Martin Blank's Journal: First night on...

Working night shifts is a little weird. After my final night before the official shift to the new job, I had really wondered if I would be able to pull this off. I had tried to make it through the whole shift awake, but was not quite able to do so. I ended up falling asleep at home around 8am, I think, waking up around 9:30. I managed a few hours more sleep during the day, but not quite what I thought I needed.

Quiet is an understatement for the night job, at least for now. One lousy little issue with some servers behaving oddly, but they were known in advance, so I didn't worry much about them. It was hard to watch it happen and not do anything about it. My general urge was to rush to the console to determine the problem, but that would have solved little, as I have no access to that specific console, or at least none of which I know. I put some time into reviewing the manual for the load-balancing software used on the servers, and I think I have an idea into what is happening. I'll have to run it past my boss when he gets in. That'll be a little later than normal, though, since he was here until after 1am to help bring me up to speed on the monitoring and help desk systems. In the next couple of weeks, we'll have a more structured idea of what will happen overnight. We'll get into periodic server reboots, patching systems, and fun things like that. May not sound like much, but it will be much better than staring at a screen or a book.

One last note: I need a new computer at home in the worst way. Windows 2000 has done me well for the last 25 months, but it's getting old now. I don't mean it's bad; my installation is just worn out. I put it through hell, and now it's starting to show. You Linux people can stop smirking. Load as much sheer crap onto your precious little penguin-labeled boxes and your systems will start to choke, too. The next system will be different (we all say that). No, really. Testing of software will be done within VMWare, a wonderful little utility I rank up in the lists with things like WinZip, ICQ, and Pez dispensers. Sure, you could live without them, but life would be a lot more boring.

5:30am. Four and a half hours to go. Last checks from the last job come in today; should total up to about two grand. Sweet. This is gonna be one hell of an income month for me.