Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

A gentle morning working on some low priority background tasks before going on leave, waiting nervously for A to finish her job interview downstairs. Once she was done, we went for tea on the balcony while we talked things through and waited for the queue to go down in the canteen before going for lunch — a slightly-less-than-healthy combination of vegetable nuggets and chips, with peas for good measure.

After a brief stop off at home to pick up gear, we went to the climbing centre where we took advantage of the quiet and I started teaching A to lead belay. She picked up the basics pretty quickly, although, as Gav says, the actual process isn't really all that complicated. Rather, it's a case of becoming good by building experience: becoming more responsive, anticipating the climber's need for slack, and getting a feel for when you need to keep them in tight and when you can safely give them more rope.

It's also the case that clipping feels really awkward and fumbling at first; no matter how smoothly you can do it when you're on the ground, using a quickdraw at waist height, it's much harder to keep things smooth when you're on the wall, dragging up a whole lot of rope. But, that said, A managed a clean send of a 5+ and redpointed a 6a, which isn't bad for someone who has only been climbing for three months and who hasn't got much lead mileage.

I, too, managed to surprise myself by rather casually on-sighting a 6c on lead. Although clipped into the auto because my belayer wasn't signed off, I climbed the route properly, clipping every draw, fighting to stay on a move where I badly misread things — the QD was very awkwardly placed, probably because the route hadn't been set with leading in mind — and sent the route. This makes it the equal of the hardest thing I've led, it's certainly my hardest on-sight lead, and it's equal to the grade I'd expect to be able to on-sight on top rope. So I'm pleased. Newberry told me last year that there wasn't any real difference between what he could top rope and what he could lead, and told me I should aim for the same...

A less than ideal day when what should have been a straightforward outage to apply patches overran substantially when the firmware needed to be re-flashed and the system re-bounced. Even after the machine was back there were problems with database corruption that refused to resolve themselves with anything less than a cold-start of the batch system — a task I'm ashamed to say I now have down to a fine art.

I eventually got home sometime after 8pm, having left for work before 7am, grabbed something to eat, and now I'm going to collapse into bed ready to do the whole thing again tomorrow...

Arriving back at work and summarily dismissing all the emails that had piled up while I was away, I discovered I'd been scheduled to meet with Altair to discuss a problem that had been seen over the Christmas period.

Unfortunately our visitors were caught up in traffic after the M5 was closed in both directions following a kerosene tanker crash, arriving at mid-day just as we were all thinking about lunch. Which, fortunately for me, gave me enough time to familiarise myself with the basics of the situation before the start of our much-delayed meeting.

Day of the big integration, with much time spent waiting for components to bounce — a frustrating process that required everything to come up cleanly and without errors before the rest of the work could go ahead. But despite various minor teething problems, all of which were obvious in hindsight, everything was completed ahead of schedule and with very little fuss.

Breaking my holiday to go in to work this morning for a meeting with Altair. Very much a flying visit, both for them and for me, but it was useful to talk over some ideas with them — especially since they had suggestions which might let us optimise our configuration and improve the performance of some of the code we've added to allow us to preempt things.

End of an era today, with the old supercomputers brought down for the last time. To mark the occasion — and the imminent departure of the vendor people — a group of us arranged to go out for supper at the Bay Leaf. The food was good, with even W, a true curry maven, pronouncing himself impressed with a garlic paneer dish which they augmented for him with a couple of naga chillies.

Suitably fed, we shed a few people and continued on to the nearest watering hole — George's Meeting House — where the others swilled back a few pints. I pushed off at about half-nine, W left shortly after when his girlfriend and two month-old son came by to pick him up, with the others planning to round off the evening with a few whiskys...

It's been a few weeks coming but I finally had a mini-meltdown after being dragged off to yet another meeting just when I was in the middle of chasing down yet another urgent problem for someone, arriving to find that it was only being held to discuss the non-events of a test the previous day and that a couple of the key people involved either hadn't come or hadn't even been invited.

At which point my patience finally wore thin.

Instead of opening with platitudes, I started by complaining that while the rest of them might not have anything better to do than sit around for an hour and discuss something that had worked, I had a thousand things on my to-do this, that this meeting was thing a thousand and one, and I really didn't have time for it, not least because the rest of my week was slowly being eaten up by meetings. Then, when someone tried to make light of it, I said that while they might think I was joking I really wasn't and while I might not have a thousand things to do, I probably had at least a couple of hundred on the my list.

After a few moments of somewhat shocked silence — although by my normal outside-work standards, it was so mild as to barely qualify — the person in the chair decided that discretion was the better part of valour and, after a cursory few minutes of conversation for the honour of the flag, they wound the meeting up after five minutes and we all went back to what we were doing. Which, in my case, was trying to work being interrupted; this time by people now wanting to check whether I was OK after my minor lapse in temper...

Suprise visit from ES today. Sadly her only free moment coincided with our two hour planning meeting, so I thought I'd missed her. But as I was leaving I saw a familiar figure standing next to a group of people obviously waiting for a taxi and we managed to fit in a quick ten minute catch up before her cab arrived...

In the office for the only the second time this week, principally to present at a meeting with a group of externals. It all seemed to pass off well and they asked a number of interesting questions, most of which I'd already anticipated putting me in the happy position of being able to say, when we reached the appropriate slide, "We've touched upon this already but..."

I was lucky and managed to get to work in a brief gap between thunderstorms, but others weren't so lucky and arrived looking distinctly bedraggled. Then, in the middle of a conversation about a thorny problem that had kept someone up until three this morning, there was the huge flash of nearby lightning strike followed by an abrupt loss of power to the building. Not exactly the most auspicious start to the day. But the UPS did its job and the power feeds switched to an alternate substation and things gradually started coming back on. Just as well: I'm not sure either of us was up to the chore of a cold restart...