Er. I don’t know what happened Friday night, but my blog entry got eaten and this webhost stopped working. But anyway. Friday was reasonably normal, except that somebody moved a development database and all the stuff in it without telling me. That was good for wasting half an hour. We also went out for lunch and got burritos, which is always kind of fun.

Saturday was reasonably relaxing, and had more food in it than usual. Asiago Chicken Sausage Ragu over Pumpkin Polenta was what Stephanie cooked for dinner. It was pretty tasty, though we weren’t sure whether it really needed Asiago cheese. Cheddar would’ve tasted about the same and cost less. Tomorrow night, I’m cooking Alsatian Gratin with sausage, sauerkraut, and Swiss cheese. That should also be interesting.

This is the Lowell Mausoleum in Flagstaff, very near the observatory where Lowell took the first steps towards discovering Pluto. Yeah, I should’ve put this up sooner, but other stuff happened.

Thursday had relatively normal work things. It also had some annoying bits, mostly with finding out that mail clients that display HTML are almost totally ignorant of CSS. I never paid attention to that, mostly because I try to get my mail clients to render text in preference to HTML. But that consumed some time.

What else. . . not that much, really.

Wednesday had relatively normal work things. I also gave blood in the morning, which didn’t hurt as much as it had previously. However, I filled the donation bag relatively quickly, and felt light-headed after it finished. I had to lie down, drink water, and eat Chex Mix before I felt good enough to leave. Did a bunch of work stuff, then ate a big lunch and drank a lot of water.

After work, we had Rock Band at my place with pork chops (made by Stephanie) and chicken enchiladas (made by me). Steve brought Adam this time, so we had 4 people, enough to play every instrument. This is unusual. But it meant someone had to play the drums, which is a little less good because none of us is really that good at the drums. Oh well, we had fun, which is the important thing.

Semi-interesting thoughts and comments on religion, from a somewhat unexpected source.

Tuesday was pretty normal at work, with the exception of a small machine that had something weird happen to its filesystem right after I got in. It was relatively easy and quick to fix. It’s just. . . strange that so many things have had weird filesystem problems in the last few weeks.

The big excitement was, of course, the rain we started getting around 6:20pm. That started right when I was about to leave for trivia. It was fairly heavy rain, heavy enough that Stephanie didn’t want to go to trivia because of it. I took the surface streets instead of the freeway to trivia, because people can drive stupidly on the freeway. There were a couple of times where it was raining so hard that I had to slow down. That’s reasonably rare.

But anyway, most everyone made it to trivia. The questions were relatively easy this time, and we ended up winning. Kelli said that we should have a Bad Movie Night soon, possibly featuring “Gymkata” or “The Ice Pirates”. Nathan wanted to buy Lego Creationary, then play it with everyone, possibly this weekend. That might work. One of the final questions of the night was about the lyrics to “Gangsta’s Paradise”, and I was the only one who knew the exact lyrics. Sarah thought this was pretty cool, and said so. “Homey, you know I always be keepin’ it real,” I replied, and everyone at the table cracked up. Ah well.

Saturday in Flagstaff, we went on a hike in Sunset Crater about 15 miles out of town. That was interesting. The crater’s a cinder cone and surrounding lava fields from a volcanic eruption that happened only 1000 years ago, which is pretty recent for geologic events. So we hiked the relatively easy trail near the base of the cone and looked at everything. Because there’s not a whole lot of rainfall, there aren’t that many plants, and the rich volcanic soil that you see in Hawaii just isn’t there.

So then we went back to town, went shopping, and then went out to dinner. After dinner, we went to the Lowell Observatory, which is where they discovered Pluto in 1930. That was kind of interesting. We walked all around the grounds and looked at the exhibits. There must have been a body of water nearby, though, because there were mosquitoes all over the place. It wasn’t quite as bad as Minnesota in the summer, but it was really the first time I’d experienced mosquitoes in Arizona.

More later.

Friday and Saturday, I was in Flagstaff with Stephanie. The hotel we were in was right downtown, which was really convenient since Flagstaff’s downtown has a lot of stuff in it. We got to Flagstaff, but it was too early to check in, so we walked around for a bit and looked in a camping/surplus store. Then we checked in and walked around downtown some more. It was nice, since it was only about 86 F, instead of the ~110 that Phoenix had.

Stephanie had been to Flagstaff years before, for work. She hadn’t had much of a chance to see the non-work parts of the town, though. So we got dinner, then spent some more time downtown, looking in all the stores and seeing all the college and high school people out for a Friday night. After the sun went down, it cooled off very quickly, so I was glad I’d brought a long-sleeved shirt.

The picture above is actually from Saturday morning, when we went hiking, but whatever.

Saturday. Not that much to talk about, really. It’s really hot in Phoenix. I haven’t been doing that much.

I did run into some trouble with a badly documented wireless setup, though. They said “use ESSID ‘thing1′ and password ’1234567890′.” This was, of course, not correct. The thing that worked properly was to use a completely different ESSID and no encryption at all (whaaaat?). It took far too much time and bootling my laptop into Windoze to figure all that out, too. This was. . . not fun. However, I did find out that a poorly-behaving AP will perform almost twice as fast with a Linux client as it will with a Windows client. No idea why that is. The whole thing is working much better now, but it’s still slower than a good wired setup.

Friday. YAY! I didn’t have to go to work thanks to being on call all last week and dealing with many, many trouble tickets. I’m profoundly grateful for a chance to relax. I got the oldest and smallest hard disk out of my desktop box and re-installed the bootloader. This took longer than it should’ve, but at least that job’s done.

For some reason, my Net connection is awfully slow right now, and things that should be happening immediately are timing out. So I’ll cut this short.

Thursday, Moira wouldn’t shut up. I don’t know what her problem was. But anyway, work was fairly normal. If all goes well, we might be able to do some interesting upgrades to a really important box next week.

After work, Stephanie and I went to Sweet Tomatoes for dinner. This is basically a large salad bar, though there are plenty of “salads” there that are full of fat and calories. There’s not a whole lot of meat there, except in the soups and a couple of salads that have salami and bacon as ingredients. (Bacon salad. This is a great idea!) But anyway, we ate and talked about stuff.

Got home. Moira was still meowing. She finally calmed down after I scratched her ears really well. I really have no idea how old she is. Minimum 6 years, though. In the last month or so, she’s been acting as if normal actions like scratching her ears with her back feet and jumping 3′ vertically are difficult, as if she’s got kitty arthritis or something. *sigh*

My parents went to Oklahoma, and apparently their luggage got stuck in Tennessee. How annoying.

Somehow, I don’t think this picture is totally legit. Otters have dextrous paws. They also have better taste in beer than to just take a Bud Light.

Wednesday was reasonably normal at work, though I didn’t get the chance to test a large new script fully and was reluctant to put it into production so late in the day. And there’s (another) new initiative that will require an enormous amount of bureaucratic frog-walking, will make it a complete pain in the ass to do maintenance to one system, and will not improve what they want it to improve.

Had Rock Band at my place, with Chinese food for dinner. That was fun. It took a bit longer than usual, because we decided to play a 4-song mystery setlist at the end of the night, and all the random songs it picked were really long. I also took some time to execute a few mdadm and fdisk commands according to the Linux softRAID HOWTO to transform my 250G RAID-1 into a 320G RAID-1.