Jim's Home Page

A long weekend has just passed, commemorating Memorial Day here. What a weekend. I left early on Friday arvo (as did most everyone in IT) as the CIO had given everyone an early mark. I got home and was just reaching for a beer, looking forward to the only free time off as I was scheduled on call over the long weekend, when my pager went off.

Being on backup I thought I better respond. When I called the number, it was my new boss on the other end of the phone and he was telling me that there was a fire in the computer room (!)

Not knowing my new boss as well as I'm sure I'll get to know him, I wondered if this was a good practical joke and asked him that *grin* Unfortunately, it was a real incident, and I rushed back to work.

When I arrived, I was told that there had been "something" that let a bunch of smoke out in the computer room. It had set off a smoke detector, which promptly shut all the air conditioning in the main computer room down, and called the fire brigade. When I arrived, there was far less panic that I understand there had been originally. There was no significant fire, just a burnt oily smell in the room, and the air conditioners were off.

And despite Facilities desperate attempts to restart them, they stayed off...

Which is not good when you have thousands of disk drives and massive CPUs pumping heat into the room.

Eventually, the temperature alarms on the disk arrays began sounding, and we shut everything down.

It turned out that what had happened was a gasket in a air conditioner's compressor had blown, dumping all the freon, which smothered a smoke detector and set off the alarm. The "smoke" was really vaporised oil from the compressor tossed into the air.

It took us about seven hours to restart everything and fix some immediate equipment problems, and I finally got out of there at about 10:30 PM.

The next day, I got a call at about midday from Operations about some tape drives that had completely stopped working. I tried a number of things, and in frustration ended up rebooting a machine, which seemed to fix the problem. However, later that night, the problem reoccured.

Then a CPU in development died hard...

To cut a long story short, I think the longest consecutive period of sleep I got over the weekend was about two hours.

This morning at about 2 AM, a fibrechannel switch died, also undoubtably related to the heat that the room was subjected to on Friday. I got into work at 3 AM or so, as I needed to get it working and was unwilling to let the Ops stick their hands in the switch cabinet.

What a weekend.

I got an HDD for the new PC today and installed my really ancient version of Caldera on it. I need to get a more up-to-date distro.

The machine is now busily munching SETI classic units at the rate of about six per day. Talk about a bargin computer.

A few weeks ago, I rescued a PC from next to the dumpster at the apartment complex here. It had a motherboard, a CPU and memory, a CD-RW drive, and an 10/100 NIC in it. No hard drive. I took it up to the apartment and plugged it in, but it wouldn't power up.

Suspecting that the problem was a blown power supply, I bet $22 on a new one at Fry's today, and plugged it in and sure enough, up came the machine!

To my delight, the machine has one of the latest ECS motherboards, and an AMD XP 1800+ CPU. Wohooo!

Next is a hard drive, and this machine will become my new linux box to replace the aging laptop I currently use.

Back in the grind at work...

Another rainy morning. I made my way to downtown to catch the bus back to Sacramento. On the way, the rain had been just drizzling down, and was not much of a bother. However, just before I got to the bus terminal, it really started falling down.

I ducked into a doorway of a closed shop (everything is closed in downtown SF on a Sunday) and waited for the rain to stop. While I was standing there, I noticed a bit of notepaper folded up into a paper plane. I unfolded it, wondering if it had a note on it, and sure enough, it did! The notepaper was from one of the top hotels in the city, and the note said "Don't you wish you had this view?" Too funny.

Finally, the rain eased up and I hopped over to the bus terminal, and onto a bus back to Sacramento.

I could go to SF every weekend.

Also in my pre-planning, I had fully intended to revisit Indigo, as I've only been there once before. But when the time came, I just couldn't be bothered with the hike. I'd spotted a Greek restaurant on Columbus Street earlier in the day, but on the way up there it started to rain, so I fell back on the stuff closer to home.

I ended up going to Alioto's at Fisherman's Wharf. Now, this may come as a shock to you, gentle reader, but in all the trips I've made to San Francisco, I've never eaten at this restaurant before.

Bog knows what I was waiting for.

The food was absolutely fantastic. I tried their speciality, a seafood sausage made from prawns, rock shrimp, scallops, tomatoes, and basil, served in a lemon-butter sauce. I could have ordered two more of these and just had them as the main course, they were so good. And the main was a tuna fillet grilled rare, with mashed potatoes and asparagus. The tuna was garnished with a tomato and caper relish that was just superb.

Wine: 2002 Mondavi fuméblanc, which was the wine of the weekend. Yumms.

I was lucky enough to get seated at a table facing the Golden Gate and was able to watch the sun go down behind the bridge through the rain clouds. If I go again, I'm actually going to call ahead to see if I can't reserve the same table. What an experience!

I did the same trick as the previous night and went and got changed. Then I went for a nightcap at the Red Jack Saloon, my favourite neighbourhood bar in North Beach. This place is certainly not overrun by tourists.

My second "mental health day" in San Francisco. I spent some time in Barnes and Noble at Fisherman's Wharf browsing books. While I buy most of my stuff on line, I still love to spend time in bookshops when I can, and I certainly can't do that easily in Sacramento.

I have lunch at a sports bar while reading most of one of the books I'd purchased. This was "Tales from Watership Down", by Richard Adams, which I didn't even know existed (although it's been published for a number of years). I'd certainly decided that the weekend was to be "seafood and eat it". I had battered halibut and chips, which was OK as fish and chips goes. Anchor Steam on tap. Ahh!

Now, in my pre-planning, I couldn't make up my mind where to go on Friday night. I had thought of Houston's at the Embarcadero, or Butterfly, which I keep meaning to try. But I ended up at The Waterfront at Pier 7, based I think on the Zargat rating.

Pretty good choice. I started with calamari, rock shrimp, green beans, and fennel, all quick fried in a buttermilk batter. This was accompanied with spicy aöli, which was just fantastic.

The main course was a fillet of Hawaiian Escolar, a fish that I'd never eaten before. It was a nice white fleshed fish, accompanied by asparagus, crab mashed potatoes, and lemon nage. The crab mashed potatoes made the dish. I had a nice bottle of 2002 R.H. Phillips chardonnay, which was the first bottle of quality wine I've seen with a screwcap by choice. I must say it didn't detract from the quality of the wine.

Why don't restaurants do cheese courses any more? This place had a great list of dessert wines, but sadly no cheese to go with it. Not to worry, as a nice double espresso topped off the meal. And the biscotti was wonderful.

I strolled back to the hotel, got changed into some more casual clothes, and hit Spec's for a nightcap. I remember Spec's 15 years ago, and it was never this busy. But some of the local scene is still there, mixed in among the tourists.

I took a day off from work today, I headed off to San Francisco. My goal was to hook up with an Aussie expat group that meets in the city once a month. Unfortunately, the information that I had on what day they meet turned out to be dated, and they were not there. (Actually, I discovered this fact in the morning before I left, but it was a tad late to cancel the trip. And San Francisco is San Francisco, after all.)

Because I didn't have to make the timeline to meet the group, and because it was raining in Sacramento, I got started much later that I had intended, but I eventually made it to the hotel in North Beach at about 5 PM. I had a semi-planned out schedule of restaurants to hit (as I usually do) and for some reason, this got thrown out the window and I ended up at Scoma's on the first night.

I think was sort of threw my plans out of whack what that there was not much in the way of music playing at the normal joints I like to hang out at. So I think I subconsciously switched the focus to food rather than music. That, and I didn't want to get to far from the hotel in case the weather decided to be nasty.

You can never really go wrong at Scoma's. I had to wait 30 minutes for a table, but I sat at the bar and had a Guinness, pointing out the the bartender that while he had Guinness in the fridge, it wasn't listed on the beer menu. We actually called the restaurant manager over and got him to take a note to correct it. Very amusing.

I ended up having a great meal. Half a dozen absolutely huge oysters on the half shells and a wonderful blackened swordfish, with mashed potatoes and fresh vegetables, all washed down with a nice little half bottle of 2003 Grgich Hills fuméblanc.

I resisted dessert but of course finished off with an espresso.