Pity the laywers
Been catching up with a few of my friends from University (and High School!) that have gone on to be lawyers. From what they've said, the common belief that all laywers earn a huge amount of money (as compared to say, software engineers or system administrators) seems to be a myth. It looks like they get paid about the same as everybody else.

That which does not kill me, improves my disaster recovery plan
Had a somewhat exhausting experience the other day. After rebuilding a RAID I needed to restore the contents, and discovered a DLT tape which seemed to encounter problems half-way through. It's not very good when your backup that spans three tapes has a problem on tape number two.

Luckily for me, I had a second set of backups which worked fine, and a path of incrementals which means that we would have lost a few hours worth of changes from a non-business period. However, the last incremental tape also encountered problems. Not good at all.

Both problematic tapes were written fairly recently, so it may be that the drive itself is going bad, or it could just be a pair of bad tapes. The tapes also seemed to feel better after 40 hours, so as it happens no data was lost.

The whole ordeal has improved our current disaster recovery plan. More scheduling for testing (although all these tapes tested fine the day before!), and most importantly tagging of unimportant data. The really important data now fits uncompressed into a 15Gb DLT. This will greatly speed restores, improve the chances of data recovery from tape (if it ever comes to that), and allow us to keep more copies of important data to allow restore.