Strange Monday & Goings On

Today has been a strange, strange Monday. I’ve been swamped over the past week working on Shockey Monkey now that the major work on ExchangeDefender v3 has been completed. And not to hit Microsoft again but god it’s great working on my own software instead of mitigating mistakes made by someone else. Organizationally, we’re about 90% done with all the service packs and upgrades and things are finally running as expected.

So what does an IT service provider do when everything is running smoothly? Try to break it of course! So today I spent most of the day planning this weekends global maintenance window for OWN. In a nutshell, we will crash the entire network, including the NOC, including monitoring, including failsafes, including redundancy, including backbone links. We’ll go down for about 5 minutes, removing OWN and every system in it for about 5 minutes. Why? Well, for one nearly all backend management systems have changed. And as much faith as we have in our systems ability to recover from single or even multiple failures we do not have a guarantee or anything other than our blind faith. And since we’re not a church but an ISP, blind fiath ain’t what the customers pay for. Cross fingers, plan twice, pull plug once

Other than that – more fanmail about VladCast. I get it, you like it!

I’m often surprised that people can guess my mood by reading my emails and blog posts (hint: they are nearly always wrong) but today has been interesting. I’ve been swamped as of late and because I haven’t blogged for a few days people emailed to ask if I’ve taken a ghost writing gig over at Susan’s blog. There are a few Angry Vlad posts on her blog, and no, neither influenced by me. Heh. Three bad nights on a single web/sql server and she gets a case of Vlad’s… wuss    

As for what I’m up to – lot’s of coding and planning. Today I’ve been porting over the new interface upgrade for Shockey Monkey, opening up the mobility API for the mobile agent and just planning the flights for World Wide Partner Conference and New Orleans. This weekend Katie and I are off to Dallas to watch our little empire burn down to the ashes and hopefully emerge as a beautiful phoenix. Go ahead, try to sell that one to your wife:

Vlad: Great news. We’re going to Dallas to watch the network go down and autorecover. And I’ll take you to Six Flags!

Katie: Cool.

Vlad: Really?

Note: If you’re one of our customers and would like to watch please let me know by Wednesday (security reasons), at Dallas Infomart from 3:10 – 3:30 AM (thats EST time, this Sunday).