An unproductive day...

Kelly McCauley — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:04:00 -0500

You know its going to be an unproductive day when you walk into work and the first thing you hear is that there was a power outage and then find that your workstation and the UPS to which it was connected completely dead.

It was a wet and slow drive into work. Nothing surprising. I walk up to my desk and my cube neighbor said that there was a power outage that knocked out a large chunk (500+ nodes) of our cluster and all of the infrastructure that wasn’t on UPS. They were able to bring the nodes back up without too much trouble. I assumed that my machine would be fine since it was on UPS and the power outage was only for a couple of seconds. My cube was too quiet. My workstation was not powered on. Strange. I check the UPS and it was completely dead. I try to reset the breaker on it but nothing happened. OK, so the UPS didn’t have enough power to keep my machine running for a couple of seconds (or so I thought). I move the workstation power cable to a wall outlet and try to turn it on. Nothing. Joy. I then open up the case, grab a spare power supply, and plug it up. Turned it on and the cooling fans started spinning but a wonderful burning plastic/metal smell immediately wafts up in my face. Power it off. Dang. Not what I want to be doing today….

I’ve gotten used to my computers staying in the background and helping me get my work done. It is jarring when your tools break. It has been over 3 years since I have had to shop for a new Linux workstation. At one early point in my life I would have been excited about this. Now it seems like a chore.

Working with my computer, as a tool, was second nature. I was concentrating on getting work done and not really noticing the hardware. That’s a big change from 10-15 years ago. Its a change I like. I prefer working with a computer, rather than working on a computer, hence why I like being a programmer and not a sysadmin.

—Kelly

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An unproductive day...