My third allnighter in my whole carreer. The first was when I was defragmenting the disks on the Vaha back then; the second was when I was writing the final version of catal6, and now this.
At least there was no coding involved this time, I just had to run the script which I already wrote and tested. However, I tested it on a partial sample of the data to convert - patients with surnames starting with A or B, and I tested it locally, on my machine. Which gives me only a rough estimate on how long will it take.
It took all night.
The job was to bring in the data entered at the semi-clinic at Harley street - more of a triage and consultation centre than a real clinic, which was now phased out, at least for fertility patients, so all their records were to be brought into the main database; about half of them were already in there (those who actually became patients) but with incomplete data.
Which I wrote without much trouble, this was perhaps the fifteenth such job in the last six years, so I had experience with what may be in the data that they didn't think was important. And, ah, their boss was Jaz, who is as experienced with Feds and Firriver in general as one can be, so she knew what I'd need and delivered it.
It's just that their network was quite slow. So I started this last night, after coming in from the rain (they said they won't be using the database on friday) and kept watch. Every half an hour or so I switched to the remote connection window just to make a move to tell the server that I'm still working on it. Then I started taking short naps on the couch but still wake up after 20 minutes to check the progress. Eventually I just got too sleepy and let it finish on its own, which it did, amazingly.
I think I slept until lunch. And then we decided it's just as good a time as any (15:00) and went on with the plan - the big trip, as planned. So we got into the van and saxo (Go and hers in it) and went to Belgrade to pick Lena. She came to the park quite on time, but we had to let the kids play a little, so we didn't move until about 17:00, and then while trying to find a shortcut to the highway we got stuck in the traffic, lost each other (but Go had GPS in her phone so they didn't get lost). There were lots of clouds; Lena made some nice shots of a rainbow somewhere around Kragujevac. At about 19:30 we were finally off the highway and had čorba in some bus stop tavern. Stanley missed the exit and took the next one, so we only saw each other after 21:00 when, amazingly, they arrived at the hotel parking within five minutes after us.
We had three rooms to ourselves. Lena and Nina with the four, Stanley and Go with their two, and we in the same room we had three years ago. It was 21:50 when we came down for dinner.
We went for a beer or two afterwards, and met Stanley with Anita and Neša - she just couldn't sleep so he had her dad take them for a walk... Exploring Vrnjačka Banja without a guide.