Tuesday at work didn’t have that much that was all that interesting. I fixed a set of stupid problems; that was about it. I also got up early, got to work early, and left early. I thought it’d be cooler outside a half hour earlier, but it really wasn’t.

Trivia: Trevor wasn’t there, but everyone else (including Stephanie) was. Heard all about Kelli’s adventure with the broken air conditioner, which was actually due to a bad capacitor somewhere within the unit, and was fairly easily fixed. Also heard all about the fire that happened in a condo a few units away from Nathan’s condo. That was a little scary. There was a bunch of property damage, but no one was hurt. We almost got a perfect score. And there’s going to be some more planning involved for the Vegas trip soon, although it’s going to be mailed out tomorrow. At least some of us would like to go out for a fancier-than-usual dinner.

What else. . . about 16.5 years ago, I gave Kari a piece of art. I’ve forgotten what it looked like, except that it had a guy with piano-key teeth and the words “TUNA HEAD” on the right side of it. I sent her a facebook message today asking if she could scan or photograph that art and mail the image to me, so maybe I’ll get to see it again.

Monday, it was time to go back to work. This wasn’t nearly as bad as it could’ve been. There were some hassles, of course—mostly related to a piece of hardware that had broken, and was going to take a lot of annoyance to fix. There was also an internal server that we’ve said was going to be shut down for months now, since a New! Shiny! Expensive! system was supposed to take over all of its functions. Apparently, that didn’t work out. Those of you with experience in dealing with computers are probably nodding sagely and saying, “Yup. They have a whole year to build and test it, and only when the old system gets turned off do they notice the deficiencies in the new system that are big enough to drive a herd of musk oxen through.”

Stephanie and I had planned to go to the 4th of July fireworks show. I was able to score a couple of free tickets to that via work. Well, any time you can save $12, it’s probably worth it.

So in other news, I took the money I got from getting delayed last week and spent about 75% of it on a new motherboard, a new CPU, and some RAM. This should be interesting. More speed for the desktop system is always fun. It should get here on Friday or possibly next Tuesday.

I don’t know that guinea pigs have ever been possessed by demons and attempted to kill or eat anyone. But their eyes sure reflect camera flash if you catch them right.

Sunday was a lot more relaxed than Saturday. No need to go anywhere, no lost luggage, just doing laundry and grocery shopping and cooking dinner. Of course, I got a bunch of people wanting to talk to me in the morning, when I was trying everything I could think of to get this desktop to stop freezing up when I logged out of X. But that’s life. I managed to find a solution after lunch.  It involved the 2.6.34 kernel and the 195.36.24 nvidia kernel module.  And, of course, it involved wading through completely useless error messages.

Of course, it’s back to work tomorrow. Well, work keeps money coming in.

Been in Michigan for the past few days. That was nice, especially for the cooler weather, but flying there and back had its own stupid problems. I was late to the flight leaving Phoenix, plus I’d checked in on the wrong flight, so I ended up not getting a seat on the plane. I did manage to get to Saginaw roughly on time, and also got a bonus from US Airways for not getting a seat. That turned out well, but it was nerve-wracking.

Spent most of my time in Michigan doing stuff with family. Went to Saugatuck on Thursday, which was kind of interesting as I’d never been there.

Saturday, when I flew back, everything appeared to be working fine. No delays, got checked in, no problems getting lunch or not getting a seat. OK, there was a 9-year-old kid two seats over who spent the whole flight talking about bass fishing, singing the chorus of “Jive Talkin’” off-key twenty times in a row, or playing a really loud video game. No, the worst part was getting to PHX and finding out that my luggage wasn’t there. I had to go to the lost luggage office and give them my claim tag, where they said, “Oh, that bag didn’t get to us in time at O’Hare. It’ll be on the next flight. We’ll have a driver deliver it to you between 6 and 10pm.” It was a good thing I didn’t need anything in that luggage right away.

So instead of unpacking, I took a long nap and then ate dinner. They got my luggage to me about 7pm, which was nice. Tomorrow: Laundry, grocery shopping, and getting ready to go back to work.

Monday, I really didn’t do a whole lot, since I didn’t have to go to work. Read a book, dealt with some oddness in Gentoo’s GNOME packages, and had ramen for dinner. Moira meowed a lot.

I also see that WordPress 3.0 is out. I think I’ll hold off on installing that. One of the things you learn with open-source software is that you don’t install a .0 release, because there’s no way they’ve found all the bugs in that release yet.

Anyway, on Saturday, Stephanie and I went to the Cornish Pasty Company in Tempe. That was interesting. They have pasties, traditional Cornish mining food, with all sorts of non-traditional fillings like chicken pot pie, New Mexican chile beef, and bangers and mash. It was filling and not that expensive. We had enough leftovers for lunch later. The restaurant is very long and narrow, though, which makes it a little odd.

Sunday actually had less happening. Well, Moira threw up on one of the bathroom rugs, which is always fun. Apparently, Stephanie’s aunt had a potcake dog, which I’d never heard of before. I’ve been re-reading To Rule The Waves, which is interesting just because there’s so much information in it. For instance, Samuel Pepys was not just a workaholic diarist, he was instrumental in getting rid of all kinds of corruption and stupidity in the British Navy. And the “line ahead” strategy used for over two centuries of naval warfare was not really thought out before being tried—it just worked really well when they tried it.

Friday, I got up really early to try to do some stuff. I found out that something was broken somewhere. Then I fixed it (I think), but by then it was too late to do the stuff. So I’ll be getting up really early on Saturday morning.

This website was down for a couple of hours on Friday because I didn’t have the settings for the slicehost daemon tuned right. I think. Rejiggered them. Let’s hope this leads to more than 1.5 months of uptime.

We went out for lunch, and I decided to get the expensive burrito instead of the cheaper burrito that I usually get at Maria’s. However, the expensive burrito tasted worse than the cheaper one. I don’t know how they managed that, but whatever.

And, of course, there’s something wrong with the hardware we recently ordered, and it’ll take until at least Tuesday to get it fixed. This. . . annoys us. It’s not like there are several semi-important projects waiting on the new hardware or anything. The problem isn’t with anything anybody at the company did; it’s something the supplier screwed up. Par for the course, eh?

Luurkenschproing? With more than one cat? It’s more likely than you think.

Thursday was relatively peaceful at work, but ten minutes before quitting time, I found that a couple of machines had run out of disk space. It’s always something. Got those problems mostly fixed before leaving. Then it was time to have the rest of the Mexican lasagna leftovers and some ramen for dinner.

The local paper has a very strange user posting many comments on a boring story about a Minnesota state senator. I sometimes wonder if the people who spend a lot of time posting really strange things to websites actually believe what they’re saying, or whether they’re trolling for n00bs.

Yawn. Tired. Glad it’s Friday tomorrow. . . .

Bunny here reminds you to not to overindulge when you’re out celebrating.

Wednesday at work was relatively normal, though the main project I was doing for most of the day took longer than I thought it would. There’s always a detail or 3 that’s really important that crops up right before installation time, or something. And after work, Stephanie, Steve, and I had Rock Band and Mexican lasagna leftovers for dinner. That was good. I think we’ve exhausted most of the things you can do as far as challenges and tours go, though, which is a little annoying. Why doesn’t Rock Band 3 come out until November? Ah well.

Zach finally returned To Rule The Waves to me on Tuesday. He’s only borrowed it for 1.5 years. I guess this means I know what I’ll be reading on the bus next.

Thanks to the NBA Finals (again), there was no trivia at Majerle’s on Tuesday. This time, we were prepared, so we went to Boulders on Broadway instead. They had trivia there. What they didn’t really have were enough tables. We ended up moving to the upstairs of the bar, where they actually had a table large enough for all of us. Not that there were that many people—me, Stephanie, Zach, Sarah, and John were the only ones who showed up. The trivia was easier than trivia at Majerle’s or Fibber’s, so we won.

I remember the food at Boulders being better a year ago than it was on Tuesday night. Maybe the kitchen was just under a lot of pressure from the basketball crowd.