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. . . .

Saturday: normal weekend stuff, mostly. Did laundry, got groceries, amused Moira. Stephanie and I went to Volcano Buffet with Angel and Charles. This time, it was mostly the same as last time—mild broth on one side, medium-spicy broth on the other, beef, pork, fish balls, shrimp, oysters, veggies, and so forth. I saw that one of my chopsticks had a split in its butt end, so I tried to break the split piece off. This was a really bad idea. A sliver of bamboo ended up directly under my right thumbnail, which hurt. A lot. I couldn’t get it out, either. Charles volunteered to drive to a nearby evil Wal-Mart to get a pair of tweezers. I was able to clamp down on the pain after a couple of minutes, but it was still a relief when he showed up and I was able to remove the sliver. I can see why they used to torture people with bamboo slivers under their fingernails.

This was sort of embarrassing, but at least the food and conversation were good. We were there for at least two hours before we called it a night.

Thursday, the department head took a few of us to the hockey game, which was really pretty fun. The Coyotes played scrappily, but couldn’t do more than tie the game in regulation, and they lost the shootout. I saw a beautiful goal by Gilbert Brule in the second period, though, so that was neat.

Saturday, I went over to Stephanie’s for dinner, and we finally got to see “Babylon 5: Thirdspace”. This was interesting. I’m not sure which series we’re going to watch next, though, since we’ve just about exhausted the Babylon 5 stuff that’s available. Buffy the Vampire Slayer? That might work.

Sunday, not that much happened. Moira threw up in the middle of the morning, always fun. I got groceries and made dinner, then did some reading and played some old video games.

Then I went over to Stephanie’s for Rock Band 3 and dinner with Steve. Stephanie had cooked a ton of food, so we feasted on stew, chicken with tequila, and pizza. Apparently, Steve doesn’t have any kids living with him now, so it’s just him and his dogs. And he said, “The first time Joy came over, we took the dogs for a walk. Now, every time she comes over, the dogs want to go for a walk.” Well, dogs know how to manipulate their owners.

Thursday: More work stuff, but Stephanie had given me leftovers from dinner, so at least lunch was taken care of. The coffee pot was empty, so I went to make more coffee. I found a package of coffee that was the right size and was sealed, but contained no coffee at all—just air. Quality control? What’s that? At least there were full packages of coffee available.

I was going to take the day off on Friday, but I’ll have to call in to work for a half-hour meeting. I think days off will be few and far between until the project gets finished. This won’t be fun, but it’ll be something we have to deal with, which is not always the most fun thing in the world.

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.

And then, it was the usual Wednesday night Rock Band 3, though Stephanie didn’t stay past dinner. Steve’s been having to work crazy hours. Zach showed up around 7:30pm since he was in town having dinner with other people. Steve said, “Yeah, I’ve been working a lot. But the boss said we’d get compensated well once everything starts working!” “Did you all get that offer in writing?” Zach said. “Um, no,” Steve replied. “You’re not going to get compensated,” Zach said, and everything I’ve seen about promises from management tells me that Zach is right. I hope Zach isn’t right, of course, but I fear that he is.

Thursday: It seemed like I couldn’t get five minutes’ peace all morning. The raft of requests didn’t let up all day, and culminated in somebody saying, “We noticed (problem) hours ago! Fix it! Now!” at 4:15pm. I just barely managed to find out what was wrong and fix it before leaving.

And, of course, I have to get up at 4am tomorrow to do some semi-complicated stuff with some servers.

Saturday: We didn’t really do all that much, but Stephanie bought some Mexican food for us for dinner. Then all of us except Dad went to the Christmas Eve service at a nearby church. This was relatively normal until the very end of the service, when the pastor said, “We hope you will join us for Easter service tomorrow.” Everyone started laughing like crazy. “I’m sorry. Christmas service is tomorrow. This is the third service I’ve done today; I’m a bit tired,” he continued.

Sunday: Christmas! I got up early to make edible penguin appetizers. (Note: Using “colossal” olives for these is not a great idea; “extra large” olives work better.) Everybody gathered at my place, where we had coffee and presents. Everybody got all kinds of stuff. I gave out magnetic pens to everybody with their books and CDs and page-a-day calendars. I got some books, a sweater, and several gift cards. Moira got a pull-back cat toy and a can of cat food. She liked the toy, at least.

Then we went to Stephanie’s for lunch, where we had leftovers from Saturday night. This worked out well. Then we all went back to my place, and I put the turducken in the oven and spent some time fooling around before it was time to get all the side dishes ready. Steve and Joy came over, and they brought crackers and several interesting cheeses. We had the penguin appetizers, which everyone liked. Then it was time for dinner. We had turducken, shrimp stuffed with crab, brioche, salad, and some of the red wine we got from Casavino earlier. Stephanie and Joy had brought Jello, pudding, and cookies, so we had tons of dessert too. We all had a good time (and ate way too much), so everybody was happy.

Monday: This started off with an attempt to mail all of the presents my parents got home. Of course, most of the places that mail things were closed. We finally found a place. For lunch, Dad attempted to make a “turducken sandwich” out of various leftovers. It apparently worked out well. Not much else was going on, so Stephanie came over, and we all watched “Babylon 5: A Call To Arms”. Then we all went out to dinner at Sweet Tomatoes.

Not a bad day, or a bad end to a vacation. The parents are leaving tomorrow, and I’ve got to go back to work tomorrow. (I usually take the time between Christmas and New Year’s off as a sanity-preserving measure, but that’s not possible this year.) Ah well.

Wednesday: More pretty ordinary work things. Then we had Rock Band 3, with Chinese food, though my phone dropped its connection twice while I was calling the restaurant to order. We also had Aric as well as Steve. This was pretty good, though Stephanie and I had more problems than I thought we’d have singing harmony vocals.

Thursday: I was the only one from my team in the office. This could’ve been bad, but it really wasn’t. The worst problem was that a bunch of files weren’t where they should’ve been. After far too long, we found out that somebody in another department hadn’t imported those files, and everything worked right after he imported them.

I’ve gotten the last Christmas card sent out. Now I guess it’s time to wrap presents and decorate the tree. . . .

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.

Wednesday, I actually had the day off. Still had a bunch of stuff to do. Stephanie and some of her cow-orkers held a charity concert during their lunch hour, so I drove out to see that. The flutist made a bunch of mistakes in the first song, but the songs after that had fewer mistakes. They all sang “We Are The World” twice, since they thought some people would only hear half the concert. But they raised about $220 for charity, which was pretty good.

After that, I ran a few errands, then later that evening, Steve came over for the usual Wednesday night Rock Band 3. Stephanie didn’t show up since she’d planned some sort of Girl’s Night Out that night. Things were relatively ordinary, though Steve said that I should keep the title for my condo in my name only, just in case stupid things happen. He’s currently paying the mortgage for his ex-wife’s house, which he isn’t living in, and his own house, so he’s sort of got a good point. The legal system isn’t supposed to be biased against men, but in divorce or family court, men have a hard time getting anything that remotely approximates fairness.

Thursday and Friday, there were stupid things at work, including some people who wanted something pretty complicated done, and first told us about this complex thing at 4pm on Friday. Yeah. That’s a really good idea there.

Saturday, at least there was no work, but there was plenty of stuff to do at home. Like laundry and finding out which one of the fans in my computer was making horrible noises, then replacing it.

That night, Stephanie took us out to dinner at Denny’s. Then we went to try to find a DVD+-RW that’d work with her computer, since her DVD+-RW is showing signs of impending doom as it occasionally refuses to eject. Of course, her computer is pretty superannuated, so this was difficult, since it only has IDE ports and Fried Hardware no longer sells IDE DVD+-RW drives. I have a spare IDE DVD+RW that still works fine, but she wanted to be able to write -R discs too, so we settled on a USB2 drive. It worked, but her machine doesn’t have many USB2 ports since it’s old.

Sunday, the major excitement was going to Nathan’s, since Miguel is in town and wanted to see everybody. We got there fairly early, and brought chips, salsa, and beer. Other people showed up a bit later, with pizza, salad, dessert, wine, shrimp, and vegetables. We saw some of the Bengals-Ravens game, which featured some pretty terrible football mistakes. We also played some Quiz Bowl packets. This is never easy for me, since most of the questions are about TV, movies, and sports.

Trevor had an idea that we tried out: He made up several 8-song Pandora playlists (“80s Hits”, “90s Pop”, “Showtunes”, “Classic Rock”. . . .) and then had all of us submit one song. He had Pandora create a playlist based on each song that we’d submitted. Then we took all of the collected playlists and played “Name That Tune” with them. The results weren’t quite what we’d hoped for with the submitted songs—several of us generated playlists full of really obscure songs that nobody had ever heard of. But it did point out that Miguel and Kelli know more about pop music than any of us, since they could name most 1980s and 1990s songs that were reasonably popular in 1 to 3 notes/chords.

Anyway, things should be back to normal. Looking forward to time off soon, yay. . . .