Some day, I’ll maybe, possibly, have a single subject post. Um. That day would probably not be today, however.

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Since tomorrow I leave for Chicago again (wondering if I still get my closet, and if it’ll rain), Mr. Hot and I are taking Shortman out to dinner tonight to Joe’s Crab Shack. Not exactly my type of 4-star seafood meal, but … all you can eat popcorn shrimp (yes, Shortman’s idea of seafood) for $9.99. Since I’ll be in brown-food-fried-heaven later on, I decided to have a nice bowl styrofoam container of soup for lunch.

Excuse me, but aren’t you supposed to take the bay leaf OUT of the soup before you serve it?

And of course, the leaving for Chicago always opens up the possibilities for some travel exploit posts in the next couple of days, right?

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Last weekend, we did an extraction of 1.6M account records from one of our largest data systems. Those of us with some experience in this process suggested to our buyer that they consider smaller chunks over a longer period of time (i.e. ~500k accounts each over 3 weekends). They told us to eat shit and die disagreed with our analysis.

During the days leading up to this extraction, we met regularly with the buyer, our subject matter experts, and the business people to discuss the ramifications of moving forward in this half-assed manner.

Primarily, our concerns centered around the days immediately following the extraction. Putting the history of 1.6M accounts on tapes (75 of them suckers), hand delivering them to a local airport (accompanied by appropriate security), putting them on a private jet and whisking them away was the easy part. But. First business day after that happened? (Um, that was yesterday for those of you keeping track.) All hell could break loose. Because each one of those 1.6M accounts? Had to be updated to show that they no longer belonged to this bank. Now they belong to that bank.

At 2 a.m., we ran out of swap space for the updates. The job crashed, burned, and generally crapped out. We freed up some space. It sucked it up again three hours later. Like a freakin’ Dyson. Finally, at 11:30 this morning, it finished successfully.

Now, if the buyer would have gotten their heads out of their asses listened to us when we said that smaller groups made more sense, this wouldn’t have happened because? We would not have been trying to update 1.6M records. Therefore, we would not have run out of swap space 3 times. Hmmmmmmm.

And what did the morons have to say during our status update? Because we were off by 40 minutes in estimating when this would be done after it blew up 3 fucking times? And we’d NEVER done more than 400k records before?

“Well, I guess our culture is just different. We don’t give the clients a resolution estimate and then change it 30 minutes later.”

Don’t you know that it was a damned good thing - probably the most insanely smart thing I’ve done since this takeover was announced in fact - that my phone was muted. That asshole would have heard things come out of this mouth that would shame a career Navy man.

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Thanks to Thora for this:

What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day? One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

This year’s Blog Action Day is October 15th. This year’s subject is the environment. “Posts do not need to have any specific agenda, they simply need to relate to the larger issue in whatever way suits the blogger and readership. Our aim is not to promote one particular viewpoint, only to push the issue to the table for discussion. “

I love this idea. Your views and my views may be different, but if we get people talking, think about what we can do. Join us!

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Do you guys remember “3rd Rock from the Sun”? One of the top 5 funniest shows ever. Ev-Er.(Hey, this is my blog, I can make sweeping statements like that. It’s allowed. Shut up.)

I was reading the NYTimes Style section and ran across this article. What? Hey, part of being the Hotfessional is to keep up on today’s styles. Especially in light of the fact that I, once again, looked in my closet this morning and about puked. Black pants anyone? How about a black skirt for somethnig different? Yea, right.

Aaaaaannnyway, this little cutie Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who is so going on my list) was in Angels in the Outfield (Shortman’s favorite movie ever), and a whole bunch of other stuff. And seeing him got me thinking about the show. And how we still haven’t managed to get through the entire first 2 seasons of DVDs that we bought. And then one thing led to another (which it tends to do in my crazy random posts), and here we are:

—- And they had the awesomest theme song, too. —-

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