Jeff Billimek’s Journal

I woke up pretty late today due to not going to bed early enough last night.

On my way into work I got a call from DHL. They were going to deliver my stereo today and wanted directions. I told them that I would be at work and it would take me around 25 minutes to get to my place, so they assured me that they would call right before they head over to my place.

I made it into work pretty late and had a voice-mail from Carole (who was out of the office today). She gave me a heads-up on the state of the system and asked that I work with Jeff C. about resolving the problems.

Around this time Jeff C. came by and we discussed the state of the system. We’re still way behind on a few paths - and have been so since June 11th. We discussed some potential solutions and agreed to call a meeting for 1:30pm with all of the interested parties to discuss an action plan. ODE is in a break-fix situation due to the pain they are getting from the current problems, so this is pretty critical.

I got a call from DHL. They were ready to deliver my stereo. The guy wanted clarification on the directions so I walked him through it and then headed straight to my house. I hadn’t even been at work for more than 2 hours and I had to turn around and leave.

A few minutes after I got home, the DHL delivery guy arrived. I helped him carry the 110lbs box up the steps to my dining room. After he left, I immediately began to take things out of the box and set them in the living-room. In a short amount of time, I had the receiver wired up to everything and tested it out.

It sounded so much better than my television speakers - but that is to be expected. I briefly looked through the manual to see how to use the _massive_ remote and then headed back to work.

We had a birthday lunch for Alex today but I had to miss it due to the delivery. So I went to Schlotzsky’s instead and got a pizza to take back to work.

I quickly ate my pizza and then went to the 1:30pm meeting downstairs. The meeting was only scheduled for one hour but we were in there until about 3:45pm. It was a long meeting and we covered a lot. We first went over the 0-ticket issue. ODE committed to having a break-fix ready for testing on Monday morning. We discussed timelines and the impact that would have to the existing testing schedule. There were a lot of things to juggle to get this to work. In the meantime, we’ve shut off TCN processing to minimize the occurrences of this problem.

The second part of the meeting was to cover the queuing imbalance problem. A representative from the MQ-series group was in attendance and we came up with several ideas about the cause and potential solutions. We’re going to open an incident with IBM as well as letting the queues completely drain out. We’re also going to look into the disk-arrays used to process the queue info. A longer-term solution we came up with is to create another instance of the MQ manager, as the current one appears to be taxed too heavily.

When I got back to my desk, I sent out a graph illustrating a connection between the 0-ticket problem and the heavy queues.

I didn’t leave work until about 6:30pm today. I didn’t stay home very long because I’m meeting Jen at Di’s house to help her baby-sit. I followed the directions that Jen emailed me and made it over there around 8:30pm.

On my way I stopped at Willy’s to get some burritos for us to eat for dinner. When I arrived, Jen was holding Mikey and just put in a DVD of Thomas the Train for him to watch. We had dinner while watching after Mikey and then Jen put him to bed. We spent the rest of the evening there working together at the dining-room table. Jen was working on a paper for school, and I was thoroughly reading the instruction manual for my new receiver.

Di and Tom came back to the house around 10:30pm. We all talked for a bit and then left. Jen and I both drove down to my house. I showed Jen the new setup and then we decided to go to WalMart.

This probably wasn’t such a great idea.

WalMart late at night tends to attract some unusual people. We drove down the East West Connector to the Nearby WalMart. The only reason I wanted to go there was to get some inexpensive speaker wire and some inexpensive speaker wall mounts.

It was difficult to navigate the cluttered aisles of WalMart and I couldn’t help but notice that most of the people who shopped there (at least at this time of night) were mostly all overweight.

In addition to a 18-guage 100-foot spool of speaker wire, I got four speaker wall-mounts. We also got some flossing supplies.

All of the check-out lines were full. We waited a long time. Finally as we got close to getting checked out, the cashier-lady left! We stood there for about five minutes bewildered at this and finally Jen realized that it was close to midnight. She informed me that they all stop what they are doing around midnight to balance the cash in their drawers?!

We didn’t get home until about 12:30pm. I was dead tired. We went to bed around 1am.