In which I have a very Monday Monday

Oof.  What a crappy day I've had.  But first, weekend recap.

DeLee and I drove out to the Ruck Friday night and basically just had a continuously good time all weekend.  I do have a desire to change some things about how the Ruck works, but I don't know how to do it while keeping it at the same facility.  (Note that I'm not in charge of the Ruck, so it's not my decision to do any of this.  I'm just whinging. ) Bears Den is small.  The living room is where talks are held, and it also holds the front door, the entrance to the kitchen, and the entrance to the dining room. You can't talk in the dining room without being heard in the living room because there is no door in between.  And the kitchen is tiny.

I have a strong dislike for "you're my captive audience and I'm going to preach at you about how you need to act, or how I need your help, or something else you don't want to listen to" sort of talks.  This ruck had a LOT of that.  I absented myself (mostly solo), but there was no place where several of us could have gone to talk amongst ourselves.  (Other than the sex-segregated bunk rooms.  I did retreat there on more than one occasion to have conversations with other women.) There needs to be a "hallway track" like there is at technical conferences.  If you're there to make friends, or catch up with old friends, you need a space where you can actually talk.  

I'd also like more talks that are interesting to me - trail social norms and behavior, gear discussions, techniques to work on your conditioning at home, and trail cooking.  If people want to learn about various trail organizations, or how to mark trail boundaries, that's fine.  But that's not what I am interested in.

That said, I did have a very good time and I enjoyed catching up with hikers.  Oh, and I was Friar Tuck this time!  Seeing as how I'm a gearhead and have had multiples of every possible item, I figured I was well qualified to make suggestions on people's gear.  We tuckerized four packs, and I hope the hikers took away some ideas on how to lighten their loads.

Sunday DeLee and I arrived back home around 10:30, 11 AM.  I spent the afternoon working on moving some hiking gear into the sunroom.  A lot remains to be done but I was glad to make some progress.

I plan to get out to see Pluto while it's warm and sunny, maybe tomorrow.

Okay, so my crappy day today.  I scheduled an outage to do a system software upgrade to our Pillar Axiom 500.  It is our primary NAS server.  If you aren't a computer nerd, it's a type of computer that other computers connect to for files.  It's kind of like an attached disk drive, except it lives in another room.  And all the other computers can see it too.

The upgrade went just fine, until it was done and I was checking the three filesystems on it.  They were all offline.  I had manually set them offline because I have no way to quiesce activity to them from all their clients.  The upgrade wanted to have very little activity on the filesystems.  Hence offline.  It's what we did for the last upgrade.  This time, however, they introduced a twist.  The new version of the operating system does not include "online" or "offline" commands.  I had no way to online them!  Tech support went back and forth for hours.  I missed the end of my five hour outage window.  Finally, I got a call asking me if they were REALLY offline, or just LOOKED offline?  Doh!  I hadn't checked that!  I took the OS's word for it.  They were in fact online and fully operational.

They're coming out with an update to fix the issue.  In the meantime, I recommended they revise the installation notes to caution customers not to take filesystems offline prior to the upgrade.  Sigh.

While this was going on, I felt a little dry eyed so I reached for my eye drops.  As soon as they went in my eye, I felt an intense burning.  My eye drop bottle is the same size, shape, and color as my water flavoring bottle.  The flavor was orange - hence citric acid.  And it's in an alcohol base.  Good golly that hurt.  I rinsed my eye out thoroughly, used the eye drops, and decided to store the water drops in the fridge from now on.  Oy.  My eye and eyelid still hurt.

I had other, unrelated technical problems at work today as well.  Data not coming in correctly from a spacecraft, software not installing.  With the stress of it all I was hungry and tired.  I still am.  And now I'm going to bed.  Good night.