Tragedy
My mother was a regular reader of this journal. Not very long after each post she'd usually contact me with advice, questions, or to tell me that I've made errors. In many cases these 'errors' were just industry puns.

Unfortunately, my mother won't be calling me about this entry.

Yesterday, Frances Fenwick, my beloved mother, unexpectedly passed away.

Mom was going to pick us up for tea. We were to go to her house and help set up a new scanner, something she was looking forward to immensely. However, she never arrived, and never returned our calls.

We're not quite sure what happened, and mom is currently with the coroner. We think that it could have been asthma related, but it may have been a heart problem, or it could be something else entirely. At the moment we just don't know.

My father found mom on the kitchen floor when he returned from work Sunday afternoon. He attempted CPR, but by the time mom was found, it was too late.

My mother was in poor health for some years, but that never prevented her from getting about and doing what she wanted. Although she was unwell, none of us expected anything like this to happen. It's been a shock to myself, my father, and our family and friends.

The main project that my mother was working on was the George Collingridge Society website. My mother was passionate and inspired by her research, and I believe that she would have liked us to view her pages, even though they were not yet complete.

My mother will be sorely missed, and fondly remembered.

It's 3am...
And I've learnt a new scenario to add to the diaster recovery plan. What if it rains? What if it rains a lot?

We just discovered that when we have huge amounts of rain, combined with big fat hailstones, that something goes wrong in the roof adjoining the office and water gets in. Quite a lot of water. This could just be because the top of the gutters is flush with the bottom of the roof, and so if they overflow, water can get into the roof cavity. This area happens to be about the only area that doesn't have any eaves, so rather than the water running away or down the exterior walls, it gets onto the ceiling -- which in this area is lower than the rest of the house as well.

Other possibilities include broken tiles, bad valleys, or the solar hot-water service somehow making it easier to flood.

In any case, at 1am we performed an emergency removal of all gear from the area, which was mainly used for storage. Some books got damp, some old ISA network cards were sodden, and a couple of pentium-90s that should have been tossed years ago were drenched. Otherwise, no significant damage that we're aware of.

However, water in the roof cavity had another danger. Electrical problems. Something, somewhere, tripped the safety switch (earth leakage detector), disabling all appliances.

Our server dutifully switched to UPS, and then ate the battery and died while we were trying to locate the fault. That's very bad -- it's supposed to prepare itself for an emergency shutdown, and proceed with it if power is not restored in a timely fashion, or if the battery goes low.

We discovered that isolating the front-half of the property allowed us to restore power to the office. We also discovered that a light fitting in the watery area was shorting, producing a distinctive smell of ozone and a very disturbing noise.

Cut the lights at the circuit-breaker, tested the light to see if it was hot (temperature or current), tested a few times in different places (using the back of one's hand), and proceeded to remove the light. We're going to wait until everything dries out before we try to turn it back on.

Powered back on our server, it grumbled but started. One of the drives complained hugely during RAID re-sync. I dropped a job into RT that it should be removed from the array and the fresh reserve drive (already sitting in the machine) added in.

Sure enough, 70% into the reconstruction, the flakey drive reported a bad sector and was dropped from the array. I checked our backups were good, and initiated reconstruction with the fresh drive installed for this purpose.

Throughout this, there was much cursing of IDE drive manufacturers who produce such poor quality drives. It's a real shame when a '3 year warranty' means it can be almost guaranteed I'll be returning the drive to them after 18 months.

I really should be moving to SCSI. Sure, they're much more expensive, but the reliability is worth it. I've got much better things to do with my time than monkey around with poor hardware.

Drive reconstruction ends in about an hour. Hopefully we won't see any more issues.

Garden Maintenance
Apparently one can be legally obliged to mow one's lawn. During/after the honeymoon and many days of spring rains and good weather, the grass in the front yard was starting to get a bit long. What was surprising was a notice served by the council that we were required to reduce its length for fire protection purposes, or face a fine and/or a jail sentance. Yikes!
The grass is now cut.

Hints for businesses
When responding to written correspondence from your clients, try not to refer to the training co-ordinator as 'the girl'. This is especially important when said training co-ordinator is the one ultimately responsible in determining whether or not your client decides to pay for your services for the remainder of the year, and hence has a direct impact upon your bottom line.

Weight
I lost about three kilos from the last time I checked. I'm not chubby, but I've found my belt tighter than I would have preferred sometimes, so losing weight is good. I put it down to stress more than good exercise habits.

Business
I haven't checked the books, but I suspect that we've invoiced more in the last five months than we did for the entire 2002-2003 financial year. Business is booming, although it means I have no time for the more plesant things such as recreational time.

Two out of three small business owners I've spoken to recently have found it difficult to find or keep good staff. I'm finding the same. The remaining one in three pays a highly-paid consultant to avoid their staffing difficulties.

Business has me travelling interstate regularly. Last week was Canberra, this week and the next is Sydney. Next year there's a trip to Brisbane, and that's one of the few business trips I'm actually looking forward to.

ToEE
The ToEE wiki has been improving significantly recently, primarily thanks to James, one of our players. New features include a public guestbook, indexed blogs, new character portraits, humour, and much much more.

If you're the sort of person who enjoys reading about someone else's role-playing game, then you might even consider visiting. The new chronological character diaries are well worth reading.

If you're interested instead in how Google can decide that all sorts of irrelevant cruft is considered to have a high page-rank because it's written in W3C compliant XHTML and is updated regularly, then our humour page has numerous and disturbing examples.

Humour
On the topic of humour, Jacinta suggested that this image may be a good addition to our office.

I would like to point out that consultants from Perl Training Australia do an excellent job of solving client problems, and the previous link should be considered for its humour value only, and should not be taken to relate in any way to our business activities or professional ethics.

We make our money because our clients seem to have an inexhaustible list of desires, and they need someone to manage their other consultants. ;)

Vegetable Thief
Caught the thief who's been stealing our vegetables, since she tried to come back and take our artichokes (which weren't even ready to pick yet), and our loquats (which needed another week of ripening).

We informed the thief in no uncertain terms that we were not impressed at her taking our produce without even the common courtesy of asking, and that no, we were not going to let take away what she had picked thus far.

I'm very annoyed, as we now have a number of fruit and vegetgables that really should have been left in for another week or two to fully mature.

Hopefully we can keep a vegetable garden that doesn't get plundered before the vegetables are mature from now on.