Sleep, Courtesy & Other Things Foreign

2:40 AM EST, 08/10/2006 Microsoft Tuesday Patchday comes to a close on a Thursday morning. It was fun.

As noted in my previous post oh… 18 or so hours ago… many things become funny through sleep deprivation. I was chatting with one of my friends/developers about the extent of our slavery and as you may imagine I had a few choice words for him as he told me he was about to go to sleep. Anyhow, he pasted the following back in the IM window:

richwalkup said: oh wait – definition link

richwalkup said: now that you know what it is – i'm gonna get me some (sleep that is)

richwalkup said: shockey 

Clicked on the link just to humor him for a second, usually it is something very gross that we point each other to just to stay awake, I found a big body of text. Started reading… Interesting theory on this "sleep" thing. But then I come upon this definition of it: 

Sleep is the fundamental anabolic process common to all life forms, plant and animal. In animals, the sleeping state is characterized by an absolute minimal degree of consciousness and decreased responsiveness to the surrounding world.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep

Perhaps its the lack sleep talking but "state is characterized by an absolute minimal degree of consciousness and decreased responsiveness to the surrounding world" is the very definition of technical support, isn't it? Somewhere north of Dallas someone just lost their coffee to their monitor.

The case is still open, still working on it. We've restored service to 100% of our customer base but have imaged a few to a standby server for further testing to isolate the case with Dell and Microsoft. The solution set was mentioned in the previous post and we spent the better part of the day dealing with it. For what its worth, we used a scaled down version of Knoppix to automate the process via USB thumbdrives. Still doing post-cleanup work and trying to get the backups in sync with the recent change. That however is just a part of the process. 

On Courtesy

There is such a thing as Karma folks. I was out on Tuesday evening, drove down to West Palm Beach to do a presentation for the Palm Beach IT sbs group and then trekked back to Orlando. While I was down there I brought a stack of things from WWPC along with an excellent book that Karl recently published. Personally, this is one of the best books for the SMB consultants out there. The title is quite misleading so let me sum it up instead: This book is about how you run your IT business and CYA as a SMB consultant.

Now Karl didn't know I was doing this, although on an occasion I did mention to him that I really enjoyed his book. Earlier tonight I find that Karl nominated me for the SBSer of the year. Nice guy, huh? Whats even nicer is that he wrote a piece on his blog about how to attend conferences in response to my earlier articles on how to follow up with people after conferences. I sometimes look at my colleagues in the IT world and am quite disappointed to see how shallow the pool is. This is why when people like Susanne and Chris show up I am shocked and cannot stop raving about what professionals they are. Ditto for Karl, check out the blog post and read it a few times .