Tuesday, the main excitement at work was getting some new servers up and running, though I managed to scrozzle the filesystem on one of them while doing that. Couldn’t figure out how I’d managed to do that at first, but it was all working just fine later on. Ah well. The network connections on everything were not clogged up with ferrets, either.

Trivia: Just about everyone was there, but we didn’t have Troy and Denise. This meant that we were pretty unprepared on sports questions. We did manage to get second place in the whole competition though. And a lot of people said they’d come to the party that Stephanie’s having on Saturday, which is nice. Trevor had his DS and the game “Brain Age” there, so he pulled that out during the slower portions of trivia and had us try it out. It was kind of interesting. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to play it seriously though. I just don’t really have time for video games most days.

Nothing interesting happened on Monday, so have a picture of Oh my God kill it with fire!!1!

Sunday. Always a fun day, especially when you go to the dress rehearsal of the Tempe Symphony Orchestra, then go out for dinner. The rehearsal was pretty good (and free to attend), but a bunch of the people who were attending had brought young children who just weren’t all that interested in classical music. One kid, about 5 years old, actually fell asleep during Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet”, which takes some doing. At intermission, Stephanie met her friend Mary, who’s still playing in the orchestra. I took pictures of them, but someone was blinking in both shots. Sigh.

Anyway, after that, we went to the Cornish Pasty Co. for dinner. I got the chicken tikka masala pasty, which was pretty spicy and tasty. And there were leftovers, which is always nice.

Caturday, in the park, I think it was the 16th of October. Wait. Anyway, there wasn’t as much going on this Saturday as there is sometimes. An important machine at work went down at about 11:00, but I saw the problem on the Nagios monitor plugin before anybody paged me, so I was able to get in and start fixing it all before anything serious happened. Then I got groceries, did laundry, and made dinner.

Stephanie also brought Pinto over, which led to an extended growling and hissing session from Moira. I don’t know that Moira accepted Pinto any better than she did the previous few times we’ve brought the cats together. Sigh. Well, there’s not a lot we can do other than keep trying. Eventually, Moira may figure out that there are other cats in the world, and that they deserve some respect.

Friday! Always a good day. Well, I managed to make a non-production machine have a kernel panic. That wasn’t all that fun, because I had to call the helpdesk and have somebody manually reset that machine. Sigh. At least the tests that I was running all worked, and we got valuable data that’ll be useful in the future.

We all went out to lunch, of course, and while we were walking to the restaurant, we saw that there was some sort of street fair going on near it. There were a bunch of downtown businesses giving out free food, and a band playing. Our initial idea was to forget the restaurant, and wander around the street fair picking up food. That didn’t work out too well—free food attracts a lot of people, so it took us forever to get appetizer-sized portions of that free food. So we went to the restaurant for lunch and got normal portions, though we had to pay for them.

Thursday saw the whole silly networking problem in the secondary datacenter get solved. And there was much rejoicing. After that, there was a lot of banging on various config files on the machines that were affected. Eventually, this is all going to result in a new master DB cluster that’s as optimized as we can make it, which should help a whole bunch of people out.

Saw this today, about a local high school football game where one team got blown out. I’m not sure what to make of the sheer amount of anger in some of the comments on that story (well, besides the obvious). For a lot of people, winning is the only thing that matters—but shouldn’t it be possible to win without being a complete ass towards the losing team? Well, there are also a lot of people who see niceness and courtesy as a sign of weakness. Also, there are a lot of sociopaths and complete @#$%ers out there, possibly more than there were previously.

Wednesday had a bunch of relatively ordinary work things, but there were also tacos for lunch. This made it a better day than it would have been otherwise. There were only two of us in the office, since several people were either on vacation or working from home. Also, there’s something odd going on with the networking stuff in the secondary datacenter, which is really annoying, but this is part of doing what I do.

No Rock Band today, but we should all be on for next week. I’ll get to see just how out of practice I’ve gotten with a bit over a month off.

Tuesday had relatively ordinary work things, but there was no staff meeting because one of the higher-ups was on vacation. This actually worked out well because most of us actually had some work to do.

Trivia: We were doing reasonably well when I left. Apparently, Zach wants to go camping in November, which may not work for me at all. Scott may not be able to attend Stephanie’s Rock Band/Bad Movie/whatever party on Oct. 23 because he’s allergic to cats. Sarah and Nathan are happy because the schools they work at are on Fall Break right now, meaning they can actually get work done without kids or administrators in the way. Apparently, Nathan’s having some trouble with a play the students are going to be performing. One of the actresses has to use a bow and arrow during one scene, and there are problems with safety and blocking and stuff—even though she’s apparently a pretty good shot. Hope they can get that worked out.

Monday! Well, it was Columbus Day, and all the state workers had the day off. This meant there were a lot fewer people on the bus.

Not really that much at work beyond the usual. They’ve switched the administration of the 401k plan to another 3rd-party provider, though. When I logged in, I found that they’d somehow managed to lose the beneficiary info I’d given them last year. Sigh. They didn’t lose everyone’s beneficiary info, though—the boss logged in and found his stuff was all there. I’m pretty sure this was an isolated instance of stupidity, not some sort of dead peasant policy, though.

This article about a teacher having a nervous breakdown led me to another article about what it’s like to teach kids who don’t care. The second article was profoundly depressing for various reasons. I’ve never had anything like that happen in any of the pre-college schools I attended, but all my experience was at least 16 years ago. Teachers are apparently not allowed to discipline their students now, thanks to whining from bad parents and administrators who are completely spineless. Ah well. It’s possible that bad policy and lazy/stupid parents will make it so that only the children of the rich and well-connected will get a good education in 30-50 years.

Saturday, the big excitement was costume shopping. I didn’t get anything like the thing this cat’s wearing, though. Of course, Zach and Sarah are having a Halloween party a couple of weeks from now, where costumes are required, so that’s why we went.

What else. . . less than you might think. Trying to relax because next week, I’ll be on call for work, which is always one of those things that’s a bit annoying.