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. . . .

And then later in the afternoon, I ran into some other stuff that has no easy solution. Well, it didn’t at the time—I think I can turn the last of the tiny boxes that isn’t doing anything into a machine that’ll serve a useful purpose that another guy thought of last week. This may work, and it’s what I’ll try to do tomorrow if there aren’t any more crises that show up without warning.

Since so many of the smart and talented people at my job have jumped ship, I’ve updated my resumé in case there are people out there reading this who need somebody with my skill set.

Then I sacked out for a few hours and set the alarm, since I had to wake up at 11:30pm and had to help migrate the website we built over to the new evil corporate platform. The stuff I had to do was reasonably easy and fast. I’d fat-fingered the temporary maintenance page config, but that only took two minutes to fix. No, after that, the other people kept running into things that they weren’t ready for or hadn’t thought through. We were all on a conference call, so I was able to hear all the gormless wittering. After hearing something particularly brainless, my boss texted me, saying, “Can you believe this? Oh. My. God.” At least everything we did worked out, so I was able to go to bed at about 12:45am.

Monday: I got up late and worked from home. This mostly worked out well. Moira liked being able to sit on my lap all morning. I learned that the new evil corporate website platform has several unexpected[0] bugs. Users were noticing these bugs and calling the customer service lines. This is, of course, bad. One of these bugs was rather simple—it’d be a 3 to 5 minute fix on their end. They said, “We might have that fixed in the next 4 to 5 hours.” This whole process has been like a Dilbert comic without the humor. I’m just glad I won’t have to deal with all the stupid fallout from this over the next few weeks, and I’m very glad I canceled the account I had with the site before they took it over.

[0] Unexpected by them, that is. I usually expect there to be five tons of new bugs and prepare various contingency plans, but they didn’t.

I reheated turducken leftovers and made some rolls, but Steve couldn’t come over for the usual Wednesday night Rock Band 3 because of work. This was a bit annoying. I called it a bit of an early night.

Thursday: I was the only person in the office, again, for most of the day. One guy was still sick, and the other had multiple appointments and was only there for a few hours.

But it was mostly OK. There was an odd ticket about part of the system I’d never had to touch, though. I looked through the documentation. “If they’ve added a new category, make sure that that category has been added to the master list,” the documentation said. I did that. The new category still wasn’t visible. I groveled through the code, looked up all the keywords I could think of, and still wasn’t getting anywhere. Finally, I looked in a semi-obscure config file. Yep, I had to add the new category to that config file. @#$%. At least once I’d done that, everything started working, and I updated the documentation so the next person wouldn’t run into that silly problem.

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. . . .

Monday: Back to work, though several people were on vacation and/or working from home. I got a bunch of stuff done, but I also got a series of really frustrating, stupid errors while trying to set up a new test environment. Maybe tomorrow, some of the people who know more about that set of software can help me figure out what’s going wrong. Anyway, I tried to get rid of as many bits of leftover food as possible that night, since they’ve been piling up.

It rained a little in the evening, which is always nice to see. tvtropes will suck up an enormous amount of time if you let it. I’d heard it was a terrible time waster from xkcd, but I’d never been there until tonight. One of the top results from a search for some stuff was on tvtropes, so I followed the link and read pages from the site for about 20 minutes. Oops. I thought the site was just about TV thanks to the name, but no, it also covers books, comics, and video games.

Instead of rock tomorrow night, Stephanie and I are going to Scottsdale to have dinner with a couple of her friends. This should be interesting/new.

Stephanie also showed up, and the food eventually got there, so we had a fairly good dinner and Rock Band 3. I’d seen that “Through the Fire and Flames” was available for download, so I got us that. It’s pretty long and complicated. It’s also a lot of fun if you like heavy metal at all and you’re not playing guitar. We called it a bit of an early night, though.

Thursday, they wanted a bunch of stuff done at work. But it was all possible to do, even though one of the things they wanted to have changed was in the bottom of a filing cabinet in a disused directory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”.

No one seems to know what’s going on for Halloween, though. Maybe we’ll figure something out soon.

Tuesday: relatively normal at work, and there was trivia afterwards. Saw almost everybody (minus Nathan and Trevor) and heard all the stuff about what’s been going on. Stephanie’s apparently planning some sort of charity concert at her work, and trying to find musicians and herd them. Zach believes that there will never be a single-payer health care system in the USA, no matter how good of an idea it might be. Nobody knows where or when the Halloween thing is going to be just yet.

Wednesday: Started out with a bang as a stupid helpdesk ticket showed up at 5:58am. Then as I was fixing that, I saw some other stupid things happening with the database. It looked annoying, but not critical, so I took a shower and made lunch so that I could get on the bus. While I was on the bus, it went critical, so one of my co-workers disabled something. So when I got in to the office, I got a chorus of “OH NOES EVERYTHING ARE BROKEN FIX IT FIX IT!!!1!” from people. Even though I hadn’t had anything to do with whatever caused the problem in the first place. So I had to find the cellphone# for the co-worker who’d made the change, then tell the people who were annoyed to call him, not me, because I had no idea of what he’d changed. That pile of hassle ate most of the morning.

After that, I tried to track down a problem that’d been bugging us for a while. Machines 1 and 2 were both in VLAN 21. They couldn’t see each other, even though they really should’ve been able to. After far too many phone calls to too many people, a guy in Systems finally said, “Oh! All of the reporting tools say machine 2 is in VLAN 21. However, it’s really in VLAN 33. Um. Let’s fix that.” After they did that, it all started working, which was a big relief.

Late that afternoon, I got a really important change request that had to be done ASAP. “I can start this, and I can get this totally done tomorrow morning. OK?” They said that was OK.

At least Stephanie, Steve, and I got to get pizza and wings after work. That didn’t quite make up for it, but it was still fun. Steve’s been putting in a lot of hours there thanks to a recent software release, but they’ve been buying dinner for all the employees if they have to stay late. We had Rock Band 3, but we stopped at 8:40 instead of 9:00.

Thursday: Much less annoying, mostly. I got another really important change request right as I walked in the door which said, “Remember what we wanted yesterday? We actually want something totally different from that.” I was glad I’d only done about half the work on it, because I didn’t have as much to throw out. And after I finished that and produced some test data, they said, “Oh! We actually want something different from what we said the first two times!” sigh. At least they were eventually happy with it all, which is what really counts.

Wednesday: Pretty ordinary day at work. Steve and Stephanie came over for Chinese food and Rock Band 3. Steve’s learning all kinds of stuff about OS X and trying to shoot basketball left-handed so that he can get an edge in the new company’s periodic games of H.O.R.S.E. Stephanie and I decided to get tickets to the baseball game on Sep. 11, since prices were lower than for the game on Sep. 10. (They’re giving away a free replica World Series ring to attendees on Sep. 10.) We called it an early night, though.

Thursday: I found out that morning that Mail.app has a pretty annoying failure mode where it’ll look like it’s running just fine but won’t periodically check for new mail. This meant I missed several mails that people had sent Wednesday after about 2:30pm. Bleah. Well, it didn’t take that long to fix/fiddle with all the stuff they wanted me to fiddle with. I’m just glad nothing insanely important happened during that mailless period.

Then there was some stupidity with a request I’d made that had never been routed to the right people, so instead of being done in 2 days, it took 3.5 weeks. Kind of annoying, but that’s the sort of thing that you get every so often.

Still haven’t had much time to play around with the kernel OOPS for TuxOnIce in 3.0.3 and figure out what’s really causing it. The kludge I wrote works, but it’s not a great way to do things.

And of course, the big San Diego..Yuma power outage is causing stupid problems for Stephanie’s parents. Hope it all works out OK for them. . . .