Coredump

I had dinner with our manager and some colleagues from work at Cafe Ysabel, which, in my opinion, is San Juan’s only redeeming value (aside from Greenhills Shopping Center, that is). Heh. Joke.

It was my first time to be there, so I was a bit intimidated. But the ambiance (don’t worry, it doesn’t cost that much) was cozy, what with the yellow gas-lantern-like lights and the antique feel of the place. (But it really is an ancestral house, with authentic antique pieces everywhere — reminds me of the post-war {the second great one} house of my dad’s relative in Bulacan.)

I ordered Paella Sulipeña, “classic saffron rice with seafood and mixed meats”, and was overwhelmed by the assault of scents and tastes that went with the dish. Heck, even their entree of Chef’s pate and cracker had me filled.

I know, I’d make a bad food reviewer, but, hey, loved the food, loved the place, will come back, budget permitting.

Way too long for a road trip back to Manila. The national highway in Bulacan is flooded so the bus had to take the route through Tarlac, and Pampanga.

We emerged from the San Simon exit to the North Luzon express way just a while back. Thank goodness for 3G.

• Work: Gone Unix-hardcore. Our team currently leads Unix training for other infra teams. Shell/Perl scripting occupies a large part of the, er, curriculum. I’m “re-learning” Perl. I’m also amazed as to how open source is being leveraged here. I lurve open source.
• Family: Prior to a change of shift sked, I go on an extended off-shift period of four days. Like, wow! What better way to start that four-day weekend than to slooowly fry in my own oil (not a nice imagery there) here at the airport. Hooray. Love the company, though, as always.
• Others: I still haven’t gotten around to reading Good Omens. Haven’t watched Harry Potter, too. (Why bother? I heard it’s not as good as the book, anyway.) And, I haven’t been online in a while. Smart 3G’s a big bummer. Been getting lots of connection errors lately. Hope it stabilise soon.

(I’m using The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Ortigas Park branch free WiFi, courtesy of GlobeQuest. The signal’s weak (at -73 dBM, according to my Dell WLAN Card Utility) so I’m getting lots of timeout, even for the more resilient Google Talk connection.)

I just got back from the province. Our four-month-old son, Julian, got out of the hospital last Monday after being rushed there last week for high fever. He had a urinary tract infection that resulted in a 40-degree fever that almost caused him to go into convulsions. Thankfully, he got out of it pretty fast. Additional tests showed that there were no other ailments — his kidneys and bladder were fine.

It’s always very stressful when someone in the family gets sick, specially the young ones. I still vividly remember when the eldest, Gabriel, was also admitted to the hospital for bronchitis when he was still two months old. We had to leave him in the pediatric ICU overnight for observation. It was painful seeing our child through the glass window — we wanted to hold him, but we couldn’t.

Fortunately, for Julian, we got to stay together in the room. He was restless the whole time, and he frequently cried. I had to carry him out of the room a few times, sometimes in the wee hours of the morning, just so he’ll stop crying.

We’re glad this is all over. He’s doing just great now, and he’s back to his usual routine: getting up early, cooing and moving around in his crib, shouting when no one attends to him, waving his hands when he wants to be carried. Too bad I have to leave for work. I would’ve have wanted to stay home longer. Peng is such a great partner, and she fills up the role of tatay and mom pretty well, when I’m not around. I’m very thankful, and I feel blessed, for that.

I feel like I’m back in college! Here I am at my new desk, cramming docs on Solaris and AIX.

I just started here at the new workplace. The first impressions were great. The environment is a bit subdued, not like in my previous one, which was, uh, “colorful”. That’s not to say that the people here are drones, though.

I’ll be handling Unix servers that run mission-critical applications for this organization. The administrative tasks haven’t been formally turned over to me yet, so instead of just shifting my a** in my seat, I wallowed in tech pr0n — that’s tons of Unix admin guides.

Yesterday, I was able to prep several SAN LUNs on an EMC 8530, using AIX, for data migration later from a Symmetrix DMX. Here’s an AIX survival tip: Use smitty! (Learned that from a former colleague who’s now a sys ad at Globe.) Wonderful tool.

AIX LVM methods are very similar to that of RHEL. I just have to familiarize myself more with the (for me) quirky commands (chvg is to RHEL’s lvchange, for example). But the concepts are the same: prep the physical volumes; add them to a volume group; create logical volumes; create the file system and mount point.

I’ll also be going through several Jumpstart scripts. Jumpstart is Solaris’ Kickstart equivalent, on the surface, but is a lot more detailed (read: complicated). Instead of a single ks.cfg Anaconda script, Solaris uses rules and profile files. The rules file also has to be validated first. As I read more about it, I get this feeling that Jumpstart’s similarity to Kickstart ends with ’start’. Heh.

Considering that my background is mostly on Linux, with a little Solaris and spotty AIX, I’m thinking that maybe I’m in over my head here. Then again, they’re all Unix so the functional similarities remain. For now, I have to mentally map Solaris and AIX methods to their Linux equivalents. I’ll get the hang of it, for sure.