Sunday 26 December 2010

Christmas Crashes and Other Tales

Another year, other Christmas. Technically it was even a White Christmas ... technically? Well it didn't actually snow on the day, but there was still plenty of white stuff still on the ground from earlier in the week.

A Christmas Dog Walk!

However it wasn't all tinsel, turkey and presents - with an absolutely immaculate sensing of timing our AV File Server (Audio Visual) decided to crash on Christmas morning. Well it didn't so much crash as die ... completely, utterly and irretrievably. I was adding some extra storage to it and this required a reboot. Everything was going smooth and by the numbers, until the server didn't restart after the reboot. Some fairly rapid and frenzied diagnoses later it was determined that its motherboard was completely kaput. For those in the know, not even beep codes. Ho hum.

Open heart surgrey on a mini-ITX server
 If it was mid-year you could get a replacement motherboard next day, however given it's Christmas and half the country is buried in snow, the earliest we can get a replacement here is Thursday :-(

For once I can feel fairly smug at this point as all the data was backuped before I started and anyway it sits on an external storage array - a Drobo (www.drobo.com).

The Drobo temporarilty sat on a desk

So the Drobo was moved from the rack to a temporary home on the office desk and hooked up to one of the desktop machines. This was renamed and re-IPed so, like Clark Kent emerging from a phone box, it's now masquerading as the AV server. Serenity, films, photos and music, has been restored to the household.

So the moral of this Christmas Tale? - Always backup your data!  This was just an annoying inconvenience for us, which ate a bit of time. It could have been much, much worse; the data on this server is all our digital photos (~50,000), music and various home movies. A thousand, thousand memories. I know you never think it will happen to you, but one day it will. PCs break, disks corrupt, CDs and DVDs fade. Remember, data isn't real until it exists in at least two places, so always, ALWAYS, have a backup.

So a final thought for Christmas - where does the rise of the mobile phone and the subsequent demise of the phone box leave Superman? Caught short and exposed? Don't let your data be ;-)

Merry Christmas!

Sunday 19 December 2010

Snuggle Dogs

Collies and Labradors are very different dogs. One was breed to herd sheep and is very good at it. The other was breed to swim and is also very good at it. They're also both very good at snuggling ... but they do it in very different ways.

Our Collie likes to drape herself across people. And of course being a collie she does it 100%!


Our Labrador also likes to snuggle but prefers to sit beside rather than drape.

How small can you curl?

Saturday 11 December 2010

An Illrador :-(

Thursday morning started very early for us, with Kira whining to be let out in the garden at 3am. I imagine this is a bit like being a parent. You get woken up by an unusual noise, your subconscious registers what it is and gets the feet going before the conscious mind has caught up. I was physically out the bedroom door before I was really awake. It's very unusual for Kira to make any kind of noise in the night so whatever was causing it was fairly serious. Sure enough, when let out, she emptied the contents of stomach and came back in looking a bit sorry for herself.

Now having a Labrador, she will "snack" when out for a walk if she finds something she thinks is tasty, so this happens from time to time. It's not something that causes too much worry, but I did spend the rest of the night on the sofa in case she needed to go out again. By the time the sun came out she seemed fine and was bouncy on the morning walk, chasing a ball with her normal gusto.

Unfortunately it being a week day we had to go to work but Andie came back to walk her at lunch time and again she seemed fine. I managed to get back at 4:30pm to be greeted by a depressed Labrador and some very watery vomit by the back door. When let out into the garden she added diarrhoea to the list of symptoms. At that point you start thinking about a visit to the vets. I debated this with myself for 30mins, but what swung it was not physical symptoms, it was the very depressed Labrador who followed me round the house and tried to hide under the bed. Our collie often hides under the bed. Any fireworks and all you can see is a black and white bum sticking out from the underside of the bed, but not the Labrador and yet here I was looking at a very sad black nose poking out from beneath the bed. After that she tried to sit on my feet while I sat at the desk. Definitely time to call the vets. That was 5 o'clock, by 5:20 we were in the vets and Kira was having her stomach poked and prodded. At this point she obliged by demonstrating her diarrhoea. So an anti-nausea injection, a course of anti-biotics, a recommendation of a rice & chicken diet and £62 lighter we left the vets.

Back home, some sofa time was prescribed. The seriousness of the situation was confirmed by Kira's reaction to suppertime.
This is not the normal reaction of a Labrador to the supper call.

She also seemed to be a bit chilly so she was blanketed.

A chilly Labrador
Fortunately dogs bounce back more quickly from these things than we do so by Friday evening we were back to a bouncy Labrador who was hinting that supper would be a wonderful idea.

So what was the point of this rambling? Having been down with food poisoning myself earlier in the year I struggled through 3 or 4 days before crawling into the doctor. And yet as soon as one of the animals is ill they're straight to the vets. Why? Me suffering is through choice (or stupidity), their suffering is not and we want to relieve it as quickly as possible and sod the expense - that's what credit cards are for!