Day Three 4/11

The old saying you learn something new everyday acquires new meaning as you age. Is that you really learn something new or did you relearn something you new previously but have since forgotten? Oh well I think today the former applies as opposed to the latter but I never could remember which is the former and which is the latter in the first place.

Whew! I just started typing and I’m confused already and normally that doesn’t happen for another minute or two. Before I forget what I think I learned and it doesn’t matter because by tomorrow I will have forgotten whatever is I’m going to say and I’ll be learning it again. I figured out how to take really dense digital images and shrink them down to a size that I can post to this blog without having to wait an hour to see the results and then have to start again because the picture ends up so large it can’t be displayed on a 30″ monitor.

Here are a few of the pictures that I took Tuesday (I believe that was yesterday) morning which was April 10th, 2007 while I was waiting for the floor specialist to arrive (not the specialist that used to work on the floor of the exchanges either, those floor specialists are a dying breed there aren’t any more on the floor of the AMEX and the NYSE floor specialists will soon be a memory as well. No they didn’t offshore this position they just replaced it with a computer).

Back to what I was trying to tell you (pause while I remember what that is), oh yes, the pictures. So I had to use three programs in order to get these particular pictures in a format that could be uploaded and viewed in a browser without requiring 10 minutes of airtime to download to your browser.

I had no idea of type format my blog writer was going to post the pictures in until I finally got this set posted and I was able to view them. There’s a trick picture in the batch – can you spot part of a poodle in one of them? Not the black poodle, that would be too easy. I noticed that there are two pictures that look alike and that’s because I forgot to move the camera after taking that particular shot. I guess I forgot what I was doing at the time.

I think I’ll drop the jokes about age and memory loss because I don’t know how many people that I work with will be reading this and they may wonder about my ability to recall any detail forget about a gaggle of details.

Back to the continuing adventures of the never ending floor re-implementation project. This morning I was pleasantly surprised that the floor specialist showed up at 8:15 AM EDT. I was truly amazed and I almost got excited that today would be a day of great accomplishment and the majority of our new floor would be in place and there was hope of reclaiming my house. My initial optimism soon waned and proceeded to fade off into just a faint glimmer of promise. As I was looking behind the first person I didn’t see anybody else, I checked to the right and to the left and looked down in case they had brought a small child to help but no there was only one floor engineer.

I let him get set up and once he started working I observed the process he was going to use to install the new tile from the layer of the mud to the setting of the tile onto that mud base. I quickly realized that cleaning up the surface area was not a part of the process and I was suddenly very grateful that I spent the 2 to 3 hours cleaning up the dust, debris and ancient particles that i couldn’t identify last night or else that stuff would have become part of the mud layer and permanently embedded into the fabric of the new floor.

Well it’s the end of the third day and the floor person has left. Come 4 PM it is quitting time. I was struck by that thought and it’s a good thing I have short term memory loss or because I began to compare his 6 hour day to my day when I soon got lost in trying to figure out how many hours a day I work and when the number was coming into my head I lost my train of thought.

Oh Well! Its time to go clean up after 6 hour a day man so I can turn my A/C on tonight. I’m banished to my backyard during the day and at night I roam my house like a ghost trying to remember when I used to have an office, access to a refrigerator, cold water, food, A/C and poodles. I realized I still have the dogs they have been loyal companions throughout this exciting event in my life – i mean Floor Re-Installation Project.

I have to write this down before I forget the most important lesson of that I learned recently – If I want to change the tile in my house – Buy a New House!

I think I’ll give up this Blog Writing experiment as well. I can’t even bring myself to read yesterday’s post and today’s can’t be much better. I don’t think I have much of a future in this arena.

I’ll give it one more shot later tonight when i go back to writing about PeopleSoft and that will be the end of my blogging career. A short lived experiment in blogging.

Day Two Pictures 4/10

Home Remodeling – Day Two

I was up until 2:30 in the morning because I couldn’t sleep, I was too excited after Day One of “The Great Floor Project”. I eventually feel asleep but I was soon awaken by my Blackberry alarm which I had set earlier in the night. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of hearing the Blackberry alarm chime it is truly something to hear.

I finally came to, found some sandals to cover my feet with because the kitchen floor is littered with tile shards and glass. I have no idea how the glass shards managed to sneak in there and considering the landscape the glass is similar to land mines. You really can’t see the glass because it is covered with the same layer of dust that everything else is.

I was expecting the floor engineers to arrive fresh and eager to get at it. Before they left Monday afternoon at 4:01 PM I asked when they would be arriving on Tuesday. I had to draw a clock using hand signals and I believe they communicated in three different languages that they would be back at my house by 8:30 the latest. Well 8:30 came and went. I was standing looking at the front window with eager anticipation and when they didn’t show up by 9 AM I started getting a little antsy and no the big head ants who recently attempted a coup didn’t get me although I was standing still long enough for them to mount another attack.

By 9:30 I got bored and decided to entertain myself by taking some pictures of the floor in its various states of exposure. I captured the evolution of the floor from concrete to a vinyl covered nightmare to it’s next phase which occurred during the disco and flamenco era during which time it sported a 2 by 2 inch look. The floor unlike the disco era, which eventually faded out, refused to fade or be forgotten so it became the basis for the next evolution in flooring attire and morphed into big tile with a slick high sheen big hair look reminiscent of the hair style that took Manhattan by storm in the 90s.

The picture taking lasted all of 43 frames and still no sign of the floor engineering specialists. I went outside, look up the street, down the street and around the corner and no sign of them. I decide to prepare my work area back out by the pool. They eventually showed up around 10:15 AM and I managed to extract the excuse that they were busy at the office which I found pretty funny because I don’t picture these guys filing documents, surfing the web and whatever else takes place in an actual office.

The one person who showed up started chipping away with enthusiasm and about 15 minutes later the sound stopped and I managed to run around the house and catch him trying to escape. He had broken his special two layers of tile and one of vinyl chipping tool so he was headed back to the office to get another one. Spares I take it aren’t given out to the employees in the field because once they do that they may show signs of organization and that would be a terrible thing. Well when he came back he not only found a spare tool but a spare human being as well who was versed in tile removal. What are the odds of that happening?

While I was occupied with meaningful conference calls the two floor re-engineers made incredible progress and managed to remove all three layers of flooring. I have observed that they are also quite adept at leaving the premises undetected. One more they are there and the next minute they are nowhere to e found.

This evening after a quick dinner (just remembered my brownie out in the car) I came back to the house and located my web vac which I have previously used on one occasion which I can’t recall so I’ll have to plead the fifth for that one. It was so long ago I can’t even begin to imagine why I bought it and what I could have possibly used it for. I hunted for over an hour for the directions and all of the parts. It turns out I couldn’t find the directions, i located the total of 4 pieces one of which was a hose, the big canister thing and a filter. I couldn’t figure out the filter so I turned it on and proceeded to try to suck up all of the dust in the kitchen. After a few minutes of intent concentration I turned around and noticed an incredible dust storm was forming in the North and moving in my direction quickly. I couldn’t locate the poodles for a few minutes, I thought they might have been sucked up into the monster but I heard some choking noises and I managed to reach the cutoff switch, sweep up the poodles and dash outside to fresh air.

I was able to revive the poodles and then I became determined to figure out how the filter attached to the inside of the canister. I finally figured that out and I was able to spend the next two or three hours sucking up all of the dust covering 900 square feet of surface area.

The best part of the day was when I turned the A/C back on. That was cause for celebration so I broke out the notebook and started working again.

Wednesday morning I’ll edit a few photos of the floor and in the morning I’ll post a few of them and take some more at the start of day three.

Home ReModeling – Don’t Do It

I have a My Space account as of today. I was checking out a link that Larry in Payroll sent me but I had to register in order to view the site so I ended up with a My Space account. I would post this to my Blog but I have to update my WordPress software and I don’t have that much time tonight.

When the tile de-installer engineers arrived today I had everything moved out of my house except for a few large pieces of furniture. Joanne was thinking that the tile should be chipped up and removed in a day but I knew that wouldn’t be the case.

When I was laying down the Pergo several years ago I ran across some places in the kitchen where I noticed a layer of tile underneath the big exposed pieces of tile. I thought that the original 2”x2” tile was in the kitchen, it turns out it was everywhere except for the sunken living room.

Not only is there tile on top of tile but there is the original vinyl floor at the very bottom. I knew the woman we bought the house from was insane but the previous owners had to be just as insane or in the possession of taste as bad if not worst the owner we met.

One of the flooring engineers proceed to take a heavy hammer (looked like 20 ounces or maybe a 22 ouncer) to a section of 2×2 tile and started beating on it with considerable force. The tile refused to break up and disintegrate and I then knew we were in for it. The store where we purchased the new tile from called Joanne and informed her that it was going to cost more to ripped out another layer of tile. Joanne informed the lady on the other end of the phone that the contract doesn’t state this and they went back and forth. I guess Joanne grew very vocal for her anyway and the lady asked her to stopped yelling. That’s where Joanne told her she be welcome to talk to me if she wanted to hear real yelling.

At the end of this very heated discussion Joanne convinced the lady she would have to eat the cost that we weren’t going to pay another dime. Personally, next time Joanne wants new tile I’ll buy a new house. This has turned into the project from hell. I don’t even remember when we actually started this project but it has involved painting the ceilings which are covered with that wonderful Florida invention popcorn resulting in one of the worst surface areas in the world to paint. While you are painting it you lose your vision and go blind because the popcorn breaks apart and covers your body in a fine dust and coats your lungs with a thin protective layer of poison.

Next it was on the painting the walls whereupon we discovered an incredible amount of water damage at the front of the house underneath the bay window that the previous owner must have put in herself. We had to repair that of course.

The estimate for the number of days it would most likely take to complete the floor work was 5 to 6 days. With the new bonus level added to the mix I’m guessing that will extend the timeline by at least two days. Joanne is staying at a LaQuinta in Coral Springs (great rate, nice musty smell and partial lighting in the rooms but it has free internet). Half the light bulbs are burned out and the room has a distinct smell that doesn’t want to vacate.

I’m working from my patio, the temperature is great tonight and there is a little breeze. Tomorrow night will be a different story. I can’t run the A/C because I don’t want the dust to infect the A/C ducts (I have Stanley Steamer on standby to come out afterwards and clean out all of the duct work) any more than want the restricted air flow blows in there during the removal process.

So tomorrow will be Day Two of the continuing adventure of why to buy a new house if you want new tile saga.

I forgot to share the best part, no one speaks English except for me. I am getting better at improvised sign language which is a great skill to have nowadays when you are using contractors, sub-contractors and laborers. I need to get a portable easel which will assist me with the diagrams of things like pieces of tile, what a house looks like, etc.

More tomorrow. If you prefer to not receive these messages you can unsubscribe at any time.

Production Cluster Part Two

After the re-installation of Clusterware it turns out the original problem – Node (Blade) 5 not joining the cluster was still there.

At this point we determined that we had read through every log file, examined every core dump, trace file and we next started comparing the OS system configuration including kernel parameters, etc. of all the boxes to the blades we used to earlier build the four node QA Cluster.

I read through just about every Metalink note on Clusterware reported problems and resolutions and I recalled one installation where they had a problem with the network adapters. I then started focusing on using traceroute, ping and the UNIX Administrator installed some trace tools and started going through the process of validating the switch configurations, etc.

The problem turned out to be another host on the network was assigned the same IP address that had been assigned to the cluster private interconnect for Node (Blade) 5. At that point we requested and received a new IP address, reconfigured the Network adapter and attempted to start up the Clusterware processes for Node 5. This time the processes came up and stayed up.

This raises a more important issue in how did an adapter that was assigned to be the private interconnect adapter whose traffic should not be leaving the subnet collided with a public adapter on another node. We haven’t completed our investigation into this problem but we will begin investigation of this matter at the beginning of next week April 16th.

Production Cluster Part One

During the week of April 2nd, 2007 started the process of installing Oracle Cluster 10g R2 on six Itanium Blades running HP-UX 11.23.

The first pass at installing the software resulted in five blades forming and joining the Cluster without any problems. We had trouble getting node (blade) 5 to join.

After spending a few hours troubleshooting we decided it would be beneficial to drop (delete) the fifth node from the cluster configuration and use the clusterware software options to add it back in. Accidentally, during the process to drop the fifth node we accidentally deleted the first node which also happened to be the master node at the time.

At that point I decided to de-install the Oracle clusterware software and start over. If you have ever used the Oracle Installer to de-install software you are aware that the majority of the times the Oracle Installer leaves directories behind. In the case of Oracle Clusterware and the fact that after the two root.sh scripts are executed by the root user before you can proceed with uninstalling the Oracle software via Oracle Installer you need to change the owner of CRS_ORACLE_HOME back to oracle:oinstall. The Installer also needs access to /var/opt/oracle, /usr/local/bin and /etc/oratab. Surprisingly, the Installer actually removed the bulk of the installed software, however, we still have to remove some directories under $CRS_ORACLE_HOME or /opt/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/crs/.., had the root user remove /var/opt/oracle all together as well as remove /etc/oratb and the three shell programs in /usr/local/bin – dbhome, coraenv and oraenv. Last but not the least important because you may not be able to successfully re-install the software if you don’t zero out the voting disk and cluster registry raw devices. If you are using OCFS2 then you may not have to clear or erase these two key file resources but if you are using raw devices you MUST do this.