Once more into the fray.....

Not to pull a quote from the movie "The Grey", but it seems appropriate considering my situation.  Back in October, the company I work for decided that my group (and a couple of other groups) needed to be relocated to one of their offices in another state.  To say that we were blindsided by this decision was an understatement.  I mean there were rumors abound for years about its possibility, but nothing ever came of it..... till now.

Seeing as how all 7 members of the team I am on are choosing to take severance (including me), they are losing many years of experience supporting their client facing product.  Four of us have already received our 90 notice of termination, and of everyone in the group, I think that I am the one most actively looking for work at the moment.  Sure, it would be nice to bank the severance, but I have to admit that staying employed and keeping a roof over my families heads is a bit more important in my opinion.

So, I have been actively doing things like learning Python and MongoDB and rebuilding my skills in Perl (which I have only used periodically over the last 3 years, but am getting right back onto that bicycle).  I am hopeful that one of the interviews that I have had (and am going to be going on) pans out as I really want to keep working.

So, at this point I have 75 days left to find myself a job.  Fingers crossed!

A Moment Of Regret

Quite a vague title for a blog post, I know.  Some of you are probably thinking, "What happened?  What did you do?".  I was thinking the same thing recently and am still kicking myself a bit.

I have a VPS(Virtual Private Server) that I have rented online for the last couple of years.  Its mostly a playground where I can do development for projects.  I have had a yearning to get a website up on it and maybe advertise my coding services, but with everything that's going on (especially as of late), I just haven't had the time to do that.

Anyway, I digress from my point.  I run Ubuntu Linux on the VPS and about 3 1/2 weeks ago I logged on to do some stuff and tried to install something through the apt package manager and was presented with some really funky errors.  Thankfully I had seen the errors but once before and they were those tell tale errors that say, "your distribution is flipping old and you need to UPGRADE!!!".  

So, I backed up my coding and my home directory and even my web directory where I kept things like my wiki, which had a TON of nice docs that I constantly referenced.  I then proceeded to attempt to upgrade my version from the command line, but was met with some other errors which puzzled me.  A bit of research on Google still had me puzzled.  Since I had to get some coding done, I decided to do a full re-install from the VPS control panel.  After it completed, I logged back in, uploaded my web directory, re-setup things like Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python, etc., configuring as I went.

I got my web server working and attempted to go to my wiki as I needed to reference something and that was the moment that stopped me.  I realized that in my rush to back everything up and get things re-installed, I had backed up my wiki software yes, but COMPLETELY forgot about....... the database.   Yes, everything in my wiki was toast.....gone..... kaput!

So here is a lesson for you everyone, back EVERYTHING up and make sure to not forget your databases.  I am still getting things configured and added, but my wiki needs the most work of all.  C'est la vie!