Yarr, it be Caturday, and the scurvy dogs are out in force.

Friday wasn’t that exciting. They tried to call me for a problem at work when I was taking a shower, and then didn’t try to call again, so I didn’t find out about it until I got there. It was pretty easy to fix though. We went out to lunch. Jeff really liked the place that I suggested, too.

And that day, I got the weirdest piece of spam I’ve ever seen. It was from a Chinese spammer who was attempting to defeat Bayesian filters by badly translating pages from Wikipedia, in this case an article about Airsoft. Sample:

In some occurrences, contend withers don’t summons out hits they make incessant as a effect of this “awning flak delay”. Players are expected to elude the flourishing of an contender who has already take cognizance ofted to being hit. Players are expected to break down into disputes politely and with conformist decorum.

It went on like this for pages. Normally, I’m all in favor of grinding spammers into a high protein animal feed slurry, but maybe this one should be allowed to live for being unintentionally amusing.

Shark is to blame for the title of this post.
This really doesn’t have much to do with what happened on Thursday. The layoffs happened. 7 people from my department, one of whom was my boss. BLEAH. YUCK. The sad thing is, he was a great boss to work for, he was meeting his goals, and just about everybody liked him. But for some reason, he’s who they picked. How annoying.

I have a new boss. Curiously, 3 of the people on my team worked for the guy years before. So some stuff will change. I don’t think many of us got a whole lot done today, since we were talking about the layoffs, then after we heard, reacting to them. Well, I have an idea that might be able to squeeze 10% more performance out of some of our machines, but I won’t be able to test it until Friday.

I also got a box from Michigan on Thursday. It’s got a few books in it, which I’ll add to the books database a bit later. The interface I built for administering that whole thing has a couple of flaws. I need to fix them, but I spend all day dealing with web services and PHP and Linux boxes, and usually feel like doing something else when I get home.

At least we heard that there probably won’t be any more layoffs this year.

My weekly science citation tracker coughed up a lot more interesting stuff than usual. Apparently, there’s an Ebola virus present in pigs in the Philippines that can infect humans. This is Reston ebolavirus, which is not pathogenic. I’m still watching out for bleeding zombie Filipino pigs with flu. Also, anaerobic bacteria can oxidize methane using sulfate ions or iron/manganese compounds.

Otters, like cats, totally know how to relax. This is mostly what I did on Wednesday, since I didn’t have to go to work. I also dropped off a few bags of canned food at the local food bank. Not a whole lot else happened, except I got a helpdesk ticket at about 7:30pm. The ticket said there was a problem with a website. I logged in to the problem website, saw nothing wrong, did a few more extensive diagnostic checks, and still saw nothing wrong. I hate problems that vanish when somebody looks at them. Makes for a lot of wasted effort. Ah well, back to work tomorrow. . . .

In the grim future of Hello Kitty, there is only war.

In the grim present of Phoenix, there is only trivia and going out with friends, which is quite a bit more fun than getting shot at. Even though we were missing a bunch of people.  Zach and Sarah are in Minnesota.  Nobody knew where John was, and nobody’s heard from him since last week.  “New girlfriend?” was the only thing we could come up with.  This is possible, or at least more likely than a terrorist organization holding John hostage. Good team names this week were “The Jackson 5 Feet Under” and “I’m going to crush my morning-after pill and snort it with my coke”.  (This will not work, and will probably make you sick, so don’t try it.)

We didn’t do well in trivia, even though I stayed til the very end.  Almost all of the questions were about sports and celebrity trivia, which are things I’m just not that interested in.  But what the heck, it’s always good to have a night out with a few people.

Monday morning, after we explained the Friday network badness and what we did to fix it, the boss said that we could each take a comp day off this week. YAY! This is how things should work. So I’ll be taking Wednesday off, which will be nice, since I can do a few things like dropping those bags of canned goods off at the local food bank. And I can stay til the end at trivia on Tuesday, since I won’t have to get up early in the morning.

Not a whole heck of a lot else to report. It’s certainly better than the alternative.

Sunday had a lot less going on than Friday or Saturday. That was nice. There’s only so many problem reports from work and scrambles to fix things that you can take in one day.

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday was that at the party, Trevor brought a 2-liter of blue Mountain Dew. I don’t know why they would sell this, since most people don’t really like blue food, but they are. Apparently, it “tastes like blue”. I took everyone’s word for that. Also, apparently Crystal Pepsi (remember that?) is going for $10 per can or something equally ridiculous on fleaBay. I remember the clear pop craze of the mid-late 1990s, but I can’t see paying that much for a can of old pop.

All the layoffs at work are supposed to happen before July 9.  Here’s hoping my name’s not on the list.

The big excitement for July 4 was going over to Nathan’s and having dinner and various video games. Several of us had never seen “Katamari Damacy”, so we had to throw that into the PS2 and play it while the chicken was frying. It was really weird in many ways. (For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to video games: The plot goes like so—the King of the Cosmos got drunk and destroyed all the stars. You have to recover all the pieces of the stars and bring them back to the King, using a ball of sticky glue called a “katamari” while J-Pop plays on the soundtrack. Also, the King is kind of a jerk.

But after we’d eaten dinner, the Gilbert fireworks started, so we all went out to see those. We were a bit too far away to see them clearly, but we spent half an hour watching them anyway. Then it was back to the house for some more Rock Band action. Things broke up a bit before midnight, since almost all of us have to do things on Sunday morning.

Imagine that instead of smoking the cigarette, she’s stubbing it out on your face. That’s sort of what Friday morning was like.

Friday was supposed to be my day off. Then horrible things happened to the network at about 8am, a bunch of machines got really confused, and I got a phone call at 9:30ish asking why everything was broken. It took a couple of hours for me to fix everything, because almost everything that could’ve gone wrong had gone wrong. Entire segments of the network have failed before, and their failures didn’t cause nearly this many problems. It’s very strange. But I fixed the worst of the damage quickly, and most of the rest of it by lunch. “It’s a good thing I don’t have a life,” I said to the on-call person over IM.

I hope tomorrow won’t be like that. The Plan for the 4th is to get together in the evening with most of the usual crew at Nathan’s house for fried chicken, mac-n-cheese, beverages, and watching the Gilbert fireworks show. No network problems are scheduled.

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. . . .