General – Page 48 – The Wacky World of Chris Knight

2006/06/18

Talk about tension release…

For the past eight or ten weeks my life has been hell. I’ve been working 10+ hours per day, seven days a week, for as long as I can remember. It’s been a huge strain on me and my loved ones. I’ve been working on a datacenter move for a client, who of course wanted it done fast, cheap, reliable and with almost no downtime. Some of their efforts at keeping it cheap made it slow, and some of their efforts at fast made it expensive. Richard and I picked up all the slack in making sure it stayed reliable.

The short story is that tonight I did the last database transaction log import, flipped the DNS switch, and now the new datacenter is up and running. It was almost anti-climactic in how smoothly the last bits went. I can’t remember the last time I had a project this big where the night before the cut-over I was well enough prepared that I got a good night’s sleep and had time to eat breakfast before taking the bike into the city to fiddle the bits.

Holy shit… It’s over. I have my life back!

Bonaire here I come!

2006/06/16

Bad Twin by Gary Troup

Amazon.com: Bad Twin (Hyperion): Books: Gary Troup

Oh, those clever makers of LOST… They have created a show that markets to a television audience that has been starved for a long time… They cater to people who think. People who read. People who like to be challenged. There are no simple answers in LOST, and every week just gives us more to think about. That makes the season gap even harder to stomach. Months without a new episode. Their solution to viewer anguish during the off season would never work for The OC, or The Simpsons or Survivor… They published a book. Not just any book, a book that appeared in the show as a manuscript, apparently written by someone who was on the plane. The book is rumored to have information about the Hanso Foundation, and the father of Desmond’s lost love. This is the manuscript that Sawyer was reading and which Jack threw in the fire before he could finish it. Whether the knowledge contained in the book is necessary to understand what is coming in the next season is an unknown, like the rest of LOST. I’m ordering my copy today. I can’t resist the mystery.

-Chris

2006/06/092006/06/10

Looking for Dave Lee?

There are a number of people from my past that I wouldn’t mind getting back in touch with. There is Tammy Mackowiak, my first serious monogamous girlfriend; I bumped into her in 1995, but I think my scruffy beard and tie-dye shirt put her off a little. I wouldn’t mind getting a chance to re-play that encounter over, for the shock value of explaining my life post-Griffith if nothing else. I wonder what ever happened to James Tingley, one of my best friends in high school with whom I lost touch when he moved to Spain. Phil Simcich, what ever happened to you?

I know lots of people have friends they have lost touch with, but for me it is a particularly prevalent problem because I’m sort of un-stuck in time. I blink, and years have gone by. I know I passed through them, but I have this sort of tunnel vision where I just don’t see the time passing. I’ve been back in the San Francisco Bay Area over a year now? No, way… Seems like only a few weeks… And so I lose touch with people for the simple reason that I don’t realize how long it has been since I’ve talked to them.

So it is with Dave Lee. I exchanged a few emails with him not too long ago. Until I go looking at my outbox, and realize that it was around the time I moved to Florida… Five years ago. Weird.

My skewed sense of time isn’t the really wierd thing though. I noticed that someone visited my website today after finding it on Don Schiewer’s alumni page for survivors of Griffith High School. Here is the wierd thing though… They didn’t come to my site looking for me… They came looking for Dave Lee. That’s what they entered into the search form. Why would someone track me down to find him?

I’d love to catch up with Dave too, and see what he has been up to; but, I’m particularly curious why someone would come to my site looking for him. Weirder still, is that the visitor came from an internet gateway at tribune.com. Whoever it was, they work at a newspaper. The IP address was in Chicago, so perhaps a Chicago newspaper reporter? Very curious…

-Chris