2016-02-14

So, I was at a party on Friday night when my watch suddenly tells me that I have messages from a work friend on both SMS and FB Chat. Something urgent has happened to a server, and could I check something out.

I'd only had one drink, and I only get asked stuff outside of work hours if it's an emergency (last time was over two years ago), so I don't actually mind too much. But I'm a 30 minute walk from work, so I asked the host if she had a Windows laptop I could borrow to remote in*. To which the answer was no, but she did have a Windows desktop. Which was hooked up to the widescreen TV. In the middle of the living room.

So I end up sitting cross-legged in the middle of the living room floor, with a party going on around me, a stage magician giving demonstrations of card tricks behind me, and a 10-month-old trying to crawl into my lap. While connected to work machines from a 37" TV, trying to work out if I even knew which server this was (there are _thousands_ of them, each with a unique name that means nothing on first glance), and whether it was something important. While people around me are offering amusing (if not helpful) commentary.

Thankfully it only took me fifteen minutes to show that this server probably wasn't that important, and that it could wait until Monday for someone to fix it. And then I got to go back to the party.

(And play with the 10-month-old, who was terribly cute. Obvs.)

*I'm sure it would work from a Mac as well, but I didn't want to faff around when I have no idea how to hook up Citrix from a Mac. Probably not that complex, but I had a party to be at.

2016-02-14

Interesting Links for 14-02-2016

Sometimes, my life gets a bit surreal