Still not sleeping
Previous insomniac nights:
TWO YEARS (cont)
… sat down, combed through the log4j docs and examples, altered the logger class and made a test app that showed that, by using a different log4j method (or maybe it was a method option? I can’t remember), the multi-line stack traces would appear in Sumo as single, discrete log entries.
I don’t generally have the inclination to say, “I told you so,” (especially when it should really go without saying), but TWO YEARS. I told my boss I wanted t-shirts distributed to everyone in engineering saying, “Karen was right.”
The t-shirts were not forthcoming. I left the company soon thereafter.
The Hottest Office
At Yahoo!, I worked on the operations side for the server imaging system. We got a call one day that the server closet in one office had overheated and they needed help imaging the replacement office servers. This took a little sleight of hand because the imaging service wasn’t set up to handle office locations, which were not part of the production network.
This story is only noteworthy because the office in question which had overheated was in Norway.
Freeway Crosswalk
I worked at a record company in downtown Burbank which had a beautiful, fancy new office building on the north side of the 134 freeway. However, my team sat in the not-so-beautiful, definitely-not-fancy, not-at-all-new office building directly opposite on the other side of the freeway.
The data center room was in the shiny new building, of course, so after we prepped or fixed servers in our office, we had to stick them in a cart and then walk them across the freeway to take them to the data center.
All right, there was an overpass between the two, fortunately, but that doesn’t sound as impressive and ruins the mental imagery.
With a Wave of My Hand…
At a small startup, we were in a planning meeting for a major service application upgrade. Someone asks to confirm if the staging instances in EC2 are up. Someone checks using the AWS web GUI. “Yes, we have a staging instance.” A minute later: “Oops, I think I accidentally deleted the staging instance in the GUI.”
Printers: The Great Unsolved Problem
So many printer stories. Here are a few, in no particular order.
There was the Iris printer at one animation studio. (Digital animation studios used a shit-ton of paper, go figure.) I’m not sure if it was warranted or just a scam, but they had a full-time person whose only responsibility was keeping that thing running. I was afraid to go near it, lest I sneezed.
The same studio had another large-format printer, although it did not have its own full-time nanny. (I want to say it was an HP, maybe?) Usually the same two technicians changed the paper roll on that thing. It took them 30 minutes. I ended up having to change the paper alone the first time…
to be continued…