Google, do you really have to make my life this complicated?

I can't be logged into my personal account and my work account at the same time and access my blog??!!

Or, let me rephrase that: I can't be logged into my work account and access my personal blog?

At least not from the same browser? At least it doesn't appear that I have to log out of my work account on all my devices ... (that would imply: including my computer at work).

The procedure is:
if you want to access your personal blog and have a gmail interface at work:
close your work email tab in your browser
edit your blog
reopen your work email tab (from the history works in Firefox)

If you leave your blogspot tab open you can still access it after reopening your work email tab but you won't get the initial access to your personal blog if you have your work email tab open

I'm pretty sure the same isn't true for Google Drive/Sheets as I do access this from my personal account all the time while having a work email tab open - so, please Google, fix this for blogger - I do want access to both of my email accounts at the same time.

Yes, I'm back

I'm back, have been for over a week, and we did visit with our daughter for a few days (finally publicly admitting that we went further than Kona this time :)), but I can't really say I'm caught up yet. Getting back sick and having to do some extra work at work doesn't help :) I'm working on it ... I am planning to order more seed beads, really this time as I'm running out of some colors, slowly getting caught up on drilling mgambo seeds, but no new tiare seeds or clove tree seeds yet. And no pictures this time, but I hope to post some vacation pictures sooner or later.

Did you bother tasting that at all?

Monday, when I started writing this post, I was reminded of something a late friend and former coworker once said. We used to go to lunch together frequently, all of us who worked at the Caltech Submillimeter Telescope office in Hilo when it was still on Kilauea Avenue, because it was more or less next door to Cafe 100. Lynn was an electronic technician, a very good one, and I still miss him. A farm kid from Iowa who went into the Navy and became an electronics technician. Later he built himself a trimaran and sailed from the West Coast to Hawaii, missed Hilo by all of about 5 miles and settled here.
One day at lunch I was in a hurry for whatever reason and ate my lunch in about 3 minutes. He said "Did you bother tasting that at all?"

I had such a day last Monday. My office mate of several years Bryan and I went up the mountain to fix some computer problems and run a bunch of tests. At Hale Pohaku, the mid-level facility, where we stop to acclimatize for the altitude I asked one of the cooks about when we were going to have lunch and was told that there was only going to be an early lunch. There went my intention to fix something, get somebody at sea level to change a configuration of computers and get a test going before lunch. We were almost late for the early lunch but got our lunch and ate it fairly quickly and managed to get some stuff done before the person at sea level went to lunch so that I could start my test. We went about the rest of our business up there at UKIRT and got back down to Hilo at a reasonable time. I even got home at a reasonable time, picking up dinner on the way home. As I was both very hungry and very tired I ate that in about 3 minutes as well.

We started having computer problems at one telescope or the other one way or the other 10 days ago. Last night we had the first night at UKIRT when we didn't have any faults in a week. Normally we don't have significant faults more often than every other week at least. We still don't know what happened to cause some of those computer problems, others we're very well aware of.

And as I didn't get around to posting this until now: Congratulations to my supervisor Craig Walther to be RCUH Employee of the Year. He very much deserves that.

To make this a not completely technical post, here's another Etsy Treasury I'm featured in:

'******COLOR OF THE W??NE********' by aytulgift

Formal Ball Gown Pr... CelestialDress... $235.00	Original Burgundy W... MyLilSweetieBo... $19.95
The Rose that Lasts... Steampunkitis $14.00	Medusa .. Opaque Ma... ImpulseCo $6.99
Dark Red Garnet Kan... KanzashiHairFl... $22.00	Chunky Macrame Brac... Mikaylove $11.54
Tie sided Harem Pan... Tribalvibe $34.00	Burgundy Queen Anne... anils $40.00
Bridal Clutch Winte... bellafiore2009 $46.00	Burgundy and light ... hilobeads $45.00
NEW Color- Ruffled ... MesBellesFleur... $11.99	Embroidered flower ... Zigettasstyle $38.00
Turkey Burgundy rub... Scarves2012 $14.00	Burgandy little gir... LilShopofCuten... $12.00
Arm Mittens Glove /... gloveshop $25.00	Ruffle scarf ,Pash... SenasShop $18.90

Treasury tool supported by the dog house

'******COLOR OF THE W??NE********' by aytulgift

Formal Ball Gown Pr... CelestialDress... $235.00	Original Burgundy W... MyLilSweetieBo... $19.95
The Rose that Lasts... Steampunkitis $14.00	Medusa .. Opaque Ma... ImpulseCo $6.99
Dark Red Garnet Kan... KanzashiHairFl... $22.00	Chunky Macrame Brac... Mikaylove $11.54
Tie sided Harem Pan... Tribalvibe $34.00	Burgundy Queen Anne... anils $40.00
Bridal Clutch Winte... bellafiore2009 $46.00	Burgundy and light ... hilobeads $45.00
NEW Color- Ruffled ... MesBellesFleur... $11.99	Embroidered flower ... Zigettasstyle $38.00
Turkey Burgundy rub... Scarves2012 $14.00	Burgandy little gir... LilShopofCuten... $12.00
Arm Mittens Glove /... gloveshop $25.00	Ruffle scarf ,Pash... SenasShop $18.90

Treasury tool supported by the dog house

(and extra spaces removed by me :) )

Wer den Schaden hat spottet jeder Beschreibung

(there is a picture of my gold stone beads at the bottom, if you don't want to read through the rest)

This saying is what came into my mind at the end of the day. I don't know whether it is a saying that's used outside my (German) family. It is a contraction of "Wer den Schaden hat braucht fuer den Spott nicht zu sorgen" (for which I can't think of a translation) und "das spottet jeder Beschreibung" (which amounts to, basically, "truth is stranger than fiction", though a more literal translation would be "this defies description").

The day started with me realizing at about 5:30 that the orange cat was sleeping in the priority mail box that my pewter beads are in. So I was up relatively early, started the coffee and checked my email. There were 223 messages in my Inbox. There had been about 90 when I went to sleep. Turns out, about 85 of them were water level alarms from one of our telescopes (JCMT). We know that the water level meter is oscillating (this is why I already changed the distribution list for those emails to go to only me rather than all the people who normally get them), and looking at the actual level I wasn't surprised: 30% is where it changes from minor alarms to major alarms and I get an email each time it changes from above to below or back. Given that it was still early I got some other stuff done like dishes and some coffee and other seed processing before going to work. I just knew I wasn't going to get out of there early.

Getting to work I found more water alarm emails, then responded to some faults, and went about my normal Friday chores of checking on disk space at both telescopes and the general state of computers at UKIRT (I don't really know enough about the state things should be in at JCMT, I'm working on it).

In my other email I found a link about olivine found in outer space which I posted to Facebook and won't repeat here ... (I did get through all my email eventually, deleting about another 100 water alarms in the process)

As our (UKIRT) data archiving student helper (who is very good) is going to be away next week I made sure that I know how to do his work while he is away (I just took this over recently) and went about checking the data tape he gave me. Much to my surprise I found that the data that are on that tape were missing their counterparts on disk at the telescope (and then some that hadn't been written to tape yet - they are by now, did I mention he's good?). So, as we have those data in Hilo I started copying them back up to the summit. We have a policy that we want data to be in at least two places at all times, and while for all I know all the data had already been transferred to the archive in Cambridge (UK), I still wanted 2 copies here.

As I had to reboot one of our WFCAM machines during the day I took some test data in between as well and everything appeared to be working. Went about some more work.

Then, as our telescope system specialist came in and ran up the system and started taking data, something failed. He showed it to me and explained what he had already done. I told him to let me have a go at it and I found it in more of a state than I can remember seeing before. There were processes I couldn't kill, positively couldn't (kill -9 as root). I logged into the console and tried to shut down and reboot the machine. It wouldn't go down. We have (for good reason - these computers are 30 miles away) networked power switches that all these computers are plugged into, and so I power cycled it. Linux (or any Unix) computers don't like to be power cycled, so it insisted on checking one of its file systems (luckily a small one) on the way back, rebooted itself again, mostly ran up but then something failed. I logged into it again (directly via network) and found the data disk missing. At that point I asked the telescope guy to call our Linux (and more general) system administrator who got the disk back but only one of the two mirrors (we have those disks mirrored for added data safety). It was only a bit over 9 hours from when I got there until I got back out, but if I didn't have my boss backing me up, with previous administrators I would have been in trouble for getting there as late as I did. On paper our flex hours for getting there end at 9 a.m.. I got there at 10:30 yesterday and at 9:45 today. I know why.

So much for that. I'm sorta toast and haven't checked my email again since I got home yet. I bet there are more water alarms. I know there is a fault I have to respond to (about the computer problem tonight, and I'm not going to let that sit until Tuesday).