journal features

writing during a write-off

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kokubunji, 2022.09.23

Today's a holiday in Japan but we're completing a cloud migration and I had to follow the team's progress for about five hours. There was the usual barrage of emails and text messages and so on to deal with, plus as always a mysterious global outage of unknown cause and unknown resolution.

But after that I put the time (which was mostly waiting) to work on improving something for this website. The tool that generates the HTML files for the images that are posted to this site was running to about 8 minutes on the new server. It was a Perl wrapper that calls the original PHP that generates the web pages. I decided there wasn't much I could do with such a workaround and rewrote the whole thing in Perl. Now it runs in 8 seconds. The job builds 7,000 files so quickly they all have the same timestamp.

Aside from that, the only excitement was a 4.9 earthquake that was kind of fun.

This is the third such migration weekend. I was honestly expecting the period to have started around April or May but we had a PM that was doing a lot of this stuff until his retirement last month. Next weekend it's more of the same, then the weekend after that I'm in the office all day on a Saturday for an annual disaster recovery test, then one final app migration the weekend after that.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner