School mascots usually aren’t this creative.

Wednesday was fairly quiet at work. However, the latest round of Redhat updates broke one of the less important pieces of monitoring software we’re using. It’s always something, isn’t it? I found a workaround. I can’t be the only one having this problem with df, but it smacks of someone trying to improve security and breaking some stuff in the process.

Did the usual Wednesday night Rock Band at Steve’s. Apparently, he’s having trouble with his freezer, so it’s sitting in the hallway instead of in the garage.

Today is supposed to be a day without cats, where the LOLcats that you see all over the Net are not supposed to be posted. Fortunately, there are also LOLdogs.

Not much happened at work on Tuesday, though there were some odd things with one machine that I had to fix. And a guy wearing a monkey mask while speeding got quite a bit of media attention.

Trivia: No Kelli, no Trevor.  We did have Jack and his girlfriend and the usual crew.  Best team name probably went to “What do Dale Ernheart and Pink Floyd have in common?  Their last big hit was ‘The Wall’.”  We got 3rd place, but we got enough points in the last few months that we were invited to the tournament next week at the Skeptical Chymist up in Scottsdale.  We’re apparently carpooling there if possible since it’s a long way.

Monday was a holiday. Yay! I didn’t do a whole lot since I’d been out doing stuff on Saturday and Sunday.

Something I forgot to mention about Saturday was that we’d installed part of the rifle stock upside down, and neither of us noticed that at first. Fortunately, when I looked at it again, it was reasonably easy to get it fixed. “Good technical writing, and clear explanations with pictures” is not a priority for the people who manufacture firearms and firearms accessories, I guess. This is too bad, since clear directions can be important for stuff like this.

So the big excitement on Sunday was getting together with everyone (minus John, plus Miguel) for Rock Band, dinner, and trivia. We heard about Kelli’s adventure with a plumber. The plumber was there to fix a broken toilet, and was apparently married, but either made a really bad joke which could be taken incorrectly or was trying to hit on her. Awk-ward.

But anyway, we played a bunch of songs, got pizza from Oregano’s, and then played a few rounds of trivia. Almost all of the questions we had available were associated with the TRASHionals tournament, which is always less fun for me because 80% of them are about movies, TV shows, pop music, and sports. Whatever. It was fun to hang out with everyone anyway, even though everyone else wanted to stay up a lot later than I planned to.

At about 9pm on Friday, it started raining. It was too dark outside to take a decent picture, so this is a recycled photo from last year showing roughly what it all looked like. It rained off and on all Saturday morning, which was nice.

The big excitement on Saturday was going over to Zach’s place and getting some help in installing an aftermarket stock on one of my rifles. The directions supplied with the stock were a bit confusing, and I had a lot of trouble removing the original stock with the tools I had, so I thought it best to consult someone more experienced. We managed to get the thing installed properly, but it would’ve helped a lot if the directions had been more clear. Part of the problem was that the directions were on one sheet of paper, with mediocre illustrations, and covered 4 different rifle models.

Zach and Sarah were dogsitting a huge mastiff for some of their friends who were out of town. This dog was friendly and wanted to play and be petted, but was also interested in everything we were doing and wanted to follow us around and stick his nose into whatever we were working on.

Cats don’t deal well at all with stupid, especially on Caturday.

Friday didn’t have a whole lot that was interesting. Well, we all went out to lunch, which is always fun. I think I set some sort of trend, because I ordered a carne asada burrito, and everyone after me changed their order from chicken to carne asada. Redhat decided to release over a hundred updates in the afternoon, right before a 3-day weekend. I decided not to install them on the production boxes. They’re pretty good about not breaking stuff, but an update that drastic is best reserved for a time when there are going to be more people around. We all got to leave a bit early, which is always nice.

Long weekend. It’s about time. I’m going to visit Zach on Saturday, and Nathan’s throwing a Rock Band + trivia party on Sunday, so there’s plenty of stuff going on.

There are way too many things that this picture could describe. Examples abound in politics. The sheer rage displayed in far too many of the political comments I’ve read online over the last 2-3 years makes me think that lots of people have taken political events as personal insults. Is “the political is personal” the new trend?

It started raining in Tempe right before I went to bed.  This is great; we haven’t had enough rain this year.

Been reading Original Sin by P.D. James. It’s hard to believe the same author wrote Children of Men. Original Sin is pretty good, especially in its characters. Most of them are middle-aged and trying desperately to hang on to something or other, whether that’s self-respect or a job or the promise of more money than they’ve got. But they’re well-drawn and mostly realistic, partially because so many of them seem so gray, ordinary, and trapped. It’s also interesting to read about old, expensive architecture and a place where people commute to the office on boats. There just aren’t very many of those things here in AZ.

Of course, since it’s a mystery, the person who got murdered was a complete bastard, and many people had reason to want him dead. Even he’s a very realistic bastard, and I’ve seen people do and say some of the same things that Gerard did in the book. I wonder what the plot twist will be like.

So: Children of Men is like Michael Jordan playing baseball. Original Sin is like Michael Jordan playing basketball. James can write sci-fi to some extent at a minor league level, but should in no way make a career out of it as her talents lie elsewhere.

Busy Wednesday. Steve’s back in town, so instead of eating leftovers and playing with Fuzzball, I spent Wednesday night going over to Steve’s house and playing Rock Band. Steve’s house looked different, and there were only 3 dogs instead of 4. But it was a fairly good night, even though all of us were out of practice on Rock Band and we called it a night a little earlier than usual.

Vending machines don’t seem to sell everything you could want. Well, not yet, at least.

As usual, they waited until 15 minutes before I had to leave to tell me that something was messed up and could I fix it? Never mind that that particular thing had been messed up for days. But it was reasonably easy to fix even with the short time frame.

Trivia: We had all of the usual crew, plus Jen, minus Trevor. Apparently, some people are going to go to the ASU game on Saturday, and Miguel is going to be in town on Sunday, so there’s going to be (another) Rock Band get-together featuring food on that day. I don’t know; it seems as if I have a talent for scheduling things on days when people have other plans. As such, the Saturday thing I had planned may have to be scrapped. @#%^!.

In slightly better news, our team got 2nd place in Tuesday night’s competition and we’re in the lead in points out of all the teams that go to that pub. I guess this is because we’ve never missed a night, and all the other teams have missed at least one.

The bit below the “Read the rest of this post” may distress sensitive readers. Fair warning.
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Sometimes, it really pays to check the work the data entry operators are doing. No one’s going to buy a house with 0 bathrooms.  And what are you getting for $2.7 million if there are 0 bedrooms? Maybe the kitchen is enormous and really nice.

Monday was uneventful, mostly. There was some sort of screwup on the main website while all of us were in a meeting, which should be really entertaining when it gets dissected tomorrow in the meeting with everybody else. After work, when I went to refill a prescription, they said the computer system was down and they couldn’t accept my debit card. Things had been like that for the last several hours according to the pharmacy tech. However, the transaction was accepted when I swiped the card again and ran it as credit instead of debit. (If I’m remembering right, credit transactions are stored and batch processed later; debit transactions happen roughly instantaneously.) I noticed a couple of Qworst trucks out in front of the store as I was leaving. Phone line troubles would totally explain the problems with the debit card.