three weeks to go…

Three weeks to go. I can hear the clock ticking now. short-timer disease kicks in (like, playing Civ IV parts of the weekend….).

We’re starting to wind down the training; hopefully have it done by wednesday. I’ve got a few more coding pieces to do as well, but only one of them of any complexity. It’s all over but the, well, the end.

On the work front, we had one of those “uhoh” moments. In one of the training sessions, I was explaining the MySQl replication setup and how it’s maintained and monitored, and of course, one of the slaves had crapped out replication with an error. So I did an on-the-fly debug/diagnose/correct/verify session, and in about 15 minutes, we’d found the table that was out of sync, figured out how it got there, fixed it, got the replication fixed, and taken care of the underlying problem (when we did the first failover to a new master a whiel back, one subsystem didn’t get reconfigured; it updated the OLD master. it only updated a single table, though, so it wasn’t until that subsystem got updated properly when we failed over to the new Tiger database that the replication got hit with a table sync problem. oops).

and when I was done, doing that — from memory — one of the follks I work with asked the question “so, when you’re gone, who does that?” — and I had to say, honestly “I don’t know….”.

That made me sit back and realize that I’ve been lecturing for over 40 hours now; by the time I’m done this week it’ll be over 50. At any time, there are 4-8 people in the room listening to me lecture, plus it’s being videotaped and audio recorded (“chuqui unplugged”) for offline use. And part of me is looking at just how many resources are going into taking up the load caused by me leaving the project, and sometimes I wonder “wouldn’t it have been a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to just have listened to me and done something about my complaints when I was still willing to stick around?”

But that’s also a false statement — I’d decided to leave the project sooner or later. I’d originally thought november or december, they were asking for March. All they really did was convince me to move up the date a few months. In retrospect, I’m happy it worked out this way. And I think I’ll leave it at that for now.

but I’ll defer talking about this in detail until later. Now’s not the time.

Checked the scale this morning, first time in a week. I’m down 4 pounds from having given notice. Six more pounds and I’ll be back at where I was before this final round of stress began.

I must say I’m getting used to the lack of stress; this weekend when I wasn’t playing Civ, I actually got around to a couple of projects in the house taht have been sitting for months because I’ve been such a zombie on the weekends. With even a bit of luck, I’ll have the living room and dining room remodels ready for painting by christmas, after having not touched them since about February.

We’ve pretty much finalized the trip. North to port angeles, across the coho and on to salt spring island. then we’ll work back south hitting victoria and seattle, a drive-by of Powells on the way to the coast, then it looks like Astoria, cannon beach, Newport and Gold Beach, then maybe a day in Fort Bragg. we’ll get home a day or two before opening night for the Sharks — yes, it’s hockey season. and I have a blog to get running… (ahh! someone hide the Civ IV DVD. for a bit….)

The job front continues to bubble. nothing really to comment on — a couple of situations look really promising, and if the both turn into offers, it’d be a tough choice. I continue submitting resumes and talking to folks, and I’ll be doing some informal talks this week with people, and perhaps a phone interview on another position.

My mom is still firmly convinced someone at Apple is going to come to their senses and convince me to not leave, or something like that. Steve seems to be busy with other things, though. Besides, I still feel it’s time to rejoin the real world, and see how the universe does things.

So it’s onward, into the future, whatever that turns out to be. Amazing thing is, it turns out that leaving Apple after almost 18 years and moving on without a new job in hand is — well — a lot less stressful than my current job was. So I wish the person, whoever it is, who has to fix that replication problem when I’m not there all the luck in the world… I’m just glad the answer is no longer “me”. ohwell.

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