Christmas Carol (an almost true story)
On the Nth day of Christmas, my server gave to me:

a bad block on hda3.
2 toasted drives;
3 boxes down;
4 volume backups;
RAID-5 failure;
6 friends a-leaving;
7 megs of spam;
8 failed recovers;
9 hours restoring;
10 calls from jarich;
11 clients off-line;
12 hours downtime;

Notes
Yup, on the morning of Boxing Day, two of the drives in my RAID-5 developed bad-blocks within two hours of each other, resulting in complete failure of my main storage device. After some failed attempts at resurrecting the array, I was forced to re-partition away the bad areas, reconstruct the RAID, re-format, and restore from tape. Luckily my last backup was made a mere four hours before the failure, so the entire process occured with no data loss. The drive that holds mail was unaffected, so I didn't lose any of the tremendous amount of spam that I seem to receive each day.

I'm investigating return of the limping drives to the manufacturer for replacement.

Remember:

• Make backups frequently.
• Test your backups frequently.
• Keep off-site backups.
• Murphy's law applies to RAIDs, too.

Work
Okay, this is getting ridiculous. Months ago I briefly meet a sales rep from something like the world's second largest telecommunications corporation. He takes great delight in telling me how fantastic his network is, how there are hundreds of engineers all working on it making sure that it's the best in the world. And when he has a problem with a Linux proxy setup, who does he call...?

Election
Labor won the state election. Wow. What a surprise there. Never would have predicted that.

Cricket
Australia won the cricket. Wow. What a surprise there. Never would have predicted that.

Happy Clients
(on the telephone)

Client: ...and we had to disconnect and move all the equipment because of flash flooding last week. Since that time we haven't been able to print.

Me: Okay. I can try to connect in to the machine and see if there's anything obviously amiss. You've got a login for me? Great. (scribbles notes and invokes ssh) Okay, give me a moment.

pause

Me: It looks like the printer is alive and on the network, but the print spooling process didn't start up cleanly. I'll just nudge it along. There we go. Your printer sho...

Client: It's printing! It's printing! (Cheers in background.)

Me: Oh good. I'm glad to hear that fixed it.

Client: It stopped.

Me: Looks like a paper jam to me.

Client: You're right. It is a paper-jam! How did you know that? Are you in the matrix?

Me: That's right. There is no spoon. Oh good, you've cleared the jam. Anything else I can help with?

Client: Nothing else urgent. That was fantastic. I never dreamed you'd be able to fix our printer over the phone. I'll tell you now, the smiles here are worth a million dollars.

Me: Oh good, because I'm only going to charge you the bargin price of $750,000.

Client: Um... Can we do that in installments?

Bureaucracy
I'm used to doing work for large organisations. Submitting a proposal and having it run past many different comittees, panels, and departments isn't that unusual. I think the longest "lead time" I've encountered for a project thus far has been about two years. The last few days, however, have really taken the cake insofar as the most red-tape.

The client is booking five days of training. Two now, three next year. The training for this year is on a tight schedule, but that's okay. However the client does have a few interesting quirks. Firstly, they pay invoices at the end of the calendar month after they've been receieved. That means that today (last Friday of the month) is the deadline for the invoice to be provided if payment is to be made before 2003. That's okay, printing and sending invoices is easy.

However, for me to deliver the invoice, I first need to sign the customer's "standard agreement" for contractors. The agreement is about a dozen pages, most of it is either non-applicable, or standard CYA (Cover Your Arse) for things like privacy laws and disclosure of confidential information. Alongside all this are the requirements that I give full intellectual property rights to the client for any material I present or develop. No thanks, I'd rather keep IP.

So, after taking the contract past the client's solicitor and risk management office, the appropriate changes had been made. Of course, by this stage (after many many days of to'ing and fro'ing) it's 1:30pm Friday, so there's only 3.5 hours for the contract to be signed, and invoice entered into the accounting system. I actually had a representative from the client drive a considerable distance to my office to have the contract signed and witnessed, and now she's driving back again with two hours to spare to get it processed. :)

I can now understand why the client wanted to be billed "all at once", instead of on three separate occasions. It's very likely that three invoices would have meant three contracts. :)

Saturation
I keep being told that we're in a terrible, terrible slump, and IT workers are starving out on the streets. Apparently it's really hard to get work these days. Despite that, I've encountered a monotonically increasing workload since the start of this financial year. Software development, code review, system administration, training, consulting, business management, broadband resale, the works.

I'm currently negotiating with a client who really wants two days of Object Oriented Perl training at exactly the same time as a milestone date for a rather large software project that I'm heading. That date happens to be in about two weeks time. In the same timeframe I had also scheduled needs assessments and SLA negotiations for four new clients.

And here I was thinking that I'd shaken that caffine addiction. :)