Focused, The Big Birthday

My first day back at work consisted of me spending most of the day troubleshooting and monitoring a server that developed mystery performance issues suddenly.  It was the same server I was on the phone with the office for on Monday and Tuesday.  I have dug through endless pages on the internet trying to get a handle on what is going on but have not yet received a concrete answer.  Instead I have been doing the network equivalent of shotgunning parts as I disable or change things to see what sort of affect it has.  In a nutshell the problem causes slow performance for a number of systems at our main office so it’s a real issue.

The issue persisted all morning yesterday, despite changes I made.  Then all of a sudden right around lunch time things went back to normal and stayed that way the rest of the day.  This made me think that possibly the cause is something external of the server I had been working on.  I spent the rest of the day looking for unusual activity inside or outside of the network but again found no conclusive answers.  One side effect of this is I am working on building a second server to perform the same functions as the first so we have a way to recover quicker if need be in the future.

Today is Cindy’s 50th birthday, a big one by anybody’s standards.  The cruise was the big celebration of the event, I had hoped it actually would have occurred on her actual birthday.  Now, going out to dinner tonight seems a little anti-climactic.  We are going to Outback per Cindy’s request with her family and a good friend.    I always want Cindy’s birthdays to be special and of course a 50th requires more attention than most.

Despite how much I lamented turning 50, I’ll never forget the effort Cindy and the rest of my family and friends put into making it a special time.  I hope the last week or so does the same for Cindy as she deserves it.  I have never known someone so willing to invest herself into the happiness of those around her as Cindy does and I love her for it.