This harp at the MIM was sort of creepy-looking. Anyway, Tuesday had relatively ordinary work things, along with a bizarre problem. Corporate wants some stuff done. They are unwilling or unable or incompetent to send me the files necessary to get that stuff done. So, I have to subscribe to an automated service that’ll theoretically [...]

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Monday! And, as usual, Americans are angry about pretty much everything. Not sure why. While it’s certainly tempting to blame everything that’s going badly on the political party or tendency that you don’t like, I’m pretty sure the problems go much deeper than any political party. Self-interest and being a complete @#%^ for the sake [...]

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Friday! I didn’t have to work, since I had an on-call day coming from being on call all last week. So that was nice. I dropped off some canned food and dried rice at the food bank, ran some errands, spent some time reading on the couch with Moira, and checked up on Stephanie’s cats. [...]

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Tuesday had more than the usual number of things at work. “Single-sign on” is a myth; there are at least two LDAP/AD/whatever databases, and while most things use one of them, the helldesk system uses another one. This means that the password I normally use for work systems is completely out of sync with the [...]

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Monday. Everyone’s favorite day. Well, it wasn’t all that bad, considering. We got news that some people from corporate said, “We think the architecture you’ve built for your site isn’t adequate. So we’ve gone with another vendor for our new initiative. They have fewer problems than you guys have. We think that in 10 weeks, [...]

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Tuesday started off with a bang as I woke up at about 1:50am to a call from work saying that a bunch of stuff had gotten fouled up beyond all recognition and could I please fix it? I tried. At least some of it worked. The problem never should’ve happened in the first place, naturally, [...]

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My phone was ringing off the hook today with people complaining about various things at work. I thought I’d fixed them after finding a problem and killing a bad query that was sucking up a bunch of CPU for no reason. Nope, people still said that things were slow. Then it was time to take [...]

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Monday had a lot more to do with this JPEG than it really should’ve. Apparently, somebody changed something somewhere in the network config months ago. As a result, some third-party people won’t be able to get access to the stuff they need to get access to in time to meet their deadline. Of course, I [...]

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Here’s a shot of a guy playing some large handbells with sticks. This is actually the easiest way to deal with larger handbells, since they can weigh over 20 pounds each. Thursday, I had to go to work. There were many, many extremely stupid “security notices” from Qualys, who are probably the least competent technical [...]

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Saturday wasn’t all that exciting. I did laundry, got groceries, wrapped presents, and sent out the last 2 Christmas cards. Yeah, I should have sent those out sooner, but I didn’t have the snail-mail address of one of the people until Friday. Sigh. Stephanie reheated a bunch of leftovers for dinner. Chicken with black bean [...]

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