Last week started off OK, but by the time we got to Wednesday things were on the way downhill. I had a flat tire just as I was pulling into the office driveway. I waited until my afternoon meetings to go out and change it. Surprise! There was one funny lug bolt that needed a special key piece that I dont have.
Public service announcement: If you have a special anti-theft lug bolt on each wheel, take some time to check and make sure you have the key adapter in your car. Do this ahead of time, before you end up needing it. If someone else put the tires on for you, check that they put the key back in the trunk with the wrench.
As it turns out the AAA guy was not able to get it off either, and the tire would not inflate at all (due to riding on the rims for the last quarter-mile or so). The dealership has the part but there are like 10 different patterns so you can’t just get a ride and go pick it up, they have to actually see the car to match it. (The manual has helpful advice for this circumstance — be sure to write down the code number (visible on the key itself) sometime before losing the key.)
After getting towed to the dealer, I got the $20 part and paid the $70 to the tow guy for the mileage beyond 5 miles. The towing guy was really nice. Also my friend JT from work drove along with me in case I needed a ride home, that was extra cool.
This week was index deployment week, which involves a lot of meetings. There were also a couple of meetings having to do with last week’s network maintenance. I don’t like having a lot of meetings… I prefer to be available to people as a resource, and take some of the extra overflow type of work and in general keep people happy and focused. Lots of meetings with people outside my group make me feel sort of cut off. Perhaps I should take a laptop to the meetings and stay connected with irc.
Most of the time that was not meetings on Thursday and Friday was taken up by helping to deploy a new product — it was delivered to us a week and a half ago but we didn’t have a chance to work on it until now, and Friday night was the deadline. So Trip and I stayed quite late on Thursday night to try and figure out why it wasn’t working (Trip was doing most of the heavy lifting and I was mainly moral support and research assistant). After getting the data rate up from being stuck at 4 megabits we were able to get it up to like 8 or 9 (the theoretical max is 50 because we are running two copies at once to the same machine). This was not enough to meet our deadline but it would probably finish Saturday, and our other deployment was likely to run over a bit too.) So we called it “ok for now” but decided we should regroup with the R&D folks Friday morning when they got back in the office.
Continue reading