Cliff Click Jr.’s Blog's Blog
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Panic Last Week (warning: no technical content) Prior Friday: my Mom calls my sister & tells her my brother Eric (hiking the entire PCT this summer) is 2 days late/overdue. Sister calls me in a PANIC!!! I plan on Saturday driving 5 hrs to northern California to calm my Mom & help coordinate search & rescue. It's not like I can get on the trail and expect to cover 100miles in 4 days like my brother's been doing. I can't reach Mom (no doubt she's driving twisty mountain roads and is out of cell phone range). To make matters worse my wife has been sick all the prior week while trying to run Vacation Bible School (her and 8 kids got it from somebody who brung it; why do people bring their sick kids to School?); she's still recovering. Saturday: no panic. Mom calls; Eric's been found and is not really late: he had told her he probably would not be able to call midway through the 100 mile stretch and indeed had no cell coverage the entire time. Mom had the local Sheriff out canvassing everything and almost ready to put up a Search&Rescue plane when she finds Eric (and the Sheriff really didn't want to do that because there was already almost 100 planes in the air fighting the local wildfires). Mom's too old to panic like that. Grrrrr..... More Saturday: I take the kids to the beach while my wife sleeps off the cold; my eldest daughter needs to photo tidepools for her Bio project and we all need to relax. In the middle of the relaxation my Dad calls home (my folks are divorced so no relationship with my Mom anymore) and reaches my wife napping; Dad and new wife (of nearly 20 years) are in Stockton and will be arriving tomorrow. PANIC!!!! Wife's still recovering; the house is a total shambles AND her inlaws are arriving in less than 24 hrs. Sunday: Inlaws arrive. Much grandparent fun. Monday: I leave my folks to have a looong planned meeting with Intel. I arrive and PANIC!!! the power is out. We relocate to the break room which has floor-to-ceiling windows. Makes me feel like Azul is a high-powered got-act-together startup to host Intel folks in the dark. Dad & wife move on (an unannounced drive-by grand-parenting), as they are traveling the western US as part of their retirement. Tuesday. I spend all day on training & mentoring, and recovering from repeated power failures. All boxes need rebooting and ..."PANIC!!!"... patches get installed, don't play nice together, need more patches, more screwing around. Things more or less functional again by late Tuesday. Of course a company wide demo coming on Thursday is hitting an unexpected new crash, so the demo gods are panic'ing and I can't help them all day because of power outage crapping out my machines. Wednesday. Unrelated at-home PANIC keeps me busy all morning (plus bugs in high-scale-lib showing up a year late). I finally get the fires out around noon and my wife offers to go out to lunch w/me. First time we'd eaten together w/out kids in a month. Of course, the housekeeper has hid my scheduler book and there's something in it keeps nagging me. Just before we walk out the door I find it and stuff it in my briefcase un-inspected - because a rare lunch opportunity w/my wife is not to be missed. 5 minutes later Jeremy of Google calls: I missed my planned Google lunch w/ high-powered Java hackers and he wants to know if I'm still giving the tech-talk at 1? PANIC!!!! I turn the car around, drop off the wife, panic another 5 minutes trying to get latest slides on wife's tiny new netbook because the standard presentation laptop is sick before the laptop recovers and I grab it and roar out the door. I make it to Google just in time (no officer, I wasn't speeding I was just flying too low). The talk goes well. (slides are here) Thursday. Demo goes OK. I actually get some work done. It's quite shocking. Friday: Planning on some kind of panic but it hasn't happened yet. Got a concert planned tonight in Santa Cruz withOUT kids... so an hour drive away from any kind of rescue. We're making plans (got neighbors lined up, etc). In the end wife and I are so exhausted that we bail on the concert and settle for a nice dinner out without kids. Saturday: We have a 7:30am Dr appointment for my youngest (no: I normally never hear of Dr's giving 7:30am Saturday appointments, but my youngest needs to see a serious specialist who happens also to be a really nice guy), then a long planned trip to SF zoo (In theory: more grist for the daughter's Bio project. In practice: she's got a long-distance romance going on with somebody who's 2 hours north of SF so they agreed to meet in the middle). We all get too much sun wandering the SF zoo in perfect weather. I finally come down with the dreaded VBS cold, and feel like crud the whole day but had a great time nonetheless. Sunday: We're all recovering from massive sunburns and a week of madness. School starts tomorrow... plenty of time to panic then!!!
PS- Concerned that there might be a correlation between PANIC!!!! and my receding hairline Category: Web/Tech | | TrackBack (0) TrackBackTrackBack URL for this entry: Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Panic Last Week: CommentsOuch, that's enough panic for a couple of months but you got it packed into a week! Hope next week is better for you. Posted by: Azeem Jiva | Aug 16, 2009 6:31:54 PM :-) Posted by: Cliff Click | Aug 16, 2009 7:52:22 PM Google talk removed from YouTube? Posted by: Roozbeh | Sep 17, 2009 3:49:12 PM Hi, Cliff. Could you please recommend a book that offers a good introduction to VMs. Posted by: mbana | Dec 22, 2009 11:46:48 AM > Could you please recommend a book that offers a good introduction to VMs. No? I feel like I ought to be able to do make a recommendation, but I really don't know of any. Cliff Posted by: Cliff Click | Dec 22, 2009 1:57:46 PM Hairline? What hairline? Mine is already gone. Probably a side effect of 15 years of Java... Thanks for sharing. Nice round off to my Friday. Posted by: Jonas | Jan 29, 2010 6:53:24 AM Post a comment |
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