DOA - for reals

I'm pretty sure I killed the Zombie. Or maybe I'm becoming one myself?

I have no clue.

You know what? I should put up a new sign next to my thesis office.

Don't Dead. Open Inside.

DOA

In case you didn’t know, writing a thesis is freaking hard.

I’m up in my elbows of the guts of this paper. I made quite a mess of the analysis. Words are splattered everywhere. If this was a murder scene, then the analysis would be the guts sprawled all over the floor. It’s bloody. It’s messy. Something has clearly gone very wrong.

But I’m going to ignore it for now.

I have to tackle the discussion.

So I’m staring at the head of my victim, trying to figure out how to cut into the brain and get the pieces out I need.

I don’t want to make a mess again. But I think I’ll have too.

This thesis writing is brutal business.

And somehow my thesis ended up being a metaphorical murder victim?

Also, I’m not sure if this metaphorical murder victim is alive or not.

Oh well. It’ll probably end up being zombie. I can deal with that.

So apparently I'm blogging about my job now?

I had a really great day at work.

My colleague and I managed to win in foosball and give the other team a bright and shining egg. I love when that happens.

The weird part is a lot of not so great stuff actually happened today. But we came together as a team and fixed it. I love when you're able to feel like you're actually working together - and not just people working within the same vicinity.

So what happened? A little after 2PM a lot of our systems started crashing. I am responsible for most of our web-based applications. Every single one I’m responsible for (on our SharePoint and .NET farms) were unresponsive. Our automatic phone systems were down as well. The combination of this affected all of our 2000 employees.

I’m in application support, in case you’re wondering. I know a bunch of stuff about the different applications and I help develop new ones and maintain the ones we’ve got.

I don’t know a whole lot about servers. I don’t have any hard technical education, with the exception of a java-programing course.

I have access to every server that is important for the applications I support. And when the applications became non-responsive, I logged on to the web-front-end servers in the SharePoint farm and there was no issues I could see. The load-balancing tool told me that they were online and working just fine.

So when everything seems to be working, what do you do? You reboot everything you can get your hands on.

This was done by the server-team.

But it didn’t work.

Now at this point about an hour had passed. I’d given notice about the error to the relevant people in the business. And I had called users from our different locations in the country and established that it was indeed all users across the board that was unable to access the web applications.

Not sure what to do, I logged onto the application servers and started checking the event logs. It turned out there were a lot of error messages regarding one of the SQL servers in the SharePoint farm.

On the SQL server, there was some information messages about a failed windows update in the event log.

I gave this information to the server team, and it confirmed their suspicion that it was an issue with a group policy that had affected the firewall of the SQL servers. This had also been the issue with the Solidus server responsible for the phone application.

It meant that they now with certainty knew what was wrong. And how to fix it.

And it sounds so fucking obvious when you write out like this. Like of course, this is what was wrong. But I feel proud as hell, because I actually helped solve a server-related issue.

Usually when our systems crash I fidget around a bit but I’m never able to actually contribute anything that the server-team isn’t already on top off. So either I’ve gotten better at this. Or they’ve gotten slower.

Anyway. I kick ass at my job. And I had sushi and champagne for dinner.

All in all a pretty good Friday.

I hope you all get to have days like this too, once in a while. They’re nice.

A Sunday in Copenhagen

I’m back in Denmark again and I feel like I’ve been hit with a sledgehammer.

Is it possible to get a hangover without actually having any alcohol? This is the worst.

Anyway.

The leaves on the trees are pretty. All yellow, red, and green. The skies are grey and everything is wet.

I’m trying to get my brain into gears. I have tons of work to do on my thesis.

And this is where I’m supposed to be positive about my thesis-progress, so here goes: I think I’ve finally found the right angle in my discussion. For the first time in months I actually have an idea of what my final conclusion will be. Now I just have to line up all the arguments for and against, and write a discussion that effectively demonstrates that I know what I’m talking about.

Ha. What do you know. The sun is shining again. It’s breaking through the grey clouds.

And now I’ll get to work.

Have a wonderful Sunday out there.

Btw, I've started reading Deadpool. He's awesome. I love my characters a little crazy and with a ton of bad puns.