My Poor Wife, Part II

Yesterday I started the story about how great my wife is but how she has had to deal with technical issues at home while I am gone. The first issue was about pulling video from our camera and putting it on the computer so my youngest son can edit it for a school project. She was able to get that problem solved only to wake up yesterday and have another computer glitch to solve.

One of the companies I was involved with over the past couple of years is in the process of being sold. They have a demo server running in my basement. This allows them to do sales presentations and testing without having to have an expensive machine in a co-location facility (where most web-based businesses keep their production servers). Yesterday was supposed to be another demo for the purchasing company and it was scheduled for 6:00 am PDT. That sounds early for me, but they are on the East coast and we had to include someone from India. 6:00 am turns out to be an optimal time for such calls.

At about 10 minutes before the meeting was supposed to start, I got a call from the person doing the demo, who said he couldn't get to the server. I was just turning on my computer and so I began looking into the problem. The first thing I did was call my wife to see if the server was still running. It wasn't. There was a power flicker the previous night and it shut down all of the computers in the house. Having the server on an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) would have alleviated the problem, but the one I have needs the battery replaced. I guess I had better add that to my list of things to do.

The demo server has been running so long without any problems, I could not remember the process to restart everything. The first thing I had my wife do, was to turn the machine on. While it was booting, I had her go through my office looking for my notebook associated with that computer. She then looked through my notes until she found the right page with the restart instructions. It was one line of cryptic code that was nearly impossible to read. Fortunately it was enough to jog my memory and we had everything running a minute later.

I logged into the conference call and WebEx demo, which was the sign to the presenter that the machine was back up and he could safely move into the live-demo portion of the meeting. Everything went well and my wife saved the day once again. Now I just hope nothing else goes wrong.