Yay for hamsters! Also, yay for the Firefox Nagios Addon, which showed me something was wrong on Thursday morning right when I was eating breakfast. With that info, I was able to fix everything before anyone noticed and called in a problem.

Friday, Trevor’s taping for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, the 10th anniversary edition. Hope he does well. I guess I don’t get to be a lifeline, which is probably OK.

The project at work is basically writing PHP that writes more PHP. This is a bit odd, but most of the bugs have been You have an error in your SQL syntax near line 135 fixed and it’s time to make it write the less complicated Unexpected string on line 278 pages that do other things.

Some names don’t go all that well with some businesses. Would you buy a chair from a store called “Assmann’s”?

I’m making progress on the big project at work. It’s moving slower than I’d like, of course, but things are happening and it does a lot more than it did before. It doesn’t work right yet, of course, but it’s not working in a much more useful manner than it was.

The title is there because I recently bought a new USB drive to replace one that I’d lost a few months back. That drive fell out of my pocket sometime between today and now, and could be anywhere. But while searching for it, I found the one I’d lost a few months back—it was in a pocket of my laptop bag that I rarely use. Sigh. I took the rediscovered drive and attached it to my main keyring, so it’ll be much more difficult to lose now.

Dogs don’t have the cognitive skills to play poker. Robots, though. . . .

It was a long day at work on Tuesday and it’ll be a long one on Wednesday. At least I got to work on the big project in between putting out fires and helping other people do stuff.

Trivia: The speakers in the second room were broken, so we had to sit in the first room. This is a little more crowded and noisier. But whatever. Spencer said he applied for a job at a bookstore where he had to write out a bunch of stuff in longhand, which seems a little odd in this day and age, but maybe he’ll get the job. Sarah wanted to know who discovered lobsters were edible. “A 7-year-old boy with a 5-year-old brother,” I said, which she thought was really funny. Kelli described an overly enthusiastic friend that she hadn’t seen in about 8 years and compared her life to a romantic comedy. “But it must be like the first 10 minutes of the movie, because you haven’t met The Guy yet!” Patty said to her. Movies tend to follow logic that’s totally different from what operates in real life, though. And the boring bits of real life don’t get compressed into a montage.

Zombies. Bread. The mind boggles. Also, there are some people who are really, really interested in beer cans.

It’s going to be a long week. There’s a big project which I probably won’t have time to finish properly, and one of the database boxes had a cow right before I left. I got it mostly fixed, but I wasn’t 100% sure it was fine when I went to catch the bus. Then the bus was 10 minutes late, so I could’ve stayed and made sure the ailing box was OK. I logged in to work and saw the box was fine when I got home, but what if it hadn’t been? Ah well.

Sometimes, it really pays to do some research before naming your business.

Not a lot going on on Sunday. I finished reading The Still, and saw that it has a sequel. The book had a bit of a pacing problem; the early parts dragged and the later parts seemed rushed. It was still enjoyable, though I don’t know if I’d recommend it to others because there’s a lot of violence, a lot of sex, and many unsympathetic characters. Next up: Exodus From the Long Sun, which will probably not answer most of the questions that I had about the Whorl.

If the Romans had had legions like this, the Roman Empire would not have fallen.

The big excitement on Saturday was getting together at Trevor’s house for dinner and a loooong round of trivia. Everybody was there except for John, who was visiting family in Tucson. Everyone brought a set of about 30-50 short questions about various topics. Most of us also brought food. I thought it was interesting how popular the Pringles that I’d brought were, but what the heck.

We snacked and then started reading the questions. Since Trevor’s going to be on an honest-to-$DEITY game show, we gave him first shot at every question, then gave it to the room if he couldn’t get it. Most of Nathan’s questions were about food and cooking. Most of Patty’s questions were about TV shows. Most of Spencer’s questions were about art and color theory. Most of Kelli’s questions were about TV shows and 80′s music. Most of Sarah’s questions were about children’s books. Most of Zach’s questions were about firearms, assassinations, and war. My questions were all over the map. I’ll provide the answers later.

We decided to order pizza from Nello’s, and Trevor volunteered to drive out and get that pizza since they don’t deliver. Right as Trevor got to the restaurant, the monsoon storms hit Ahwatukee, and Trevor and the pizza got a lot of rain dumped on them. He was OK, though it was a bit annoying for him.

Trevor had written up a packet of questions, and while we were eating dinner, he posed them to all of us. Through luck and skill, I ended up on top in points when the round of Trevor questions was over. It was close, though, and Nathan or Zach could’ve beat me if things had been a little different.

I left at 11pm because I was tired, though everyone else seemed to be up for one more round of questions.  Sigh.  I have had to program myself to get up early for work, which makes it hard to stay up late for fun.

Caturday, and as a public service announcement, most cats hate baths.

Friday, the big thing was getting together with Adam and the old boss for lunch. Old boss is going to Ireland next week, which will be a nice break for him. There was a lot of kvetching about the way upper management and HR handled the latest round of layoffs. Old boss said that he was proud to have worked with all of us, which was a bit humbling. There are a number of things that I’m really good at, but there’s no way I can do everything. Also, there are flights from Phoenix directly to Heathrow, which may be nice if I ever want to visit Britain again.

Then, of course, when we got back to the office, we learned that one of our powerful boxes had fallen over and people were complaining. It didn’t take long to fix, but it was still annoying.

The plan for Saturday is to get together at Trevor’s house for dinner, and practice trivia since Trevor’s going to be taping for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” on July 31.  He asked us to write up a bunch of trivia questions about various topics.  I could only think of 30 questions, though.  Ah well, we’ll see what we get and attempt to have a good time.

The movie “G-Force” is really lousy according to a review that I saw today. So here’s a much less lousy guinea pig.

Not a whole lot of excitement on Thursday. Well, there was a problem when I walked in the door, and I immediately saw what needed to be done and fixed it. “Wait, you fixed it that quickly? Whoa. Did you have a shell script that does that?” “No. Not yet,” I replied. I’ve been living in a Linux world for the last 10 years, though, so there are some things that I can do very quickly without even thinking.

What else. . . started reading The Still, a fantasy novel that I picked up at random. It’s about the young heir to the throne, who must find a way to keep whiskey production up or face economic ruin and general mutiny. The real plot is a bit different; a 16-year-old prince’s mother dies to start things off. He then has to deal with a regent who wants him dead or imprisoned, two annoying younger brothers, and a really useful magical device which will become useless immediately after he has sex for the first time. So far it’s reasonably well written. Sometimes, the books I pick up at random are.

The Plan(tm) for Friday is for all of my work team to meet up with the old boss for lunch.  That should be interesting.  A bunch of people from work who knew him had dinner and beer with him on Monday night, but none of us knew about that until Monday morning, so none of us could go.

Who doesn’t love a good ferret loaf?

On Wednesday, someone found out that you could print out a coupon and get a burrito for free with the purchase of a drink at Baja Fresh today. So we did that. It’s always nice when you can get lunch for $1.72. The only problem was that it’s kind of a long walk over there when it’s hot out. And while we were walking south on Central, two of the downtown bums were swearing at each other about something like who got to sit on which part of the sidewalk.

The prairie dogs are getting really militant. Maybe we should call in that groundskeeper from “Caddyshack” or something.

Trivia: We had everyone there for the first time in a really long time. This was mostly because we all learned that Trevor got selected for “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and the taping’s July 31. So he came to trivia to practice and/or warm up for that, and everyone else came to wish him well. The contestants on that show can only use land-lines when they “phone a friend”, though, so there’s no way that Trevor can phone me. Not that this’ll matter; the only reason he’d have to phone me is if he gets some question about science, computers, or comic books.

We also heard about Zach and Sarah’s trip up to Minnesota, where they stayed in a monestary that had nuns in it (which was not a nunnery, for some reason.) They told us about 70 F weather and eating in a restaurant which was advertised as “A place in East Grand Forks”. Seriously, that was the slogan they came up with. And Kelli has apparently been getting slammed with work at her job, which is annoying. But we were in second place when I left, which is better than we usually do.