Stephanie and I went to see “How To Train Your Dragon” at the $3 theatre on Monday. That was neat. The theatre was packed, since it was a holiday and a ton of people took their kids out. It was probably one of the more enjoyable movies of 2010, actually. According to the IMDB trivia page for the movie, Toothless’s behavior was based on a house cat. The dragon does look a lot like Moira, but Toothless is much quieter than Moira. Moira is also a lot less trainable.

What else. . . we ate at Popeye’s before the movie. I’d never eaten there before. It was fairly good, though they got my order wrong. I never would’ve thought of selling fried catfish and jambalaya in a fast-food setting, but they managed to make it work.

More virtual animals in FarmVille keep showing up. Well, they’re kind of cute, and they generate money every so often. (I am glad that the virtual animals don’t generate virtual digestive byproducts. Maybe this could be a future FarmVille extension—”Cleanse the Augean Stables for 1000 XP and 10,000 coins!”)

Sunday was pretty non-exciting. It’s good to have a day like that every so often. Forecast is that it’s going to be 101 F tomorrow. That could be really annoying.

I’ve put together a daemon that runs on any low-RAM machine (like this one) that seems to help with running things. I’ve had this running for the last 2 weeks. In that time, I haven’t had to manually reboot this low-RAM slicehost, whereas before, I had to do that every 2 or 3 days if not more often. I hope this will prove useful to somebody. There are improvements I could make to this little script, but those will have to wait a bit.

Well, the Suns lost game 6 of the finals, so basketball is over for the town for the year. Sigh.

At least on Saturday, Stephanie and I got to eat at Essence Bakery, a nice little French café that was really, really crowded. I think about half the people in line were waiting to get take-out, though, so it didn’t take that long for us to get a table and get food. Then it was time to go grocery shopping and do laundry, which were kind of boring but necessary.

More pictures from FarmVille. I think they spared no expense in making the virtual animals cute.

Friday, a lot of people had taken the day off or were working from home. The office was pretty sparsely populated. There was something that could’ve caused a problem in the afternoon, but that problem never showed up.

What else. . . not much, really. Might go out for lunch on Saturday, which would be neat.

Things didn’t turn out that well for the Suns in game 5, even though they played hard and had it tied up until the final 0.2 seconds. Sigh. I’ve been reading Herodotus recently, and it seems that in the real world, Xerxes and the Persians win more often than not. (This could be one reason why Herodotus’s book was so darn popular; it showed a real-life example of the underdog winning very convincingly.)

Thursday: went out for lunch with Stephanie and Iqbal. Iqbal used to ride the bus with us, but then he moved to a house that was much further away, so now he takes a different bus. That was nice. And we’ve still got hardware problems with one machine at work, which are really annoying. But anyway, it’ll be Friday soon, and we’ll all be greatly relieved when that happens.

Wednesday had something like this happen at work. I got the go-ahead to reinstall the OS on one machine. After I’d done the reinstall and had it work well, I rebooted the box. It froze on reboot and was totally unresponsive. Then it started giving out POST beep codes that meant “there is no RAM in this machine”. This is sort of ridiculous. It’s like having a van that was totally fine last week, and this week, the van’s wheels have fallen off, its carburetor is stuffed full of dead mice, and all the instrumentation is now labeled in Finno-Ugric. But it’s not like we were really wanting that machine to be working properly or anything, oh no.

There was no Rock Band this Wednesday. I did, however, figure out that the computer desk and chair where I usually sit is apparently in a Verizon dead zone. I can’t receive calls very well at all while sitting there. No problem; since I’m in front of the computer there, Skype is a perfect alternative to Verizon.

SUNS WIN!!!1! YEAAAAAAHHHHHH! This means there will be a game 6. That game will be in Phoenix on Saturday. I’ll see if I can get tickets and go, since it’ll be easier to do if the game’s on a weekend night.

Here’s a bridge over Tempe Town Lake at night. The lights on the bridge are impossible to see in the daytime, but they have them cycling in colors at night.

There’s another team that wants a Linux filesystem that can handle a size of over 2T. I said that ext4 could do it, but that team will have a problem as they’re running an older distro that doesn’t support ext4 just yet. I wonder if I’ll have to help them reinstall that system later on. That might be interesting.

“The expensive cable tester said that this cable is totally fine.”

“Try another cable that we know is good.”

“Wait. Is it working better now?”

“Yes.”

. . .sometimes, you can’t trust stuff that tells you that everything’s OK. Most of the rest of Monday was a lot more boring. Game 4 of the basketball finals is on Tuesday, so there almost certainly won’t be trivia, but I haven’t seen anyone saying anything about what they’d rather do instead.

Sunday, the big excitement was going to a baseball game with Stephanie. I got OK seats. It was a good thing that I didn’t spend more money on good seats, because the D-Backs stunk up the stadium something fierce. They allowed 2 homers and 5 runs while I was using the restroom, which is pretty bad. Oh well, we had a decent time at the game.

There were a bunch of guys sitting in front of us. After the 5th inning, one of them said, “Let’s find a dang bar and watch the rest of the game from there!” and they all cleared out. Well, there’s only so much you can do when the home team’s on their way to losing 12-4. Stephanie and I left at the top of the 8th, because the final outcome was obvious.

Oh noes, I have yet another game to play. It’s kind of silly, but at least the beginning stages of it are interesting. And there’s a lot less cow poop involved in running a virtual farm than there is in a real farm.

The Suns won Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals. Oh hell yes!

Saturday was pretty relaxing. Found a recipe on the Net, then went out and got groceries, then made chicken enchiladas from that recipe. They were good. However, it took longer than usual for me to make them, since it was a new recipe.

Saturday morning, Moira threw up in the windowsill, then she pawed at the towel in the windowsill until the towel covered all the cat barf. Sometimes, cats can do things that are pretty smart. I didn’t notice the cat barf for a couple of hours because she’d hidden it. Sigh.