I'm behind on diary entries again, and the other authors seem to be slacking aswell: short diary entries, Backline not writing any details about his nights with Little Elf, pah

Since he won't tell us, I'll just assume that his wank-o-meter is back to zero and that he's generally having too much fun to write about it. Good for him. Lil Elfy is a nice girl and so far she hasn't told him about the hot relation I had with her a few months ago, so all is well.

Slow days, slow diary entries. Let's see.. well I got my second paycheck a week ago, one for a whole months work this time, so I'll go buy all those things I've been dreaming about (actually I've been dreaming about chicks.. no, I won't buy any of those)

I had just pressed 'submit' when I noticed lots of typos, mainly q's instead of a's. This bring me to the following point : qwerty keyboards (US-English in this case) suck. I'm used to typing on an azerty keyboard (Belgian-latin1) layout. It isn't too hard to get used to a qwerty keyboard, but the problem is that when I get home, I start making typos there. The worst part is that I am in a current split-personality kinda thing, and I can't go back. I could just replace the keyboard here with an azerty one, but I'm used to it now (well, half) and the same goes for home. I fear my self-taught typing skills are gone forever. Thank God I never learned how to type properly.

Ok, I've been slapped on the wrist by some actual techies that read the diary (hi there !). They have been informed that the last logentry wasn't technical at all. So, to elaborate, the D-class servers will be running HP/UX 11.00 and MC/Serviceguard, to provide protection beyond single node failures within the cluster, using dynamic quorum capability and will most likely run in an active-standby configuration.

HP MirrorDisk/UX, HP OnlineJFS (Journaled File System) will also be installed. I am not sure what the primary function will be but it is likely to be a Orqcle database server, in which case the OPS edition will be used. Hardware-wise the servers will be equipped with dual 64bit HPPA cpus, 1GB ECC ram, fibrechannel disk controllers and all the goodies. Price is expected to be no more than $100,000 (2 servers, mind you) which is a bargain.

Hmmmm, we could use one of these setups for geek-ware ;-)

I'm a bit bored so I'll just write something in here. Have I mentioned before hoz much Joe Cartoon rocks ? Well not nearly as much as Alan Cox does. I found out one of the engineers here stayed in the same dorm as one of the main linux kernel developers, and maintainer of the motorola (m68k) port. My ego is being bruised here on a daily basis. Extremely capable people, and I am the sysadmin... what a strange world we live in.

Speaking of work and sysadmin, I lowered myself to a level low enough to use HTML codes for reasons other than this diary. Very un-techy of me. Before you know it I will be exhibiting some form of creativity and even start playing music again

Coporate life has it's little oddities. besides the manager-related troubles that employees experience and overall paper-work, requests, confirmations, validations and so forth, which I will tell you all about later, the moral/propaganda machine is remarkable. We have this bulletinboard at the coffee-corner and now that I have looked at it for some weeks, it always has newspaper/magazine articles about blunders the competitiom makes, such as the Sun Server Flaw (tm). How smug.

Wooops, I just went to the coffee-machine and passed by the webdesigner guy. I'm forced to reconsider the un-techy-ness of web design, although I wouldn't call SQL database management and server-side scripting webdesigner-stuff, more webdeveloper-stuff.

Ouch I'm hurting. I had the brilliant idea to go to a student party yesterday, which is cool because of free beer, but not so cool to wake up early for work, despite the full three hours of sleep. Some genious (probably drunk) decided it would be cool to hold it at a karting circuit and organise races inbetween free rounds of beer. Also some famous actors were supposed to be there, but I didn't know any of them since they star in soap operas, which I hate. Felt like going up to one of them and say "I've got chairs that can act better than you", but it felt like a ripoff.

Being the professional racedriver that I am, I managed to lap everybody once, except for some short little midget-like woman that turned out to be one of those actresses. (something tells me the famous people were given better karts) who said women can't drive ?
Our team finished fourth out of twelve, which wasn't too bad since we were ranked 12th until the last driver (me) started his session. Surprisingly all the drivers were relatively sober, so no real physical damage was done, but then again we belgians can drink proper beer in large quantities without looking like an englishman. I am a bit sore now though, and tired.

It's supposed to be someones birthday soon, but I forgot who. I wouldn't know what to get him or her anyway, so that works out nicely.

I have made some progress here at work. My security clearance has been altered to allow me access to the client production servers too now, and I got my phone installed at last (not sure that's a good thing.. come to think of it, when someone has a problem they are likely to ring me now. Also, at least noz I have a list of things I should (be) do(ing). The bad part is that I rather sit here and type stuff in the diary-entry window.

Speaking of phones and todo-lists.. my to-buy list is getting longer by the day. I am looking for a new mobile phone (decided on the Nokia 6210), a new pcmcia network card (decided on a Lucent card, not sure if they can use linux waveLAN drivers tho), a new gfx card (a twinview Geforce2 MX would do nicely), a dual cpu motherboard (had decided on the abit VP6, but after the abit-beefcake fiasco [abit sucks] I will have to look elsewhere. For those unix junkies out there: the abit bp6 is flawed and will crash on you. For all those windows users out there : the abit bp6 is flawed, but windows will crash sooner) I would need cpus to go with that motherboard, and the p3-800 seems to be affordable now, harddisks too.

Last but not least : a new car which the company is supposed to pay for. The Astra98 1.8 simply uses too much petrol (7.4 litres per 100 km, according to the onboard computer, which is probably hacked by the car company to make it look better), but I fear that the company insists on a diesel engine in a new car.. ugh.. I can see it now.. overtaking someone will take minutes on the motorway. And don't give me your "TDi is rather good" or " that new direct injection ones are nice" cos they are not.

I have also begun work on running linux to HPPA machines, starting with the 712 series. I have burnt two cdimages but still got the boot-setup wrong. The motivation to run linux on a 712 station is mainly to just # cat /proc/cpuinfo, so I'm not sure how much effort I want to put into it.

The D-class still hasn't arrived, and now somebody has taken the standalone DLT drive "it'll be back on friday" pah. doubt it.

Ok, I've been slapped on the wrist by some actual techies that read the diary (hi there !) and have been informed that the last logentry wasn't technical at all. So, to elaborate, the D-class servers will be running HP/UX 11.00 and MC/Serviceguard, to provide protection beyond single node failures within the cluster, using dynamic quorum capability and will most likely run in an active-standby configuration.

HP MirrorDisk/UX, HP OnlineJFS (Journaled File System) will also be installed. I am not sure what the primary function will be but it is likely to be a Orqcle database server, in which case the OPS edition will be used. Hardware-wise the servers will be equipped with dual 64bit HPPA cpus, 1GB ECC ram, fibrechannel disk controllers and all the goodies. Price is expected to be no more than $100,000 (2 servers, mind you) which is a bargain.

Hmmmm, we could use one of these setups for geek-ware ;-)

Not much to do. Bored. Slacking. Qnd then you are startled because 4 people are standing next to you holding these clipboards and looking all serious. Turns out they aren't the FBI, nor the people from the cafeteria coming to collect my lunch-money which I owe them really (see previous diary entry), they are just ISO9002 ( control-type people, checking if silly procedures are followed, while the department manager is standing next to them szeating alot.

I'm expecting the delivery of a long lost D-class server from luxembourgh. A _what_ ? I'll have to go and make some room for it now. It's supposed to become a high-availability cluster with it's twin, and use an external 'jamaica' disk array too. All these technical terms just for you techies to tell you how exciting my job is, and for all the non-techies to tell you how 'boring' it is (pah shows what you know).

Well it seems I'm the first one here at work, which is cool because now I can leave early too. Being able to come in and leave whenever you want (whitin reason0 rocks! I'm going to leave at 5 today because it took me 2hours to get home yesterday (it rained. everybody seems to slow down when it rains and crash and stuff, you'd think it was california here)

Geek-ware seems to be doing fine, despite my slacking lately. I've given backline access to do some noring routine tasks, so I don't have to. It's called 'delegating'. I _would_ like to see SSL support for submitting stories and such things, though (hint hint). It seems backline generated a .pem key with the wrong hostname.. we all gotta learn I guess.

People are starting to come in now.. so I'll just press submit before they ask me what this site is, with that ugly 16-color man (grinning in your top right hand corner). Does anybody in fact like him ? I think we should have a poll.. or maybe we had one already. I forget.

Ah end of another working day. I thought I'd amuse myself with wrting down how we in Belgium hold _proper_ *cough* elections.

You see, Belgium is this very small country with a little over 10million inhabitants. 6 million or so speak Dutch, the other [retarded] southern part speaks french. Every four years, we elect a federal government. It seems this country has a proper democracy, since we are allowed to vote for more than two parties/people (for you Nader fans : don't kid yourselves). But what about the power of the individual states (Flemish, French and some little German part we seem to have gotten after the war) ? Easy. A seperate government for those ! This wouldn't be so bad if we didn't also have governments for the different regions (geographically this time).

So, in short, I would have to vote for: federal, flemish 'state', flemish 'region' and of course the European elections. On top of this we also have to elect a town council and if you live in a big city like Antwerp also a board that does social-security stuff.

Confused yet ? only 10 million people, but 5 governments, town councils/mayor elections, european elections. All counted by the amount of votes, not some weird high-score list per states or whatever.
How on earth do we count it all ? No belgian in his right mind wants to go counting weirdass ballots with punch-through holes and what not, so we just vote by computer. No, not from home, just a computer with a light-pen in the little booth.

So here goes my attempt to crash the SQL database. I have to be very careful about what I say, because one of these days the server will crash because of human error. We seem to have had any sort of hardware failure known to man, combined with bad luck, a jinx, software incompatibilites, you name it. In short, it was all the 16-color man's [look: top right, he's grinning at me] fault, I had nothing to do with it.

Today is nice and quiet as usual. One full backup of a production server failed last night, so I'm sure it will crash in a few hours, computers are evil like that.
The former sysadmin seems to come up with the wildest projects for me to do, which reminds me of parents that enter their kid in beauty-contest and such to compensate for their own missed opportunities.

It's almost lunch time and I don't have any money on me, so I will have to go for the (rather nice) company cafeteria, and get away with not paying at all (the company doesn't pay my lunch, as I just get $10 a day surplus to my wage for food, paid at the end of the month). I'll let you know if I get caught.