Wednesday: more stuff at work, though some of the really terrible problems have been solved. They wanted to install Bugzilla. I tried that, and found that the automatic dependency-resolving mechanisms in it don’t work. This took a while to solve. Fortunately, I’ve been through this particular rodeo before, so after manually downloading and compiling what seemed like fifty Perl modules, it all started working. Of course, nobody’s put in any real bugs yet. I don’t think anyone’s going to like it when they start getting bug reports in their mail every day.

Had the usual Rock Band 3 with takeout Chinese food with Steve and Stephanie. We tried playing songs on higher difficulty levels for the hell of it.

Thursday: Still plenty of stuff at work, including an odd mail from someone who wanted to know whether N was ready or not. Of course, I’d sent that person a mail two days ago saying, “N is on dev, please check it and make sure it’s OK, if you say it’s OK, I’ll put it on live.” I guess they forgot. It was slightly less busy than Wednesday, at least.

Finished reading You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, but It Helps. Good (mostly) triumphs, evil is (mostly) handed a funny and poetically just beatdown, and the people who are supposed to be in love with each other are (mostly) happy. I wonder what happened to the demons in the machine room, though. There might be too many Britishisms in the text for some Americans to take (“bigger than Tesco”, for instance) but it’s a bit funnier and smarter than many other books I’ve read in the past few months. And there’s a really good reason why Connie always takes two sugars in her tea. . . .

More epic stupid happened later, but I’m not sure how to phrase it best just yet.

At least You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, but It Helps by Tom Holt has been an amusing book to read on the bus. Colin and Cassie are both in love with the wrong people, and they’re trying to fix that, and Colin’s father has decided to sell his soul to the Devil. Also, Cassie’s firm has been acquired by some efficiency experts, so all the employees have to do assessments where they’re quizzed about their abilities to proactively synergize core competencies value-orientatedly moving forward. Some of the parody there is far too close to what I’ve heard people actually say. (Poe’s Law?) Anyway, I’m only halfway through it, and it’s got a lot of Britishisms in it, but it’s been fun so far.

Friday: Had to get up at 4am to move some servers. Fortunately, this all went about as smoothly as possible. At work, there were tons of things going on, including, “Instead of web development, you guys might be writing Android/iPhone apps!”. This gave us a lot to talk about. But there were only two of us there, so we spent a lot of time handling all the minor crises.

Saturday: This was the great white elephant gift exchange. We all went to Nathan’s, where we had an assortment of breakfast foods for dinner. The point of the gift exchange was apparently to find something cheap, stupid, and funny, so I sort of missed the point by bringing a stuffed narwhal and two magnetic pens. Oh well. Scott got a Justin Bieber singing toothbrush, which we all thought was just crazily horrible. I got a set of old books about life over 50 in Arizona, which I won’t be able to use for a while yet. (And by the time I could use them, the area will probably be overrun by radioactive giant slugs or something.) Anyway, it was sort of silly, but fun.

Sunday: They started doing maintenance at 8am. I thought everything had been fixed so that nothing would go wrong. Nope. I had to fix some stuff early on, then later at about 3:30, when they finished, I had to log back in and fix some more stuff. This was mostly manually getting the DB slave that’d been powered off for 7 hours back in sync and doing useful work. Made dinner, then watched “Black Sheep” with Stephanie.

Monday: More work stuff. Found out that something had broken on Sunday, but they’d told the wrong people about it, so we didn’t hear a thing about it until Monday morning. *bleah*. I found what the problem was and fixed it, then fixed the monitors so the next time this problem happens, we’ll know about it in 5 minutes and can fix it in 10. Sometimes, all you can do is improve existing processes.

Also finished reading Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. It’s sort of like a modern Lord of the Rings with more female characters, more depressing and/or realistic bits, inscrutable Japanese Elves, and things like that. I read the series in high school, college, and now, and I got different things out of it each time.

But anyway, we tried to learn everything possible from Chris. I also tried to deal with the usual raft of really weird problems, requests that made no sense, and recalcitrant Citrix clients with singularly unhelpful error messages and terrible UIs. But I got most of that stuff done.

Finished reading The Wake, the last book of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman this evening. That book is about everyone saying goodbye to Morpheus, the main character of the series. It’s been a few years since I’ve read the whole thing. Like most long and complex works, it gives you a different experience every time you read it. Well, The Kindly Ones, the second-to-last book, is “big and heavy enough to stun a burglar if you hit him with it”, which is apparently a good criterion for judging whether something’s a good piece of literature. . . .

It rained on Tuesday afternoon for a while, which is always nice to see. Tuesday had a bunch of regular work stuff, with some more fiddling with databases. They want to retrieve a bunch of stuff and populate a temp table to use later, but I think this will only take a few seconds to do. This is always a good thing. And I found a couple of things we really don’t need anymore than can be removed, which is also a good thing.

What else. . . finished reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. This was the first book Gaiman wrote, so it has less of the intense weirdness that I’ve come to expect from him, but it was still fun. It’s more. . . conventional than Sandman, and there are parts of it that seem to be informed by Hero with a Thousand Faces, but it’s still an enjoyable yarn.

Saturday was relatively relaxed. I got groceries, did some cleaning, and catered to Moira.

Finished reading Ghost Story. Well. Molly and Karrin aren’t doing all that well, Chicago’s suffering because the Fomor have been doing terrible things to the people of the city, the Corpsetaker got PWN3D, and Harry’s back among the living. OK then. The Bob/Evil Bob fight was left unresolved. This probably means that Evil Bob won, and Harry’s dealing with Evil Bob will be a reasonably big part of the next book. (This is overly pessimistic, but in the books, Harry generally has more bad luck than good luck.)

Stephanie and I both cooked on Sunday, so we pooled our leftovers for a big dinner tonight. Chicken, angel hair pasta, green chile enchiladas, potatoes, and strawberries gave us a virtual smorgasbord of food.

I’m going to the D-Backs game tomorrow night, and won’t be getting back until pretty late. This means there probably won’t be an entry tomorrow.

Sunday was a bit more relaxed. I did laundry, got groceries, and attempted to find a copy of Ghost Story by Jim Butcher, since Mom tried to send me a copy and wasn’t successful. The first bookstore I went to didn’t have any copies. I don’t know how that happened. OK, Jim Butcher’s not exactly Herman Melville, but he’s been on the NYT Bestseller List multiple times. I went to another bookstore, and they had several copies, so I bought one. Kind of odd, but that’s what you get sometimes.

Lots of stuff to do this week. Hope it’ll all work out well. . . .

Sunday didn’t really have that much that was going on. This was actually a relief. I did some reading and made dinner, and that was about it.

It took us seven months, but Stephanie and I finally finished watching the middle three seasons of “Babylon 5″. I thought the show really held up well. Even though the special effects look a bit dated, the writing and acting still work. It also helped that the show wasn’t open-ended, but constrained to a 5-year set of story arcs. That allowed JMS to plan almost everything out, do foreshadowing, and make the story flow well.