So: What would you do if you were a small squad of 31st-century mercenaries trapped on a hostile planet with no assets besides pointy sticks and a 500-pound ambulatory talking poop ball? If you’re Kevyn Andreysn, you find a way to win. Even if you have to deal with carnivores, losing your clothes, forest fires, and the occasional zombie uprising. There’s a lot to like in the story—metric tons of humor, plenty of action, and romance. What makes the story stand out from the other comics in its class is Tayler’s writing. Schlock Mercenary has always had foreshadowing, details mentioned offhand being really really important a few strips down the road, social commentary, arc words, and more bad jokes than you can shake a small mammal at. And somehow, Tayler makes it all work together, and makes it mostly make sense. Because of that, I’m going to buy myself a copy.

For what it’s worth, there’s a contest going on where if you write a blog about the book, you could win a free copy. Yeah, full disclosure, I’m participating in that contest. I’ve been reading Schlock Mercenary since roughly July 2000, I’ve bought a bunch of the books, and I’ve never regretted spending a minute or so every morning reading the comic.

Friday after work, I picked Stephanie up from the airport. She was kind of tired from the trip and the conference.

Saturday, not that much happened. Sunday, we went to meet Nacho and Luly at Rocket Burger, which was actually pretty good. They have a large set of coolers with hundreds of varieties of gourmet pop. Nacho thought that was really cool. I did too, since I got to try Diet Dr. Cane, which is really pretty good.

I finished reading David Zindell’s Ea Cycle. It was OK. Not insanely great, actually not as good as his previous Requiem for Homo Sapiens trilogy, but it was worth reading. Even if the protagonist is sort of a Mary Sue. The last 2 books in the series haven’t been released in the USA yet, so I had to pay too much to have them shipped from booksellers in Australia and the UK. Fair dinkum, mate, we’ll throw a fantasy potboiler on the barbie for ya!

Not really that much happened Monday. This can be a good thing.

So Stephanie picked up the chicken, and when Steve got here, we all attacked it like starving Chihuahuas on a side of beef. Well, maybe a little less messily. It was pretty good. Then I showed Steve my attempts to get TV-out working with the nouveau driver, and was partially successful. I made the mouse cursor disappear again, though. Oops. No matter. Then we spent some time on Rock Band 3, and Stephanie wrote down a bunch of people’s individual scores so we could keep track of how we were doing from week to week.

Thursday: More work stuff. I got a few useful things done. I didn’t get any response on the stuff that I thought everyone wanted to hear from me about. I microwaved some hearty peasant fare leftovers for lunch, and people said, “Wow! That smells really good!”

Started reading The City and the City on the bus ride home. So far, it’s a police procedural set in a fictional Balkan city with some decidedly weird things going on. Interesting, but I’ve barely scratched the surface of it.

And when I got home, I started playing around with the nouveau module. Apparently, if you put the line Option "HWCursor" "off" into your xorg.conf , any attempt to change anything with xrandr will cause X to die. I thought this’d be a quick and easy way to work around the disappearing cursor problem. Nope. Further fiddling made me think there’s something unexpected/wonky going on in the interaction between SDL’s mode switching, xrandr, the nouveau driver, and possibly the NV44 videocard I’ve got. This is annoying, but workaroundable.

Anyway, Friday was notable mostly for going out on a long walk to Five Guys for lunch. Mmm, dead cows and potatoes. Stephanie and I bought some more tickets for the gigantic lottery, but neither of us won anything. This is only to be expected.

Saturday, I didn’t really do all that much. Moira meowed a lot. I found that a couple of books I was interested in (the 4th and 5th of David Zindell’s The Lightstone series) had never been published in the USA and had to be special-ordered from Britain. What? Well, the publishing industry isn’t supposed to be sensible. Oh well.

Sunday had more stuff going on. I got a panicked work ticket right before lunch that was actually valid, though I wondered why they hadn’t called me hours before. I did a bunch of laundry and got groceries, made sure my TuxOnIce patch worked with kernel 3.2.13, talked on the phone with my parents, and made pork enchiladas for myself and Stephanie. We then watched some more of “Firefly” and fired up Skype so we could talk to Stephanie’s parents and aunt. This was interesting, even though we had some trouble with the lighting—we were pretty terribly backlit, and I tried to fix it but couldn’t. Anyway. It all worked out. . . .

Monday was back to work. Five tons of things had happened. I didn’t get much of a chance to work on anything new, because I was busy fixing all the stuff that had broken and I didn’t get a chance to fix while on furlough.

And I found a package in the mail on Monday. It was a couple of books, from Teh Nacho. YAY! Books are always nice to get. The City and The City should be neat, whenever I can get around to reading it. (China Miéville is a Marxist, but he can write good fiction. . . .)

Tuesday, I had to suffer through a really pointless 2.5 hour conference call while trying to field plaintive requests from people who didn’t really know what they needed but wanted it all right now. Then there was another 2 hour meeting, followed by a protracted session of trying to fix an inexperienced coder’s badly specified problems.

After I got home and had dinner, I tried an experiment: I installed the latest and greatest new VPN from work. This is the 3rd VPN that they’ve used in the 3.8 years I’ve been with the company—which is a bad sign in itself. It also has the worst functionality of all of the VPNs they’ve used. Several things that my team absolutely requires are completely impossible with the way the new VPN’s set up. I don’t know who’s in charge of deciding what to use, but whoever it is is apparently a complete dumbass. I’ve heard that they switched to this new VPN because it was cheaper than the old one, but that really doesn’t make any sense, because Free as in beer and speech VPN software for all major platforms exists. If the VPN problems can’t be solved—and soon—then this’ll cost the company a significant amount of money. I have a feeling the people who make decisions either don’t know about this, don’t care about this, or are incapable of understanding this.

But apparently John Common can not pay his employees, not pay his suppliers, not pay child support, and get nothing but a slap on the wrist. <SARCASM> This really makes me think the justice system is working properly. </SARCASM> What are we supposed to do when faced with people like that? Our ancestors would’ve said, “Don’t do business with John Common, don’t work for him, and tell everybody you know he’s a slimeball,” and that would have (eventually) made it impossible for him to continue behaving like that.

However, the sheer number of people in the modern world makes that difficult. It’s also possible now to only read or watch news sources that cater to your biases, which used to be very difficult. If you think that the Alien Lizard Vampires are indoctrinating elementary-school children into building landing strips for gay Martians, you can find a website/community that believes those things and reinforces that belief. So people with various beliefs could/would self-segregate, and reject everything that didn’t come from their community as subversive or unclean or something. If you had a bunch of communities like that, and made it so that at least 40% of the people belonged to one of those communities, you’d have effectively Balkanized the body politic, and made it easy for a powerful or manipulative group to do whatever it wanted to everybody.

I don’t think we’re in that situation yet, but it’s one of those things that could happen. (In Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, this Balkanization is how the intelligent machines eventually destroyed human society, though this is a pretty minor plot point in the series.) But it does seem that right now, it’s possible for a sociopath to gain more power and have more freedom than an ethical person. I wonder how this could be fixed (or even if it could be fixed) since having amoral self-interested people controlling everything doesn’t seem like it’d work well in the long term.

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. . . .