I had a couple of fun nights with server support people fixing and troubleshooting database crashes. One positive aspect of being woken up at 4 in the morning is the dreams brought on by sudden awakening. I had two memorable ones: one that directly relates to the server issues, and another probably cause by reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
In the first dream I heard by parents bickering with my grandfather. I immediately realized that I was dreaming as my grandfather is very dead. I was glad that I finally achieved lucid dreaming, and also glad to see my grandfather whom I miss terribly. I cried “Gramps!” and ran to him. I was hoping that like that Pooka in Donnie Darko my grandfather had a message for me. I asked him how he was, and he said that he was all right. I woke up then and saw my parents, who apparently heard my scream and shook me awake. Of course I was in another dream layer, as I don’t live with my parents since getting married. My grandfather looked healthy and was cheerful enough as a member of “manipulated dead”. Hopefully we are not in a Tangent Universe, unless that server that keeps crashing is the Artifact…
The second dream is a bit easier to analyze. I was standing at a fishing at a pier right near my job. I was a bit worried that my boss might see me fishing and decide that I was slacking, but my wife told me to go ahead and enjoy myself – it was still 4AM and I did put in a lot of overtime lately. She found a guy who agreed to rent me a fishing rod. It wasn’t as good as mine (the one with the Van Staal Reel), but was usable. Except as soon as I stepped up to the rail, it was swarmed with people who proceeded to cast right in front of me. This was exactly like resource starvation in the database: a few people managed to cast their lines, but so many people casting so close to each other just end up in a lot of tangled line and cursing…
Related: my other dream about my grandfather (it was in ’02, he was still alive then), another similarly recursive dream I had as well as the rest of my dreamblogging (it’s not even boring, I promise). I am glad that I wrote down all of those dreams, rereading them is pretty interesting now.
If you know a good sysadmin with MySQL experience who’s looking for a job, please let me know (my contact information is here).