingly slow support-wise considering we just got off a two-week break. I thought there’d be a ton of issues to deal with, but so far I’ve only gotten a couple of calls.

Other than that the only other news is the amazing lack of snow we’ve got here considering how much we had at Krismas. We had one day were we broke a record high of 60 degrees and the landscape has looked more like spring than winter since then. We might be getting more snow later this week, but it’s pretty bleak looking out there at the moment.

Lastly the next semester of college classes start next week. Not looking forward to it as it means I’ll be going from work to school Monday through Thursday nights every week for 15 weeks, but it’ll get three more classes out of the way. Decided to go ahead and take the PC Hardware class even though I already know 90% of it (been building my own PCs for years) as there’s still that 10% to fill in the blanks with. If nothing else it’s an easy A. The Windows Server 2003 and ISA classes will actually be new to me, though, so those should be fun. Speaking of classes, my grade for last semester was a solid A giving me the first 4.0 GPA I’ve ever had. Kind of cheated in that I only took the one class and I knew most of it already, but you take your accomplishments where you can find them.

Tomorrow morning we’ll get up and open the handful of gifts we have under the tree which consists mostly of the couple of items we got Courtney, the half dozen or so you folks were so generous to send to me, and Courtney’s gifts to Anne and myself. The presents are a little sparse compared to years past, but we’re back out under our own roof, the bills are pretty much up to date, we’re relatively healthy, and we’re all together and those are arguably the best gifts one could hope for. After doing our small gift exchange in the morning we’ll be heading over to Anne’s parents place for Christmas brunch and the gift exchange there. To keep costs down us adults drew names this year and set a limit on how much to spend. Anne is working tomorrow as well so we won’t be able to stay too long before heading back to Ann Arbor.

On the plus side it looks like Anne and I may have a little spare money to take advantage of the After Khrismas Sales to pick up a little something something for each other. We won’t be opening them up on Krismas Day, but better late than never I always say. It’ll also be one of the first times I’ve had any money to spend on an After Krismas Sale. May see if I can’t pick up a few sets of LED Krismas lights on sale in preparation for next year. I want to have enough strings to do up a couple of windows in lights as well as the tree. All in all it should be a very good Krismas in spite of the tough times everyone is facing at the moment. I’m feeling very grateful for the family I have, both immediate and the extended family that includes the SEB Regulars who drop by to see what nonsense I’m spewing each day.

Posting has been light the past couple of days because I’ve been fairly busy running around getting last minute stuff done with the family and it’ll probably continue to be light until at least Friday, but I’ll try to get a few more things up when I can. For now I’ll leave you with my sincere hope that you’re enjoying your Krismas Eve as much as I am.

Click to embiggen!

Today it’s snowing some more. The weird part is that it’s wasn’t, and still isn’t, the stereotypical big fluffy flakes you normally associate with lots of snow, but lots of wussy little flakes reminiscent of sugar substitute that sting your face and are generally annoying as hell. Normally you’ll get an inch or so out of those, but it just kept on coming and we ended up with a metric assload of the stuff. It’s also been bone bitingly cold as of late with temps not reaching far out of the teens, if at all, during the day. It feels more like February than December.

On the plus side it does feel like the Krismases of my youth. It’s entirely possible that I’m not remembering them clearly, but it seems we had snow like this a lot more often when I was a kid. Of course Pontiac is a bit further north than Ann Arbor so it’s possible we did get more snow, but the past decade or so it seems like we get dumped on with a foot or two in November that lasts three days tops and by Krismas we’re lucky if we have a dusting of snow. This feels like Krismas. Though ironically it may end up keeping us from visiting with my folks come Krismas Eve as the weather report guys are predicting freezing rain that day. Winter has come early to Michigan.

Updated: Just checked the weather and we’re under yet another winter weather advisory until 7PM tomorrow night:

... WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 7 PM EST WEDNESDAY…

THE WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW… SLEET… AND FREEZING RAIN IS NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL 7 PM EST WEDNESDAY.

PERIODS OF SNOW ARE EXPECTED FROM LATE THIS MORNING THROUGH TONIGHT. SNOWFALL WILL BE MODERATE TO HEAVY AT TIMES… DROPPING VISIBILITIES TO LESS THAN ONE MILE. SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 2 TO 5 INCHES WILL BE POSSIBLE THROUGH EARLY WEDNESDAY MORNING. IN ADDITION… THE SNOW IS EXPECTED TO MIX WITH SLEET AND FREEZING RAIN LATE TONIGHT… BEFORE CHANGING OVER TO MOSTLY RAIN BY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON.

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY MEANS THAT PERIODS OF SNOW… SLEET… OR FREEZING RAIN WILL CAUSE TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. BE PREPARED FOR SLIPPERY ROADS AND LIMITED VISIBILITIES… AND USE CAUTION WHILE DRIVING.
More Information

... ANOTHER WINTER STORM TAKES AIM AT SOUTHEAST MICHIGAN…

.A PROLONGED PERIOD OF UNFAVORABLE WEATHER CONDITIONS WILL OCCUR TODAY THROUGH WEDNESDAY AS A COMPLEX WINTER STORM TRACKS THROUGH THE UPPER MIDWEST. A WARM FRONT PRECEDING THE SYSTEM WILL SLOWLY LIFT ACROSS SOUTHEAST MICHIGAN TODAY AND TONIGHT… BRINGING WITH IT SEVERAL BANDS OF SNOW. THE PASSAGE OF THESE BANDS ACROSS THE AREA WILL PRODUCE PERIODS OF MODERATE TO HEAVY SNOWFALL… WITH ACCUMULATIONS GENERALLY RANGING FROM 4 TO 6 INCHES BY 700 AM WEDNESDAY MORNING.

THE MAIN SURFACE LOW IS THEN EXPECTED TO TRACK NORTHEAST THROUGH SOUTHERN LOWER MICHIGAN ON WEDNESDAY BRINGING A SECOND ROUND OF WINTER WEATHER TO THE REGION. BY THIS TIME… ENOUGH WARM AIR WILL HAVE SURGED NORTHWARD TO ALLOW SNOW TO MIX WITH SLEET AND FREEZING RAIN. THIS WINTRY MIX OF PRECIPITATION WILL MIX WITH RAIN TOWARDS THE OHIO BORDER. AREAS NEAR AND NORTH OF TRI CITIES WILL REMAIN PRIMARILY SNOW… AND THE POTENTIAL EXISTS FOR ADDITIONAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 6 INCHES FROM WEDNESDAY MORNING THROUGH WEDNESDAY EVENING. FOR LOCATIONS ALONG AND SOUTH OF I-69… ADDITIONAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS ARE EXPECTED TO REMAIN LESS THAN 3 INCHES… WITH LIGHT TO MODERATE ICE ACCUMULATIONS. TRAVEL WILL BE DIFFICULT ACROSS THE REGION TODAY AND WEDNESDAY.

Jinkies!

Still this is annoying.

So the good news is that the pressure to find a new job is off for now as I still have a year and a half on my contract. This makes me feel good. Of course there was a chance, however slim, that I could have been hired by Big.com Company and that would’ve been really cool. That makes me feel bad at the same time.

I suppose I’ll just be pleased that I have one less stress to stress out over during the holidays.

She explained that, unlike our hips which are really nice ball-cup joints, the shoulder’s rotator cuff is composed of muscles and tendons that surround the shoulder joint and are responsible for holding our arm in place. Somewhere along the line about a year ago I managed to injure mine—not sure how but I’d guess from my habit of sleeping on my arm—and it’s gotten progressively weaker since then. The good news is that she doesn’t think I need surgery to fix the problem. I should be able to get it back to normal using physical therapy. The bad news is the closest PT office that my crappy health insurance considers in-plan is in Livonia which is a good half-hour away by freeway. But at least I know what the problem is and it’s not something melodramatic like shoulder cancer or something.

So I have a prescription for a pain killer and a physical therapist. I also have a prescription for a CAT scan thanks to a last-minute question I had about how a certain activity, which I won’t go into here but does involve some strenuous effort, that occasionally results in a major headache that shoots up from the base of my neck to encompass my whole head to the point that I can feel my pulse in my head, my nose feels like it’s bleeding, and my eyes feel like they’re about to explode. It doesn’t happen often, last time I can recall was maybe seven months ago, but when it does happen it can put a major dent in how my day is going. She thinks it sounds like I’m triggering a migraine, but she’d like to do a CAT scan to rule out something much more melodramatic such as a potential aneurysm. So assuming I can find a facility my insurance will cover nearby I may soon be getting my first ever CAT scan.

Oh yeah, one other bit of bad news: I’m back up to 296 pounds having managed to regain the weight I lost by switching to diet pop. She was less concerned with that at the moment than the rotator cuff injury, but it’s something I’m going to need to address as well eventually.

Now if you drive just a mere hour and a half north to Otisville, where my parents live, the same snowfall nets you pics like these my mother took.  Here’s an example in the image to the right. Again, click to embiggen.

As you can see a mere 75 or so miles can make a huge difference in how white your your landscape becomes during a given snowfall in Michigan. If it weren’t for the fact that there’s not jack in the way of jobs for my chosen career or much of anything else to do further up the state then I’d be inclined to move there just for the better snowfalls. Though given the shortage of funds to do much of anything other than hang out at the house probably makes the fact that Ann Arbor has quite a lot to do rather a moot point. Just the same, I have snow-envy.

Saturday started off OK, but saw me slowly sliding into a funk as the stress of trying to hold onto my job, get through Krismas without going bankrupt, new car problems, and my health started to build up. You already know about how I recently had to apply to keep the job I’m already doing as they’re converting it from a contract to an internal job so I won’t go over that again. The Krismas issue is the standard one of not having enough money to do all the things I’d like to do in part because there’s all these other problems cropping up. I don’t even have a new artificial tree yet and I have a feeling I’m going to end up buying what I can afford as opposed to what I would like to have and that happens so much these days that it’s really frustrating.

The latest car problem involves the driver’s seatbelt. Something has gone wrong with the latch for the belt such that simply sliding in the tab doesn’t latch it and I end up having to repeatedly ram the tab into the latch to get it to, well, latch. Obviously this doesn’t affect how the car runs, but I’ve been in enough accidents to understand how driving without a seatbelt puts me at risk of more than just a traffic ticket. I have no idea how much it’ll cost to fix it, but I’m sure it won’t be cheap.

As for health problems, well I’ve mentioned previously how I’ve been having a problem with my arm muscles for about a year now where if I stretch too hard to reach something it feels like I tried to rip my arm off. In my right arm this has gotten progressively worse to the point where it’s now constantly sore with a dull ache and even simple efforts like reaching to my back pocket to pull out my wallet while sitting in the car causes excruciating pain. I have no idea what could be causing the issue. Perhaps a blood clot or a vitamin deficiency, it’s hard to say, but I’ve gone ahead and made a doctor’s appointment for this evening to have it checked out. Trouble is I’m sure it’ll be the sort of thing where I’ll need to have all sorts of tests done to figure out what the hell the problem is. Tests that’ll probably only be partially covered by my crappy insurance.

Add all of that up and I’ve not wanted to do much of anything over the past several days which is part of why I haven’t blogged like I had intended to. I tend to be fairly laid back so when I do get stressed I tend to really over-stress and as such I ended up being awake all Saturday night into Sunday morning. I finally went to bed about 8AM, was back up in an hour to drive Anne to work as she got called in on her day off, went back to bed an hour later and slept until 2:30PM. I’m feeling a bit better today, but not quite back to normal. I was depressed for about two days and now I’m just kind of out of it. Which means I’ll probably be back to (what passes for) normal tomorrow.

The National Law Journal

Tresa Baldas / Staff reporter
November 17, 2008

Is booting up a computer work, or a work break?

More companies fending off suits on the issue.

It seems just about anything in the workplace can find its way into wage-and-hour litigation.

Click to read more...