Been a while. Lots of stuff. So: Tuesday, work was roughly normal, though we got unexpected news of some big changes. One of the managers who’s been working with us a lot got promoted/transferred/kicked upstairs, and this could cause all kinds of interesting things to happen. It could add much-needed sanity to some things, or it could cause all kinds of other things to go to hell. We’ll see.

Tuesday night, I met Stephanie near work for dinner. Well, first I had to parallel park her car, since she’d found a parking space but couldn’t get her car into it. Anyway, we had dinner at a Japanese restaurant, then she went home to prepare for a loooong committee meeting on Wednesday, and I went to the baseball game.

The game was kind of sparsely attended. Only 2 other people from work showed up in the row of seats we had, and the attendance was about 17,800. It was an exciting game, though. A young girl sitting behind me got hit in the stomach by a foul ball, which was just a bit unnerving. I wasn’t able to get anywhere near the ball as it came in, but at least she wasn’t hurt badly. Marquis didn’t pitch well for the D-Backs, and they were down by 6 runs. Then they put Owings in, who pitched a lot better, and the offense stood up and performed. I left at the middle of the 8th, at about 9:20pm, even though the D-Backs were only up by 2 runs and anything could’ve happened. Didn’t get home until 10pm. Ah well, it was a pretty cheap game and a fun one. The seats in left field were better than the seats I got before in right field. Jeff from work was there, and he likes baseball and likes to talk about it, so we had a good time discussing various things and wondering whether the umpire needed a seeing-eye-dog.

Wednesday, there were odd problems with a CentOS box. It’s doing something weird with its X, so it’s impossible to see the 20 pixels on the extreme right-hand side of the monitor. Not sure how this is happening. Reading The Fine Manual and looking through the logfiles hasn’t helped much. I also think I found an extraordinarily dumb bug in the “security audit” script that the security auditors want to run on various machines, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

But anyway, we had Rock Band 3 and Chinese food with Steve and Stephanie. We got to hear all about Steve’s adventures in interviewing. Apparently, one of the companies he interviewed with asked, “Do you mind if we swear?” (Steve is from Long Island, so he’s heard many, many people who are practically Picassos of profanity.) No word yet on jobs, but he’s hopeful. Hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever truly dies. . . .