Woo, after 5 hours sleep, I woke up at 6am, listened to the radio.

They said that Rene Rivkin had died, hmm, wouldn't have expected that.

I sent an SMS to the senior DBA, at about 6.10am, asked if I was going to see him at 7am, for a lift to work.

I waited a couple of minutes for a reply, didn't get one, so then I got up, and went and had a shower. Ugh I feel a bit crook this morning.

I got dressed, packed my bag, which I hadn't done last night, being too lazy, and then had some breakfast.

I waited, I checked slashdot while I waited, and then the senior DBA arrived, and I went and jumped in the car.

We drove to work, nothing eventful on the way, except for a bit of rain.

On the way, he told me there were some major issues with the production system we'd been mucking around with on Friday afternoon.

As we got near work, the senior DBA said he wanted to go and look for a house that was for rent that he'd seen on the internet last night. He didn't have the address, he'd just seen a picture of it, so we looped around some back streets of maitland looking for it.

We didn't find it, so we gave up and headed to work.

We got to work, and went into the building, I went and dropped my stuff off at my desk, and then I went up to see the senior DBA, and try to work out what was wrong with the production system.

From the error he'd told me he'd seen, it sounded like Oracle Application Server had crapped itself again. Yep, that's what it was.

We tried restarting it, but kept getting errors.

I had a look, and the license server for another application had run away, eating 75% of the cpu. We shut that down, and the restarted everything, including the Oracle table space, and it all came back working.

We went across the road and got a coffee after that. I really didn't want a nasty coffee, but I was cold, and tired.

The coffee wasn't as bad as usual, the chick who usually ends up making my coffee (who has no idea how to make a coffee) wasn't there, so the other chick made it.

We came back to work, and I went back to my desk.

I finished rewriting the module from the system I'm developing that I started on Friday afternoon, finding a couple of big bugs, that are now in production, because my testing is lazy. Oops.

I copied all the music off my new USB memory thing that I loaded up last night, finding that I already had 30 songs, (112MB worth) of them on my machine at work. D'oh, I could have brought other stuff.

Maybe I should have taken a directory listing home with me on Friday. I wish I had a VPN account, I could have logged into my work machine from home, and checked what was on it.

I continued working, and the web services guy called me, talking about the upgrade procedure for the software we use to serve the website, since it's been having a lot of issues lately.

As soon as I answered the phone, and realised who it was, I started checking if the website was up, because the only time this guy ever calls me is when the site is down. When I checked it, I found that it was down again, but I didn't let on.

When I got off the phone, I started investigating more, and found that there was something seriously wrong with the server. The website was not responding, usually it gives an error, trying to use the application served by Oracle Application Server was returning all sorts of weird errors, and when I tried to ssh to the server, I could login, but it wouldn't spawn a shell.

WTF is going on? some dumb process has run away eating all the cpu and/or memory.

I tried for a while to get in, actually managed to get a shell, but then the prompt became totally useless as soon as I tried to work out what the problem was.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he was there with the sysadmin, trying to work out what was going on. I stayed on speakerphone to them for a while, and after not getting anywhere, I gave up, and went upstairs.

It took us almost an hour to get it sorted, eventually we managed to get in, but the shell was useless. There was a guy at the colo facility working on the console, apparently it was coming up with swap error messages.

His local console had a slightly higher priority than our remote shells, so we were telling him what to run, to try to shut stuff down.

When we got a shell that was responsive, we killed of apache, giving us a bit more memory, and then we killed all the instances of oracle, and mysql for good measure.

When we had it like this, with everything stopped, we figured we might as well just reboot it, since we already restarted all the processes this morning, but the machine still fell over again.

We asked the guy at the colo facility to reboot the machine, (so he could watch it come back up properly). The senior DBA went for a smoke while he waited for that, and when the guy at the colo called the sysadmin to tell him the box was back up, we went about checking it was all ok.

The senior DBA came back, and had to go through all the procedure of starting up the license server, Oracle, Oracle Application Server, and a few other things.

Once it all looked like it was back working, we decided to go for lunch, only an hour and a half after I wanted to go in the first place.

We went and jumped in the car, the senior DBA had called the real estate place responsible for renting the place we'd looked for this morning, and he'd got the address.

We went and found it, and wandered around looking in it. I didn't like the look of the place at all, and it was too far from work, too close to the train line, too close the main road, with trucks thundering along, and too close to a church.

We got back in the car, and the senior DBA drove down the back of the house, and there were some weird people hanging out of a door, of a part of the house that was for rent, so it had some attached, separate residence. I don't like it at all.

We headed back towards work, trying to work out where to go for lunch.

Eventually we decided to go to the Grand Junction for lunch, so we drove there, parked, and wandered in.

We went and ordered our lunch first, and then went and got some drinks. I decided to have a beer, ordered it, and shouted both drinks.

While we were waiting for our drinks to be poured, I told the senior DBA that I was going to the movies tonight, because I hadn't been able to last Thursday.

A couple of the guys in the bar started talking to me about my hair, and I briefly explained about doing it for my holiday, and then st pat's day, and then leaving it until I had to get rid of it for court, otherwise I would have already got rid of it.

I went outside, and sat with the others, we chatted for a while.

They were served their meals, and the chick said that she'd stuffed up, and only cooked on schnitzel (both the sysadmin and I wanted schnitzel burgers), so it would be a few minutes.

I continued chatting, and drinking my beer. A little while later my food was served, and the senior DBA went in and got me another beer.

We finished our meals, and the chick came to collect our plates, and asked if it was lunch, or if we were finished for the day.

It was now almost 3pm, so the senior DBA said he was finished, I'll go back and do another couple of hours.

I finished my beer, and then we headed back to work.

On the way, the senior DBA got an SMS from the little guy in royalty, saying "long lunch ha?", since we'd been gone a little bit over an hour.

I grabbed his phone, and replied "short man ha?", to which his witty reply, about 5 minutes later, was "ass clown".

Hmm, that reply is about on par with a Guybrush Threepwood "I am rubber, you are glue" response.

We got back to the building, and went in, and got in the lift. The senior DBA wouldn't let me press the button for level 1, until it was past level 1, since he's sick of me making them wait while I get out on the floor below them.

I decided to go and annoy the little guy in royalty for a while.

As we went past the director's office, we noticed a jar of jelly beans on the counter, the senior DBA asked a (large) woman working near there if we could have any, and she said "the more we eat, the less she has to".

I got around to the area near the little guy from royalty after collecting some jelly beans, but found him to be doing some work (for once), so I left him alone.

I came back to my desk, and continued working.

Some guy came around, complaining about how cold it was, though it was colder on this side of the building than his side.

I said we could swap if he wanted, and then commented on the fact I was sitting here all rugged up, and I said that I couldn't stand to be here otherwise.

I told him about the fact the aircon is not adjusted properly, it thinks it's 24 degrees, when it's more like 16, but the guy who looks after it doesn't want to come up from Sydney, travelling for a couple of hours, to do 10 minutes work and go home again, so we're still waiting on an analogue line, so he can dialin and fix the machine remotely.

I don't want to think about how much money is being wasted running the air conditioning at full pelt all day every day.

I sat and wrote a letter for court, basically what I was going to say in my defence, when I got a chance.

I was just finishing this up, when I got a call from the senior DBA, he was leaving for the day. I asked him to get the credit card statements sorted out for me, as proof that I've been living in the pub, and don't have a fixed address (even though it's crap, and I've been living at home).

He said he'd do it now, so then I went up to get them, he printed them out for me. While I was up there getting them, I spoke to the royalty manager, he was suggesting I get a letter off one of the bartenders (since they all know us all by name), to say I've been living in their pub for the last 6 months, but I don't really have time to do that.

We left the building after that, and went to the pub we're staying in. I dropped off my bag, and was feeling really tired. I wanted to lie down for a while, but couldn't be bothered, I probably wouldn't want to get up again.

We went across to the pub, saw the support guy and the old librarian, and had a few drinks. I played the pokies, and drank a bit more.

On my way to the bar, I saw the email guy in the pub, playing the pokies. I played a bit more, won a few dollars, and when I went to take my money out, the machine stuffed up, and didn't give me the full amount, but it stuffed up even more, and gave me a dollar that it didn't count.

I went in and complained, and the guy came and fixed it, giving me the rest of the money, I didn't mention the extra dollar, big whoop anyway.

I'd decided to go to the movies and see HHGTTG tonight, so I walked down to the cinema, to see the session times, because I'd forgotten to check on the internet before I left.

I walked all the way down to the cinemas, looked around, couldn't see the session times anywhere. I asked a chick working in there, who was changing the name of the movie displayed over one of the cinema entrances, where the session times were.

She told me that there's a green sheet on the counter with them on it. I found that, took one, had a look as I wandered back up to the pub.

I got back, had another drink. There's a couple of sessions I could go to, 7pm, or 9.15pm. The later one is probably better, so there's time to have dinner.

We eventually finished up in that pub, and walked down to the Grand Junction, and had another drink, and ordered dinner. We waited, were served, and ate. I sat chatting until about 9.05pm, and then I walked back to the cinema again.

I bought a ticket, went in, and sat and watched the movie. This was the first time I'd been to the movies since I saw the third Matrix movie.

When the movie finished, (which I though was ok), I wandered back up to the pub I was staying in.

I saw the senior DBA on the way back, he was staggering back up the road. I opened the door, and we went into the pub, and back to the room, and I went to bed, and had a terrible sleep, restless.