Author: Doug McCaughan

I didn’t arise as early as I had planned but I made poached eggs with bagels, mozzarella cheese, and tomato for the family this morning. My daughter left before they were done. My 13 year old son enjoyed his. My wife wasn’t hungry. I decided I would take the three meals to the office and consume them myself. When I arrived at the office, I realized I’d left them on the counter for the cats.

In college, I had the pleasure of being posted as the undergraduate system administrator for the computer science department working with graduate students on 200 or 300 mostly unix computers. We were called wizards. There is a reason. I’ve been working non-stop since Friday 6pm (it is now Sunday at 10:20pm) with a brief break Saturday night to celebrate my wife’s belated birthday. This was after an all-nighter Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning. What have I been doing? Recovering data for a database server that crashed. A business relies upon this data. My wizardry? Firstly, trying to bring the deceased server back to life. Secondly, finding the data, analyzing the data, rebuilding and merging tables in the database, bringing the database back to life on a brand new server.

To the non-technical this is magic. Even to those of us in the know, sometimes what we do involves prayer, miracles, and some lucky but it is all based on a deep, technical knowledge that I think we wizards take for granted. Weekends like this reminder me that I’ve forgotten more about technology than many people will ever learn.

Time to start my weekend chores.

Seriously, I need someone to come ice my wrists like those assistants do for the football players on the sidelines. I’ve typed so much this weekend that if I still had a wedding right, it probably wouldn’t fit on any of my swollen fingers. I’m in like a runner’s high and almost working on autopilot with some heavenly glow surrounding. It’s like Fry’s 100th cup of coffee for programming.

I love the efforts we have made toward home automation. However, sometimes there are pains. For instances, often, “Alexa, turn off the goddamned timer” is much more effective than “Alexa, turn off the timer.”

Music to get data recovered on a client server: The Offspring, Vampire Weekend, Gorillaz, Sugar Ray, The White Stripes, Steve Miller Band.

I’m giving her 120 per cent.

Then give me 150%!

I want to begin this week (Monday) with everything caught up. The list includes home maintenance, shed building, yard work, marking property lines, managing finances, scoutmaster duties, computer programming for clients, computer programming for me, and winning the lottery.

Must. Not. Stop. Moving.

You reach a point each day when you have to ask yourself, "Beer or Real Hot Yoga?"