Perri Nelson's Website 

Life goes on

The election is over. Some of the things I wanted to pass actually passed. Some of the things I wanted to see defeated were defeated. A few of the things I didn't want to see pass passed. Some that I wanted to see pass were defeated. That's pretty much the way elections go.

In general, turnout was low. For the most part, conservatives won the day, despite gerrymandering and the overwhelmingly liberal nature of King County. Mail in ballots are still coming in, so none of the results are official, but things aren't likely to change much.

Some of the crisis mode has gone out of work. We had a really trying time for a bit. We changed data center providers and so we had to transfer servers from one location to another. There were some unanticipated problems in that  process even though our trial runs went well and we spent months of planning.

We had a power outage during that timeframe too that affected a lot of our internal systems. Our database backup server went offline and didn't restart. Transaction logs filled up, and we ran out of disk space on one of our critical servers. Recovery was slow.

Network service interruptions also messed things up for us. Some servers that are normally reliable started working only intermittently.

The worst part of it all, is that all of these things happened pretty nearly at once. Quite a few sites were offline at unexpected times and for several hours longer than they should have been.

To put it in perspective, we had somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred or so sites going up and down for a week or so. At least it wasn't 165,000 sites that went down. Still, we're a smaller company than NaviSite. This could have hurt us quite badly.

I think we've got a handle on it all. We're still running in a hyper-alert sort of mode, but all of our systems seem to be back and running in a more reliable state. There are still a few problems, but all in all things are better than they've been for a couple of weeks.

Soon we will be back to our usual hectic schedule. Through all of this we've still had to do work for our clients. Despite the problems we had with our systems, life, and business still go on. Thank God for that. Hopefully some of the things we've had to do to recover from the recent series of unfortunate events will make our systems more robust and our clients will be happier in the future.

I know we'll be working hard to make sure of that.

Things at home are pretty normal. The older kids are working on moving out, but they're still not ready. They've started cleaning up after themselves better though. Deadlines come and deadlines go and the song remains the same. It's sort of like politics you know? Elections come and elections go but the parties stay the same.

Lucas is growing like a weed. He's taller than his mother and his brother now, and at times if he turned sideways he could hide behind a straw. He's a teenager now — and I'm sure you know what that means. He's a pretty good kid though, so it's all going to turn out fine.

The trip to Oregon last weekend went well. Betty, Lucas and Sidney left early Saturday morning. I followed a couple of hours later in Betty's dad's truck with the dog. Traffic wasn't too bad despite the Pacific Northwest's obsession with transit instead of roads (and once again I thank God that proposition 1 went down in flames despite the fact that they tried to make the people that would pay the taxes ineligible to vote for it).

The great-grandparents got to see their great-granddaughter. They got their truck back. I "fixed" their computer problems by buying a new mouse for them.

I don't really know how it happened, but their mouse stopped working. They bought a new mouse and replaced the old one with it, but it still didn't work. They bought another new mouse and replaced the replacement, but it still didn't work.

When I looked at it, the mouse cursor would show up in the center of the screen at boot up, but it wouldn't respond when you moved the mouse. I looked, and couldn't find a mouse driver. I couldn't find an event in the event log to explain it. I couldn't load a new driver for the mouse.

All of the mice were the old-fashioned kind. Plug them into a PS/2 mouse port. Mechanical mice with rubber balls that roll over a mouse pad. I bought one of those wireless USB mice that you get for your laptop so you don't have to use the touch pad. That "fixed" the problem.

I still don't know why the original mice wouldn't work, or what happened to the mouse driver. I suppose if I had had more time I could have found out, but I'm not really a hardware guy. Still, when they move the mouse, the mouse pointer moves, and when the click the buttons the mouse click event occurs. They can use the computer again and they're happy.

I'm not. They're running Windows Vista. They still have a hardware problem, and Vista seems to make it harder to deal with.

Lucas was happy though. He spent what time he could playing games on their computer. Now isn't THAT like a typical teenager these days?

THIS weekend we're going to Spokane to see the sister and brother in law. Lucas is going to go fishing. (Note to self, go get a fishing license and steelhead tag.) It should be a fun weekend.

This linkfest is for the 8th of November, 2007.

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