Is this Panama?

Driving home, feeling the humid, sultry heat, watching the steam rising from the hot pavement, all courtesy of a day of +80 degree heat and our recurring late afternoon rainstorm. A whiff of damp warmth came in through the van window when I rolled it down at the mailbox... instant change from frigid air to soggy dampness.

But no new complaints today, and a couple of nice things happened. My distant acquaintance is speaking to me again -- I'm delighted by that, more than might be obvious. My daughter's unhappiness with some arrangements at summer camp were addressed to her satisfaction, so that's good. And her final grades came back from school, better than expected. All goodness.

Got involved with a discussion about a technical problem that one of our customers had yesterday. Four people, each representing a different technical discipline, and two non-techs trying to get us to speak English. We didn't come to an answer, but it was a fun discussion. Well, I had fun, anyway. It was an interesting question -- see, the deal is that our customer runs a financial application that lots of people need to talk to, either directly or via an application somewhere else that needs info from it. To do this, they either run a job on our system (a big iron mainframe) that talks to the financial database directly, or they dial in, using a session manager that connects them to an application on the mainframe, and run queries against the database, or they use some unknown (to us, anyway) kind of remote application to connect to one of a series of servers that in turn establish a session with network software on the mainframe that then talks to the database. At about mid-day, the session manager started kicking out error messages, saying that it couldn't hear anything from the application -- it was talking to it, but the application wasn't responding. People who were trying to sign on were reporting very long response time -- hanging, is what its called. About thirty minutes into this, the customer shut down one of the servers, and about twenty minutes later, the problem went away -- error messages stopped, response time went back to normal. Question is, what caused it? Well, the roomful of technical experts said, looking slit-eyed at each other, thats a tough question, you know, could be lots of things... so one of the non-techies asked what I thought was a very good question: next time this happens, what information do we want, and where will we get it? Cause you know, you just know its going to happen again. Reprise the slit-eyed scene.
I love that kind of stuff. Course, I love even better figuring it out, and we're not there, yet.

One month from today, plastic surgery. Not looking forward to walking around with stitches in my chin. Hope it doesn't look hideous; hope even more than the surgeon doesn't say Hey, what's THIS?, halfway through the process. I kid about having a nightlight put into my chin so I can read at night, but truth is, I just want this to be over.

But overall, things are good here in Saunaland.