I can’t remember where I saw this first, but the text on the picture may not be the best advice in all situations. (What is the world coming to when we can’t trust anonymous Internet images?)

Wednesday, Stephanie brought over a few leftover chicken wings and a big container full of Illinois corn chowder. I got some garlic bread, and we put that all together into a good dinner for us and Steve. Then Steve and I played a few more Rock Band songs and tried to get rid of some of the challenges on bass. I guess ABLEConf is Saturday, but I can’t go to that, since I’m already signed up for Desert Code Camp. Steve’s going to ABLEConf. I guess he’s going to be selling stuffed penguins in between going to panel discussions. He had a plan to get as many people as possible to go to a restaurant in Chandler, where his younger son is now working as a busboy, but I don’t know how that’s going to work out.

Thursday had a little bit of everything. There was something messed up with an include file, and then a script that wasn’t working quite right, as well as the usual raft of minor requests. Friday, I’m going to be going out for dinner downtown, with Stephanie and Nacho and Luly. We might be going to the First Friday art walk for a little while after that too, so that could be fun.

Tuesday had more than the usual number of things at work. “Single-sign on” is a myth; there are at least two LDAP/AD/whatever databases, and while most things use one of them, the helldesk system uses another one. This means that the password I normally use for work systems is completely out of sync with the password I need to get into the helldesk. Syncing these password systems is apparently beyond the capabilities of the people who are in charge of this stuff. So, I have one username, and two passwords, depending on which systems I’m trying to make use of. This sort of thing makes the Security Nazis have a damn cow, because it inevitably leads to people writing down their passwords on pieces of paper and leaving those papers in convenient places.

Trivia: Patty and Spencer are getting married in June. In Maine. There’s no way I can go—I don’t have enough vacation time to take an entire week off to go do the long itinerary that everyone else has planned out. Mostly because I’m already taking a whole week off in June to go visit family in Michigan. Sigh. Our team name was “We’re too classy for penis jokes”, which probably irritated the quizmaster. (It’s also totally untrue, which is part of the joke, but meta-jokes don’t go over well with many people.) And thanks to some hard questions, we weren’t doing very well at the half. Stephanie and I left then, because we were tired.

Monday. Everyone’s favorite day. Well, it wasn’t all that bad, considering. We got news that some people from corporate said, “We think the architecture you’ve built for your site isn’t adequate. So we’ve gone with another vendor for our new initiative. They have fewer problems than you guys have. We think that in 10 weeks, they’ll be able to launch an awesome initiative!” This is, of course, complete bullshit, but we have no choice in the matter. These people are infamous for making really bad decisions. In 10 weeks, they won’t be able to launch anything at all, let alone a successful site and business initiative like the one we’ve built. But none of this is really my problem, so I’ll just sit back and be ready to say, “I told you so!”, laugh hysterically, and dance a hornpipe or jig.

Also, the “single-sign on” that’s supposed to be in place for all company sites has some serious, glaring flaws in it. I changed my LDAP password several weeks ago. This change has not replicated to the helldesk system. Even though that change should’ve propagated in less than 30 minutes. The helldesk system wants the password I had last month, even though I’ve forgotten it (since it was generated with dd if=/dev/urandom bs=256 count=1, and I haven’t used it for a month, and I didn’t write it down, because that’s pretty insecure.)

Not really that much else. Moira’s been meowing even more than usual.

Sunday didn’t really have as much stuff going on as Saturday did. I went to Costco with Stephanie, mostly to help her tote barges and lift bales. (Forty pound bags of cat litter are heavy, so she wanted me around.) Also got some cereal and some couscous while there. I saw a bunch of pricey TVs there, but somehow resisted the urge to get a 60″ LED HDTV for the low price of $2000. My TV is a CRT and is about 33″, but that’s totally OK for what I do with it.

And then I amused Moira and spent some time doing the rest of the laundry. I cooked dinner for us; I made chicken with angel hair pasta and vegetables. Stephanie brought over some soup as a side dish. There will be a lot more stuff next week, since I’ll be on call all week, and Desert Code Camp is April 2, and I said I’d go to that. There might also be a rifle range day next Sunday, but that’s still up in the air.

Friday was pretty much a normal workday, although we had one thing that was different. We had a guy come in and interview for a job, specifically the job that Sherry left earlier. I don’t know how it all worked out, since he had to interview at 4pm, and I had to leave at 5pm even though I took the late bus. He wasn’t quite done with the paper test when I left. I guess we’ll see how that all works out tomorrow.

Saturday, I took Stephanie to see “Sucker Punch”, since Zach and Sarah were going on Friday night, and that time totally didn’t work out for us. The movie was fairly interesting, but the review in the local paper was written by someone who doesn’t understand much about sci-fi or fantasy. I enjoyed it, even though the actions sequences were over-the-top. Stephanie thought it was awfully violent. Some of the basic themes of the movie echo things you see in The Wild by David Zindell, but that’s probably too obscure for most people to get. (The trouble with reading a lot of books is that people will come up with an idea they think is new and interesting, yet you’ve already read about that idea years and years ago in something few people have read.)

Anyway, Stephanie made jambalaya and salad, so we had that for dinner, and I went home to finish up the laundry.

This is the casserole I made on Sunday. It was inspired by German cuisine, so it’s got pork sausage, sauerkraut, Riesling, and cheese in it. It was pretty tasty.

Wednesday was filled with normal work things and a special request which was kind of hackish. Then went home and had Chinese food with Stephanie and Steve, and then Rock Band with Steve.

Thursday saw me taking the hackish request and extending it more so that it wouldn’t be hackish for future requests like that. So that was good. Also think I’ve found a way to get back a few G of disk space on that one machine that seems to be permanently starved for disk. And that was about it.

These are the frog pops that I mentioned a couple of entries ago. They looked interesting. I wonder how they tasted.

Tuesday didn’t have that much that was interesting at work. Well, the big meeting had news of a ham-handed and fairly stupid decision by people far at the top of the food chain. I also quoted Dilbert, saying, “To solve our problems, we must first defeat our own company,” and got far too much laughter from that. I wonder what it is about our organizations and systems that tends to impede useful work. It could be that “the ground state of humans is not to work together to achieve a goal, but to fight with each other over scarce resources,” as one of the Grumpy Old Sysadmins said once. That’s certainly borne out by example—Microsoft had a working tablet computer in the early 2000s, years before the iPad, but internal politics and fights between different groups caused their tablet to tank horribly. I’d guess that the larger an organization gets, the more resources it spends in interdepartmental wars. I wonder if this tendency can be mitigated in any way, or if it’s one of those things that just emerges from the way people are.

Trivia: We had Trevor, but no Nathan. Hard questions left us in 3rd place. Ah well. Zach wants to go see “Sucker Punch” this weekend, and possibly go to the rifle range next weekend. I don’t know about next weekend, because Desert Code Camp is next Saturday, but we’ll see. Lots of other stuff going on.

For the last couple of months, it’s been impossible for me to use suspend-to-RAM on my desktop machine. Nothing I’ve tried has worked properly. I haven’t even been able to get anything coherent out of the kernel after enabling all the ACPI debugging info. I’m not sure why this is.

So, I went to Tux On Ice, downloaded the patch and the userspace utilities, applied the patch, and started trying to get it to work. This wasn’t quite as easy as I’d hoped, but it was possible. Part of the problem is that everything on my desktop is on softRAID-1, and Tux On Ice doesn’t know what to do when the swap partition/file is on a softRAID device. So I told it to resume from /dev/sda2:0x21618, which is sort of a Nasty Hack™, but works. Sigh.

At least this means I will be able to suspend my desktop to disk before going to work, and turn it on when I get back and have it exactly how I left it in 30 seconds. This should be useful since SRP (the local evil electric monopoly) seems to have raised their rates recently.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! Well, mostly. The main event was John Tyldesley’s birthday, which we all were going to celebrate at 7pm, but he moved the celebration up to 5pm, and none of us knew that until Sunday morning. No problem. I moved up my dinner plans so that dinner was ready at 5pm, so Stephanie and I were only about an hour late.

So when we got there, they had snacks and various desserts available, so we all sat around the big table and had those. There were cake balls that had been decorated to look like frogs, which were interesting. Someone (John?) said something about “underaged banana hammock” that got Spencer talking about an impractical and silly (but funny) design for a cake. We handed out presents, even though John had said something about “no presents needed”. Trevor and Michael had never heard of the clock spider (don’t GIS that if you’re arachnophobic.)

But then everyone decided to play “Team Quelf”, since there were too many people to play normal Quelf, and Stephanie and I decided to sit that game out since it was 7:40 and we were leaving at 8. So we saw a bit of the game, which looked sort of fun, but also complicated and time-consuming. One team had to pretend they had a duck glued to their forehead and complain about it every turn, which seemed like it could get old really fast.

Friday! Everyone usually looks forward to that day. Work was reasonably ordinary; spent a lot of it trying to deal with making machines do the right thing after hideous and sundry networking failures. That didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped—it looks like manual intervention of some sort will be required even in a simple test case. Sigh.

After work, there was a get-together at a nearby pub because Jamel’s leaving the company next week. Stephanie and I went for a while, had dinner there, and saw some of the other folks.