Monday actually felt great, mostly because I didn’t have to answer any trouble tickets. I felt a bit like this snow leopard, who finally caught his own tail and is obviously pleased with that. There were ordinary things like banging on webservers and databases all day, but that’s part of the job.

A co-worker got a strange call asking him about the website he’d just set up. “I haven’t set up a website with you; are you sure you have the right person?” he said. They hung up on him. He called them back and spent at least 10 minutes on the phone with various people trying to figure out what was going on. Apparently, someone set up some sort of account using his name and cellphone#, but a different credit card and e-mail address. I wondered if it was an elaborate phishing scam. But whatever happens, “Intuit Web Services” sounds like a shady outfit that hires idiots who don’t know what they’re doing.

What else. . . the other day, I put the new disk into my desktop, and then used a few mdadm and fdisk commands to turn it into a 3-disk RAID-1 with an effective capacity of 250G. Now I’ve removed the smallest disk from the RAID, and am getting rid of all the data on it so I can give the disk away or use it for something else. It’s taking a while. Writing multiple passes of random data and zeroes over 250G tends to do that. Then I have to shut the box down, rearrange the disks, reboot from a liveCD, re-partition, and install the bootloader on the new disk. Should be fun.