TGIF!

Yesterday was the most stressed that I’ve felt since the run-up to the launch of the Massive Christmas Tracking Project in my old job. I don’t think I slept properly all week. There were a lot of wobbles through the day, times when I was trying to respond to five IM conversations at once and wanted to tell three people to go away, but thankfully it’s done and 85% of the Zombie Project went into production.

The other 15% is the bit that’s not done yet and we’re still trying to figure out how we can even make it work. None of the other stuff is dependent on it, though, so the deployment was unaffected.

We had a slight issue around security settings on a table that the DBA managed to fix this morning. One overnight processing job blew up this morning because an index had not been setup on a new materialised view, which was easily fixed by smiling nicely at the DBA.

So, the stuff is actually there on our production server. Sadly, most of it has not been tested yet so we don’t know whether it’s going to blow up yet. The business analyst for the project is sick and my boss is working from home so that she doesn’t infect us with her lurgy, so the testing will not happen until Monday at earliest.

I’m already feeling a bit more relaxed, though. After a day from hell I went out last night with my knit group and a night of food, laughter and knitting helped a lot. Hopefully I can catch up with some sleep over the weekend and feel much more able to cope with everything next week. I enjoy my job a lot, but I wish that I wasn’t quite so much of a perfectionist because a lot of my stress was pressure that I had put on myself. It always feels like the success (or not) of a project reflects a lot on my professionalism and I want to be bloody good at my job. Finding the middle ground between caring about how well I do my job and getting crazy obssessed by it is something I fail at totally.

Due to all the extra time that I put in yesterday, I’m leaving an hour early today. I shall probably be hitting the Gap for a new pair of casual trousers and then possibly slumping in Starbucks for a while with hot chocolate. Then I’m conflicted.

On the one hand, I could buy some grociers and then order pizza when I get home so that I don’t need to cook.

Or I could get some takeout from my favourite sushi place, except I really want some tempura based things with it and that doesn’t transport well because my house is so far from everywhere.

Or I could eat my sushi at the restaurant and pick up groceries on the way home, except I’d be eating alone.

Or I could do what I usually do when faced with these options, which is to feel guilty about not wanting to cook and therefore buy my groceries, go home and eat toast because I have no energy to cook. Hey, at least I prepared the toast myself!

There are good reasons why I nearly cried at work today

Today has been a Bad Day.

My back has been hurting a fair bit for the last couple of weeks and I’ve been waking up a lot through the night, finding myself lying flat on my back which only makes it worse. I’m suspecting that part of the reason for my back being so sore and stiff when I first get up is the sleep position issue. Last night I tried sleeping with a cushion to prop me a bit and another to cuddle-ish and it seemed to work. Or at least, I slept pretty well and wasn’t lying on my back or front when I woke up! And wasn’t *quite* as stiff as I’d been other mornings.

Unfortunately, shortly after work I started to get really bad stomach cramps and nausea, which didn’t make me feel amazing and my back then kicked in. Yay. Took several hours with herbal tea, heat pads and anti-spasmodics to get it under control and quell the urge to just double over and wish for death.

In the middle of this, we discovered a big issue with the project that I’m working on. That wouldn’t have normally got me massively upset, but the project is suppose to go for release on Thursday and the issue could mean that I miss my release. It’s that size of issue.

Plus, I haven’t got the first clue how to fix it because it was one of the few bits of the software that actually appeared to be working correctly. It’s all about which code gets assigned to data for which dates (yes, it’s a load for some huge, complicated database tables) and it’s wrong for some data. Gah.

We discovered this and my boss announced that it needed fixing just as I was feeling particularly ill. I didn’t take it well.

And that is why I nearly ended up in tears at work today.

Thankfully my stomach is settled and feeling fine now. So fine that I’ve got a huge craving for fish and chips or possibly sushi, but I’m playing it safe and having baked salmon with steamed veg instead. My back is…um…yes. And although I’m home, I’ll be spending the evening working because a whole bunch of data needs to be re-loaded for validation first thing tomorrow morning.

Really, this week can stop sucking. I’m serious. Why is food my first thought when things are going badly?

Good and bad day

The good: the code for the project that I’ve been working on for nearly two months finally worked properly today. The data still needs to be validated, but this is the first time that it’s run through (twice!) without issues and produced data that looks good on a cursory inspection.

The bad: OMG, indigestion. And bloating. And can we say gas? Plus, did I mention the indigestion? There might also have been a touch of acid reflux in with that.

Hello there, IBS. You’re trying to persuade me that I need to carry Tums with me at all times, aren’t you?

I was so glad to get home. And stuff myself with Tums. And at least be able be gassy, crampy and ick in the privacy of my own bathroom.

For extra fun and laughs, I’m going to be stuck in a minivan (people carrier for the UKers) for several hours tomorrow while I go to Moncton and back for a potentially pointless meeting. Yay? If my GI tract does a repeat of this, my co-workers will hate me by the end of the day.

Worst part? We’ve just had to do our ’employee engagement’ survey and one of the questions was about whether we get indigestion/gas/bloating/cramps/constipa

tion etc. In other words, have you got IBS? And, heh, are we to blame? Not said in those exact words, but the implication was clear.

Some days, my body sucks piggy wonks. Now I’m going to watch Holby City and try to forget about this entirely pointless exercise in management BS. Instead I shall focus all my good vibes on getting home in time tomorrow to join my knitters in the bar and eat yummy food.

Unix script help needed

I have hit a brick wall and any help that can be offered would be gratefully appreciated. My Google-fu isn’t up to the task, we have no reference books on Unix scripting here (“here’s a card with basic Unix commands – have fun!”), my local library has no books on Unix scripting and I haven’t got five days for Canada Post to lose deliver an Amazon order of books for me.

I’m attempting to loop through some files in a directory, count the number of files that contain a particular word sequence and put that count into a file that I can then email. All the filenames that I am searching begin with ‘O’. So far, if I cd to the directory and put this into the command line it works:

print cat O* | grep -c 'XXXX_PROD' >> test.log

My log file correct shows a count of 2.

When I do the same thing in my script and run it, I get big fat zeros in my report 😦

cd $LOGDIR1
print $PWD >> $REP
print "Count of XXXX_PROD jobs run (test only):" >> $REP
print cat O* | grep -c 'XXXX_PROD' >> $REP

According to my log, I’ve cd’d to the correct directory. I’ve tried using $LOGDIR1/O* with no luck.

Can anyone point me to some resources that might help? If it helps, I would appear to be using the Korn shell in this installation of Unix. The mere fact that I’ve had to write “appear to be using” should tell you how much I actually know about Unix 😦