Sometimes life turns into a pinball machine for small stretches; shot up the lane and into play, rolling and bouncing around and not really able to do anything about it. That’s the story of my weekend and likely the rest of this week. I’m a pretty laid-back guy, but sometimes life’s little needs and emergencies require immediate attention. And no, none of my issues are hugely important. 🙂

My vmware box has just been cleared from the infirmary. Last week, fairly randomly, two things kept occurring that might have been related. Every few hours the kernal would throw some irq alerts to do with my video card. At other random intervals, the networking on the box would “lose itself.” Once I would get on the console and attempted to access the network, the system would realize that eth0 had timed out, bring it back up, and all was well for another random period. I added “irqpoll” to the startup parameters for reasons I cannot explain, and all was solid all weekend. So now the system is cleared and back to building vms. The IRQ alerts still come in, but so far I’ve seen no reason to pursue fixing those.

Tomorrow I have a major service appt for my car, but yesterday my battery decided it had had enough. It had corroded enough to affect the leads and died in the afternoon. Sunday afternoons are maybe the worst time to have a car issue since few shops are open. I waited until this morning to get a jump, drove it in to the shop, and got the battery replaced. Since this is the first time I’ve had it die on me, at least I got to see the effects on my car of a dead and/or weak battery: what things worked and what didn’t (beyond the obvious lack of action upon key-turn).

I also am hoping to ramp up more focused CCNA studying. I finished the book I have at the dealership this morning, albeit in between being distracted by Regis and other stupid morning television. I’m pretty happy with the knowledge I gained, and I just need to look into some more detailed things like making sure I can quickly calculate subnets (evil).

And this week one teammate of mine is off on a cruise which leaves me caring for all his duties for the next week+. A bit hectic and overwhelming, but things should be fine, albeit busy.