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.

Trivia on Tuesday, with most of the usual crew, where we got 3rd place. During trivia, I saw that there’s a ballplayer for the Brewers who’s named Corey Hart. He was not wearing sunglasses at night, though, and Kelli thought that was terrible. I hadn’t seen Nathan in a while. He said he’s lost a lot of weight. He also said, “When I’m bored or I have nothing to do, I tend to cook elaborate meals and then eat them. I’ve been trying not to do that.” I guess everyone needs a hobby, and cooking is less bad than many things.

Wednesday, I had the day off. I did laundry, read, petted Moira, and took some canned goods to the food bank. There was going to be Rock Band 3, but Steve had to stay late at work, so it didn’t happen. Ah well.

Thursday is Patrick’s last day at work. End of an era and all that. Sigh. We’re all going to get dinner at a nearby pub after work, so I’ll probably get back late and won’t be able to write an entry up. Anyway….

Then when I got the usual Golden Eggroll food, they said, “Um, it’ll take longer than usual. OK?” I really didn’t have much choice, so I said OK. Moira meowed so much and so often that I gave her some canned food to quiet her down for a couple of hours. Stephanie said she’d be late because of traffic. Steve got here on time, so we talked about video cards and TVs. Stephanie got here late, but before the food showed up.

So we ate, then played some Rock Band 3, and that was fun. What wasn’t fun was not being able to go to sleep that night. Every time I was on the verge of snoozing, somebody started yelling loudly in the parking lot and/or Moira started meowing. I finally sacked out around midnight.

So, on Thursday, I was drinking coffee like the above kitten in order to stay awake. There were some minor kerfluffles and some odd-sounding database stupidity. Aaron said he was going to have a party on Friday for the hockey game (Coyotes in round 2 of the playoffs for the first time ever! AHWOOOOO!!!!) but I’m not going to be able to go to that. His house is a long way away, and I’m still on call this week. Guess I’ll watch at least part of the game from my couch, since there’s no way I’ll be able to afford tickets.

Last Tuesday, we learned that Patrick’s quitting. He said he wasn’t happy with the long-term prospects at the company, tired of the immense pigheadedness of corporate, and really wanted to go somewhere else and do iPhone development. Wonderful. What does this mean for ordinary peons like me?

Wednesday, there was no rock. Instead, there was an HOA meeting. I went, but it was really mostly useless. Not many people were there. Officers were elected. One cantankerous old coot complained and complained and complained about everything he could think of. This is pretty normal; some retirees with too much time on their hands do this and expect everyone to cater to them. Don’t know what you can do about that. I was just glad when the meeting was over.

Friday, the big excitement was the farewell lunch for Dan. Dan’s moving back to Pennsylvania, because he wants to do some sort of self-sufficient small farm hippy thing while working from home doing iPhone development. Larry was there too—he said that he’d just handed in his 2-week notice at WebPT, because, “It was boring as hell working there, the management were idiots, and I wanted to go somewhere else and do iPhone development.” OK then.

Everyone seems to want to do iPhone development, which seems odd to me. Real computers can do everything an iPhone can do, and more, for less money, and more easily. The only real draw is that you can fit an iPhone in your pocket, and you can’t do that with a real computer yet. Well, Apple’s spent a lot of money on marketing, which convinces a lot of people of a lot of things that aren’t necessarily true.

Saturday, Stephanie and I went to see “Legend of Zelda: The Symphony of the Goddesses”, which was a concert where an orchestra played a bunch of music from the Zelda series of video games. The guy who arranged the music talked briefly before each part of the program, and scenes from the various games played on a big video screen behind the orchestra. The theatre was fairly crowded, and there were a lot of people wearing video game T-shirts among the more formally-dressed folks. The orchestra played well, and the music was interesting. I’ve only played the first 3 Zelda games, though, so I couldn’t really appreciate the music from the later games as much as others might’ve.

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.

Work actually hasn’t had that much happen this week. We’ve got a new employee on the team—this will be really useful later on, and will take some of the pressure off the rest of us. Of course, it took several days for them to actually get his network login and password to work properly.

In non-work stuff, Tuesday, we went to trivia and saw everyone. Apparently, Zach’s younger brother Malachi isn’t just visiting, he’s moved to Casa Grande and is staying for an extended period of time. I’d thought he was just visiting for a week or so. Ah well. Kelli said that Moira had been good while Kelli was taking care of her. (Moira’s never good while I’m taking care of her.) So that was nice.

Wednesday had some more pretty ordinary work things. Steve and Stephanie came over for Rock Band 3, though they were delayed a bit because of terrible traffic on I-10. We all dined on boneless buffalo chicken strips and red beans and rice. Steve’s job is asking him to work more overtime than I’d want to deal with, but Steve seems to be dealing well.

Thursday saw some more stuff. Stephanie wants to go to a concert on Apr. 21. The Braves are playing the Diamondbacks here from Apr. 19..22, so I’d like to see the baseball game on Apr. 22. At work, a few problems get resolved. Our new guy is still unable to log in to the corporate-approved IM system, though they finally got his mail fixed. <SARCASM>I’m glad the Gannett-approved IM system is so much easier to use and so much more reliable than the free 3rd-party IM system that all of us have accounts on for the many, many times when the Gannett-approved IM system shits itself for no reason.</SARCASM>

But: Last Sunday, Stephanie and I went to Peter Piper Pizza with John, a bunch of his friends, and the trivia group. We all dressed up in suits and formal dresses for this. OK, this was kind of weird, but what the heck—we all had fun. Stephanie and I spent some time playing skee-ball, then playing a “Terminator: Salvation” video game where the main objective was to shoot evil robots. (I didn’t think Stephanie was much on shooting evil robots, but she wasn’t too bad at it. . . .)

Wednesday, we had the usual Rock Band 3 with Steve, though we had pork chops and black beans and rice instead of Chinese food. This worked out well.

Thursday, Stephanie and I drove up to Sedona. It’s been at least 13 years since I’ve been there, so I figured it was time to go back. We got a pretty good hotel room, but it was kind of far away from the rest of town. No matter. We went to a mall and browsed around for a while. I saw some interesting-looking art, but it was priced too high for me to buy it. Most art is. Maybe someday, I’ll have enough spare time to actually work in pencil or acrylics again, and can make my own interesting-looking art for less money.

We ate at Barking Frog, which was actually a lot better than the one horrible review on Google made it sound. (The waitress did forget to bring me the drink I’d ordered, but that drink didn’t show up on the bill, so no worries.) That was about it—we’d gotten there too late to do much more than poke around a bit and eat dinner.

More later.

Had Rock Band 3 on Wednesday with Steve and Stephanie, and played more songs on Hard. Stephanie was highly caffeinated, so she sang a lot. Steve didn’t think he could make it that night, but was able to. Thursday, Stephanie and I went out to eat at a nearby Mexican restaurant. This was pretty good, and not all that expensive.

At least I wasn’t on call, and I managed to get a few things done, like updating a bunch of stuff on a bunch of machines and fixing a script that writes out a bunch of stuff. I updated the Tux On Ice patch for kernels 3.2.1 through 3.2.11 page with additional info and such.

I also found that you can’t have a /usr separate from / any more without doing silly things with initramfs, which made me just a bit annoyed on Friday night. I’ve had a separate /usr on my desktop for 12 years, without using initramfs. I don’t like using initrd/initramfs, because it’s yet another thing that has to be messed with and can go wrong. I don’t think the arguments in the previous link make a whole lot of sense, actually. Who cares about how Solaris does things? Also, having /usr shared across multiple machines via NFS only makes sense if you have an NFS server that never goes down. I’ve found that directly-connected IDE/SCSI/SATA disks are actually more reliable than your average NFS setup.

But anyway, thanks to work furloughs, I’m not supposed to do anything at all for work from 2012-03-18 to 2012-03-25. It’s sort of like an enforced vacation without pay. Maybe I’ll have some time to relax, do some reading, play some video games, and just do nothing over the next week. That’d be nice. . . .

Friday, I had the day off work, since I was on call the previous week. This was fun. I slept in, made good coffee, catered to Moira, and did some reading.

Saturday, I’d planned to go to the Renaissance Faire with Stephanie, Zach, and Sarah. This worked out well, but it sort of took all day. There was a whole lot of traffic. Stephanie and I got there about 10:30am, and we spent some time looking around before watching our first show, Lord Zarko’s Hypnotist Show. Lord Zarko explained a bit about hypnotism, then asked for volunteers. I volunteered to be hypnotized. (I’ve been hypnotized before, at a U of M show in 1996, and that worked well and entertained the audience, so I figured it’d work again.) As in 1996, I was a pretty good hypnotic subject. Zarko did several routines, but the best one was probably one where he had the woman to my left believe that I had pinched her butt, and had me act as though that was the funniest thing ever, while she became quite upset. (I never touched her, of course.) Zarko made it up to the woman a bit later, when he had her believe that she hadn’t seen her husband in six months, and then had her run to him, jump on him, and kiss him like she hadn’t seen him in six months.

Stephanie was in the audience through all of this, and she took a bunch of pictures. Zach and Sarah actually saw the last few minutes of the show. So we met them after the show was over, and then went to get some lunch. After that, we wandered around, looking at all the stores and crafts places. Zach wanted some tea, so we found some. Stephanie wanted to see Neidfyre the violinist (since we’d seen her a couple of years ago.) We did that. And after that, we just walked around some more. We left the faire at about 4:30, leaving Zach and Sarah there, since they’d gotten there later and wanted to look around some more.

Sunday, I did some fooling around with Tux On Ice, since the maintainer is busy, and doesn’t have time to do some stuff. I put together a Tux On Ice kernel patch for the 3.2.x kernel series that should work properly, though I’ve only tested it for 3.2.1, and only on the x86-32 architecture. Anyway. It is through small enhancements like this that progress is made in the open source world. . . .

Google informs me that the search term “bonial cranesaw” returns 0 results. This is kind of odd. Brian (pictured above, with his head in the lion’s mouth) said something about a bonial cranesaw in late 1995 or early 1996, although he was mostly spoonerizing the term “cranial bone saw” because his sister, who was going to medical school, was using one to do medical school things.

Anyway. I’ll have a bunch of stuff to do this week, but I hope I’ll be able to continue writing on a regular schedule, and not blowing it off because I have to answer panicky phone calls from work. I had to do that last night—Stephanie and I were watching an old episode of “Lost In Space” when I got an “OMG PANIC EVERYTHING ARE BROKEN!!1!” call from work, and had to go home and spend 1.5 hours dealing with stupid instead of having a relaxing weekend. Sigh. Well, this is sort of what I’ve chosen, but it still doesn’t make it easier to deal with when it happens.