Yesterday pal.pp.se crashed. The root disk died, at only five years of age. Really sad to se a young disk die before its time…

…and I can’t wait for solid state disks to become mature (read: cheap) enough to make the whole freaking hard disk world DIE!

I’ve now spent the night with migrating everything to one of my other servers, and most of the stuff is up and running now. I might have missed some small things, and some configuration parameters might differ. If any of your stuff is broken, please let me know so I can fix it. No data was lost, so there’s nothing that can’t be fixed.

No evil without good - this means I finally got the wagon out my ass and migrated everything to a new server. That old box was meant to die anyway, even though I would have preferred to let it die under control. RIP.

/P

I’m in LA right now, attending the MS TechEd conference. Walking around on the premices meeting people, both new accquaintances and people I already know. Perfectly normal. The other day Knowledge Factory had a party. Jeremy Moskowitz, running GPanswers.com, is a partner of Knowledge Factory, and he was at the party. It turns out that he plays pinball, and that he met a Swedish Pinball player last year. But he can’t remember the name, but he’s got a friend back home that do, so he could text her and ask for the name. So Jeremy sits down and start to write an SMS. I look at his phone, and the to field reads “Jamie”. I realize that Jeremy is from Seattle, and I know a Jamie from Seattle, so I ask him if it’s Jamie Beth. Yup, it was Jamie Beth - My candy lady! I told Jeremy to text her that he was partying with Candyman. And of course I knew that Swedish guy very well as well - Mats Runsten. Hilarious!

If we were talking about Säffle and Bromölla or some other redneck places I wouldn’t have been that surprised, but now we’re talking about two million-headed cities, and two guys meeting at a conference with several thousand attendees in a 15 million-headed city…

A couple of days later I met up with my friend John - the shotsbricka guy - and went to the Pig’n Whistle on Hollywood Blvd. We had a beer when this guy comes up and asks if he can have some snus from my box on the table. Apparently he had lived in Sweden, and he even had a Swedish flag tattooed. He talked about an Opeth concert the next day, and I told him that I knew a former singer of Opeth. It turns out that he knows him too, and a couple of other Swedish friends of mine, both from Stockholm and from Örebro. Hilarious!

Itty bitty world.

/P

Edit: And it happened again!

I started at my new job today - as a consultant at Knowledge Factory, after two years of working at Consign. This means going back to do more Microsoft stuff - Windows, Active Directory, Exchange and other products from their portfolio, and first thing now will be to take the Windows 2008 family of certifications. It does not mean that I’ll stop doing networking stuff though, and I’ll keep my assignment at Logica.

In a week from now I will go to LA for the MS TechEd conference, and so will a bunch of other Knowledge Factory employees, so it will be a great opportunity to get to know them, and also a great head start into the Microsoft world again.

/P

I got texted by my mother today. “Internet is down at my hotel in Bobo in Burkina Faso. Fix it!” I’m glad to have a mother who believes in me!

/P

I’ve been working with this American guy John for a while now (the same guy that called the Spanish embassy). He’s been here for six months. So far, he hasn’t met even one person that don’t speak English. How is he ever going to learn any Swedish if noone speaks Swedish to him?

Anyway, he learned two Swedish words during these months. “Tack” which means “thanks”, and “shotsbricka” illustrated by this photo of John:

Shotsbricka

Tonight AIK is playing a derby against Djurgårdens IF at 2000, and I just got this from a sales guy:

From: Sales Guy <sales.guy@consign.se>
To: patrik.bodin@consign.se
Subject: Assignment tonight!!

Patrik, we’ve got a gig tonight that would fit your profile perfectly.

1700 - 2100 at the governement, special assignment.

Pays 45 000 SEK for 4 hours of work!!

Taken?

/Sales guy

Funny guy, eh?

/P

I just returned the laptop, phone, keys, dongles and ten years of acquired books to Qbranch. You buy a lot of books over ten years! A lot of books weigh a lot of kilos. Returning them took some time and effort, both mentally and physically.

Books are best in the movie theatre.

/P

I quit my job today, after almost 10 years as consultant at Qbranch. After finishing up here, I will start to work at Consign, a bunch of highly skilled networking and telecom consultants. I guess for me, this means more basis on networking stuff like routers, switches and firewalls, and less on Windows and Active Directory stuff. Though I intend to continue to keep both of my competence legs active, so don’t count me out as a Windows consultant just yet!

/P

The different departments at work have put up signs outside their offices. Below they’re posted in chronological order:

The frontend team

The backend team

The project management team (stating "highend")

The database team (stating "endgine")

The GUI team (stating "user end")

The help desk team (stating "working end")

The rest room (stating "deadend")

A guy just came running into the office. His eyes was wide open and his breath was heavy. His whole appearance smelled desperation. He started yelling: “We’ve got pain killers to put a fucking stud farm to sleep, we’ve got two pinball machines, we’ve got 100 millions worth of servers, we’ve got at least 200 conference phones… but we don’t have any rulers. I need to measure stuff! Anybody got a ruler?”

I went into Visio, draw a bunch of lines with one centimeter in between them and printed it out.

It wasn’t until after, when it was too late, I got the idea of printing it at 90% size…

/P