Murphy's Law

I had a bad day yesterday, things just ain't doing right. Users encountered slowness accessing two of the web systems maintained by our team. One was hosted on Mainframe, the other on Unix and Windows. I was bombarded with phone calls from users, SA, boss, management, etc.

The application running on the Mainframe was obviously not designed to take the load, more CPU MIPS were added, but, it didn't help much. There was simply too may users trying to access the system.

The other one, well, we found that it was due to some DB settings, which set the DB in batch mode during online hours, it slowed system access. One of the application batch scripts was supposed to change the DB settings (e.g. keep buffer) to online mode, but didn't.

The worst things, one of my SA was not at the DC, another one, on 3 weeks leaves (sigh...one more week to go). The other DBA, NE and SA were not familiar with the batch and middleware support. There's gap in the knowledge transfer somewhere, this has to change.

IELTS

You know what is IELTS? It's short for International English Language Test System. An international English test for people who would take if they want to migrate to countries like UK and Australia, or for academic study.

Usually for undergraduate studies, you will need to score at least a 6 out of 9, i think, for post graduate is 6.5. The test comprises of listening, reading, writing and speaking, if you think it's easy, think again. I have got a friend who used to studied in UK, he scored a 5.5 average, well, still good enough for him to migrate to Australia. He's a DBA, and this skillset is in high demand in Oz land.

I'm going for the test too, need to score at least 6.5 for my MSc program by June. I think this is going to be tough, most probably an uphill task.

She goes on holiday

I think she flew off to Melbourne yesterday's night. I sent her a messages wishing her a good trip today, but, she didn't reply.

I was told when she left office yesterday, she was in a rush and didn't even handover her outstanding tasks.

She applied leaves from 9Mar to 24Mar, but, her 'out of office' agent says 6Mar to 27Mar. This means she is clearing Offs for 6Mar, 25-27Mar, some of these off days were from her last year's weekend work.

I wonder where is she now? Kinda miss her...