Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Day 153 - 07/23/2007

Another day at the customer site downtown. This time our man in Havana was out on vacation, so I didn't have to deal with him directly. I say directly as we still had to deal with his incompetence in trying to get their environment up and running in order to support the migration effort. After a series of errors (a comedy of them is more like it), we finally got the migration running. The kicker occurred early on in the day when I put the CD in the drive to install the latest version of our software. I waited for the autostart feature to kick in, but it never did. I checked Windows Explorer to see whether I had put it in the right drive, but there was no disk in the drive. Thinking I had put it in the wrong drive, I reopened the drive and it was empty. Since we were working on a rack of servers, where one keyboard and monitor drive 10 servers, I opened up all the CD drives and the disk was nowhere to be found.

It was gone.

After about 20 minutes of searching through the drives (and putting a flashlight to use from the shelter-in-place kit), I was finally able to find the disk: it wasn't seated all the way in the drive when I pushed the drive in and it was pushed between the top of the drive and the top of the server. Fortunately it was easily accessible after sliding the server out and popping the top. That out of the way, we moved forward with the installation. I wasn't quite sweating bullets at the time, but I didn't relish the thought of having to make yet another trip downtown!

Due to the mishaps at work, I missed M swim her freestyle at her meet. She had her best time yet and will look to improve next year. I was able to see her swim breast stroke, however, and again, she did great.

While she has a way to go with both strokes (considering she's only been "seriously" swimming for a few weeks now) I'm very proud of the progress she's made. I'm even more excited about her excitement about swimming. I stopped doing the hard sell about joining the swim team last year as she was adamant that she didn't want to do it. I'm sure she might have done it had we forced the issue, but that's not the way to succeed with her. (Actually, she probably would've done it had she known other kids doing it. That's one of the negatives about not attending the neighborhood school, she doesn't know that many kids from the neighborhood.) Now that she's experienced the swim team buzz, she's even committed to swimming over the winter with the team.

What she said after we returned from vacation sums it up well when, after D asked her how practice was, M replied: It felt great to be back in the water. Who knows, maybe she'll follow in her grandfather's footsteps (or maybe she'll just follow in mine). Whichever route she takes, I'm sure the experience will provide her with enjoyable memories to reflect upon some years down the road.

No comments: