the boredom of ramfree17

AWS Transfer Service comes with a Bill Shock. Life lessons from not reading the fine print. I cant believe it costs that much to run a relatively passive service. ?

Sometimes giving up is the only option. Shelving it. Lowering the priority. Putting it in the backburner for a later time.

Give up with the hope that someday might be a better day to try again; that on that fateful day you will have the numbers and support to cross the pitiful gap that for all it’s worth could be the chasm between two continents.

“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight”
– one of the essentials of victory, Sun Tzu, Art of War

There is an implicit law and unseen forces in nature that increases the intensity of the urgency to take a crap as the distance decreases between your vehicle/position and your home or the nearest toilet.

Ever heard of the male trick of thinking about other things to delay “satisfaction”?It doesn’t work against the law of diminishing distance.

In a nutshell, Murphy’s law states that whatever can go wrong will go wrong and at the most inopportune time. This day for me seems to to be the most literal example of that law and it seems to crown a really crappy week:

• My “so called” team has never been complete the whole week.
• Nothing seems get to the state that can be called as “done”.
• Screening of the “fit to contribute” recruits across the company isn’t going well.
• Issues germinate like dormant spores and each one comes unwrapped with a tag of “URGENT: RESOLVE IMMEDIATELY OR GLOBAL MELTDOWN IMMINENT”
• I have had the introduction to the project incident report template and mastery of accomplishing one in a single week.
• I got tagged for not finishing the work I wasn’t even scheduled to do on time even if it would supposedly only take a few hours (and which task isn’t supposed to get done in a few hours?)
• A little storm called “Basyang” decided to kill the power and water supply in our area w/c forced us to stay in an overpriced hotel-esque place. This reminds me that I need to create a mini-review for that place.

Those are just some examples for the week and just for today:

• My “change” can’t be completed because it hasn’t passed UAT execution because…
• The environment decided to crap out the whole week and be excessively stubbon today that no requested build from me ever finishes successfully. It doesn’t matter that I went to the office earlier than usual to get the testing done.
• I got tagged for not being prepared to present items in a meeting attended by the client. It doesn’t matter that the list items magically appeared in the list and it hasn’t really come into my attention.
• My change suddenly had a twin ticket that I wasn’t aware of, and the approach is still dubious as it smells of too much patch-me solution.
• Everybody is too busy to submit admin requirements. And that is because I really don’t do anything each day but be a PHB and think of useless things to assign to my team.
• I said I will leave at 7:30PM, announced to the powers-that-be that I will leave at 7:30PM, and then get stuck in ten thousand little important tasks that made me walk the hallway with the powers-that-be at 8:15PM. The powers-that-be are on their way to a meeting that I declined because I need to go leave at 7:30PM!

And to top it all off, I still don’t feel like I am contributing anything. This is the feeling that I really, really hate. Life is getting consumed by work that is starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth because I don’t feel empowered nor ingenious enough to really make a difference.

Oh life… I just need to accept that this is one of my “Shit Happens days & it will keep on pouring”.

ciao!

The day after having posted the previous entry my blog went down, or something like it. The site is still accessible but accessing capsule will show the web installation page for WordPress. Oh great, so I will be losing at least two posts since I only backed the site up after the Kronborg post. Better than nothing, right?

And then I found out that my precious backup was next to worthless since it only contained the basic database structure (and not the WP tables at that). Something was wrong with the CPanel database backup routines, which created the minuscule zip file without any errors.

I logged a request to my provider last Friday night and thankfully it was restored earlier this week with all of my posts intact. What a relief! I thought I was going to redo the blog again from scratch. It might have been a good “re-birthing” experience but something that I don’t want to go through if I really don’t have to.

Kudos to the Web.com.ph technical support group for the restoration, but would really appreciate it if you can tell me what went wrong. 😀

Two morals to this post:

1. Backup your data. Often. And don’t forget to validate afterwards!
2. Shit Happens. Embrace it.

ciao!