Wednesday: had a long meeting about all the stuff that needed to be done at work. This really wasn’t all that useful for me, but maybe it was for other people. They’re not budging on the due date for the project, even though two of the most experienced people have left, which is really nice to see. At least we heard that our corporate overlords are thinking about not doing a really stupid thing they said they wanted to do.

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.

This has got to be the silliest Nativity scene anyone’s ever thought of. Like, whoa, dude, three wise Darth Vaders? Bogus!

Unfortunately, we all found out today that Larry’s found another job, and he’s actually taking this one and leaving in a couple of weeks. This will make things interesting, since he’s involved with a bunch of important stuff. It seems as if the people who have other options have found different jobs or are trying to find different jobs, which is a bad sign. Not sure where it will all end. . . .

Anyway. There’s been surprisingly little time for writing anything recently, mostly because Friday and the weekend had way too much work stuff going on.

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.

Wednesday: Lots of stuff at work. Most annoying was a new project, which I finally got a chance to start on, which is going to take a lot longer than I thought because of a bunch of design decisions made years and years ago. At least it isn’t insanely urgent yet.

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.

Monday: We both had the day off, so Stephanie took me to dinner at the Volcano Buffet, where we got the “hot pot”. The waiter brings out a small stove and a bowl of broth, and you put meat and vegetables into the broth until they’re cooked. This was interesting, since I’d never done it before. The food was pretty tasty, though the spicy side of the bowl had a whole lot of seeds or something in it. This made almost everything I cooked and ate in the spicy side have a very crunchy texture, which was a little odd. The waitress seemed to be impressed that I ordered “medium hot” for the broth and was able to handle it.

The restaurant was pretty crowded, and they apparently do karaoke starting at about 7pm. I hadn’t known that. But a large table full of people were enthusiastically belting out songs in Cantonese. The waitress asked me if I wanted to sing, and said, “We also have English songs!” when I demurred. (I’m not prepared for karaoke right now, unless it’s something that I’ve sung before in Rock Band.)

Tuesday: A bunch of stuff at work. Plus, of course, there are only two of us in the office for the rest of the week, because other people wanted vacation. This could get annoying.

Hosni Mubarak can be rearranged to spell “A Bum Honks Air”. Others have said that this Year In Review column is more depressing than most, but I thought it was funny enough.

Anyway, it’s New Year’s Day, and that’s at least pretty good. Friday, I got to leave work a bit early, because everyone else was leaving too.

Saturday was mostly normal, but I did get a panicked mail from work about something sort of stupid. This was mostly easy to fix. The person requesting help was grateful, though, which is always nice to see. I brought champagne over to Stephanie’s place, where we had chicken soup and leftovers for dinner. I got a text message at 11:45pm that woke me up, and I thought it was from work, but it was actually from Marcus (who I haven’t actually heard from in aeons.) Anyway.

Sunday hasn’t had all that much. Good to have a relaxing day after everything, and before the rest of the new year leaps on us with fangs bared.

Otters Otters Otters!!1! (video, requires Flash to play.) Anyway, Friday was OK, even with minor amounts of stupid. There’s other stuff I’ll have to do later, of course, but at least I get a three-day weekend.

So. Wednesday: I was the only person from my team in the office, because the other two people were sick or working from home. This wasn’t too bad and could’ve been a lot worse. The helpdesk gave me a ticket with “User joebob can’t log in.” There is no user named joebob. In fact, “joebob” was part of the user’s password, and it took much longer than it should’ve to find out what the user’s actual username was, so I could reset the password and send the user the new one.

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.

The giraffes at the Phoenix Zoo, waiting to be fed.

Tuesday! Well, I had to work, but it was mostly OK. Not too many trouble tickets, got some reading done on the bus, and got some actual useful work done. Except my keyboard threw a hissy fit while I was trying to do some minor updates to some stuff, which has never happened before. It didn’t take long to fix. It was just weird. There weren’t many people in the office; almost everyone is on vacation.

Epic stupid is happening to a guy who thought he could swindle gamers out of their money (contains swearing and mispelled words). Penny Arcade got involved. This will not end well for the guy who delivered terrible customer service. In fact, it should stand as an example of “How not to treat customers when everything you send them can be broadcast to the Internet with minimal effort.”

I’d hope that people would learn from these real-life examples of how not to do things. Nobody ever seems to. Willa Cather said, “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as if they had never happened.” There just might be only two or three dumb marketing mistakes, repeating in the same fashion.

Lots of stuff has happened over the last few days.

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.