andrewducker | Beyond the Valley of Sleep

Current Mood: tired

Beyond the Valley of Sleep

Monday night: Was about to turn off the computer at 11pm when I got frantic email from nICk because Outlook Express had crashed and lost all of his email. Fortunately this is a problem I know of, so I could retrieve it all for him. Still, finally crashed out at half past midnight. Had to be up at 6am to get a train to Glasgow (due to train strike).

Tuesday night: got home at a half reasonable hour (10:30) and was actually in bed by 11:15, leading to feeling almost human on Wednesday.

Wednesday night: Mulholland drive started later and lasted longer than expected, got home from Glasgow at 12:30, went to bed by 1am, phoned by GF at 1:05, managed sleep by 1:30. Alarm went off this morning at 7:00 and I was sooo close to just going back to sleep. Tonight I have no plans except "get to bed early and be snoring by 11pm"

If only my eyes will stay open until then...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I have days like that all the time. I work graveyard shift, three days a week -- 19:00-08:00 Wed-Fri. I live an hour from work. (Not by choice, but it's the closest area where I can afford to rent.) I have precisely enough time to get home, check my email, and fall into bed if I want to be able to haul my sorry ass out of bed to be at work on time, and some days I just plain old don't make it.

Last week one night I woke up, hit the alarm, made a noise that could be transcribed as "gnnkkkkkkh", called in dead, and went back to sleep for two hours. I'd feel guilty about it, but my supervisor regularly rolls in that late with no call and no apology. :)

When people asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year, I said "a good night's sleep".

They make you work 13 hour shifts? I hope they pay you ridiculous amounts of money for it. I think I'd probably work nights if the pay was right, but it'd have to be pretty good.

Lack of sleep isn't good for me, I'm definitely a lot happier when I've slept well. But trying to actually organise my life to get enough sleep is definitely tricky for me. Maybe if I threw out my social life.

I get paid pretty decently for it, I guess. The reason for the 13 hour shifts is because they have us work three-day work weeks; we're a 24/7 data center and that gives us the most coverage with the fewest operators. They're pretty decent hours; I'd just be a lot happier if I had some coworkers who weren't on the mental level of your average simian. :P

Oddly, I get more sleep on the days when I'm at work than I do on the days when I'm off work. Even though I'm nocturnal by preference and profession, on my days off I always wind up slipping around into a weird kind of sleeping pattern that involves being awake for about 20 hours and then asleep for 8 or so. This of course means that I'm wiped on Wednesdays; some weeks I wind up waking up at 06:00 Wednesday and being awake until about 09:00 Thursday.

And it's not because of my social life, either ... I don't have one of those. Misplaced it about five years back and it just never turned up at the lost & found. :)

Yeah, having decent coworkers can really help. There's nobody in my current organisation that I can really have a decent technical conversation with, and less than nobody that I can have a conversation with about my hobbies (gaming, films, books, comics, etc.). As to the number of people I can discuss anything deep with, well I think we're into imaginary numbers there...

Fortunately I manage the network here, so I can have personal email/web without problems. Which means I can happily chat on livejournal and email my friends without too many problems (as long as nothing breaks horribly and requires my attention...)

My coworkers seem to think that "decent conversation" involves discussion of various portions of the female anatomy. While I can sympathize with the subject matter, I'd much rather just hang out online and pretend that I don't hear them. :)

We are technically under all sorts of restrictive internet usage policies here, but I am fairly clever and resourceful and my manager knows that I run this shift single-handedly. (It's fun when I take days off. They appreciate me so much more when I come back.) He therefore lets me get away with an awful lot more than my average evolutionary-impaired co-worker. So I just sit around with an ssh window open to my home machine all night, and hang out on the social MOO that my friends and I overrun.

It's pretty funny to hear the boys frantically looking for porn behind me and running up against the firewall at /every turn/, while I'm sitting there with an inocuous-looking text window, whistling innocently, and reading whatever I want through lynx. And when the day shift comes in in the morning, I can get out of having to socialize by frowning heavily and typing as fast as I can, with the occasional murmur of "I'll be able to talk in a minute, gotta finish this first..."

...However, I think our external DNS servers have just fallen over. Thank god that isn't my department. :) Still, I should grab the Phoenix Down and go and cast Life3 on them.

Yeah, being invaluable rocks. In my last job my boss would take me to one side about once a month and ask me to cut down on my web access. And I'd say "sure" and carry on, knowing that he didn't actually mind so long as I kept everything running and kept writing code (my last job was database programming).

Running a MOO or similar would actually be pretty cool, if enough of my friends had internet access during the day. As it is I've organised a few mailing lists to keep us going.

Unfortunately, things are about to get busy for a bit. This weekend (and probably next) we upgrade our 3 Windows NT servers to Win2K, and then I have to go around all of our machines (thankfully only 80 of them) and change all the directory paths and to work with the new systems. Great fun.

So what is it you do?

See, my access doesn't show up on the logs -- they don't monitor SSH access, just web, and most of my web browsing goes through my home machine using lynx. So I pass under the radar. :)

I work as 'Distributed Production Operator' for a Very Large Insurance and Finanacial Company. Technically, I'm Unix Production Support. In actuality, I watch the Big Red Board and when the BRB lights up, I call someone and haul them out of bed in the middle of the night. It's actually quite theraputic, and appeals nicely to my inner Bastard.

Win2K, huh? Haven't touched it myself -- we use NT4.0 at work and I use Mac OS X at home -- but good luck with it.

And now, I get to go home! wheee, one-day work weeks. I [heart] managers who will let you use vacation time to play video games.

Yeah, tracking SSH is a lot harder. Well, pretty much impossible except for the original endpoint. I occasionally use Remote Desktop from home to connect to my Windows XP box at work and then use all my software from there. A bit slow over the crap internet connection, but still perfectly workable.

My brother works at the Royal Bank of Scotland in a similar position to yours. Technically he works in support. In actuality he takes incoming calls, phones the right person and then says "Sort it!" He finds it pretty dull most of the time, but passes the time by working on web pages and gaming background.

I find Win2K (and WinXP) a lot nicer than NT to use, but you really do need enough memory. I'd recommend 256MB, but as that's only ?45, it's not really a problem. I haven't used OSX, but I've heard good things about it. Is it really that user friendly?

I originally thought that working the shift I work would give me time to write, but my coworkers are really distracting and I don't have music, which means that I do a lot of writing research and a lot of useless web browsing while at work. (Favorite search term to start with: 'I am bored. Educate and amuse me, Internet.')

OS X is wonderful. It's easily the most user-friendly Unix GUI I've ever touched. I don't know how it would work for novice users, as I haven't been one of those for a /very long time/, but it's managed to get Unix on the desktop in a way that Linux has only been dreaming of. And it's got the Unix rock-solid stability -- go and take a look at kekkai.org. That's my desktop machine serving you that page. Right now, it's also running Photoshop, Premiere, iTunes (MP3 player), and three different web browsers. The webserver doesn't even hiccup. And all of that on only 384MB of RAM.

I do like that about OSX, the fact that it's based on a very powerful infrastructure with a nice GUI is pretty cool. I'm not likely to move across to it in the near future tho - I've got far too used to things like Fast User Switching in XP (allows me to leave all my software running while my flatmate switches to his login (with his favourites/shortcuts/mail/etc.). I'd be tempted to give it a go if it wasn't Mac hardware only. Hmm, how well does OSX do multiple logins on the same machine? Or is that not something it deals with?

I'd love to run my own webserver, but I really don't have the money, unfortunately. Here in the UK broadband is still heinously expensive, especially if you actually want to run a server.

I'd also do more writing at work, but I can't listen to music either, due to running support and having to listen for the phone. In my last job I coded all the time (well, mostly) and thus had my headphones pretty much attached to my skull - made life a lot happier.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Beyond the Valley of Sleep

no subject

13 hour shifts???

Re: 13 hour shifts???

Simians

Re: Simians

Invaluable

Re: Invaluable

Monitoring

Re: Monitoring

Looking for stability in all the right places