Much catching up. So: Sunday, didn’t do a heck of a lot. Went through a couple of episodes of “Babylon 5″. Monday, Stephanie and I went to see “Thor”, which was actually better than I’d expected. There was a lot of humor, as well as some in-jokes that only long-time Marvel fans would recognize (like the New Mexico billboard that said “Journey into Mystery”.) And then I cooked dinner, and then did some fooling around with computers, where I found out that Gentoo’s main repositories are having some trouble, so that the current stable version of portage can’t actually build the current stable KDE packages. No idea when that’ll be fixed….

Tuesday, I went back to work. This was reasonably OK, though I found out that something had stopped working a couple of weeks ago and nobody had noticed until this morning. Bleah. The thing is, it was a piece of the monitoring system that’s supposed to alert us to problems. How is the monitoring system supposed to watch itself? Who watches the watchmen? (The answer is not “Alan Moore”. . . .) There’s a way to do this, it’s just a tiny bit kludgy.

No trivia today. Trivia’s being held, but almost all of the trivia people are now in Maine, mostly for Patty and Spencer’s wedding, which is on Saturday. Most everyone’s taken the week off to go see them. When everyone was making trip plans, I didn’t know that I’d have a work furlough. So I had to decide between going to Patty and Spencer’s wedding, and going to see my family in June—I didn’t have enough vacation time to do both. Just when it was too late to get non-exorbitant rates on hotels and airfare, they announced that we’d have a work furlough. Sigh.

Saturday! Always a fine day. Didn’t do that much other than laundry and amusing Moira. I did get a gift certificate via Deal Chicken, though, and took Stephanie out to dinner at Fatburger. You can get up to XXXL burgers there, but we didn’t go nearly that far. Stephanie got a turkey burger, which was probably healthier than the regular burger I got. Anyway, we spent some time walking up and down Mill Ave after dinner.

Not that much else. The lunch with Nacho and Luly has been called off due to unspecified problems on their end. I guess we’ll try again next week, or something.

Friday was pretty quiet. A lot of people were out of the office, because they wanted to get a head start on the three-day weekend. The day was pretty ordinary, which was sort of a relief. We all went out and got lunch. It wasn’t burgers, it was Mexican food—I got a bowl of shrimp, rice, vegetables, and salsa. This was far more expensive than it should’ve been, but at least Dan had a stack of coupons for $2 off your total bill.

Not that much planned for the long weekend. Going to try and take it easy. There’s apparently a baseball game on Memorial Day at 5pm, but I don’t know that anyone else wants to go to that.

The last couple of days have been full of stuff. Wednesday had the usual Chinese food and Rock Band 3, with Stephanie and Steve. Steve’s got a ton of stuff scheduled, as his older son is graduating from high school, and he’s going to Comicon starting on Friday. That sounds really interesting, but I totally can’t go, mostly because I’m still on call for work. But anyway.

Thursday had a relatively ordinary workday. Many of my co-workers were working from home that day, so the cube farm was sort of empty. The A/C system is set to cool a space containing 4 or 5 people, and there was only one person there, so it was about 64° F in the cube farm even though it was 100° F outside. Figures, eh?

Eugene Mirman got really, really irritated about Time Warner Cable. I can understand why—lots of large companies that have a monopoly feel they can treat their customers horribly. I just don’t think it’ll help, even if it is sort of funny.

Both Monday and Tuesday had more than the usual number of annoyances at work. I at least got some stuff done on Monday. Tuesday, thanks to a problem that didn’t make any sense and that no one could explain well, my OS X box was basically unusable all morning. Ah well. At least I could use my Linux box to do useful work, and a bunch of other stuff is working properly and doing its job.

We’ve also got a plan for moving a number of things around, which will start tomorrow morning. This should be interesting.

Trivia: Didn’t go. Too tired, plus I thought that if I went to trivia, I’d get a helpdesk ticket at a really inconvenient time.

Sunday. Not really that much happened, though I think almost everyone was glad that the predicted apocalypse didn’t materialize. (Considering history, this shouldn’t *surprise* anyone, but whatever. But anyway: Did laundry, cleaning, and cooking. Instead of roo meat, I got a chicken stuffed with shrimp étoufee yesterday, and I made that for dinner. It was tasty.

Not really all that much else. On-call week starting tomorrow. Oh joy. Well, it’s part and parcel of work. . . .

Friday had a bunch of relatively ordinary work stuff. Went out to lunch, got pizza, helped another guy with a bunch of UPDATE statements in a new tool he’s building. And then Stephanie took me out to dinner, which was kind of nice. Moira meowed a lot.

Saturday, I had a plan: I’d go get some kangaroo meat, so I could make marsupial enchiladas. This didn’t work. The closest AJ’s had ostrich, quail, duck, veal, goose, buffalo, squab, and venison, but no kangaroo. This was sort of annoying. Oh well. Maybe later. I wonder if making enchiladas out of ostrich or venison would be an acceptable substitute?

While driving home from the ill-fated kangaroo meat buying attempt, I saw a car with the license plate “NARSIL”.  I wonder if that car had been broken while fighting the forces of evil. . . .

Really well-done pencil drawing that borrows from Bosch. I’d like to do something like that, but there’s no way I’m talented enough, and I certainly don’t have enough time.

Wednesday, instead of Rock Band 3, I went to see a D-Backs game with Stephanie and Steve. It actually rained a bit on Wednesday, so they kept the roof closed. The game was fairly interesting. D-Backs took an early lead, then the Braves came back with a few runs. Then Ryan Roberts made it from second to home on a wild pitch, which was pretty exciting and sort of rare. At least 3 foul balls got hit into section 110, right next to us. No foul balls got near where we were sitting, though one fell a few rows up. This was the first time the D-Backs won a game that I attended. There were a bunch of loud people behind us throughout the game, though. It’s always something.

We left at 9pm, though, because everybody had to work on Thursday. The game went into extra innings, and the D-Backs finally ended up winning at 10pm. But it was a good, if slightly expensive, way to spend an evening.

Thursday had no baseball. Well, somebody sent out a mail to all of us saying, “I have 2 tickets to tonight’s game that I can’t use. Anybody want them?” I couldn’t go.

Tuesday had a protracted discussion of something that really wasn’t a good idea that also seemed really unnecessary. Oh well, maybe it won’t get implemented, or will get implemented in a better way. Also, one of the guys had a hard disk that he couldn’t read any data off of. I plugged the disk into a Linux box, tried to get stuff, and got:

Error reading USB device 4-4: -110 ; Unable to read sector 0 /dev/sdb repeated many times. Dang hardware problems. I suggested a few more things to try, but they required equipment we don’t have at the office, like a freezer. But anyway, this was a backup disk, not a main disk, so all the stuff is still recoverable.

Trivia: Was sparsely attended. Sarah had to stay home, and she said that if she couldn’t go to trivia, then Zach couldn’t go either. Nathan had a play to put on. Trevor’s in Las Vegas. Patty and Spencer are looking for one of their cats, who escaped a few days ago. And Stephanie and I left at the half because we’re going to go see the D-Backs play the Braves tomorrow.

Monday had about the usual number of annoying Monday things. There were a ton of kind of weird permissions problems that took much more time than they should’ve. But that was OK, because they all got fixed.

Stephanie’s reading A History of God, by Karen Armstrong. She lent me one of her textbooks, for an introductory course on comparative religion. I think it was written by committee, or something—chapter 1 is much less well-written than chapter 2, for instance. But at least chapter 2 had some interesting bits in it.