Work: I’ve been fighting with a problem that’s essentially unfixable for long enough that I’m hard pressed to care much anymore. Especially since I didn’t get to go to trivia tonight—had to do more work.

The root cause of 90% of the problems I’ve had with this whole process is that Microsoft Outlook can no more render HTML than a Labrador Retriever can do calculus.

Monday was actually a fairly typical workday, even though there were some problems with the stuff that I’d done on Sunday (sigh). These were overshadowed by other problems that other people found that were more severe. AFAICT, everything I’m responsible for is working reasonably well, which is always nice.

Tired. Would like to emulate the kitten above. I’ll be able to pretty soon, at least.

Sunday, I really wanted to emulate this kitten. However, I had to work. I had almost all the problems fixed, when a couple of pieces of networking equipment in the secondary datacenter fell over. That caused way too much grief for everyone involved, and took a couple of hours of finangling to get fixed. It would’ve been worse if some of the more experienced people hadn’t been right there watching large portions of the network fall apart.

Oh well. The stuff I had to do is fixed as well as I can fix it. I barely had time to make dinner tonight, but whatever. I just hope nothing falls apart at 0-dark-thirty, which has a nasty habit of happening sometimes.

Since the whole problem I talked about yesterday still isn’t entirely fixed, I spent far too much of Saturday working from home. And of course, I’ll have to do that Sunday as well.

Naturally, Friday came with its own stupid crisis. It consumed hours at work and hours after work, and will consume hours of my time tomorrow and probably Sunday. All because some clueless suit’s favorite “e-mail client” is incapable of rendering modern HTML. So yeah, not a fun day.

Five years ago, I found Moira outside my old apartment building in Lansing. She didn’t have anyone, so I took her in, so she’s spent the last five years meowing really loudly and costing me money. But anyway, she’s here, and will be for as long as she’s still around.

Work was relatively normal. There was some stupid stuff happening with mail, but I think the latest fixes should’ve gotten that settled. Stephanie and I went out to Sweet Tomatoes again (we went there 2 weeks ago.) At least this time, I remembered to print the coupon off, so it was cheaper.

Work on Wednesday wasn’t really all that interesting, though some folks decided to wait until 5 minutes before quitting time and say, “Can you do (complicated stuff)? Right now?” I don’t know why people do that. They have a great talent for that, though.

We had Rock Band at my place, since Steve’s in the middle of getting all of his stuff moved.

Tuesday had a bunch of stuff to do at work, including fooling with mail servers and doing something that we described as “teaching a chicken to ride a pig”. At least most of that worked properly. We were discussing sites like Groupon, and I said, “We should make a website called dealvampirebat.com! Slogan: ‘Our Deals Really Suck!’ ” People found that a lot funnier than it really should’ve been.

Trivia: The sky looked dark and threatening, but it didn’t rain very much at all. The sound system wasn’t working very well, so they had to cut the trivia competition short, but we ended up in second place. We heard all about Zach’s adventure hiking up in the Superstition mountains in the afternoon—it gets really hot in the afternoon here; that’s not great hiking weather. We also determined that “Pulp Fiction”, “The Shawshank Redemption”, the Star Wars trilogy, the Indiana Jones trilogy, and “The Big Lebowski” are important cultural touchstones. After trivia, we took a couple of group photos. I threw up the horns in one of them.

Monday included far too much database silliness, far too little pizza, and absolutely no hamsters. At least I’ve got most of the problems that I could foresee fixed. (Next: fixing the problems that I can’t foresee, which is always much harder.)

Anyway, after work, Stephanie came over and we had leftovers. The pumpkin and Asiago cheese polenta tasted different after being reheated; earthier and more robust. The pork chops were about the same. Some food actually benefits from sitting around a while. Pinto beans are like that, and the regular beef enchiladas I make are like that. But anyway, the food was one of the good things about Monday.

Sunday, I made the casserole gratin dish to the left. I was surprised that it turned out well, since I’d never made something like that before. But it’s somewhat hard to screw up a dish that has potatoes, chicken sausage, sauerkraut, cheese, and half a cup of Riesling in it. We had brown rice and vegetables with this. Now I have to figure out what to do with the leftover pint of sauerkraut. (Stephanie had a suggestion, which was funny at the time, but is probably not a good idea in practice.)

Not really that much else going on.