neurological dryer lint

chalk another early morning up for iis and general microsoft unreliableness. and my grammar skills. yesterday afternoon i discovered from the lab that our SSL webserver at work just stopped serving pages for some reason. systematically there was nothing wrong as far as i could tell, so when i got home from clovernook i did a little more digging, and i couldn't find anything wrong with the bloody thing, as scotty would say. did everything i knew to do, restarted IIS, checked the certificate, turned SSL on and off.. it served up regular pages fine, just not anything over https.

i don't ever like rebooting servers remotely, so instead i decided to come in early (5:30 am) and fix it. big ken is doing the 4am to noon shift a few days a week so he was here to talk to when i got in, that was nice. i noticed i was only at win2k sp2 on the server, so i installed sp4 and rebooted. and prayed.

this is a key element. i probably would have been fired long ago due to server failures were it not for the mercy of the God of the universe. seriously. the only greater force that exists that is greater than microsoft's unreliability is the Almighty's great power. i'm gonna write isaiah 41:10 on the side of every windows box we have. i don't think it's by skill that i fix anything in my server room. it's just the panicked ravings heading upwards that get things working again. :)

btw, artie, brian, you message geeks, check out the msg translation of the above verse. "don't panic". im gonna start calling it the douglas adams translation. :)

so anyway now im dead tired and in desperate need of a bagel or something. i have a bag of oranges sitting here. think i'll eat one. yeah. and some hawaiian punch, too. woo.