January 16, 2008: Long, Long Day

Up early and in to work.  Blah blah blah.  Nothing exciting to tell there.  Big IT news today: Sun buys MySQL!  This is awesome news for those of us who have worked a lot with MySQL and have been concerned about the long term open-sourceness of the company.  I am confident that SUN will lead the European company towards a greater level of being open source and will help to make the company enterprise ready.  The product may be enterprise ready but MySQL’s wishy-washy attitude towards its open source licensing has made the company seem as though they weren’t ready for the big time yet.

The early morning was slow as always. I am not sure that I can even remember a time that I had a busy early morning.  It just doesn’t happen.  Worst case scenario is an early morning conference call or something.  But nothing serious like that today.  The day itself turned out to be relatively normal.  There is starting to be quite a bit of chatter around the office about the announced layoffs, however.  So far I don’t know anyone who has been laid off but it is bound to happen soon.  Since we didn’t hear anything today it seems likely that we will be hearing something tomorrow.

For lunch I just ran up the street to the Wall Street Cafe and grabbed some pizza.  Dominica is coming home late tonight.  They needed her to work late this evening to cover for someone and since she was out on Monday we decided that it would be good if she stayed even though she has a cold and doesn’t feel particularly good.  She is getting paid double time for the hour that she stays which works out really well.

My afternoon got really busy and I have some after hours work scheduled for this evening too.  By late afternoon, though, it was decided that there was some “emergency” server builds that needed to be done and that I would just have to skip sleeping tonight to be able to do if that is what it took.

I took off from the office around three thirty.  Just enough time to get me home so that I could get right back to work.  I stopped at Borders quickly and picked up the next four books by R. A. Salvatore for Dominica.  Who knows when I will ever get a chance to read any but at least she is getting to enjoy them.  And I picked up the latest issue of Model Railroader for me.

I got home and immediately set back to work for more than an hour working on the project that was scheduled earlier today.  I hadn’t been expecting it to take so long but I should know better by now.

After doing my random project it was time to order in our dinner and shortly Dominica was home from work. This cold is really kicking her butt and she is totally exhausted.  We ate dinner and starting cooking the dog’s stew or else he won’t have any breakfast in the morning.  Then I headed back to the living room to get to work building those servers.  It is going to be a very long night.  No question about that.

In between other things I did get a chance to work on some Ruby code that I have been working on that takes emailed network appliance logs from Netgear hardware and parses it and files it into an enterprise database – in this case MySQL.  It is still a very basic system and I got most of it working a while ago but never got around to wrapping up some loose ends.  Now I have it working pretty smoothly where the email is parsed via a variety of sorting options, it is parsed, it is uploaded to the database, the email is removed from the folder that it is in and placed into a temporary “holding” folder to await inspection and then the mailbox is expunged.  It isn’t fast but it works and under normal circumstances would be run as a background job so speed isn’t too much of an issue.

Now that I have my script working my first order of business is to get one hundred and five thousand email messages moved out of my Inbox and onto the database.  This is going to take some time.  But it needs to be done.  My email just keeps getting more and more full.  I have been procrastinating long enough on this issue.

My work dragged on after midnight and that means that it is time to post.  I expect that I will get to go to bed tonight but my night will definitely be short.

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