Public speaking is always nerve-wracking. Even a small group is nerve-wracking, especially if they’re directors.

A really nice article about Intro and Extraverts. My favourite quote:

General Charles Krulak, the former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, introduced himself to me as an introvert too. When Krulak took over as the CEO of a bank, he sat down with his vice presidents and said, “Everyone around this table has forgotten more about banking than I know. And because of that, I’m going to need and seek your advice. I may not always agree with you, and if I don’t, I’ll let you know why. If you get to a point where you don’t feel you can come to me, I’ve failed as a leader.”

Had my first encounter of Linux, or specifically, a linux-like environment in a corporate environment. The IT peops were trying to setup an environment on Xenserver, and they had setup a storage space to copy a virtual machine image onto. But they kept running out of space. It took me a while to figure out what they were doing (wrong), though.

They were trying to copy onto the PV partition, and Xenserver had setup its environment to use LVM, so the PV partition was already allocated to the LVM system, and therefore had no space to copy onto.

After figuring out which LV was the one they wanted to use, I had problems mounting, with mount saying I had to specify the filesystem. After trying various switches with mount and specifying a filesystem (only NFS, ext, ext2 and ext3 were supported by Xenserver. No vfat, ntfs or btrfs. Admittedly, however, the Xenserver version the IT people were using was an older version), I soon found out that the IT people had created the storage space, but not done anything else. Therefore, that would explain why I couldn’t mount it – it hadn’t been formatted. So a simple mkfs.ext3 (remember ext4 wasn’t supported) on the block device in /dev/mapper/ meant I could mount it without specifying filesystem. scp’ing into the server and copying into the path proved it worked.

Related articles

• Optimising Xenserver (aedwardsitblog.wordpress.com)
• Installing Citrix XenTools 6.2 on CentOS Linux release 6.0 (Final) from command line (gunnalag.com)
• Xen Launches The Mirage Cloud OS (techweekeurope.co.uk)
• Xenserver - RAID monitoring (community.spiceworks.com)
• Lvm (wiki.archlinux.org)
• Difference between ext2, ext3 and ext4 filesystem in linux (adarsh5388.wordpress.com)
• File Systems (wiki.archlinux.org)

If you go blind from monitoring my internet activity, that's not my fault. It's yours for eavesdropping on my activity in the first place.

Why is it I can relate to Wally more than any of the other characters?

A meeting to decide upon the effectiveness of meetings. Sounds about right…

Dilbert comic strip for 10/03/2013 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive..

I kid you not:

Me: (Picks up phone) Hi, {boss' name}

Boss: Hi, is {name of a colleague} there?

Me: No, he’s not.

Boss: And what are you doing there?

Me: I… work here? I’m at my desk….

Boss: (pause) Oh, I dialled the wrong number, sorry.

Managers and businesses can be so hypocritical, it sometimes drives me up the wall.

I have a holiday allowance and I’m only allowed to carry over 5 days of holiday leave over to the following year - any extra days, I lose. I’ve been lectured by my boss many times about not taking all my leave. So, this year, I booked everything in advance. I had to pull one week off due to work load, and now my boss wants me to pull ANOTHER week off my holiday. When I told her about the excess doing this would cause, she told me “don’t worry, it’ll be approved”.

So, they can make me lose holidays when it suits them, and keep them when it doesn’t…

I have been wanting to upgrade my laptop for a long while but have been putting off. Now my decision has somewhat been pushed. I’ll need to upgrade it to handle some of my work from the office and the software I need to use is really going to struggle on my current hardware.

I’ve worked as both a user and as an IT engineer, so I know how true this is…. :P

Although I guess some could argue that robot have already replaced some CEOs….