Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

I rushed in to work first thing to print off my diary — I keep a paper-free home — put everything together and made it to the Post Office in time to get everything sent off by half nine. I now feel as though a great weight has been lifted.

I've had a distinctly mixed day. After an initial panic triggered by my almost chance discovery that I'd forgotten to send my research diary to my tutor for signing ahead of submitting my thesis, I had to rush down to the Post Office first thing to make sure that the stupid thing went off in time.

Having done that, I rushed to get in to work in time for my morning meeting. Fortunately, I bumped into one of my colleagues on the way and we were able to brain storm some new scheduling ideas on the way in. Our final master plan involved coming up with a way to partition the work up into user-defined priority levels and then to use peer pressure to ensure that people didn't hog the highest priority band.

My meeting, which I managed to make with time to spare, was also unexpected productive. We were got through a whole load of interesting stuff and someone from management passed on Official Thanks for the success of the HPC upgrade project. They noted that ECMWF had yet to complete their upgrade, despite having a year's head start and 5+ years of experience running their production codes on IBM hardware, and there were general feelings of smugness and self-congratulation all round.

After a brief break for coffee, in which Sartre was discussed, I tested out a disc replacement procedure, debugged a network problem, sorted out some festing problems, did some paperwork, caught the bus into town, went for a swim, came home, loaded back up with carbs and listened to Die schöne Müllerin.

On balance, I think the good outweighed the bad.

This is week is not shaping up well. My normal workload has increased, not entirely unexpectedly, increased substantially but unfortunately this seems to have coincided with a spike in the consultancy side of things. If things get any worse, I'm going to have to start handing out numbered tickets.

Worse still, a chance check of my calendar this morning caused me to realise that I'm supposed to hand in the last couple of chapters of my thesis at the end of the week — a revelation that prompted much swearing and cursing. So after spending the early part of my evening reading up on Rawls, I did what the tough always do when the going is hard: I went cycling.

After yesterday's rest day, I was on pretty good form and pushed reasonably hard to keep up a good pace. In the end I managed a 23 mile loop over mixed Devonian terrain in around an hour and ten, which gives me an average speed of around 20 mph. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Today has been even tougher than I predicted yesterday, thanks to a combination of manic firefighting at work and frantic philosophy writing.

Work, in particular, was a real slog, with the day capped by a particularly nasty HSM problem on the old machine which started when we brought down Unitree in an attempt to clear a problem with a non-existant cap. The software shut itself down successfully — always a relief — but, when we attempted to restart it, the tape movers complained that their network port was busy and refused to come back up. Reconciled to a reboot, I started quiescing the batch subsystem and cleared out a whole load of stale ftpd processes. Just as I was about to start bringing the OS down, operations called me to say that the movers had just restarted themselves and that the reboot was no longer necessary.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened but my best guess is that one of the ports normally used by Unitree had been grabbed by an ftpd process which had hung because the HSM NFS archive directory hadn't been unmounted correctly when the software was first taken down. This ftpd process then blocked all the subsequent attempts to bring the HSM back up until I when through and kill them all off, freeing up the troublesome port in the process. Once I'd done this, taped, the tape service minder daemon, was able to bring the movers up, to kick start the tape server and to resume normal production.

My philosophy work too, was a bit of a death-march, but I managed to finish my current chapter ready for today's deadline. It was rather weak, with too much exposition and not enough argument, but hopefully it's enough to give an idea of the sort of thing I'm aiming for.

Thanks to a sudden rush of inspiration, I'm back on track with my thesis proposal. Or, if not exactly on track — because if I was on track, I'd have finished a week early, wouldn't I — then at least on schedule to be done by Friday's deadline.

Pretty uneventful journey back to Exeter, despite a minor panic trigged by the appearent loss of my door keys — somehow they'd managed to hide themselves in the very bottom layer of the linen press. On my return, I discovered that:

• I've passed the second year of my MA with an extremely respectable grade and I'm on course to do the dissertation this year;
• the results of the various blood tests I had at the end of last year have come back healthy, so it looks like I'm not diabetic and the balance of my LDL and HDL cholesterol are exactly as they should be;
• that I really, really need to turn the heating up!

Miles to Lothlórien: 113

Somehow it's the end of the week already and I haven't done half the things I was going to do, include all the work I was going to do on my religion essay that's due next week. As per, it looks like I'm going to have knuckle down to some serious work over the weekend. Serves me right for goofing off and reading novels when I should have been studying...

I think the worst of my essay is now behind me. I've written the first part and set up the logical structure of the second part, so now all I have to do is sit down and convert the logic into prose — shouldn't be too hard. Hopefully, I'll have everything done in time to go to BTP for afternoon coffee.

After spending the last few hours frantically trying to jam learning into my head, I now feel sandy-eyed and ill. My condition is not helped by the knowledge that I'm going to have to get up tomorrow morning and go through the same process all over again.

How on earth did I manage to get so behind? Oh, wait, I remember now: I spent a couple of weeks lazing and slacking off...

I think the main argument of my essay is done, although it still requires polishing, bolstering with quotations, and proof-reading. The basic question was, "Does denying that animals have rights have absurd consequences for our treatment of some human beings", to which my, perhaps rather surprising, answer was essentially no.

( Lightweight philosophical musings... )

Obviously, there's a bit more to it than that, but that's the basic gist of it. And now, for my next trick, I will offer a comprehensive a priori proof for the existence of zebra crossings...