This kitten knows what it wants, and that’s to chomp on your fingers.

Most of Thursday was quiet. The machine that does database backups was slightly hosed. I fixed it, though it was a bit nerve-wracking as I had to do a bunch of stuff with production machines to make it work properly. None of the users noticed that anything was wrong, which means that it was a success. I didn’t brown-bag my lunch, and went to the cafeteria instead, where they had mac-n-cheese with bacon. That sounded really good, so I had that. Did some other stuff in the afternoon, which mostly worked fine.

Of course, later on, I got a call from work. They wanted something done. This thing was not insanely difficult. However, it would’ve been a lot easier to do if they’d said that they wanted it done while all of us were at work. I don’t know why they waited until 7 pm to tell us. But they did, and it took much longer than it should’ve. It was pretty annoying, really. But it looks like it works, and maybe they’ll be happy with it for the next few days.

Things really don’t work out the way you want them to. I got called right in the middle of dinner for a really, really strange work problem, then spent about 2 hours on it. Got it such that it was mostly working, but I’ll have to do the rest of it tomorrow morning. I don’t know how it ever worked in the first place, since the configuration is not set up to do what they said they were doing for the last few months.

I suppose everyone needs a little mystery in their life. I could do with a bit less “getting called while eating dinner” though. Tomorrow is Friday, which makes it a whole lot better. . . .

This sign may have been badly translated. Or something. If you need a sign that tells people not to spit too loud, you may need to upgrade your clientele.

Stuff was a bit less hectic on Tuesday than it was on Monday. There was a really weird problem with something in the afternoon, and I eventually traced it down to a file in a disused corner of the filesystem with a sign on the directory that said “Beware of the Leopard”. This file had a typo in it. This typo caused a ton of totally unexplainable error messages. After fixing the typo, everything worked just fine. Sometimes, doing what I do is akin to being a copy editor who’s relentlessly searching out typoes.

Trivia: We were doing badly when I left.  Spencer is teaching a theatre class for grade school kids.  He calls them his “little bastards” when they’re not listening.  Kelli spent the last week on a cruise.  She had fun, but was seasick most of the time.  Whenever I’ve been out on a boat on Lake Superior or the ocean, I’ve either not gotten sick or barfed quickly and gotten over it.  Nathan bought an Xbox 360 and all the Rock Band gear, because “Rock Band: Beatles” is coming out for the Xbox and not the PS2 in September.  Zach and Sarah are going to be in Minnesota next week.

In less nifty news, there are apparently going to be layoffs at work on Wednesday.  This is annoying.  I don’t know how the users would react if any of the people on my team got laid off; if anyone left, service levels would suffer.  Oh well.  Whatever happens happens.

Sometimes, you should be really careful about how you decide to abbreviate things.

Monday wasn’t that fun. A bunch of stuff broke, and I had to fix most of it. At least some of the fixes I put in worked properly, but I won’t know if it’s all fixed until tomorrow morning. What else. . . the room where the mailboxes are had its lock broken on Sunday, and I was glad to see that they fixed the lock sometime today. I didn’t get any large checks in the mail, though, which is always annoying.

If McDonald’s in Canada developed and sold McPoutine, would anyone buy it? I’d think so, but there are some who just wouldn’t like the idea of cheese curds and gravy on top of french fries.

There are all kinds of things that are wrong with this picture. Mushy peas are not a main dish, for instance.

Sunday wasn’t all that interesting.  I don’t know what I’ll find when I get to work on Monday, but at least I’ll only have to work 4 days this week.

Hm. Lots of stuff happened last week. Saw the family, had various relatives over for dinner, saw a minor-league baseball game, visited wonderful downtown Midland. Only got one call from work, which was nice.

Going back to Phoenix on Saturday had its problems. On the first flight, when we’d pushed back from the gate, we were told, “The bathroom on this plane does not work.” Fortunately, it was only a 25-minute flight. The second flight had working bathrooms. This was good. It also had several young children who screamed loudly when the plane was ascending or descending, which was not so good. Oh well. Got home, paid way too much for parking, and then saw Fuzzball after almost a week. She meowed a lot, but seemed happy to see me.

The author of The Book of Biff likes to invent solutions to problems that do not exist. I just wonder how carbonated ketchup would taste, and whether purists would put it on a hot dog.

Lots of last minute things consumed Saturday. I’m getting on a plane and going to Michigan Sunday morning, so updates may be less frequent over the next week. Not sure which library book I should take on the plane. I’ve got a thick book about an engineer, and another really thick book about Nazis. However, the library didn’t have books 4, 5, and 6 in the Vlad Taltos series, which was a bit annoying as I’d just finished reading the first 3. Libraries do this; they get books 2 and 3 of a trilogy and not book 1, or books 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 in longer series. I guess this is because libraries don’t have as much money to buy books as they’d really like to have.

Caturday, and the kittens want you to know they are not snacks.

Friday was on-again, off-again. Every time things calmed down, something else happened. Well, I went to lunch with some of the people from upstairs, since I was the only person from my team who was there. There was a trouble ticket that came in half an hour before I left that said “This doesn’t work in IE 7. See attachment for details.” There was no attachment. I asked what had happened to the attachment, but got no reply at all. I guess if they can’t provide details, then the problem isn’t serious enough to worry about.

Beware the hamster ninjas. They come out with their little beady eyes and their bo staves, and they unleash swift irreversible destruction.

Thursday was a bit better than Wednesday, which was really nice. I was the only person on my team who was physically in the office, though. Could be worse. Friday, I’ll be the only person on my team who’s available at all. I hope the number of people who need our services is low, because there’s only so much I can do without help.

In other news, it’s my one-year anniversary with my current job. That’s always nice. However, there are rumors of (more) impending layoffs on July 8, and that’s never a good thing. It’s been nice to work for a company where my direct boss isn’t a complete idiot, and the boss is responsive to employee concerns and isn’t trying to make my life suck. It would be really annoying if I got laid off, so I’m hoping that doesn’t happen.

A user complained about part of our website on Thursday. This user said she had not been able to access or post to a blog, and followed that up with a 4-paragraph rant about how she was being censored because of her political views. This was, of course, bullshit. No users are prevented from posting because of their political views. The real problem was that the user was using Internet Exploder 8 (what intelligent person would use that piece of shit when better browsers exist?) and that a malformed piece of code that we’d written was screwing things up for IE8 users and only IE8 users. People who used Real Browsers had No Problems. And after 11am, even IE8 users got all the content. But no. We were obviously censoring political views that we didn’t like.

This experience and many others like it have made me think that The People are a bunch of morons, and following The Will Of The People is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, following the will of a dictator or the will of a crew of oligarchs is also a recipe for disaster.

Arrrrrrrrrgh. Wednesday was not a great day. Very little happened for most of the day, then there were a ton of problems reported, with minimal information that would help anyone fix them. And there’s an extremely puzzling problem with some code on the development box that may prevent me from doing something the users want. So yeah. Rotten day.