Wednesday had a slight change of plans from the usual, since Steve had a bunch of work to do. That meant no Rock Band 3, so Stephanie and I pooled our resources for dinner—salad, chicken, and the last of the leftover enchiladas. And then we watched episode 6, season 4 of “Babylon 5″, “Into the Fire”, which showed the resolution of the whole Shadow/Vorlon problem. A paraphrase of the whole thing would be Sheridan saying, “We can find our own way! Quit @#$%ing with us! The humans, Centauri, Minbari, Narn, Drazi, and so forth have earned the right to do our own thing without all of you butting in!” (It’s interesting to see that happen in a fictional setting, because in real settings, those with the most power never leave those with less power alone.)

Thursday had only the normal amount of stuff at work. This was reasonably good, since I was the only person from my team who was there. I’ve also been reading The Skinner by Neal Asher, a sci-fi book about a few people who travel to the planet Spatterjay. Personal almost-immortality, horrible wartime atrocities, nasty insectoid aliens, and an interestingly designed ecology combine to form a very interesting story. I’m only about 2/3 of the way through the book, though, so it could still fail to deliver.

Monday: waded through the Augean Stables that my e-mailbox had become, and put out a number of fires that had cropped up while I was away. There wasn’t a whole lot that was really going on, actually.

Tuesday: Found a serious filesystem problem on one of the backup machines. Somehow, it thought that one of its filesystems was 30M larger than the backing device. This manifested as odd problems every so often with no real explanation. Then I finally saw “attempt to access beyond end of device. . .” in the output from dmesg this morning, and knew I had to do something. umounting and fscking the darn thing helped somewhat. However, it was impossible to resize the filesystem, because there was one file that apparently had been put in space that didn’t actually exist. I had a block number for that file—but not an inode number or anything like that.

I fixed this by finding out that you could run through the blocks of a file and call the FIBMAP ioctl on every single block. That’d give you the block number. From that, it was conceptually easy to figure out which file had the problem. Run through all the millions of files on that filesystem, find that file, delete it, then umount the filesystem and resize2fs it. Nothing to it, and there shouldn’t be any more of those weird problems happening with that machine.

It’s a very good question how that filesystem ended up like that in the first place. But it’s fixed now. I don’t know that anyone else on the team could’ve solved this without doing drastic things like zorching the filesystem, remaking it, and restoring from backups.

And I’m going to be the only person from my team who’s here Thursday and Friday. Let’s hope the end of the week is quiet. . . .

Thursday: Again, it was raining a lot. Went to several local stores, read books and magazines, played with the cats, and so forth.

Friday: It was (still) raining, though not as hard as earlier. The trip to Mackinac Island was still off. But what the heck. We ended up not doing a whole lot, though we went to the Brass Café for dinner. The owner came out and asked us if the food was good—it was. One of my mother’s friends was in the restaurant, so she stopped by and chatted with us briefly. (This is relatively common; it’s a small town and there aren’t that many good restaurants in it.)

Saturday: More airplane adventures! Our first flight was delayed. It was impossible to get on the earlier flight, so we resigned ourselves to waiting. Mom and Dad bought a couple of one-day passes for Stephanie and me to use the Sky Club in Detroit. This was half-price for them, so they didn’t spend that much. The club was nice—free pop, snacks, wine, beer, coffee, 802.11, TV, showers, and so forth. It was nice to spend about 2.5 hours there while waiting for our delayed flight to Phoenix.

The flight back took a while. At least we got a few meal vouchers out of the flight delay. Stephanie used these to get some dinner for both of us while I got the luggage. It took forever to get the luggage, and I was sure my suitcase had been lost irrevocably, but it eventually showed up. Drove home. Saw Moira. Ate. Fell asleep.

Sunday: Moira was very unhappy that I’d been gone for so long. She calmed down after a lot of lap time. I did a fair amount of laundry and cleaning, got groceries, and made chicken enchiladas for dinner. Then sacked out most righteously.

Vacation! Sort of. I spent most of the last week in Michigan, seeing the family.

Sunday: Traveling. No surprises on any of the flights, though the Phoenix to Detroit flight was bumpier than usual.

Monday: Less traveling, though we went to downtown Mt. Pleasant and took in all the sights and shops. This took less time than you might think. Then we all went down to Lansing to see Sandy and Al for dinner.

Tuesday: Drama. ‘Nuff said. Also went and saw the Ziibiwing museum near the casino, which was sort of interesting. Then lost a few bucks at the casino itself.

Wednesday: It was raining all day, so we couldn’t do much. The Plan™ for this whole trip was to go up to Mackinac Island for a day at some point, but we couldn’t do that because the weather wouldn’t cooperate. Ah well. Went to a few local stores instead.

More later.

Friday was relatively normal at work. Got just about everything set, since almost all of us are going on furlough and/or vacation in the next few weeks. I hope not many of the other folks will want drastic changes to a bunch of things, since we’ll be short-handed for a while.

Had lunch with Temre and one of the other people from upstairs. We had Mexican food, and talked a lot about various things. I said that the impact of Rock Band and its sequels won’t be measured in the gameplay, but in how it makes younger kids hear/play classic songs like “Won’t Get Fooled Again” multiple times.

Friday, I cooked plantains, or tried to. I thought I could peel them. I was wrong. Plantains are usually sold very underripe, so they can’t be peeled, and you have to cut the peel off of them with a knife. I did this, and it all worked, but it was annoying. Underripe plantains, after being cooked, taste a lot like potatoes. (Ripe plantains taste a lot more like bananas.) Stephanie said that plantains are a big staple in the Bahamas, since the soil there isn’t deep enough to grow cereals or potatoes.

I think there’s a flaw in my first disc of Babylon 5 Season 4, though, since it skipped like crazy in the last two minutes of the second episode. This annoyed the heck out of me and Stephanie. I tried to clean the disc, but it didn’t make any difference. Wonder if it’s a pressing defect or a piece of crud that I just didn’t see. I am surprised at how much Stephanie likes Babylon 5. Well, the show had good characters, pretty good writing, pathos, humor, fun, and some very quotable lines:

I’d like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up at your lifeless eyes and wave (wave) like this. Can you and your associates arrange this for me, Mr. Morden? —Vir Cotto

Let’s see. . . Wednesday had a whole bunch of stuff at work. It felt like every 30 seconds, someone had something minor that they needed me to do right away. And then there was a bizarre problem where someone couldn’t get to a directory, and it totally wasn’t obvious what had happened, and it turned out that they’d renamed the directory so that it had a ^I (tab) in its name. This is totally possible on Unix machines. It’s just. . . difficult, and not usually what you want to do. But it was easy to fix once I’d figured out what had gone wrong.

Had Rock Band 3 and food at my house. Stephanie ordered chicken with black bean sauce, which wasn’t on the menu, but they made it for her anyway. (Many places have items which are not on the official menu, but are on the secret menu, and Chinese restaurants often have a few things which don’t show up on the English menu.) Steve bought a house in the same neighborhood he’s in right now, and is in the process of moving and painting. Apparently, Steve’s older son lost his job due to not calling in sick and not showing up for work, or something, which will be a bit annoying for him. But Stephanie sang “Free Bird”, which she’d never done before, and that was kind of neat.

Thursday was a little less busy, though the office was sort of empty as two of us were working from home. There were no weird filename problems, though.

This is the three-year anniversary of my current job, and almost the four-year anniversary of my moving to AZ. Doesn’t really feel like it’s been that long. Well, stuff changes, but so far, this job has worked out a lot better than my previous job.

This is one of the giant storage arrays at the secondary datacenter. It’s got over 80T of disks in it. No idea what they use it for, but it must be really important. If you stand next to this cabinet, you can feel a ton of heat coming out from it, even though giant A/C units are about 5 feet away.

Tuesday didn’t have all that much that was exciting, even though the project that I had to reclaim disk space worked much better than I’d thought. Always nice when stuff like that happens. The rest of the work day was actually kind of boring.

Trivia: Got to hear about the whole Maine adventure that everyone else went on for Patty and Spencer’s wedding. Apparently, they were going up some mountain at 0-dark-thirty to watch the sun rise from that mountain top, and Spencer forgot the camera, and Patty didn’t immediately strangle him. (This is probably a good sign.) Everyone who went got to see a Red Sox game, experienced a tornado warning in Boston, bought lobster hats, and generally had a grand old time. One of Kelli’s friends went out on a date with some guy, and didn’t want to go out with him again, so I suggested that she say, “Nope, can’t go out with you; I’ve decided to become a militant biker nun.” This went over a lot better than I thought. We were trailing after 2/3 of the game, though.

And the huge pile of paper that Kari referred to yesterday is actually a big set of handwritten medical reports, which explains why they need a human to look at them. Current tech makes it impossible to OCR handwriting.

Monday! Well, there wasn’t that much really going on. A box had far too little disk space. After talking with some other folks, I figured out how we could reclaim at least a few percent of that space without causing any problems. We should be good for another month or two, we hope. (Our servers don’t have photogenic tabby cats inside them, though.)

On lunch break, I saw a post Kari had made on Facebook, where she said she had to deal with a whopping amount of data on dead trees. She says that dealing with ~200 pages of data on dead trees is actually more efficient than dealing with the same data in an electronic format. I wonder how that could be. (Well, they might’ve used MS Word with no rational markup of any sort to store the data, which would be difficult to deal with, but still doable with appropriately deranged Perl scripting. . . .) I’ve learned how to use various Unix tools to filter out extraneous stuff from huge masses of data, leaving only the things a human really needs to look at. I’m not sure how you’d do that with dead trees, though. I’m sure Kari’s using some sort of pattern-matching to determine which parts of the dead trees are important and which aren’t, but she didn’t go into details about that.

A bug in kded4 can eat 100% of one CPU. Bleah. I just noticed this last night. It’s sort of annoying, but manually killing the runaway process seems to work.

Saturday didn’t have all that much going on. It was a peaceful day, though Stephanie and I watched a couple of episodes of “Babylon 5″.

Sunday was a little more involved. I did laundry, got groceries, and made dinner. The entree above was a big part of dinner. I was going to make plantains to go with the chicken, but the plantains that I’d bought a few days ago weren’t ripe. (How do you tell if plantains are ripe by looking at their color?) So I had to improvise, and I’ll be having plantains a few days later, I hope.

Moira threw up in the afternoon. I was glad that I’d gone out to get groceries early, instead of late, because if I’d waited until 2pm to get groceries, Moira would’ve thrown up on the carpet.

Back to work tomorrow. Ah well, work pays the bills, and theoretically, I’ll be going on a week’s vacation after another week of work.

Friday was pretty good, since I had the day off. Took some canned goods to the food bank, then tried again to find some kangaroo meat. Zach said he wanted “marsupial enchiladas”, it’s possible to buy kangaroo meat, therefore I should be able to do this. Of course, they didn’t have any at the specialty food store—it has to be special ordered. They say kangaroo tastes like venison, and venison is relatively easy to find, so I may make venison enchiladas instead to save time and hassle.

Not that much else happened today. Took a nap on the couch, listened to Moira meow.