View From the Bushes

While I was at church on Sunday I got a call from a guy at work. I'm not sure if you remember me talking about a big, six-figure content management system we recently purchased and were bringing in-house, but he said, "You know the server you were using for the content management system?" "Yeah," I said warily. "It's gone." I said, "What do you mean it's gone?" And he proceeded to explain that he had somehow installed an operating system on top of the virtual partition of the CMS server and a bunch of other servers. In effect, he had formatted the hard drive of my server.

Fortunately we have a really nice backup system. Unfortunately he hadn't installed the backup client on this particular server. In January we had some consultants from the CMS vendor come out for a week and do a ton of custom work. When I initially heard that the CMS server went bye-bye I thought that the most recent backup we had was from before that week. And so there was about an hour and a half where I figured we were really in trouble. I later remembered that I had made a backup at the end of that week. So at least we didn't lose all that work. However that backup was still over almost a month old. Overall, kind of a messy situation.

My wife has been bugging me about blogging since Friday. See, every other Friday the elementary that my kids attend has a chess club, which I help out with. So last Friday I headed up there and wandered around while the kids played, and played a few myself. Right near the end I was playing with my oldest son. I wasn't taking the game seriously at all and was frequently pointing out to him where he could have done things differently. But after a while I decded it was time to end it and I prepared to mate him. All my attention was focused on his end of the board, and I was one move away from mate, when he said "What happens if I do this?" Well, as it turns out this consisted of moving his rook from one side of the board to the other, where my king sat unprotected in the center of a wall of three pawns. This was check mate.

I don't want the world I just want your half
Ross