This picture is from a while back, but it kind of shows how everything went on Sunday.

Monday was a bit less eventful. Our staff meeting turned into a complaint session about all the construction that’s going on around the Valley. A trouble ticket that has nothing to do with us got routed to us. “That box? We don’t even have logins to that box. We don’t want logins to that box. Let’s send this back to the helpdesk and tell them to contact person N. . . .”

In Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks, none of the main characters are human. I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on that earlier.

Sunday, the big excitement was going out with Dan, Stephanie, and Zach to the rifle range in Casa Grande. It didn’t run entirely smoothly; Dan forgot his ear protection so we had to stop at Wal-Mart and get more. But I got to fire Zach’s Saiga .308, which was interesting. It kicks quite a bit more than my Saiga—only natural since his fires a more powerful cartridge. There were a lot of people there when we got there, probably since it was supposed to be a nice day, with a high of only 95 F. Stephanie might have been a bit bored.

Naturally, I didn’t get any pictures of anybody while we were at the range. So here’s a picture of the meal I cooked Sunday night, Mexican chicken lasagna with cottage cheese. It turned out well, which was a relief since I doubled the recipe, and some recipes react weirdly when doubled.

Saturday, not a whole lot happened. I went grocery shopping; that’s really exciting. Here’s what at least part of my “animal area” in FarmVille looks like. Yes, I have llamas, ducks, sheep, a pig, cows, and a cow wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

The Plan(tm) is for me, Zach, Thunder Dan, and Stephanie to go out to the rifle range in Casa Grande on Sunday morning. The high temp all day will only be 95 F, which will be much better than it was last weekend. Ah well. I’ll bring the camera along with the pistols, rifles, ammunition, targets, and accessories, and post pictures later if I get any that are good.

Sometimes, you just have to ask yourself this question.

The great hard drive migration continues at work. They’re replacing all the hard disks in all the machines of a certain age. My turn’s next week. I just hope the disk won’t die before they replace it, though I have all the really important stuff backed up already.

A bunch of us ate at Mi Amoebas for lunch, and Stephanie and her co-worker Kay joined us. That was fun. Well, it took a while for us to get our food, but when it got there, it was good.

Thursday had a weird problem with an OS reinstall and a daemon that decided it needed to write a copious amount of useless info to a log file every few seconds. Finding out which config file had a bad number in it and changing that took much longer than it should’ve.

Also, a co-worker’s computer died (hard disk failure), which was good for a fair amount of drama and stupidity. At least he had everything important backed up. My home backup plan is actually more robust than my work backup plan, but I made sure to back everything up at work anyway.

What else. . . we may all be going shooting again on Sunday. Don’t know for sure yet. And the pool at the apartment complex is kind of cruddy, and the hot tub is far too hot to use when it’s 103 F.

Stupid problems at work: Some third-party consluttants want us to solve a problem which is not a problem and doesn’t have a solution. I don’t know what we’ll end up doing, but it’s really frustrating trying to solve a bureaucratic problem when the only tools I have are technical in nature.[*]

We ate out for lunch, which was a nice change. On the way there, I learned that Thunder Dan recently bought a Marlin .22 rifle, really likes it, and wants to go out shooting again at some point. Have to see whether Zach and Teh Nacho are up for another weekend trip soon. It’ll have to be earlier in the morning, though, since it’s so dang hot now.

Went to Steve’s for Rock Band, which was kind of fun as we did the “Rock Immortals Challenge” and got a set of clear instruments.

(more…)

NASA has been trying a bunch of things to enhance mission success. I don’t know how this program turned out, though.

Tuesday, there was no trivia, which is a bit annoying. Darn NBA Finals getting in the way. Few people here really care, since many local fans are still in a funk after the loss to the Lakers. Also, I found a USB cable that is exactly the right shape for my phone in the conference room after the staff meeting. It wasn’t anybody else’s, but I’ll keep an eye out for anyone in the building who’s lost a similar cable.

More food from Yupha’s Thai Kitchen. This was pretty tasty, if a bit more expensive because it had shrimp in it.

Monday at work wasn’t actually that exciting. Tomorrow might be, since I’m going to be fooling around performing important upgrades on the inactive node of an important cluster. I’ve got a backup plan in place just in case of OMGWTFBBQPANIC, but it’s impossible to cover every contingency.

This HAS to be satire, right? I hope so.

Here’s one of the dinner entrees at Yupha’s Thai Kitchen. They did a good job with the presentation here.

Sunday was relaxing, if really hot at about 107 F. I spent a lot of time inside with the A/C on, drinking water and trying to keep cool. I also found that I had another meal’s worth of leftovers sitting in the fridge, and no clean containers for any more leftovers. So it looks like I’ll be making a tuna noodle casserole on Monday instead of Sunday. Oh well, it’s always good to change things up a bit.

Back to work tomorrow. Hey, at least I still have a job!

On Saturday, it was about 105 F. That’s really, really hot. So I didn’t do that much. Got groceries, did laundry, catered to Fuzzball, ate dinner.