Lots of stuff happened Saturday night. However, stupid problems with the PHP on the VM this site is hosted on mean that there’s no way I’ll be able to get an update out by 6:30am MST.

Caturday! There’s not a whole lot going on, but I was able to deal with almost all of the junk that I got handed on Friday. Even though I had to get up at 5am and do some semi-complex things with a couple of DRBD cluster boxes. Whatever, the maintenance I did worked with practically no disruption to the normal user’s point of view, so I’m inclined to call it a success.

Most of us went out to lunch, as we usually do on Friday. That was OK.

Friday, I have to get up really early and perform some maintenance on the database box and another machine. It should be no problem, apart from the “getting up early” bit.

Thursday was fairly quiet. I remembered the book (a short story collection by Jonathan Lethem). It’s quite a bit better than Ink, though the stories I’ve read so far are all pretty dark. There was some consternation in the afternoon because of a <tr> tag that was lacking a <td> tag inside it, which made all the browsers render the contents really stupidly. I was able to figure out what had gone wrong with some fiddling around.

Wednesday, I unintentionally slept in for half an hour and had to take the late bus. And of course, I realized that I’d left the book I was going to read on the end table when I’d gotten 40 feet out the door, and decided there probably wasn’t enough time to go back. There was plenty of time, since the bus was 5 minutes late.

At work, I ran into a bizarre problem that should never have happened according to everything I know about the machine and the network it’s attached to.  Rebooting the machine fixed it.  (That may seem like an obvious step to take for some of you, but this was a Linux box, and rebooting is almost never the right solution for a Linux problem.)

Went to Steve’s for the usual Wednesday night Rock Band. Steve’s oldest dog wasn’t feeling well. Apparently, medicine for dogs costs almost as much as medicine for people, even though dogs can’t file malpractice suits.

It looks like I’ll be getting up early Friday morning to perform some maintenance on a couple of machines. Oh joy.

Tuesday was really full.  After work, I thought I had some time to eat dinner and try to clean the place up since the plan was for everyone to show up at my place at 7pm.  Of course, Zach showed up at 6:15pm.  And the trivia contest was at Skeptical Chymist in Scottsdale instead of Fibber Magee’s in Chandler, which was about 20 miles further than it usually is.  Then we couldn’t find the place that easily since none of us had been there before, and while we were looking for it, we saw some idiot driving an SUV on the sidewalk. Oddly enough, there was a cop less than 50 feet away from the sidewalk driver, who didn’t seem concerned about that.

The trivia was reasonable, though it took forever.  Almost everyone wussed out and didn’t show up.  Even though it was only me, Sarah, Zach, and Nathan, we got second place and a $50 gift card.  I don’t know if it was worth it, though, since I’ll be really tired at work on Wednesday thanks to the additional travel and time spent.

This picture has nothing to do with anything, and is just silly.

Monday was reasonably quiet. One of us was sick, and another of us took an on-call day, so things were a bit more subdued than usual. I fixed an annoying problem, and documented all the stuff I did to fix it, so that other people will be able to fix it without tearing their hair out in the future. Someone stole Zach’s credit card info, which is causing him some annoyance. And apparently, Sherry has a boyfriend in Seattle, which was a surprise to most of us. (Long-distance relationships? Eh, whatever, she’s got enough sense to decide how to deal with that stuff herself.)

Almost done with Ink. It doesn’t look like the potential that the story had will be fulfilled. It’s sad in a way. The book was almost like William S. Burroughs took a lot of hallucinogens and decided to rewrite Illuminatus!, but with less coherence. I wasn’t expecting great literature from Ink, since I basically picked it off the sci-fi shelves at random. Still, the whole book feels like it’s on the verge of veering close to good literature, then being drunkenly swung around into schlock by an author who can’t figure out what he wants to say.

So on Sunday, I went out and got a splitter and some coax so that I could watch the Cards play the 49ers while still connected to the Net. After I connected everything, the cablemodem went into “trying to connect” mode for over a minute, and I thought that the splitter I’d bought was broken. It eventually got its act together.

However, the football game was pretty painful to watch. The Cards were playing sloppily throughout the first half, they had way too many penalties, and Warner threw an interception. The defense was looking good, but so was the 49ers defense. At the half, I turned the game off.

But yeah, not a whole lot else going on. We’re trying to set up a rifle range day with Zach and Nacho 2 weeks from now. An interesting recipe for “ramen pizza” that can be made while you’re in jail. (NOTE: the comment section of that link contains copious swearing.)

The big excitement on Saturday was going to the gun show with Jen and Zach. That wasn’t really that interesting, though. No one was looking for new guns, and I had stupidly left my scope mount in the car, so I couldn’t really look for a scope. I found some reasonably cheap ammo, but that was it. We met TehNacho and Jason there briefly, but they said they hadn’t found anything that interesting either. Zach was looking for a 20″ upper for an AR-15, but everything he found was more expensive and/or less good than the 20″ uppers he could find on the Net.

We then went out for lunch. After some confusion about where to go, we ended up going to Red Devil Pizza, which is not that far from my house. I had seen this restaurant many times, but had overlooked it and never gone in for some reason. (I don’t usually eat out except for Friday lunch.) But Zach recommended the place, so we went in and had pizza and garlic toast for lunch. It was pretty good, and not that expensive. Then we went to the nearby pawn shop to look for interesting stuff, but didn’t find much. We tried to convince Jen to buy a piccolo, but it was apparently too expensive for her.

Saturday was supposed to be lazy. However, I’m going to the gun show with Zach and Jen and possibly some people from the Zombie Squad, because there was some interest in that early on Friday morning. The only things I’d want or need are a sling and an inexpensive scope, though. We might also go out to lunch after the gun show, which could be good.

I’ve been reading Ink by Hal Duncan. It’s not all that coherent, but it’s still interesting. Apparently, the apocalypse happened. Except it didn’t go as planned. So the plot has a backdrop of some angels trying to bring some order to chaos, a whole bunch of lost and confused people, a bunch of strange nanotech devices, and a thing called the Book of All Hours. With this backdrop, we get 3 (or 4?) disparate plotlines involving a gay guy named Jack Flash, a couple of people named Joey who may or may not be the same person, timelines that skip back and forth, a world where everyone has wings, and flying motorcycles. Did I mention the adaptation of “The Bacchae” that’s being performed in one of the plotlines? The verse in it is reasonably well done, though it takes forever to get anywhere because the POV keeps switching to another plotline.

The book is a sequel to Vellum, and of course the library didn’t have that one. So I may be missing some context that’d help me make sense of what all’s going on. Or not. So much is going on, and the time and context switch so much, that it’s more like a series of 30-second MTV shorts than a standard novel. I hope it starts going somewhere more coherent. There’s a lot of potential in the story the author’s telling. It’d be a shame if it were unfulfilled.

The author of Ink has a blog, though it’s kind of hard to read. Someone ought to tell him that chaotic backgrounds are lousy backdrops for text.