Sometimes, I wish I had a lawn, so that I could tell people to get off it. Maybe not with a Gatling gun, but in some way.

Work: A rather simple problem caused massive consternation yesterday. I don’t know how the problem happened, but it was really annoying and consumed a great deal of time and effort. After a bunch of brainstorming that involved too many people, one of us (Adam?) figured out what was really going on. After he’d done that, the fix was trivial, and after I applied it, Stuff Started Working. I ran into a similar problem about 11 months ago, back at the old job, and all I can think of is “Why didn’t I recognize the symptoms immediately?” Oh well, it should be fixed, and I hope to be able to devote tomorrow to making the database machines behave properly.

Fun: I watched the first episode of “Firefly” last night, and enjoyed it. If I watch 4 or 5 episodes per week, it will only take me a month to watch the whole TV series. It rained last night as well, which was fairly cool. Monsoon weather in AZ, aw yeah.

“Random Axe of Kindness” would be a great name for a punk band.

A few strange things happened at work yesterday, but they were mostly fixable. I think I have a way to prevent one machine from eating all its disk space at 5 am. I hope it works. Ken Thompson said, “The steady state of disks is ‘full’ ” back in the 1970s when disks were less than 1G in size. Now we have directories that are at least 10G, and those aren’t even the big directories. Progress, I guess.

Went to Steve’s last night, ate dinner at Subway and talked of setting up a “virtual office” consisting of a bus or motor home full of Linux boxes running business applications all hooked up to an LDAP server. Also whether the principles behind micro loans could be applied to the open source community with any degree of success. ISTR that someone partially famous (Scott McCloud, Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade) tried to use micropayments, and failed miserably, but that was back in 2000 or 2001. Then again, micro loans aren’t micropayments. I don’t know . . . micropayments would be hard to keep track of, and when you have expenses that are hard to track, you tend to have annoyed consumers and horrible PR backlash.

This is one of my favorite Dali paintings. I’m not sure exactly why. The expression on the horse’s face is great, as are the surrealistic elements of the long-legged elephants bearing worldly treasures.

Work had some minor victories, again. The stuff that I thought was going to be a big problem is apparently not a problem at all now. So, of course, now I have to deal with a machine that isn’t hooked up at all and another machine that is hooked up, but to an incorrect place. Never a dull moment in the world of IT. (There are plenty of dull moments. We just gloss over those parts.)

Trivia last night: We were leading when I left, which is always good. Nathan lent me the complete “Firefly” TV series, which I will have to watch at some point. I really liked “Babylon 5″, but “Firefly” is something completely different. I’ll watch the first episode Thursday night and see how that goes.

I have a new watch (thanks, Mom!). It’s pretty nice. No battery required, has all of the normal timekeeping functions, water resistant, can tell you what month or year it is if you forget, and so forth. I used to wear a watch all the time, then the band broke. I got a new band, then that band broke after less than 2 weeks. So I said “forget it”, since I was always carrying my cellphone. Now I guess I can start wearing one again.

A couple of automated scripts were filling everyone’s inbox with useless error reports. One of them just required reading The Fine Manual, and then following the procedure the manual described. The other one actually required some coding to fix. Then one of the less important machines started behaving in a really odd way, and nobody could figure out what the heck was wrong with it. Win some, lose some.

Saturday, after I’d eaten dinner, I took my rifle out of its carry bag to clean it. Fuzzball decided that the open bag made a perfect place to sit. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because the bag hasn’t been in the house for very long, so it doesn’t smell like cat hair yet.

It was only 104 F yesterday afternoon, but it felt hotter as I was walking to the library. This time it took me 3.5 weeks to get through 4 books. The whole process of starting a new job didn’t help my reading speed much, though. I suppose now that I’m riding the bus, I can read for about 20 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening for 4 days a week, which should help.

This car ornament would make all other car ornaments gibber in terror and go insane. Actually, I’m out of art museum pictures and haven’t taken any pictures since then, so this next week may be a “theme week” consisting of H.P. Lovecraft references.

Went out to the rifle range yesterday with Zach and Juan and Juan’s wife. That was fun. Fired 200 rounds through my rifle, and it worked pretty well, only misfeeding once. Juan said that occasional misfeeds are relatively normal for a new rifle and a new magazine. I also fired Juan’s AK-47 a few times, which was fun even though the sights were somewhat messed up. The AK is not the most accurate of rifles, but it was pretty consistently low, bad enough so that you had to aim about 5 mm higher than the target at 300 yards. 7.62×39 is about $0.22/round, while .22LR is about $0.05/round, though. Zach had an interesting handgun, a 9-shot revolver chambered for .22LR, that I should’ve tried out. Then we ate lunch and went back home, as it was getting really hot out.

A trebuchet load of bile, aimed at a recently dead politician.

Here’s one of the last paintings I saw at the Phoenix Art Museum. Each individual dot in the painting is fairly large, about 1.5 cm in diameter. I had to stand pretty far back and use the widest-angle lens setting my old camera could manage to get a reasonable picture of it. The info board didn’t say, but I think this is supposed to represent the events of 2001-09-11.

Went down to Casa Grande yesterday to meet up with everyone, have a barbecue, play Rock Band, and hang out. We had burgers, brats, grilled tuna steak, pasta salad, regular salad, ice cream, and various other things. Played a bunch of songs on Medium, mostly with Nathan or Kelli on drums. I sang a few songs, played bass on a lot of songs, and played guitar on a few songs. Then we took a break, and saw this Daft Punk fan video made by people with far too much spare time and perused Zach’s extensive music collection. Then we tried to play a few songs on Hard, and found that though we could five-star “Say It Ain’t So”, “Dead On Arrival” is way too difficult for most of us. More practice. . . sigh, it’s always something.

While driving back to Tempe, I saw a lot of lightning in the sky. Monsoon season has started, so we’re getting unpredictable rain in various unpredictable parts of the Valley. I also saw a few fireworks explosions from the fireworks they had at the Tempe Town Lake festival.  I suppose I could’ve gone up to see the Tempe fireworks, but it was relatively late and I was tired.

Since it’s a three day weekend, this picture seemed appropriate.

The plan for the 4th is to go down to Casa Grande, possibly carpooling with Nathan or John, and spend the afternoon playing Rock Band. It’s been a while since I’ve played that, and I only got about 95% on “Heat of the Moment” on Medium in Guitar Hero 80′s last weekend, but it should be fun anyway.

I’m gonna come at you like a spider monkey! Why is it that young children behaving badly are so much funnier on video than they are in real life? Maybe it’s because you can stop a video or walk out of a movie theatre if it gets annoying. You can’t really do that with an actual kid.

Here’s the right half of the laboratory painting from a couple of days ago. I think the left half was better, but the right half has a pretty obvious reference to the Sistine Chapel.

Some seemingly ordinary stuff at work had strange implications when I looked at it more closely. I hope to find out what’s really going on with that stuff tomorrow, though that’s probably a vain hope.

Went to Steve’s last night. We had dinner, then discussed iptables, Apache virtual hosts, running essential services on alternate ports, and assorted other technical topics.

Three-day weekend soon. WHEEEEEE!!!!1!

Here’s a closeup of the left side of the painting shown 2 days ago. Actually, I think the left side by itself is a better painting than the whole painting. I wonder how many other works of art you could improve by selective cropping.

I finished The Buddha from Brooklyn yesterday. At the end of the book, at least, the Buddhist center toned down some of its stranger practices and stopped insisting that the founder be treated like a living deity. However, the people at the center treated several monks and nuns very shabbily, and wasted tons of money on things that were neither rational nor Buddhist. Some senior lamas from Tibet were going to formally censure the center’s leader, but politics prevented them from doing so. Big chunks of the book are almost like a “How Not to Do This” book for Buddhism.

I then started A Walk in the Woods, which is about 2 out-of-shape guys who decide to hike the Appalachian Trail. Parts of it are really funny. When the obnoxious woman ate the protagonist’s last cupcake, I was surprised that he didn’t smack her for being so rude. I guess he was too tired to do anything at that point.

Tuesday is Meeting Day at work, but I still managed to get some useful things done.

Trivia: In honor of “Mansquito”, our team name was “More mosquito than man, now”.  Another team had a better name, “If Obama wins, is it still the White House?”.  Nathan bought Rock Band for the PS2, which is less nifty than Rock Band for the 360 or PS3, but was a bargain at $99.  Apparently, I need to watch all the episodes of “Firefly”, but when will I have time?