A new home

On Friday I collected my keys. I am now the proud owner of a shiny new flat not too far from the centre of Manchester.

It is somewhat daunting however, bills and mortgage ontop of debt and living :/ if I have done my maths right, then the savings should offset the increased costs….. I hope 🙂

First order of the day however is getting flooring installed. I wasn’t early enough to buy to be able to specify any options, so I have what is called “builders finish” as a floor at the moment. Tomorrow sees my dad and I taking on the job of laying lamminate and vynal flooring. Hopefully all be done, and I can start the moving in process proper.

Going to be a long, stressful day, and costly :/ being a Sunday also limited time wise for raiding diy stores. I have taken Monday off work too so I can spenc that whole day moving and fitting things.

Exciting and daunting at the same time.

To Italia (and back)

I have just returned from my 1st ever trip to Italy!  Very interesting it was too.  First thing we noticed is that the lovely Northern weather I am used too has hardened us Brits to a more cool climb, so we got a few strange looks as we swanned around in just T-shirts whilst the locals shivered under layers and with thick scarves :D  (the word ‘Nesh’ was also used a lot 😀 )  As always cultural ambassadorial duties were not overlooked 😀

First course of duty was to goto the Italian JagFest organised by Marco.  Much Atari goodness was beheld and his rather impressive shop and collection of all things computer game related! impressive.

Food was consumed, it has to be said Italian food, is very good, although their Pizzas only seem to come in one size.. HUGE, and made of NOM :D  Pizza hut is NOTHING like real Italian pizza, no where near.  The 3-4 foot long Pizza’s we had for Lunch were impressive (I didn’t get a pic 🙁 ) those were shared 😛

As we all know Italian beer is like flavoured tap water to the cultivated British taste buds, so Gaz and myself undertook a mission to deplete the stock of Guinness in the local Irish bar whilst Mike tackled the Erdinger.

Second and best (for me) was meeting my long time On-line chums from WoW.  Franco, Piero and Nic are quite simply the nicest blokes you could hope to meet, and completely bonkers 🙂 was more like meeting old friends than meeting friends for the 1st time, much more delicious food was consumed (the three Italians worked their way through a local Zoo I think 🙂 ) and much Vino was drunk.  After goodbyes more Guinness in the Irish bar and bad… followed by the WORST Hangover I have had in years, and most of the next day going missing 🙂

Unfortunately due to various issues (like the hangovers and illness) we didn’t get to see them again the next day, although promises were made to come over to the UK for our next guild meet 😀 I didn’t forget lads :D  Look forward to seeing you again.

Soon enough it was time to head home and here I am writing this as I upload the pics.  Its been must be nearly 12 hours of travel time and I haven’t shaved in days (bloody silly airplane carry on laws).. So now the pics are up I think I will go and get a nice long shower and trim my face off 😀

Pics here http://www.linkovitch.me.uk/gallery/italy201003

Storage Jenga

If you look after storage arrays you may have come to a situation like this.

You have a disk array, you want to turn it off (for whatever reason, age, replacement, it smells of old cheddar.. whatever).  Alas there is some customer still using a portion of it, you now need to wait for them to leave before you can decommision it.

Well I have had an idea to ‘help’ them in their exodus from the shelf.  Quite simply you enact storage Jenga.  How does this work?  easy, every day/couple of days/ weeks  (depending on your desired timescale/array size), you send a member of staff to site, once on site, that member of staff removes, physically a single disk from the array and leaves.  Now the customer has a chance of surviving this, depending on your configuration and hot spares, but each disk removed increases their odds of goodbye 🙂

I imagine this will work with maximum excitement with RAID 10 arrays with a couple of hot spares, possibly pulling a disk JUST before the time it takes to rebuild the hotspare 🙂

Wonder if management will let me try it some time? Hmmmmm 😀