I’ve never had this happen to me. Maybe this is because I use Linux for everything at home, and so avoided the whole “streaming media” format war of the early 2000s. Well, YouTube and Adobe have basically won that war, but who knows what the future will bring?

Monday wasn’t that exciting at work. I got some stuff done, at least. The problem with the SCSI disk that I referred to a while back is sort of solved. I’ve got it hooked up, it’s behaving with the kernel, and I can read data off it.

No, the problem is that the disk itself had some sort of hardware failure, and as such, 1 in 4 sectors on the disk is basically toast. I’ve had dd_rescue running on the thing for 2 days, and it’s copied only about 5% of the disk, with metric tons of read errors. This is. . . troubling. Especially so because the disk contains data that this Austin-based rock band would really like to have back and one of the guys in the band mailed the disk to me because he thought I could help out. It’s really annoying when I want to help out, but bad hardware prevents me from doing so.

Arizona proposition 203 appears to have passed. This is sort of surprising to me, but what the heck. It’s probably a good thing, though I don’t know whether the legislature will overturn the will of the voters again. They did that a few years ago, when a similar proposition won enough votes to be enacted, and the legislature said, “You guys didn’t really mean that!” and overturned it.

Sunday: Not really that much, though I got a call from work at about 8am thanks to something that went FUBAR with networking. It’s really annoying when things like that happen. At least it wasn’t that hard to get 90% of the stuff up and going again once I’d managed to log on.

I also went over to Stephanie’s place and attempted to help her with a plumbing problem. Apparently, the control knob on her shower had broken, and she was trying to replace it but not having any luck. I tried to help, but I couldn’t get the collar piece off the pipe. I must’ve been doing it wrong. Well, I managed to help install a new control knob, though I couldn’t replace the internal valve. It must be something really simple. I’m just not a plumber; I’ve spent most of my time in the last 11 years doing stuff with computers.

Monday tomorrow. Bleah. Well, that’s par for the course. . . .

Caturday! Mostly. I didn’t do an entry on Friday, mostly because I had to get up at 3am that day and do a bunch of stuff for work. That took a lot longer than it should’ve. Also, Friday had a lot of stupid things associated with it because of a thing that should’ve been fixed months ago. But it eventually all worked out.

I didn’t do much Saturday. I planned that. After a week that had far too much going on, it was nice to spend the day sitting around the house.

This picture is pretty simplistic, but it does illustrate some of the problems that show up when you replace thought with bumper-sticker slogans.

Thursday was Veteran’s Day, and the bus that I usually take to work wasn’t running at all. So I worked from home. That was actually OK, though the corporate-approved IM server barfed ingloriously for an hour or 2 after lunch. It’s actually had a lot more downtime than any technical person would tolerate. This is only to be expected; most suits would rather spend lots of money on something with a fancy marketing campaign that doesn’t work well than spend $0 on something with no marketing campaign that just works. There must be some sort of psychological reason for that.

And, of course, I have to do more work later tonight, because they’re going to do a bunch of maintenance at 0-dark-thirty in the morning. Arrrrgh. The weekend can’t come soon enough.

I still haven’t managed to get that SCSI disk working properly, since it doesn’t like AHCI and I haven’t managed to get the kernel for my desktop to find its root partition while the motherboard’s using IDE mode. Will keep trying. It’s just. . . frustrating, since I’m beset by so many problems that I’m responsible for, and I can’t get help for the vast majority of them.

So on Wednesday, there were a bunch of things at work. At one point, I was trying to IM one person, talk with another person, and take a phone call, all at the same time. Not really recommended. But I think I got most of it done, which was a relief.

Then, I got home and found that I’d gotten a SCSI disk, a SCSI card, and a SCSI cable in the mail. Yay! Sort of. I had planned to plug all those things into my computer and find out what the heck was wrong with the disk. Didn’t quite have enough time for that, but I did manage to get everything physically attached right after Steve, Aric, and Stephanie showed up. Then the food showed up, and some of the soup got spilled on the floor somehow. Party foul! Ah well, we ate fairly well.

Everybody else started playing Rock Band while I plugged the computer in and turned it on. I expected the new SCSI card and disk to show up. I didn’t expect the whole thing to freeze up right after it did the AHCI scan and before going into the BIOS Setup. After multiple resets, I found that on this motherboard, AHCI and SCSI are apparently not compatible. Yikes. And, of course, the bootloader and kernel think that all the disks are AHCI. Getting all the bits working together will take a bit more time and effort than I thought, and I didn’t want to spend all night doing that. So I gave up after a while and spent the rest of the evening singing various songs. Maybe I can get it all done after work on Thursday.

The city’s cut bus service to the absolute minimum on Thursday, so I’m working from home that day. This is not quite as nice as you might think, since I’ll be spending a lot of Thursday with Moira on my lap getting in the way and meowing.

Tuesday, I had to get up at 4am and do a bunch of stuff for work. It didn’t really take all that long, though. What took longer was taking care of all the other minor things that I found wrong while doing the big important thing. And by the time that was done, it was time for me to get up anyway. Bleah.

But anyway, it all worked, and everybody else was happy that the users didn’t complain or even notice that anything had happened. So that was a relief. It was still a long day. Long enough that I didn’t go to trivia, since I was more interested in sacking out than seeing everyone.

Luposlipo phobia: fear of being pursued by wolves around a kitchen table on a freshly waxed floor.

Monday: Not really that much happened at work, though I’ll have to get up very early on Tuesday morning and do a bunch of stuff during an early morning maintenance window. Well, it should work with only a relatively minor amount of hassle.

Stephanie wanted to go out to dinner, because she was cooking Monday night for a work potluck. We wanted to go to a Mexican restaurant about a mile north of my place, but we found it was closed indefinitely due to renovations by looking at its website. Plan B: Another Mexican restaurant within walking distance. That place was closed, because it’s never open on Monday night. We were just a bit frustrated by this. However, there was an Italian restaurant which was open not that far away, so we ended up going there. Even things like eating out can be a hassle sometimes.

Sunday! Not that much going on, really. I didn’t watch the football games, which was just as well since the Cardinals lost in overtime. This football season isn’t going to be a very good one for the Cardinals, which is annoying, but it might make ticket prices cheaper if I ever decide to go to a game later on.

But anyway, I made dinner and got everything prepared for tomorrow. I think something was going on with one of the machines at about 6:45pm at work, but at least I didn’t have to fix it or deal with it. That’s always a good thing.

One of the other things we saw at First Friday was a bunch of women dancing with fire batons and torches. I tried to take some pictures of this, but it was too dark to get pictures that weren’t blurry.

Saturday was comparatively relaxed. Stephanie and I went out and got groceries together, which we haven’t done in a while. Then she made dinner; chicken, rice, corn, vegetables, and chocolate cake for dessert. That was nice. It’s been forever since I had a multi-course meal with cake.

The big thing on Friday was, of course, going to First Friday. Stephanie and I first went out for dinner, then met Kelli on Roosevelt St fairly early on in the night. Unlike the last time we’d gone, they hadn’t closed off the street. So there were a ton of people walking around and trying to look at stuff, with a bunch of cars trying to go by at normal traffic speeds. This did not work out that well.

Anyway, we were all a little disappointed that there were so few booths set up and not nearly as many vendors or people up as the last time we’d been to one of these events. Things were a little better south of Roosevelt, where they had a few more galleries open and more people out on the street. “Looks like a lot of the people that were on the street last time have moved here,” I said. But there weren’t quite as many pieces of good art out as there were last time, which was annoying. I bought a pack of Christmas cards and a small and cheap print of the painting pictured above, because Stephanie liked it.

So: Not much else, although Kelli said that she’s adopting a kitten tomorrow. This will be very interesting for her, but it’ll produce some cute pictures.