I might soon face a severe change regarding my job. At this time I can’t tell you more, but hold on for a few days, and you will get more concrete info at this place. It all has to do with a phone call I received last Thursday… 
I got a feeling of horror yesterday when I noticed strange noise coming from out of my PC. I immediately knew it was one of the harddrives, and I also knew these sounds didn’t mean anything good…
The sounds sounded as if the airlock/headlock mechanism was being activated again and again, the drive made a terrible “clicking” noise.
From how my system reacted when I navigated around with the Windows Explorer I feared that the drive that holds my user data had died. This would have been a catastrophe since my last backup was more than a year old. Yeah, I know, as an IT professional I should’ve known better, but… <insert lame excuse here>
Anyway, it turned out that the drive that had died was just a storage “dump”, where I had my MP3, video, and shareware files lying around.
You ask me what I’ve learnt from this? I’ve started a backup to DAT of all of my user data immediately after I had removed the dead drive, and I plan to perform a regular backup from now on at least once or twice a month.
BTW, the dead drive is an IBM 80 GB drive, and if I remember correctly it’s just over two years old. Still, there’s no warranty anymore on the drive, so I will have to shell out some money tomorrow to buy a new drive. I doubt that it will be an IBM/Hitachi again, tho.
I’ve been to a training in Munich last week. To get there, I took an airplane, the airline was dba. My hotel was the NH München-Dornach. NH Hoteles seems to be a Spanish hotel company.
The training was about administering BEA’s WebLogic Server (WLS), a Java application server we use at work. Because I’m working with WLS since more than a year now, I thought it was a good idea to book the “advanced” course, rather than the entry-level course. And I was right — I could easily follow the training. We were five students, and in a group that small the trainer had a lot of time to answer questions and to go into more detail on selected topics.
Altho the training was very interesting, I’m glad that I’m back now, because one week of highly-concentrated learning can be quite tiring.
