Friday wasn’t really that interesting, though I ended up doing a whole bunch of non-work stuff after work.

Saturday was more relaxing. Did ordinary chores, and went to the library for the first time in almost a year. They’ve finally finished remodeling the place. I was confused since they’ve changed the shelving layout, but I figured it out pretty quickly. Got a few books. Then I took Stephanie out to Cork in south Chandler. This was a little more expensive than a regular dinner out, but hey, we got antelope chops and duck breast. (The antelope was kind of tough and chewy. This was a shame, since the other parts of that dish were really well done.) Stephanie also said something about a “sabre-toothed bunny” that was funny at the time.

There’s got to be a story behind this particular image. I don’t know if it’s possible to find it out, though.

Thursday wasn’t particularly notable. Did a bunch of stuff, found three machines with weird problems, asked some folks to check on them and fix them if they could. But that was about it for work.

Been reading Woken Furies again. On the bus, I got to the part where Takeshi Kovacs says, “We all get our dreams stomped on from time to time. If that didn’t hurt, what kind of dreams would they be?” All right, Richard K. Morgan’s not the world’s greatest author, but sometimes he gets off a really good line that makes a lot of sense in context. The book was about 100 pages too long and had too many digressions. It still had occasional flashes of brilliance, which is the main reason why I’m reading it again.

Wednesday, with stuff sort of changed around. Did relatively ordinary work things for most of the day. Rock Band was on, but Steve was delayed for a long time because of a truck rollover on US-60, so instead of doing Rock Band, we ended up talking about math and Linux things. Steve’s watching a bunch of educational videos about higher math, which he’s gotten interested in. (I’ve forgotten everything about anything more advanced than integral calculus, since I’ve basically never used any of that info anywhere outside of class.)

Because the freeway was (still) closed at about 8:30pm, Steve left a bit early. That’s why there’s actually an entry tonight. Steve also told me about his adventures on Easter, where he tried to get prime rib at a restaurant and found out they weren’t serving it until 4pm. So he spent hours drinking Coke and hanging out with people who sounded slightly off-kilter. Or in one case, drunk enough to fall off a bar stool. But that at least sounded interesting. And apparently, the Braves/D-Backs game on May 18 is a go, and we’re apparently sitting in the slightly more expensive seats. This should all be good.

Kari is not fond of baby showers at the office. Although I think “Nerf Baby Cannon” would be a good name for a punk band.

Late last week, one of our servers blew an important component or 3 and let out the magic smoke. They fixed that server late this morning. However, early this afternoon, a recycling plant near downtown Phoenix let out quite a bit of magic smoke. I think we all noticed the fire at least 5 minutes before any of us heard any sirens. That was really the big excitement in an otherwise mostly boring day.

No trivia today. They’re having trivia, but apparently most of the regular crowd couldn’t make it. Zach and Sarah are busy with their son, who was born at about 4am on Tuesday, and other people have vacations, work, and other things going on. So I decided to sit on the couch, pet Moira, and read instead of doing trivia. I guess it’ll all be back to normal next week.

Owg. Things have been more than usually full of stuff over the last 48 hours. But anyway. Sunday had a lot of laundry and cleaning, as well as catering to Moira. Also made dinner. Also logged in to work at about 7:40 and did a bunch of stuff to deal with the Net outage that was scheduled for 1am. That actually worked well, which everybody was happy with.

Monday had a whole lot of fooling around with stuff. Some other people changed some stuff, and that broke a script, and I didn’t notice for about 1.5 hours. This shouldn’t cause that much trouble, I hope. And then there was a problem with somebody who needed a password reset, and the automated tool to do password resets didn’t appear to be doing the right thing. I think that worked out, but the person requesting the reset never got back to me. (Figures, eh?) More ordinary work stuff filled out the rest of my Monday.

What else. . . Sarah is in the hospital now, probably since she’s about ready to give birth. Hope that all works out well. I guess we won’t see her or Zach tomorrow for trivia, since they’ll be preoccupied with more important stuff. Zach said, “Garçon, a brace of your finest painkillers!”, which made me think of this old cartoon, which was probably not the best thing ever, but whatever. . . .

This wouldn’t work at all, but it’s kind of funny.

Friday had many fewer people in the office than usual, but it also had the news that I’d have to do a few server moves on Saturday night or Sunday morning. And there was a user who was trying to log in interactively and wondering why he couldn’t. Turns out we hadn’t set him up for interactive access, so his shell was /sbin/nologin, which totally didn’t work. Oops. At least that was easy to fix.

Saturday I didn’t do that much. That was nice. I took a nap, had dinner with Stephanie, and watched “Crash” (2005). That was interesting if somewhat disturbing. Basically, every character in that movie did a bunch of dumb things, and most of them suffered a fair amount because of them.

Wednesday was relatively normal at work. Then it was time for the regular Wednesday night Rock Band, with Steve and Stephanie. Stephanie said she was just going to stay for dinner, but we convinced her to sing a couple of songs, and then a couple of songs turned into a bunch of songs, and then she picked up the guitar. . . . Things like this happen sometimes with video games; you say “just a few minutes,” and before you know it it’s 3am and you’ve just spent hours doing a raid on the Temple of Verminous Argh. (This is why we start after dinner and end at 9pm.) But anyhow, Steve says he’s found a house to buy, so that might be nice for him.

I was just about to go to bed when our monitoring system said, “Yikes! Panic on the main DB!” This took far too long to fix. I really wanted to emulate the fox above, but couldn’t until after 11:30pm. You win some, you lose some.

Thursday was less exciting in terms of databases. Another machine seems to have decided to crawl into a corner and say nothing but “ECC Uncorrectable Error”, which is just a bit annoying. I hope they can fix it reasonably soon. Didn’t do anything Thursday night except eat and pet Moira. Probably a good thing.

Everything’s pretty much FUBAR at work, since there’s this big initiative that no one seems to know who’s in charge of or what it’s supposed to be doing. Personal life? Ha ha. Don’t ask.

Trivia: Wasn’t feeling social. Made myself go anyway. Was awfully monosyllabic. We were doing well, and there’s a bunch of stuff going on with the Patty-Spencer wedding that I can’t attend.

Monday. While not as bad as Monday can be, it involved a whole lot of talking with various people.

But anyway. Got the latest issue of “Shards of Glass in Your Eye”, Kari’s zine, but I haven’t had time to read it yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Tons of stuff has been going on. Not much time to write it all up. Normal service will be resumed shortly.