Andy's Blog

Definitely in a bit of a ‘funk’ at the moment. All the responsibilities I thought I had seemed to be in the hands of others and nobody seems to have had the decency to explain why, what and how this all happened.

New ‘challenges’ are coming on-stream and the resources I thought I had have been moved elsewhere, and the people who moved those resources are asking how am I planning to support the new ‘challenges’? Good question!

I actually do enjoy challenges and given the reins I will run with any challenge, the position I find myself in now is kinda pulling me down. I have decided to just calmly follow the new world order and see how well they do my job for me.

Let’s see how this week works out….

As Robert F. Kennedy once famously said; “we live in interesting times”. Now as most of you probably know ‘living in interesting times’ is not necessarily the best of places to be. This, however, is definitely where we are at work.

A product that has taken an inordinately long time being delivered to the customer has now, on the eve of its launch, been shown not to be able to deliver what it promised…. by a country mile! Instead of supporting the 500 concurrent users it supposed to be able to do, it can only just manage 83!

For the past week teams of guys here, including my fair self, have been working around the clock to re-engineer the architecture and understand where it failed. But it doth seem that the Gods are against us. I present to you the prosecution against the Gods;

• At the same time the failure was found, the computer room air-conditioning has failed and now requires teams of developers to blow on the servers in an attempt to keep them cool whilst tests are ran.
• The only person who knew the local administrator password on the servers, at the hosting company, has disappeared on holiday.
• Key personnel from our Company also disappeared on holiday BEFORE the problems occurred (hmmmmm)

Not a huge list I grant you, but at the end of 18 hour days it doth seem somewhat suspicious to already paranoia ridden minds.

Ah well, I am in work on my lonesome trying to figure out the best way to cool down a server room which is slowly cooking servers…. as I said to my manager; “This wouldn’t be happening if we were using Linux”.

…his response was VERY rude!