This morning, I was awakened at 2AM by a call from Nino. He was on standby providing support to the deployment team and it seems there’s a problem. I quickly dialed-in to the conference call and got the log report. I saw, as Nino already did, that there’s a communication problem between two components, the CWS and the PIS.

However, due to the configuration of the production environment, it is hard to confirm. There is a staging environment but the configuration is different (bad) so it’s pretty much useless. Eventually, the deployment team did manage to isolate one production server and we tested on it.

Same conclusion: there is a communication problem between CWS and PIS. I asked if PIS is available on the port the CWS is trying to connect to. That probably switched the light bulbs in the deployment team’s collective heads because they instead of responding, they configured something, and voila, it worked!

UPDATE: I found out that the port our system has been configured to use is not compatible in production because they had decided to keep the old application server up (good) on that port and have the new application server on a different port (but they hadn’t informed us, bad).

I was browsing through the Forbes when I read these two articles about the ten worst jobs and ten happiest jobs. The ten worst jobs are:

1. Director of Information Technology
2. Director of Sales and Marketing
3. Product Manager
4. Senior Web Developer
5. Technical Specialist
6. Electronics Technician
7. Law Clerk
8. Technical Support Analyst
9. CNC Machinist
10. Marketing Manager

Director of Information Technology, a job on my current career plan, is at the top. Not good.

And the ten happiest jobs are:

1. Clergy
2. Firefighters
3. Physical therapists
4. Authors
5. Special education teachers
6. Teachers
7. Artists
8. Psychologists
9. Financial services sales agents
10. Operating engineers

It may be too late for me to become clergy but author or teacher (I’ve actually taught before) seem feasible. Hmmm.

I’ve always been interested in having my own business, manage my own time, and thus have more time with the family. Which is why I found this article particularly interesting. How to be your own boss—and have more time with the family. What’s not to like? One of the observations on the benefits of managing your own time contains a nugget of wisdom:

“This was a big plus when I became a mom because I was able to stay home and be hands-on with my boys (and squeeze in work whenever I have the chance, usually when they’re sleeping). I get to bring them to school every day, spend time with them at home.”

That is how it should be: Squeeze in work (and workplace related activities) into your schedule. It shouldn’t be the other way around where you squeeze in family into your schedule. I resolve to do that… even while I’m still a cubicle denizen.

It’s ironic when some companies try to espouse supposed work-life balance when the best thing a company can do for work-life balance would be to make you work 8 hours tops.

Consider a company where you end up spending 10 hours per day for work and work-related stuff (including team-building activities):

6 hours – sleep
1 hour – prepare for work
1 hour – go to work
10 hours – work
1 coffee breaks + lunch
1 hour – go home
4 hours – remainder

4 hours, 4 measly hours for your family, your kids, your friends, yourself. How is that balance?

Support asked for a list of log entries that indicates that the system unusable and require immediate action. So we provided them a list of fatal exceptions. The next question was stupefying: How many times should the exception occur before immediate action is taken? First, those are fatal exceptions. Fatal. Get it? The system is dead. How many time does it have die? Second, it’s immediate action. Immediate. Do it right away.