The most interesting weekend I've had in a while.

Friday: Go with Myself248 to Michigan 2600 meeting. Had an interesting time describing ricochet to a bystander, hanging out and generally having an interesting time. Making it more interesting was the fact I hadn't slept since 3pm Thursday.
I get home on Saturday at 3am and go to sleep. I wake up on Saturday at 3pm.
Saturday: I get up, dink around until gets out of work. We decide to eat dinner, and then screw around doing evil things. On our way out the door, there was a loud pop and a smell of an electrical component releasing its magic smoke that makes it work. In seconds , and I were diving for the equipment, and within 10 seconds afterwards, I had pulled all the AC to my rack, and all battery backup was down within 20 seconds. Mainframe and hellraiser were suspects, but after ripping apart both, we can't figure out what was wrong. Mainframe was filled with asstons of just the nastiest dustballs you've ever seen, so it got well acquainted with my vacuum cleaner. Cleaned up everything, checked everything out, and applied power to the rack component by component. Everything works and is stable with no abnormalities. Bizarre. By the time my network is back up, it's 3am so I pull in to the bedroom, lay down with and watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's stone, and fall asleep afterwards. Sleep happened at around 6:30am.
Update: Just before the movie started, there was a strange thumping I heard. I traced it down to zer0's door to the hallway. I open it to find a panicking big black dude saying "we need to call the fire department, there's a fire down the hall. Oh, and by the way, nice to meet you, I'm the courtesy officer. Please evacuate your apartment." I run and wake up zer0 and get becky dressed, and they get out of the apartment. I stand by with the courtesy officer as he forces the door to the apartment, on the third hit he blew through and was damn near halfway in the living room of the place. Turns out the guy left something on the stove and fell asleep on the toilet or something like that. Nothing but smoke damage, pretty much. But interesting nonetheless.
(End Update)

Sunday: Wake up around 4pm, and zer0 wants to go to mongolian BBQ. I gather up my pop bottles, take them back to the store, and see that this bizarre orange mountain dew now exists, but only for the summer. Damn it's good. We go to mongolian BBQ, and on the way, these two cars line up on university drive at MLK, and just floor it when the light turns green. Zer0 gets a crazy idea that we should follow them. He proceeds to floor it and we're now going 75 down University, keeping up with the racers (!). He hits 83 by the time both shoot off seperate ways down side streets, and he decides to do likewise for good reason (nothing gets attention more than driving 4 times the posted speed limit). We then go to Mongolian BBQ, eat ourselves silly, and then get home and do the bad things we planned to do the night before. We learn alot about the Madison Heights Meijer store, and on the way back home I get this bizarre confrence call at 1am. They hang up on me, call becky and start to bother her, asking for an account on the most uninteresting machine that exists on my network. I hang up on them, and until I can get home and make sure the machine is okay, I have becky Stop-A the server. Everything is fine when we return, some suspicious usage from one of 's users, and otherwise is fine. I then talk to for a while and he finds out about some of my projects. haha, that caught his attention.
Monday: I get ready to head into the office, and one of our machines at work onsite at a very large unnamed customer begins malfunctioning. Damn it all if I can't figure out who is my POC for network issues there. Then I have problems with the monitoring server, and do alot of work that was long overdue on that server.
Then I sleep at 12:30pm, get up at 5pm.
Zer0 comes in and greets me with a cold 2 liter of the orange mountain dew. What a great guy. While we're bullshitting and I'm waking up, the weatherradio goes off, telling me that there's a Tornado Warning in my county. Hit weather.gov and see the radar shows storms to the north and the south, but none are in line with us. I grab my HT, becky grabs hers, and I turn it on just in time to hear the skywarn net go condition red, and I get dressed and hit the door towards the outside. I notice I forgot shoes, but it shouldn't matter. Becky, zer0 and I all watched the skies, saw a couple of weird clouds, but nothing particularly menacing. We go inside as the net clears to condition green. I get on the 2 meter base in the house, check into the net, and run to the store with my HT. While shopping the net goes condition red again, as the sirens yet again go off. Everyone is looking at me funny as my radio begins spewing spotter reports. "I see a funnel cloud at blah blah, medium rotation speed, blah", stuff like that. Fortunately again it wasn't near us, so I proceed to shop and carefully monitor. Get out just as the warnings are cleared and the net goes condition green, and concludes an hour later.

I don't know if my week will be any more interesting, but I figured I'd get this all out while I still remember it all clearly.

5 thoughts on “The most interesting weekend I've had in a while.”

    1. I'd rather not discuss the projects in a public forum. Hrm. Maybe I'll have to document it all in a private post soon. But not today.

  1. every drive I have is hotswappable. It would take scant seconds.

    But you see, I have alot of insurance. My insurance would cover datasavers to come in and recover the drives on my backup server that runs backups of every machine I have.

    That reminds me, I want to double my insurance, I'm sure I'm more than covered as is, but more can't hurt.

    Currently I have $35k of full replacement coverage on my property within my apartment and car, so I'm not incredibly concerned.

  2. Yea, ever since the great breakin of 2000, I figured it would be easier to file a claim than it would be to go back down to the ghetto and get my shit yet again, so I bought alot of insurance so I didn't have to worrry about it.

  3. Oh, and the other thing is that this complex requires you to have renters insurance on the apartment as a condition of the lease, so most people here are really all set in that department.

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