It’s been a strange day today. First of all, Jan’s back is still bad, and so I didn’t go in the office this morning and took Jamie into school. I phoned work and told them I would work from home. I managed to get some work done, but they were having problems with their firewall, and in trying to fix it kept cutting off my VPN access.
Old Friend
At lunch time I received an IM from an old colleague, Mark D, to whom I haven’t spoken for far too long (I’m too lazy to keep in touch) which was a pleasant surprise. I was just telling him that a mutual ex colleague, Steve P, was now working again with me, when who should IM me, but Steve P. spooky 🙂
Anyway, Mark happened to be sat in his office using ICQ remotely on his Linux machine at home, using, I think, VNC over SSH to talk to his firewall, and then running ICQ as a remote X-app from a machine on his internal network. I was impressed! LOL
Problem!
After I had fetched Jamie back from school this afternoon, I got a phone call from the office to say they were having a major problem on one of the sites and could I investigate. As the VPN was down I couldn’t. But they got IT to stop what they were doing and restore the old configuration so I could re-connect. Hmmm, that serious then! So I looked into it and Duncan R and I have come up with an hypothesis which may explain what happened. It’s one of those true multitasking issues which you don’t often come across is my line of work. Caused by the fact that the site runs on a box with three or four processors, and things really do happen at the same time.
I’ve still got to investigate whether our hypothesis holds water, but my gut feeling is that it will. There’s certainly nothing else to explain it.
Toilets
Back to this evening, and I fixed the downstairs loo. That’s the second loo I’ve had to fix in a week! Both broken by me. I don’t know what’s going on. Last week I managed to break the SEAT of the upstairs loo. I mean the actual seat, the ring shaped bit you sit on, not the hinge (which is what usually breaks on these things) but a split in the seat. And I wasn’t even standing on it ( which is how I’ve broken hinges in the past). I was sat on it. I know I need to lose a bit of weight, but I’m not that heavy!
I replaced that last weekend. Then yesterday I broke the handle on the downstairs loo. Just snapped it right off. So now it’s got a new one which doesn’t match, but hey it’ll do for now.
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