ZZZZZZZZZZZZNORRRFFFF!... Huh?

If I said I had been working day and night, would you believe me? There's little reason not to, since I've been doing exactly that at the same place for 36+ years. I must be a slow learner.

Part of my problem is the nature of my business. I keep our sales agencies and other databases functioning. In most cases, nobody thinks about what I do until it stops working. When it does, it's automatically a database problem until our group can point the blame at the actual guilty party. Usually, the problem is some new, "improved" code from one of our developers. I think their motto is: "I never made a mistake in my life! One time I thought I had, but I was wrong."

But, to turn back to my insomnia and lack of blogging, I've been working on trying to make an unsupported version (that's OLD in English) of a database run where it was never intended to run. Just because something is possible, does not make it a good idea.

In this case, we're trying to run an agency on a virtual machine (a pretend server running as part of a bigger computer, but looking to the world like a stand alone server). VM and old versions of DB2 don't play nice together, so we moved the database off of the VM and onto...well let's just say we moved it. It solved our performance problem, but the maintenance stuff that has to happen each night is broken. Think of a car with the oil drain plug welded on. It's tough to change the oil. It will run OK for a while, but eventually, "She's gonna blow!"

The real problem is that the database now resides in what can be charitably called a non-production environment. It might also be called my laptop. Getting it moved to somewhere more secure is a priority, hence the lack of sleep.

Another part of my lack of blogging has been a bout of home improvement. I've been working on fixing the 937,000 little things that get ignored in the life of a 35 year old house. At least it gives me a chance to use power tools. The current project was replacing the door to the crawl space. That ate up most of last Saturday, and with luck will be finished tomorrow. Trust me when I say it will look a lot better than the old hunk of de-laminating plywood that formerly covered the opening.

Then there is the continuing saga of the homeless, Winterville Brockmanns. I spent Sunday with Jon at the new house, refreshing my drywall finishing skills while he and a friend crammed a water heater under the stairs. I need to get back tomorrow night and sand what I covered with mud over the weekend. I hear that the closing on the house is tomorrow at 3, and the painters are due to descend over the weekend, followed by the carpet folks. It's gonna be a little tight if I'm sanding my drywall patches (Patches? We don need no steenking patches!) while somebody else is in the room with a paint roller. My plan is to be in the semi-finished, new room, putting up edge guards, taping and mudding the seams in the (you guessed it!) drywall while the painters are attacking the rest of the house. One other task will be to swap out all of the locks for something where half of Oglethorpe County does not have a key.

It's going to be good to see Jon, Missy, Violet, Peabody, and Scarface (Ollie) in their new house. They ought to be just about settled in by the time Violet has a birthday at the end of the month. God bless them, they've got more energy than I can remember ever having.

Well, it's time to start siphoning the oil out of the computer dipstick tube, so I'll let you all go.

Later.