Anyway. It really hasn’t been that busy, it’s just felt a lot like it. I still have to get a bunch of Christmas cards written, wrap a bunch of presents, and put the tree up. But Friday was relatively quiet, which was really nice as the earlier bits of the week were pretty hectic.

Saturday, Stephanie’s toilet overflowed, which was just slightly annoying. At least it was relatively easy to fix and only a few things got dirty. We also watched “Babylon 5: The Lost Tales”, which was a direct-to-DVD attempt by JMS to get the series restarted again. It didn’t work, but it was interesting anyway.

Sunday, I got groceries and made dinner. That was about it. I’m OK with having a boring few days, because there are sure to be interesting and/or stupid things happening later on this week.

Wednesday, the big excitement was what seemed like a never-ending raft of trouble tickets, a couple of which had absolutely nothing to do with us. Sure, something sourced from http://example.com/stuff/ may be giving a “500 Internal Server Error” for everybody. This doesn’t mean that I can fix it, even if ten people are all yelling at me to fix it right now, because I don’t have any access to example.com’s webserver. Fortunately, it didn’t take that long to fix once we’d found the right person to talk to at example.com.

The potluck went well. People liked the penguin appetizers. Some people asked me about them while I was riding the bus to work, since I had them in a clear plastic container. There was also macaroni and cheese with bacon, which was probably tastier than the penguins even though it wasn’t as eye-catching. There were actually a few penguins left over. I was surprised at that, but I ate one and took the rest home.

Steve couldn’t show up for Rock Band, since there were terrible things happening at his work. Stephanie and I had dinner without Steve, then I played through some of Dragon Age: Origins to show Stephanie what it’s like. It takes a long time to run through the adventure, though, which is why I’ve barely touched the game in the last year.

Thursday had even more trouble tickets. I got three or four at once as I was riding the bus in to work. Only one of them was a real problem. Then, I had to deal with being the only one of the team who was actually in the office. There was a really bizarre problem with the dev site that neither Bill nor I could figure out, though we were both looking at it. We finally said, “All right, leave it for now, come back a bit later and try again.” Then I took a good look at the directories. The place where everything worked had files 1, 2, 3, and 4. The place where nothing worked had files 1, 2, and 4. One of these things is not like the other. . . . Sigh. Well, once I’d copied the missing file over, the dev site started working, and there was much rejoicing.

I’ve still got tons of things to do, though. The cat above is engulfed by bunnies; I seem to be engulfed by problems that are a lot less cute and fuzzy.

It seems like there have been five tons of things going on recently, leaving me with little time or motivation for writing a blog. But I was off work for the last couple of days, which was nice. I made these edible cream cheese/olive penguins for the potluck at work on Wednesday, and this time, I got a picture of them with the good camera. Hope people like them—they did last year, at least.

No idea what I’m going to find at work when I get back. I guess I’ll find out.

Wednesday had fairly normal work stuff. Except for the semi-panicked attempts to learn as much as possible about the huge complex system that we’ll all have to rewrite and maintain in roughly 2 months. That’s going to lead to far too much work until February, for sure. And maybe beyond that. Not much that can be done, really. And the pace of “Could you do X if you have a minute???!” requests has not slowed down one bit.

But after work, Steve came over, and we had Chinese food. Apparently, he’s now a full-time employee, which will be great for him, since he can get cheaper medical insurance. His older son Adam did something stupid, though, so that was annoying. Stephanie came over as well, though she was late. We ended up talking and looking at the ThinkGeek paper catalog instead of playing Rock Band. The catalog has a ton of interestingly weird and geeky gifts, like caffeinated marshmallows and T-shirts that say, “The book was better.” Anyway, it was different, but interesting.

Thursday, I saw some interestingly obvious stupidity:

• In this established and semi-anonymous forum, 95% of commenters hate it.
• In this non-anonymous forum where all comments that appear must be approved, 40% of commenters hate it.

So, they appear to want to turn a thriving comment section into a moribund wasteland of suck. This isn’t entirely unexpected, just. . . really stupid. And of course, we also recently learned that there are going to be furloughs next quarter. Not everybody has to take furloughs, though. People who work directly for corporate don’t have to take them. Everyone else does.

On a slightly happier note, I did my annual donation to Child’s Play tonight. Hooray for helping kids out, or something.