McBubble and Squeak, anyone? Didn’t think so.

Wednesday: more stuff at work, though some of the really terrible problems have been solved. They wanted to install Bugzilla. I tried that, and found that the automatic dependency-resolving mechanisms in it don’t work. This took a while to solve. Fortunately, I’ve been through this particular rodeo before, so after manually downloading and compiling what seemed like fifty Perl modules, it all started working. Of course, nobody’s put in any real bugs yet. I don’t think anyone’s going to like it when they start getting bug reports in their mail every day.

Had the usual Rock Band 3 with takeout Chinese food with Steve and Stephanie. We tried playing songs on higher difficulty levels for the hell of it.

Thursday: Still plenty of stuff at work, including an odd mail from someone who wanted to know whether N was ready or not. Of course, I’d sent that person a mail two days ago saying, “N is on dev, please check it and make sure it’s OK, if you say it’s OK, I’ll put it on live.” I guess they forgot. It was slightly less busy than Wednesday, at least.

Finished reading You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, but It Helps. Good (mostly) triumphs, evil is (mostly) handed a funny and poetically just beatdown, and the people who are supposed to be in love with each other are (mostly) happy. I wonder what happened to the demons in the machine room, though. There might be too many Britishisms in the text for some Americans to take (“bigger than Tesco”, for instance) but it’s a bit funnier and smarter than many other books I’ve read in the past few months. And there’s a really good reason why Connie always takes two sugars in her tea. . . .

Tuesday! Always a good day. Mostly. I solved a few problems in the morning, then got sidetracked by things like our entire floor not having any coffee anywhere. We finally found some, though.

And then later in the afternoon, I ran into some other stuff that has no easy solution. Well, it didn’t at the time—I think I can turn the last of the tiny boxes that isn’t doing anything into a machine that’ll serve a useful purpose that another guy thought of last week. This may work, and it’s what I’ll try to do tomorrow if there aren’t any more crises that show up without warning.

Since so many of the smart and talented people at my job have jumped ship, I’ve updated my resumé in case there are people out there reading this who need somebody with my skill set.

Sunday: Not that much, really. I got some reading done and made dinner. Stephanie and I channel-flipped for a while and found an episode of “Criminal Minds”, which was actually better than I was expecting. I’m not sure if it’d be worth it to grab the earlier seasons of it on Netflix.

Then I sacked out for a few hours and set the alarm, since I had to wake up at 11:30pm and had to help migrate the website we built over to the new evil corporate platform. The stuff I had to do was reasonably easy and fast. I’d fat-fingered the temporary maintenance page config, but that only took two minutes to fix. No, after that, the other people kept running into things that they weren’t ready for or hadn’t thought through. We were all on a conference call, so I was able to hear all the gormless wittering. After hearing something particularly brainless, my boss texted me, saying, “Can you believe this? Oh. My. God.” At least everything we did worked out, so I was able to go to bed at about 12:45am.

Monday: I got up late and worked from home. This mostly worked out well. Moira liked being able to sit on my lap all morning. I learned that the new evil corporate website platform has several unexpected[0] bugs. Users were noticing these bugs and calling the customer service lines. This is, of course, bad. One of these bugs was rather simple—it’d be a 3 to 5 minute fix on their end. They said, “We might have that fixed in the next 4 to 5 hours.” This whole process has been like a Dilbert comic without the humor. I’m just glad I won’t have to deal with all the stupid fallout from this over the next few weeks, and I’m very glad I canceled the account I had with the site before they took it over.

[0] Unexpected by them, that is. I usually expect there to be five tons of new bugs and prepare various contingency plans, but they didn’t.

Friday: not all that fun, since minor crises that we couldn’t really fix kept happening all morning. And then it was Larry’s last day, which was also annoying. It seems as though all the people who have the option to leave are taking it, which sort of alarms the local management. Naturally, corporate either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that we’re losing far too many smart and experienced people.

Saturday: normal weekend stuff, mostly. Did laundry, got groceries, amused Moira. Stephanie and I went to Volcano Buffet with Angel and Charles. This time, it was mostly the same as last time—mild broth on one side, medium-spicy broth on the other, beef, pork, fish balls, shrimp, oysters, veggies, and so forth. I saw that one of my chopsticks had a split in its butt end, so I tried to break the split piece off. This was a really bad idea. A sliver of bamboo ended up directly under my right thumbnail, which hurt. A lot. I couldn’t get it out, either. Charles volunteered to drive to a nearby evil Wal-Mart to get a pair of tweezers. I was able to clamp down on the pain after a couple of minutes, but it was still a relief when he showed up and I was able to remove the sliver. I can see why they used to torture people with bamboo slivers under their fingernails.

This was sort of embarrassing, but at least the food and conversation were good. We were there for at least two hours before we called it a night.

This pretty much summed up Thursday. It started off with a machine dying, then we got it back up, then an obscure important piece wasn’t working because somebody else had never set that piece to start automatically on boot. Finding this took what seemed like forever. At least I fixed the problem and got it all documented.

More epic stupid happened later, but I’m not sure how to phrase it best just yet.

At least You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, but It Helps by Tom Holt has been an amusing book to read on the bus. Colin and Cassie are both in love with the wrong people, and they’re trying to fix that, and Colin’s father has decided to sell his soul to the Devil. Also, Cassie’s firm has been acquired by some efficiency experts, so all the employees have to do assessments where they’re quizzed about their abilities to proactively synergize core competencies value-orientatedly moving forward. Some of the parody there is far too close to what I’ve heard people actually say. (Poe’s Law?) Anyway, I’m only halfway through it, and it’s got a lot of Britishisms in it, but it’s been fun so far.

Tuesday. Always fun. It seemed like there was a never-ending tide of requests and things to do. It didn’t help that one of us was sick, and one of the people upstairs is sick. Stuff is sort of coming together, not quite as smoothly or as quickly as the bosses would like, but actual progress is being made.

Then, of course, the database had a fit, and I had to get it working again. And when I was on the bus, I got a phone call saying that something really, really important had broken, and could I help fix it? Trying to talk on the phone and have someone else do semi-complex Linux tasks while on a noisy bus is not optimal. But when I finally got home and was able to look at a real computer, I found that the problem wasn’t with any system we were responsible for. Nope, some other people had done an unplanned reboot of something really important, and as a result, a bunch of stuff was completely unavailable for ~45 minutes. So naturally they called us. *sigh.

Monday had the usual raft of work-related bits of silliness. But at least I got some stuff accomplished, which is sometimes all you can do. We interviewed a guy over the phone. We really need another person since we’re stretched pretty thin. I hope we find somebody that the bosses and the team can live with pretty quickly.

And apparently my washing machine has some sort of problem with its hot-water line. I tried to do a load of laundry the other day using warm/cold, regular cycle, and it leaked water all over the floor. At least I was home, so I could mop it all up and contain the damage. I tried running a short cycle using only cold water tonight, and there were no leaks. Well, this could be a lot worse—I can still wash clothes in cold water. I wonder if I can fix this myself, or if I’ll have to call a repairman.

We’re trying to get something set up where Stephanie, Angel, Charles, and I go out for dinner this weekend. I don’t know if we’re going to the Volcano Buffet or Tao Garden or somewhere totally different yet.

Anyway, it seems like five tons of things have been happening all week, which is why there haven’t been many entries here. Let’s see. Last Wednesday, had the usual Rock Band 3 with Steve and Stephanie, which was kind of fun.

Thursday, the department head took a few of us to the hockey game, which was really pretty fun. The Coyotes played scrappily, but couldn’t do more than tie the game in regulation, and they lost the shootout. I saw a beautiful goal by Gilbert Brule in the second period, though, so that was neat.

Saturday, I went over to Stephanie’s for dinner, and we finally got to see “Babylon 5: Thirdspace”. This was interesting. I’m not sure which series we’re going to watch next, though, since we’ve just about exhausted the Babylon 5 stuff that’s available. Buffy the Vampire Slayer? That might work.

Sunday, not that much happened. Moira threw up in the middle of the morning, always fun. I got groceries and made dinner, then did some reading and played some old video games.

Monday! This was a lot better than a regular Monday, mostly because I didn’t have to go in to work. I didn’t do all that much. Amused Moira, made dinner, checked up on Anna and Pinto. Back to work tomorrow. I’ll have a whole lot of stuff to do, plus I’ll be on call all week, but this is the price I pay for doing the job that I do, or something like that.

Quite a bit of stuff has been going on.

Friday: I almost, but didn’t quite, have the day off. I had to call in for a meeting at 10am. This only lasted a half-hour, but not too long after that, I got mail asking me to do a bunch of stuff. So I got some stuff done, but it really wasn’t quite like being off.

Saturday: Not that much work, at least. Stephanie had a bunch of books and stuff to get rid of, so we took those to Bookman’s, then took the stuff Bookman’s wouldn’t take to Goodwill. Then we went out to a Vietnamese restaurant for lunch. At least half the clientele was Vietnamese, and Stephanie said, “Matt, were you the only white guy in the restaurant?” after we’d left. I saw at least one other white guy eating lunch there, though, and the food was good.

We tried to watch “Babylon 5: Thirdspace” after dinner, but we found that the DVD was broken. Oops. So we fell back to the other DVD Stephanie had, “The Book of Eli”. This was better than I’d expected, even though the premise was ridiculous. (Over one billion copies of the Bible have been printed, so the idea that all copies of it except Eli’s have been destroyed seems just a bit unlikely.)

Sunday: Stephanie took some time off to go see her parents in San Diego, so I drove her to the airport. Then I got groceries, changed the air filter in my condo, amused Moira, and took care of Anna and Pinto. Not much else. I’m glad I’ll have the day off tomorrow.