Jim's Home Page

At last! I received my Employment Authorization Document in the mail today. This means that I can officially flip burgers instead of working in the computer industry. I am now just one tiny little step away from permanent residency.

I have been following the Tour de France over the last three weeks, and today was the last stage, finishing on the Champs Elysees in Paris. Robbie McEwan, an Australian rider, was leading the sprint competition by one point at the beginning of the stage, over Erik Zabel, the six-time winner of the green jersey. All Robbie had to do was stick to Zabel's wheel and he would win the points competition.

That wasn't good enough for Robbie, though. He won the first intermediate sprint in front of Zabel, opening his lead to three points. And then he topped that by winning the stage!

The first ever Australian to win the green jersey! Congratulations, Robbie McEwan!

Congratulations also to Lance Armstrong. His win in the overall classification is his fourth in a row. How many more times can he wear the yellow jersey of the overall race leader in Paris? And will he equal Miguel Indurain's record of five wins in a row?

We will have to wait until next year to find out.

I saw "Minority Report" today, and it wasn't a bad flick, if a little predictable. A movie that is worth seeing for the car and highway scenes alone. It reminds me of another book that I would love to see made into a movie just for the author's vision of how the highway system should be: "The Gold Coast", by Kim Stanley Robertson.

In this book, the cars are run from tracks embedded in the road, just like slot cars. Of course, a computer does your driving for you: just program your destination and away you go. Don't forget to clean the pickup "brushes" every now and then *grin*.

I was thinking yesterday that I should get a new power supply for my PC while I was at the shop getting the DVD drive, but thought I would wait until it died. Well, overnight it must have read my mind, because when I got up this morning, the fan was totally dead. Unbelievable! I am so used to the reliability of DEC and Compaq gear that commodity PC parts surprise me all the time.

I asked Russ if we could run up to the computer shop again, and he told me that he had left his sunglasses there yesterday. Heh. So up we went. As I type this, a new 300 watt supply is burning in.

They say things break in threes. Let's hope I have a flat tire on the bike. I'd hate to replace a mobo or something.

I got a new DVD drive for my PC today. Toshiba 16x for $50. A very reasonable price. Recently, I got a couple of DVDs that the old Samsung 2x was having major problems with. Surely a firmware upgrade would have fixed the issues with the Samsung? However, on investigation at the manufacturer's website, it appears that they are offering absolutely no support for the drive at all. I highly recommend that when you are considering the purchase of a DVD drive, your shortlist excludes Samsung.

Flying back to Sacramento today.

Arrived back at the recovery site to find that the restore of the data warehouse cluster had completed over night. There were a couple of minor problems with the SAN when we attempted to full boot the machine, but it was available around midday.

The other two VMS systems were completed yesterday, so we were ready to go. The batch run tests were kicked off and I returned to the hotel to get some much needed sleep.

The test continues today. We left the recovery site late last night, leaving the database guys to begin restores. Of course, just as I made it to bed, I got a call from one of the guys wanting some help. So I got to sleep at about 1 AM. And it felt like I had just closed my eyes when the phone went again at about 4:45 AM. I was concerned enough with one of the problems to get the VMS team back to the site. Of course, it turned out to be nothing, but it was better safe than sorry.

At about 2 PM, the restores for the VMS production cluster completed with not one problem. Too good. The machine was full booted and was ready for testing. Approximately 10 terabytes restored in 30 hours. Not bad at all.

The disaster recovery test started today at 8 AM Eastern time. We are restoring 4 major VMS clusters, IBM mainframes, AIX systems, and Sun systems. A major operation that I really wouldn't like to do for real. When it all comes down to it, the test is quite boring. Load up some tapes and then watch them spin for long hours. However, it's a nice change from the normal workday madhouse.

Got up really early to catch a flight to Newark. Katy drove Russ and I to the airport, which was great as we had to be up at an unearthly hour. After a 2 hour flight to Denver, and a 4 hour flight on a Boeing 777 (first one I've been on) we got in to Newark Airport and headed up to Mahwah in preparation for running a disaster recovery test tomorrow. The plane was rather full of systems management talent. Five systems managers all in one place.

Spent the afternoon with Katy and Russ at their place. Drinking some beers and eating some BBQ was a nice way to spend Independence Day.