*sigh* More work woes.

You know how the Chinese give names to their years. Like, the Year of the Dragon, and the Year of the Monkey, and so forth?

This is the week of the Raid Failure.

Got a page this morning, waking me from what had been a fairly restless night, so I was none to happy at being dragged out of bed half an hour before I was due to get up. It was one of the network engineers, who wanted me to know that the server on my workbench was beeping loudly and was there anyway to make it stop. I had him log in on the console and shut the box down, as it's not in production and could stand to be switched off until I got to the office.

After my morning meeting, I came back to my desk and fired it up to see what was up. As soon as it got to the SCSI initialization phase, it started wailing. I had a sinking feeling I know what that meant, so I escaped into the RAID controller's config screen to see. Yep, there's a bad disk. This box only has three drives, so it actually has no spare to pull in in case of disk failure; when you lose one, it is automatically in degraded mode.

I started a rebuild, and will now have to see about getting a replacement drive before I can wrap this project up. My only consolation is that at least it failed today, rather than this time next week after I had shipped it to the customer's site in Kentucky.

Apologies for all the work stuff this week, but it's what's consuming most of my attention the last few days. (Well, there's some non-work stuff, but I'm not ready to talk about that yet. <G>)

Heh.

As a result of the large number of lovely UK people on #filkhaven, there's often a bit of discussion about the latest cricket matches. I wondered idly today if people raised on cricket understood why Mad Magazine's 43-Man Squamish was supposed to be funny, or if they thought it made perfect sense and looked like fun.

The Weekly Reader

Well, i haven't gotten back into my daily habits yet, but I have managed to at least pick up a book more often than in the previous few weeks.

• The Legion of Super-Heroes Archive Volume 5 (DC Comics)
  
  Continuing to work though the LSH archives, I found the stories trying to pick up a bit as we get firmly into the Jim Shooter era. Shooter is, of course, one of those legendary success stories that all of us dream about: he sold his first story to DC when he was thirteen and made such an impression that he was invited to write for the book regularly afterwards. The biggest improvement of his writing over previous LSH fare was his ability to write a group of teenager who actually sound like teenagers of their day.
  
  The plots are still silly, but I started seeing a little bit more variety here, and started to see a bit more of the spark of "early legion" that everyone talks about when they rhapsodize about this era of the title. Very enjoyable.
  
  
• Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson
  
  I absolutely adore Tove Jansson's Moomin books, and have been idly recollecting them as I happen across them. deidrecorwyn handed this one back to me along with a small stack of books of mine she had unearthed from her recent move that she was sure belonged to me, so I picked it off the shelf to re-read.
  
  To be honest, I adore this one a little less than the other two that I still have in my collection, though I don't think the fault is really Jansson's. Elizabeth Portch translated this one, and the other two were translated by Thomas Warburton, who has a better ear for Jansson's whimsical characters, and has a lighter touch with phrasing that really makes them dance. Portch does an adequate job, but it doesn't sparkle as much as some of the other Moomin stories.
  
  Having said that, what a delightful read! I neither have nor intend to have children of my own, and I have very few regrets about that decision, but one of the few I have is that I won't have as many opportunities to read these stories outloud to a young person hearing them for the first time. I think I must remember to take them with me the next time we visit Don and Dina, or better yet, find a set of them that I can take and leave with little Kailyn and Connor.
  
  If you love good, whimsical children's literature, and have never read the Moomin books, do yourself a favour and go grab one now. My personal favourite is "Moominpappa's Memoirs" (which I read originally under the title "The Adventures of Moominpappa").