And the angels can’t help us….

Today was supposed to be a day of leisure – the second half of my Avengers marathon (now that it finally arrived!), and a day free from the on-going project of getting my house ready for some estate agents to come and look at it. (I am planning on selling my house, to buy a bigger house so that my girlfriend can finally move in with me). 

However I got a somewhat panicked phone call at 11 in the morning, asking what the root administrator password was for The Hive operating system. Which woke me up in a bit of a hurry, to say the least.

Turns out that there had been minor flooding in one of the basements – one that contained some of the backup systems – and the entire system had had to be rebooted to make sure it was fully functional. 

The on call support guy tried to log in, but after three attempts it became apparent that he had forgotten the password to his administrator account, and also that his account was now locked out until another administrator could reset it. (After an incident with a former member of staff six years ago, we take user security and network security a tad more seriously, even if it does mean there are occasions when it is a huge PITA).

But, as part of the upgrade to our security procedures, we had also put in place a system for dealing with such incidents as this (Jane, Trent and Jessie designed the system, because it turns out that together they are not only very smart, but also incredibly sneaky) and I so I sent an encrypted copy of the password file to his mobile, and a few minutes later he was logged in, his account was unlocked and everything was back to normal.

There is going to be a review tomorrow (any incident where an account has to be unlocked has to be reviewed, even if it is a cursory review) and we’ll have to go through the area that was flooded to see what can be recovered, what was lost and what we need to do about it. 

Hopefully – if THRAIS are on our side – we’ll not have lost anything, we won’t have to replace anything and we can get on with the testing as planned.

The other good news is that – after my early morning wake up call (and I know – who defines 11am as early? But it’s 11am on a Sunday and after the events of The Angels Take Manhatten I admit my dreams were a little odd and I kept waking up), the rest of the day went pretty much to plan. I toyed with the idea of going out for a bit, but as much as I might love walking in the great outdoors, I do not love walking in the rain. (Dancing barefoot maybe, but not walking). 

True, learning about the death of Michael O’Hare put a bit of a damper on the day. He was the reason that I got so interested in Babylon 5 so quickly. And while Bruce Boxleitner was brilliant as his successor, I missed Commander Sinclair a great deal. Plus his entire story arc was superb. 
 

And now, if the universe works as it should, he is in the big space station in the sky with Jeff Conaway, Richard Biggs and Andreas Katsulas, enjoying their well deserved rest.

But possibly the most important thing is that there are now only nine more days until my girlfriend comes to visit. We last saw each other over the final week of August, so it hasn’t been that long, but as a smart man once pointed out, when you are waiting for something a second feels like a lifetime. And – when it arrives – a lifetime will feel like a second. Which is the main reason why we are planning on moving in together.