Hockey!!!1! This was really the only fight of the game last night, though. (The refs broke it up pretty quickly and penalized one player from each team—fighting is not cool in the modern NHL.) The game was pretty good. Pro hockey is faster-paced and more fluid than college hockey, and there are video screens, contests, and many distractions during the inter-period gaps. Stephanie and I were sitting in the upper deck, halfway between the red line and the goal, but we could see everything even though the seats were cheap. We both had fun. I think I’d make hockey a regular event if the stadium weren’t so dang far away.

Anyway, Sunday had fairly normal stuff. Got groceries, made dinner, listened to Moira meow quite a bit. Stephanie’s apparently got a huge amount of stuff to do since the charity concert is coming up soon. Nobody from trivia has said a thing about dressing up and getting together for a Halloween thing. Ah well. This is annoying, but people have tons of stuff to do. I’ll be heading to the secondary datacenter on Thursday, so I’ll have to drive in that day. It’ll be different, at least.

Friday: Relatively normal. The conference call and massive amounts of mail and spending about 6 person-hours of work for no results were not because anything was actually wrong. That all happened because some numbers were smaller than some people had predicted. So. . . yeah, it was all a tempest in a teapot. Heck.

Saturday: Stephanie and I are going to watch the Coyotes take on the Kings. This should be interesting. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a hockey game, and I’ve never been to a pro hockey game—just college hockey. This entry will probably post while we’re at the game.

An interesting quote I saw a few days ago:

The real complexity of the tax code comes from the big lie that some income is more desirable than other income, and that some expenses are more desirable than other expenses. Thus most capital gains and dividends, which are deemed desirable, are taxed at lower rates than labor, presumably because people are not supposed to work. The profit that you get by investing your money in someone else’s business to buy goods and having that business sell those goods is supposed to be better than investing your money in your own business and selling those goods yourself. The money spent on maintaining machinery for a business is more deductible than the money spent on maintaining yourself. These are examples of where the unfairness and complexities comes in.

Wednesday: Work was reasonably normal. After work, Stephanie and I went to the Scottsdale Culinary Institute for dinner. We met Angel and Charles there, though they were a bit late because of traffic. No real problem. The place is basically a training kitchen/restaurant for the students at the Institute, so you get gourmet food for a pretty low price. Angel and Charles really like the place, and tend to eat there about once a month.

Anyway, we tried to spread out our orders so that we all got different things, and everybody got to try a couple of different things. I didn’t want to give up any of my shrimp and crayfish ragout, though. Whoever made that had really done well, so I gave Stephanie a crayfish and some sauce with some reluctance. I got to eat some of her game bird platter, though, so it was all good.

Angel works where her weekend is during the week and she has to be at work at 6am. Heck. I’m not sure how I’d handle that. Charles is an engineer, and spends a reasonable amount of time on the Net, so he laughed when I said I had “an encyclopedic knowledge of LOLcats.” (I are serious Matt, this are serious post.) But anyway, it was fun to meet new people and have a nice dinner, even though it took a while. We were supposed to write up “report cards” after finishing, though it was getting kind of late by then, and I didn’t have enough time to write everything out that I would’ve liked.

Thursday: It was cold in the morning, so I wore a jacket. It was also more annoying. I was the only person from my team actually in the office, and a bunch of stupid things happened in the morning. There was also a conference call that seemed to last aeons and didn’t actually resolve anything. But at least stuff is mostly working, which is sometimes all you can ask for.

Tuesday, always a fun day. There were relatively ordinary work things at first. Then we heard something that sounded really weird. Not bad, just unusual, but there’s no way we’ll get the full story until next week. Anyway, we also had a really odd problem later with a new test box. “Why won’t this apache stay up for more than a couple of minutes? There’s nothing in the logfiles.” “Oh wait. The ‘check for stale NFS mounts’ cron job is still running every couple of minutes. And there aren’t any NFS mounts on this machine any more.” This wasted some time, but at least it all got fixed.

It rained a little in the evening, which is always nice to see. tvtropes will suck up an enormous amount of time if you let it. I’d heard it was a terrible time waster from xkcd, but I’d never been there until tonight. One of the top results from a search for some stuff was on tvtropes, so I followed the link and read pages from the site for about 20 minutes. Oops. I thought the site was just about TV thanks to the name, but no, it also covers books, comics, and video games.

Instead of rock tomorrow night, Stephanie and I are going to Scottsdale to have dinner with a couple of her friends. This should be interesting/new.

Monday! I didn’t have to go to work, which was nice. I bought a couple of bags of canned goods and dropped them off at the local food bank. Then I ate lunch and spent some time reading. Monster Hunters International isn’t great literature, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun, and there’s a Sluggy Freelance reference on page 131. (A team of monster hunters has a mini-lop bunny with a switchblade as its mascot/badge. Sluggy’s mini-lop is kind of a badass.) Anyway, I read, amused Moira, and had dinner, and that was pretty good. Plenty of work to do tomorrow. . . .

Lots of stuff to catch up on. So: Friday was pretty normal at work, though there were a few last-minute things that had to be done, and there were only a couple of us in the office. Anyway, Stephanie had wanted to see my office for some time, so she came by at around 4:30pm. She had to sign in and get a temporary badge, but I got to show her my area of the cube farm and all of the other interesting places on the floor where I work. (There aren’t that many of them.)

Saturday, I went out and got groceries. Stephanie made dinner for both of us, then we went out to the recently opened Tempe Town Lake bridge and walked across it and around the paths there. That was kind of interesting.

Sunday, Stephanie took me out to lunch at The Vig since she’d bought a coupon from Phoenix Deal Chicken earlier. The food’s really pretty good there. It’s a little more expensive than some other places, but that’s all right. After that, I drove over to Bookman’s in Mesa, because it’s been quite a while since I’ve been to a used bookstore. I bought $8 worth of cheesy sci-fi titles, including one (Monster Hunter International) that Steve recommended.

I’ve got the day off tomorrow. Wheee! Not sure what I’ll end up doing, but it should be more fun than going to work. . . .

Wednesday was full of pretty ordinary work things. No protesters or weirdness. But then when I got home, I tried to use Bluetooth on my phone, and it totally didn’t work. Spent at least ten minutes trying to figure it out and got nowhere. Then I tried to call the local Chinese takeout place, and couldn’t get through. After about another ten minutes, I was able to place an order, but they must’ve been totally swamped, as they said it’d take 45 minutes to get there. No worries. I then managed to get Bluetooth working right before Steve showed up. Kernel 2.6.39.1 apparently had some sort of Bluetooth problem, but 3.0.3 didn’t. So simple, yet it wasted far too much time.

Stephanie also showed up, and the food eventually got there, so we had a fairly good dinner and Rock Band 3. I’d seen that “Through the Fire and Flames” was available for download, so I got us that. It’s pretty long and complicated. It’s also a lot of fun if you like heavy metal at all and you’re not playing guitar. We called it a bit of an early night, though.

Thursday, they wanted a bunch of stuff done at work. But it was all possible to do, even though one of the things they wanted to have changed was in the bottom of a filing cabinet in a disused directory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”.

No one seems to know what’s going on for Halloween, though. Maybe we’ll figure something out soon.

Monday had one problem: Two text messages from work had apparently gotten stuck somewhere, and they got delivered at 3:30am and 3:50am, over 24 hours late. This was really annoying since they came through with the “this is high priority, deal with this now” ringtone and woke me up for no reason.

Monday itself was fairly normal. Stephanie and I went to the first Tempe Symphony concert of the season on Monday night. They played Beethoven’s Symphony #1, which was interesting and fairly well done, even though it’s not as famous or catchy as his later compositions. We left at the halftime intermission, though, because it was 8:30pm at that point and we both had to go to work on Tuesday.

Tuesday was pretty normal at work. It was great to not get any delayed trouble tickets, at least.

While waiting for Stephanie to show up on Tuesday, I saw this small protest march. Didn’t have time to talk to the marchers. Didn’t have my real camera with me, so the picture quality’s terrible. But I guess people are still protesting, even though I’m not sure that it’ll do any good.

Anyway. The $5 debit card fee that B of A is starting to charge has really annoyed a lot of people, hence the old cartoon.

Friday didn’t really have all that much going on. The “Occupy Phoenix” protesters marched downtown that day at 4pm, and they went right by the building I was in. No real trouble, though, and they didn’t leave a mess, although they did leave some messages scrawled in sidewalk chalk.

Saturday, I went and bought a new mouse. This was relatively cheap, and so far, it’s worked just fine. Stephanie cooked dinner—tuna noodle casserole, vegetables, and watermelon.

Sunday, I got a trouble ticket at about 3:30am. I looked at it and said, “Whaaaat? This can wait until I’m awake.” So after I woke up, I looked at it and saw that it had actually been submitted at about 3pm on Saturday. And I didn’t get any notification until over 12 hours later. Argh. I was finally able to figure out that the user had eventually made everything work, but the whole thing made me wonder what’s really going on with the whole helldesk system. I’ve gotten text messages 12 hours later than they were sent a few times, but those were personal texts, not work texts. Sigh.

Well, I made dinner (chicken, couscous, and steamed vegetables). Stephanie came over to watch “X-Factor”, because apparently, her D/A TV converter stops and pixelates things far too often. My cable box doesn’t generally do that. I’d never seen the show before, but I watched some of it. It’s awfully overemotional, and not many of the songs the judges picked are anything I’d listen to. I’m not sure if they’re trying to manufacture drama, but I can’t really get interested in it.

Lots of stuff going on. The picture is because Aaron said he was “quitting caffeine cold turkey”, and not quite succeeding.

Tuesday: relatively normal at work, and there was trivia afterwards. Saw almost everybody (minus Nathan and Trevor) and heard all the stuff about what’s been going on. Stephanie’s apparently planning some sort of charity concert at her work, and trying to find musicians and herd them. Zach believes that there will never be a single-payer health care system in the USA, no matter how good of an idea it might be. Nobody knows where or when the Halloween thing is going to be just yet.

Wednesday: Started out with a bang as a stupid helpdesk ticket showed up at 5:58am. Then as I was fixing that, I saw some other stupid things happening with the database. It looked annoying, but not critical, so I took a shower and made lunch so that I could get on the bus. While I was on the bus, it went critical, so one of my co-workers disabled something. So when I got in to the office, I got a chorus of “OH NOES EVERYTHING ARE BROKEN FIX IT FIX IT!!!1!” from people. Even though I hadn’t had anything to do with whatever caused the problem in the first place. So I had to find the cellphone# for the co-worker who’d made the change, then tell the people who were annoyed to call him, not me, because I had no idea of what he’d changed. That pile of hassle ate most of the morning.

After that, I tried to track down a problem that’d been bugging us for a while. Machines 1 and 2 were both in VLAN 21. They couldn’t see each other, even though they really should’ve been able to. After far too many phone calls to too many people, a guy in Systems finally said, “Oh! All of the reporting tools say machine 2 is in VLAN 21. However, it’s really in VLAN 33. Um. Let’s fix that.” After they did that, it all started working, which was a big relief.

Late that afternoon, I got a really important change request that had to be done ASAP. “I can start this, and I can get this totally done tomorrow morning. OK?” They said that was OK.

At least Stephanie, Steve, and I got to get pizza and wings after work. That didn’t quite make up for it, but it was still fun. Steve’s been putting in a lot of hours there thanks to a recent software release, but they’ve been buying dinner for all the employees if they have to stay late. We had Rock Band 3, but we stopped at 8:40 instead of 9:00.

Thursday: Much less annoying, mostly. I got another really important change request right as I walked in the door which said, “Remember what we wanted yesterday? We actually want something totally different from that.” I was glad I’d only done about half the work on it, because I didn’t have as much to throw out. And after I finished that and produced some test data, they said, “Oh! We actually want something different from what we said the first two times!” sigh. At least they were eventually happy with it all, which is what really counts.