Here, we see one of the most evil beings in the galaxy. . . getting beat down by Kelli.

Monday wasn’t actually that interesting, though. I saw something from Patty that said, “carried an extra 11 pounds for the last 20 minutes of her cardio today, because Atwood insisted on being held … on the elliptical.” Atwood is one of her cats. This is a really innovative workout technique, and I’m surprised someone in NYC hasn’t opened up a studio where people carry domestic animals and do normal exercise routines. Think about it: It’d be like working out, with a big fuzzy kettlebell attached to you! This has potential, for sure, but it also has big liability concerns if one of the animals goes Ginsu-ninja on a yuppie lawyer.

Not that much else to talk about. It’s nice to not be on call, though.

This rather large plate of food is one of the smallest breakfasts you can get at Hash House A-Go-Go.

Hm. The weekend was a lot more relaxing than the week was, mostly because I wasn’t getting called all the time for work problems. I didn’t really get all that much done though. Got groceries, did tons of laundry, fiddled with the computer so that it wouldn’t freeze up for 30 seconds at a time while updating the softRAID-1 superblocks. Running in IDE mode instead of AHCI mode leads to that, for some reason. But now that I’ve finished trying to recover data from that broken SCSI disk, I don’t need to keep the motherboard in IDE mode. Thank goodness for small favors, or something like that.

Made tortilla soup for dinner, not from scratch, but from a box that I got as a Christmas present. It was actually pretty good. It had a lot of thickener in it (masa harina, or something like that), which I don’t usually put in my chicken broth-based version of the same dish. That made it taste different.

Very glad I’ve got a short work week this week. Not sure whether to take Wednesday or Friday off. I should get to choose, if everything else works out.

It’s been a very, very long week. At least Friday wasn’t too horrible. Going to try and relax a lot this weekend, if I can.

My phone was ringing off the hook today with people complaining about various things at work. I thought I’d fixed them after finding a problem and killing a bad query that was sucking up a bunch of CPU for no reason. Nope, people still said that things were slow.

Then it was time to take Moira to the vet. This had a little more drama in it than usual; there were two people ahead of me taking in a dog that had just been hit by a truck. So Moira and I waited. Moira was mostly OK, though the vet found one of her anal glands was full and that was causing her some discomfort. Usually, cats don’t have that problem; it’s more of a dog thing. If it keeps happening, I might have to switch her to a high-fiber diet. (Even the cats need more fiber, sigh.) I don’t know what happened with the dog. Probably nothing good.

Stephanie wanted me to reduce the amount of leftovers in her fridge. So I went over there and had okra soup, noodles, duck, and various vegetables. And a few minutes after we’d finished dinner, I got another call from work. This time, it was something that was really wrong, but it was also something I could diagnose and fix reasonably quickly. It’s been a pretty annoying week. As I said to Stephanie, “Oog annoyed at thinky box. Oog need club. OOG BREAK HEAD WITH OPEN-SOURCE CD!!1!“

Wednesday had no rock, because Steve had to go do something at his younger son’s school. Wednesday did have a neverending series of stupid problems, starting off with a bad failover right as I was getting on the bus that led to a bunch of stuff not getting processed. After I’d fixed that, there was a horrible problem that no one could figure out that was making a really important app take forever to do anything. Then there was a really weird problem with a command line script and a password that contained a semicolon, and we finished up with a password on another site that had been totally lost and nobody could remember it. So yeah, it was one thing after another, with no respite or time to actually do anything new and useful.

Fortunately, Stephanie invited me over to reduce the number of leftovers she had in her fridge. So there was at least one good thing about Wednesday.

Thursday, I’m working from home, since I’ve got to take Moira to the vet for her yearly checkup. No idea what they’ll find wrong with her. Probably something.

You shouldn’t count on winning things like this, but it’s really nice when it happens.

Tuesday had relatively normal work things, for the most part. However, there are (finally) some indications that the whole Big Website Redesign is going through, and this will almost certainly consume a lot of time later on. I’m wondering when they’ll decide when the date when absolutely everything must be working is. I don’t plan on taking any vacation around the time when that happens. I don’t think any of us will be able to.

Trivia: Not that many of us were there. We were “Egyptians In Denial” since the people of Egypt appear to be holding massive protests against the corrupt government they live under. That didn’t help us much, even though there was a Meat Loaf question that we got right. We didn’t even place. At least Trevor’s planning some sort of Bad Movie Night, with additional trivia, for this Sunday. I don’t know if I’m going yet. Well, there’s still time.

Monday had a lot more to do with this JPEG than it really should’ve. Apparently, somebody changed something somewhere in the network config months ago. As a result, some third-party people won’t be able to get access to the stuff they need to get access to in time to meet their deadline. Of course, I don’t have the access I’d need to fix this. Of course, various people in the management chain know that it’s nothing I’ve done, but problems with the networking infrastructure. Of course, since I touched this problem, someone will blame me for it, even though all the parts that I actually have root access to are working just fine and have been since 30 minutes after I learned about the problem.

If the right people had been told about this a month ago, it’d probably all be working fine. However, none of the right people knew about this until Jan. 20. This shows a few problems with the way we’re approaching these types of problems, but I don’t know how to fix them. Part of it is that there are multiple elements, all managed by multiple people, some of whom are employed by totally different companies. This diffusion of responsibility leads to more “I can’t do that! Call Bob, who can!” than actually fixing what’s wrong. (I think this is endemic to large systems, and no amount of meetings or mail will ever fix it.) I just hope it doesn’t have terrible effects on stuff in the future.

That was the main bad part of the day. At least the other stuff I was doing looks like it’s worked, and only 20 jobs were stuck in the job queue at 11am. Last week, thousands of jobs were stuck in the queue at that time, so this is a big improvement. We’d like to get it so that nothing’s ever stuck, but that may be asking too much.

This was the birthday cake we got for Trevor, with a whole bunch of lit candles on it. I’m surprised we didn’t set off the dang smoke alarm. Anyway.

Sunday was relatively relaxed, though I’m on call for a week starting tomorrow. This will add more stress to my life. Oh well; it’s part of the job. Stephanie invited me over for dinner, since she has a fridge that’s chock full of leftovers. And then I offered to hold Anna while Stephanie gave Anna some antibiotics. Anna, naturally, spit most of those antibiotics out all over my pants. This is what cats do. It was still a little annoying.

You wouldn’t think socks would be a big deal. However, there were a ton of people in this store.

Saturday was quite a bit more relaxing than most of the rest of the week. I got up late—which is almost newsworthy in that I so rarely get to do that. I had lunch with Stephanie and some of her friends from work. I’d never met any of them before, so that was sort of interesting.

Then went to buy a new suit, since the suit I had is about 11 years old and showing its age. (Also, the pants from the old suit don’t fit anymore, but this is a standard consequence of getting older and fatter.) They were having a sale, so I saved about $150 on the whole thing. Yay, or something.

Not much else. There was a game night or something tonight, but Stephanie and I decided we both were too tired to go, since we’d been doing something almost every night this week.

Friday had far too many weird errors to be comfortable. And there was another problem, this one not because of anything I did, where one guy forgot to enable an account and another guy forgot to send everyone the full set of info they needed. That wasted far more time than it should’ve. So, have a sparkly disco horse!

At least we all got to go out for lunch. Viet Kitchen again, but this time I got the chicken pho. It was good, but the beef pho is better. Dan and Sherry got banh mi sandwiches, which looked good too.

Had dinner with Stephanie and her parents again, which was fun. They’d bought a couple of large bags of locally grown oranges. Susan gave me a bunch of oranges. I guess I won’t have to buy oranges for a while. Victor asked me if I could solve the whole “illegal immigration in Arizona” quandary, as well as fix the horrible economic quagmire Michigan’s gotten itself into. OK, I can fix broken computers, but problems caused by ~50 years of shortsighted politics and global economic realities may be a bit out of my league.