Today’s featured image is – what a surprise! – my cats. It’s not often that I can get all three of them in a photo together.
February has arrived. As far as I’m concerned, that just means that the year is about 1/12th over, and I’m good with that. Work has been a disaster since late December and the closer we get to the end of tax season, the happier I’ll be. I’m actually updating this on this lovely Saturday morning while I’m also working at home. I’ve got a huge client in Chattanooga & Memphis (surely you remember the story about setting THEM up) which has been having nothing but trouble since things started ramping up for the season several weeks ago. As usual, someone made a major chance to their environment a few days ago. Didn’t document it. Apparently didn’t test it. The result being that, since Thursday morning, a high percentage of the users at this particular client can’t get any work done. So they’re losing tens of thousands of dollars daily, they’re yelling at me, and I’m saying, “Not much I can do to help you.”
Oddly enough, in the middle of all of this, I was indeed approached about taking a level 1 lead role, which will put me into more of an administrative/teaching capacity. I interviewed for it – seemed to go okay. Waiting for an offer letter to see what kind of salary bump we’re talking. If nothing else, it will take me out of the first line of fire from clients like the one I mentioned – but it will also put me into the middle of problems with a lot more firms, as the L1s on my team will start sending their problem children to me. I figure, “What the hell?” If I don’t like it…well…I don’t like what I’m doing now, but I’ll be making more.
GoDaddy has once again managed to destroy a few years of my life. They did something to my website early last week – said they were moving my source files and it would only take a day or two. Most importantly, they swore that they weren’t moving the database. After several days of not having database access, I called and asked them what the deal was. They said they’d take care of it. Yesterday, connectivity to the database was restored – only the database in question was missing about a year’s worth of data. This includes not only messageboard posts, but also statistics, custom code, forum modifications, vital links….the site is pretty much dead in the water. I put up a message last night to tell my users what’s going on and today I’ve been contemplating what to do next. Starting over is the logical step, as it would take – literally – a year or more to get things back to where they were last week. I still have two years left on my contract with GoDaddy, but I’m honestly not thrilled about the chance of this happening again, so I’m looking at alternatives.
Should you be wondering, THIS site is also hosted on GoDaddy. Don’t be suprised if it just disappears one day. I’m trying to keep local backups of the database with this, at least. Doing so with the football site was nearly impossible due to its size.
Jenny and I are slated to take in a minor league hockey game tonight. Truth be told, I’d really rather sleep; but it should be fun.