Stan’s Obligatory Blog

10/8/2005

Have I mentioned lately how much I like my job?

Filed under: — stan @ 8:42 pm

Last night one of my computers fell over dead. It was a very definite dead-kind of falling over. Sadly, it was the main earthquake detection system for Southern California. Not the sort of thing we want to remain dead for long.

We switched over to the backup system, but I still wanted to get the main machine back up. So I hatched a plan. The problem was the big external RAID disk that died. I managed to ‘borrow’ another one from another machine. So I went in to the office this afternoon.

The old RAID was beeping and had red lights on it. I hooked up the borrowed one and did the setup. Then I started restoring stuff from backups.

When it was all said and done, I’d spent a good part of today working on this. But it’s all right. I like my job. It’s fun. And the occasional crazy day after an earthquake or a computer failure is just an occupational hazard. Although I have to say that a busy day after an earthquake is more exciting. With that there’s more of a sense of something big is happening, whereas a computer failure is more of just a pain. But mostly, I just like the feeling that my job is something that is Useful to Society and also is part of the Advancement of Science.

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