Caturday! When you leave cats alone, somehow they always seem to end up in dire straits.

Relaxing day on Friday. In bad news, Google is leaving Tempe. I heard about 6 months ago that one of Google’s offices was looking to hire someone. The candidate had all the right skills, passed the long and grueling interview process, and everyone liked him. They didn’t hire him. Why? His degree wasn’t from a top-tier university. That seems really crazy to me, but then I’m just a programmer/sysadmin, not Catbert the evil HR director.

There was an article a couple of weeks ago about how the local food bank’s shelves are running low. So on Friday, I took a couple of bags of canned soup, canned fruit, canned chicken, and dried rice over to them. They are only open from 8am..5pm on weekdays, which means I had to wait until I had a day off to donate. They gave me a donation receipt, but they let me fill it out and didn’t check the dollar amount I put down against what I had donated. (I guessed—it might have been +/- 2 or 3 dollars.) Oh well, some people will probably eat the food I gave them, which is what’s important.

Fuzzball with some text that I’m sure we’ve all felt like saying at some point. Also, matey, it be Talk Like A Pirate day! Scuttle the mizzenmast! Keelhaul the politicians!

At work on Thursday, it seemed like I got a relatively constant stream of “Oh, can you do (small thing)?” requests. As a result, I got almost nothing done on the large, more long-term project. Some days are like that. Also found out an interesting and stupid way in which Internet Exploder 7 behaves badly. (Seriously, who would use that when Firefox is so much better?) I also got to fix a rewrite rule by Reading The Fine Manual, which is always a good feeling.

Reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. This is apparently a book that tackles the technological singularity head-on. I’ve read a few other Stross books—Glasshouse and The Atrocity Archive were pretty good, while Halting State and Iron Sunrise were enjoyable but less good. But what surprised me was that the first chapter of Accelerando was actually a short story called “Lobsters” that I had read about 5 or 6 years ago. Well, good writers imitate, great writers steal, and all writers recycle if they can.

Back in the 1980s, in “Bloom County”, Oliver hacked into the NYSE and made all the boards display “Avast, ye scurvy dogs, Bank of America is about to go belly up!”  This touched off a worldwide financial panic.  I can’t find the image that shows this, though.  Dangit, life is not supposed to imitate comic strips.

Went to Steve’s last night, where we found that one of his machines has a bad network card, then discussed physics.

Sometimes, the lizards are happy. I am also happy, because I don’t have to go to work on Wednesday, and can spend the time planning the swift destruction of all my enemies seeing a matinee, reading, and stuff like that.

Trivia: We were Trevor-less, and they’ve changed the contest format around quite a bit. We got second place, thanks to a huge set of questions about obscure geography that none of us had any idea about.

At some point on Wednesday, this site and everything on it will migrate from its location on my home box to a server at a hosting company. I’ve had the server running test stuff for over a week and have had no problems. If you get timeouts or weird DNS problems at some point, the server move is why.  UPDATE: This has been done.  Looks like it worked fine.

I’m also trying to organize a party. “Feed people and give them beer/cider/pop, have them move furniture such that Matt’s living room is more awesome, and then play Rock Band until we get tired and bored” is the working theme. Not sure on the date just yet though. The 27th might not work out for everyone.

So because I had to be awake for hours and hours during a time when most people are snoozing, I get to take Wednesday off. Yay!  In non-good news, they’ve raised the price of the cafeteria’s chili by about $0.30.  Well, it’s pretty good chili, so maybe they had to cover rising ingredient costs.

A machine was acting wonky on Monday. When I left, it was acting much less wonky, but I have no idea why it was being flaky in the first place. It should never have been flaky at all. But unexpected flakiness is par for the course in these things.

A Farker’s son has a nasty form of brain cancer. They’re trying to raise money for treatment. Tons of details in the link in the previous sentence. The direct donation link (beware, has music embedded in some sort of Flash or MIDI thing. Get FlashBlock!).

The posters on that topic are interestingly divided. My rough estimate is that 60% of them said things like, “Man, that’s horrible, I donated (small amount), good luck.” 37% of them said things like, “Wow, that’s horrible, good luck, various things like being poor or unemployed or in massive debt prevent me from donating.” 3% of them said, “You’re running a scam! There is no kid! Instead of asking us for help, you should pull yourself up by your bootstraps, only the unworthy can afford medical care!” and other things in that vein.

What surprises me is that the number of people being unsympathetic is so low. We’re a fairly snarky and cynical bunch. But throughout history, communities have banded together to help out their members who have suffered something extreme. It’s just that this is now happening over the InterGoogleWebNet instead of in neighborhood organizations.

This makes sense, actually.  Most of the time, the only things you have in common with your immediate neighbors are that you live in reasonably close proximity and that you have roughly similar socioeconomic status.  I think it could be easier to build a community based on shared interests (Free Software, bolt-action rifles, quilting, golf, photography. . .) than one based on mere physical proximity.  I Could Be Wrong.

The plan for Saturday night was to get everybody together at Nathan’s, eat potluck, then go bowling. I haven’t been bowling in ages. I think I can remember how. The wallpaper in the picture is hideous. Did anyone in the 1960s/70s think that was a good idea? Oh well, I’m sure that “Fashion Mistakes of the 00s” will be a VH-1 special in 15 years.

I took a nap on Saturday to recover from getting up really early and spending about 4 hours involved in the disaster test. I think it worked. But it probably wasn’t long enough or deep enough, since when 10pm rolled around, I was too tired to go out with everyone to the bowling alley. Shoot. Well, I got to eat dinner with everybody and catch up on stuff, like Trevor getting a new job (yay!) and tentative plans for everyone going on a Vegas trip in January.

Writing this at 2:30am on Saturday while waiting for other people to get their stuff together during the disaster recovery test. Of course, not everything is working properly. In fact, as far as I can tell, a bunch of stuff is behaving about as stably as a stegosaurus on rocket-powered roller skates. DNS, networking, various Windows machines. . . all either not working or working sporadically. I do not know how long it’ll take to fix the stupid domain controller problem, and until they fix this, everyone is essentially incapable of doing anything (3:30am.).

The stuff that I’m responsible for is actually working fine as far as I can tell. This is always a good thing.

Finished Moby-Dick. The ending is sad but inevitable. Ahab’s given multiple chances to turn back, and rejects them all. Starbuck knows Ahab and the crew are headed for a bad end, yet he is incapable of either persuading Ahab or shooting Ahab. Many are the Starbucks, and many are the Ahabs, my friends.

I guess owls can suffer from megalomania, just like evil geniuses.

I’m almost done with Moby-Dick. Six people look at the doubloon nailed to the mast and see six different things. Of course, this is supposed to show something about the character of each of the six people. Briefly—Ahab: crazy. Starbuck: resigned. Stubb: cheerful. Flask: dull and mercenary. The Manxman: full of strange rubbish. Fedallah: totally enigmatic. On the bus Thursday morning, I got to chapter 99, where Pip says, “And I, you, he, we, ye, and they are all bats!” Back when I lived in Sarlaac House, I quoted this line of Pip’s and my housemates wouldn’t believe that line came from a famous critically acclaimed novel. (For some reason, that summer, we all used “bat” to mean “loser”, and “wombat” to mean “extreme loser”.)

The power went out at my place for about 45 minutes on Thursday night, probably due to high winds in the Tempe area. I walked outside and down the road about 0.3 miles to see what was going on. A bunch of houses and businesses had had their power go out, but a few businesses still had power. Several traffic lights had gone out, though. This was probably annoying for anyone who was driving. Oh well, it was somehow fitting to be reading Moby-Dick with high winds outside, by the light of a tiny LED flashlight.

Late Friday night/early Saturday morning, there’s a disaster recovery test. I have to be awake and doing stuff for all of it, which will be a bit annoying. The stuff we deal with will be fairly easy, the other teams involved are doing much more intricate work. It’ll still screw up my sleep schedule, but oh well. At least I can do everything from home, and I won’t have to drive 30 miles to the other datacenter, like a bunch of people will have to do.

Time. There just isn’t very much. I had to get up early Wednesday morning to try a semi-complicated thing with an important server, it failed miserably, so Thursday morning I’ll be getting up even earlier to try the same thing. Only this time, I’ll be armed with fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Update: It worked—not perfectly, but it worked. And there was much rejoicing.

I went to Steve’s on Wednesday night, as usual. We had Pei Wei for dinner, then talked about a bunch of Linux stuff. Also touched on how to test people for competency in computer skills. From there, we started talking about physics, which led us to this surprisingly addictive waste of time, which was interesting. I found that many of the early puzzles there can be solved with more power, which is a bit strange, but what the heck. The game gives you multiple ways to win, some more elegant than others.

It also rained quite a bit on Wednesday night, which was welcome. I wonder if there were any hurricane-force winds this time. There was certainly a lot of lightning in the Chandler/Mesa/Tempe area around 9pm.