December is going to be rough

I fully realize that today is still November, but today is the first day of “hit the ground running” for the rest of the month for me.

Usually, December is a bit of a slow time at work. It’s the end of the year, so we usually don’t have any big projects. Lots of people are on vacation, so I have fewer people to support. And everyone is more concerned with the upcoming company holiday party than with making more work for Tech Ops.

This year, it’s different. We’re going to be moving all of our stuff to a new data center this month. This is a huge undertaking, with very high visibility all the way up the chain of command. It requires massive amounts of planning to ensure that the move goes smoothly (when you’re a dot com, it is of paramount importance that your site never, ever has a blip – because that blip might just happen when Google decides to come calling, and if you aren’t there to answer the door, it could have a very detrimental effect on your SEO. Let’s just say that’s what we in the industry call “a bad thing”.)

Of course, many months ago, before I knew this move was happening, I scheduled a whole mess of activities based upon the theory that “December is a slow time”. I have Microsoft coming in this week to do a health check on our system monitoring software, for example. And while this is all going on, there’s always that minor detail of my wife being super-pregnant and possibly popping out a pair of babies any day now.

So don’t be surprised if I’m a little stressed for the next few weeks. I’m going to be elbow-deep in server elevations, migration schedules, and “what if?” scenarios. Plus all of the usual holiday parties and activities. Fortunately, we’re done with our holiday shopping. I even ordered Carrie’s “push present” this morning (although once it arrives, there’s another activity where I have to prepare it for her. More details on that when I can tell you all what I got her. Which will be after SHE finds out, of course.)

This weekend was also the second one in a row where I fully intended to finish the setup of the boys’ blog/website (http://strattonboys.com). Yeah, that didn’t happen.

Fun sidenote – this is my first blog post composed entirely on my iPhone. It was not as easy to type as you might think.

(The photo attached to this post is something I found at Walmart last weekend. I wanted to get it, but they only had one. The joy of twins rears its head again!)

Tagged as: The Dot Com