Workwise I should really be hating today. Scorpio (our main mail server) was down for most of the morning. It was our scheduled downtime and I decided to upgrade our mail server software (for the nerds benefit: it is cyrus). However, because we never normally get any downtime to perform such routine activities, we had to upgrade around 14 versions, including a major revision. Despite the need for multiple recompilations and a few scary problems during the initial upgrade, it was back up well before the end of our at-risk period. Consequently, scorpio decided to crash 20 minutes later, after cyrus had decided to corrupt a very significant database and the number of incoming connections caused it too much hassle.
Rebooting scorpio after a crash now takes over 2 bloody hours due to the massive size of our throbbing disk array (Phwoaaar and so forth).
It was fine by mid-day and everyone was really nice about it. Good job I didn’t actually have a heart attack this morning really.

As if the nervousness engendered by a major systems problem wasn’t enough, it turns out that I also managed to send about 15 minutes worth of unscanned mail into the college as a result of my desire to clear the mail backlog. In the grand scheme of things it’s not really significant (we frequently have periods where in-the-wild viruses pour in before the protection is available), but it still made me feel like an arse…

Here’s a very simple mathematical problem that seems to confuse even the most intelligent people…I don’t know why…but I do know it confused me when I first heard it:
“If a brick weighs nine pounds plus half a brick, how much does a brick and a half weigh ?”
Answers on an e-card please.
Loads of other stuff too, probly.