Friday: not all that fun, since minor crises that we couldn’t really fix kept happening all morning. And then it was Larry’s last day, which was also annoying. It seems as though all the people who have the option to leave are taking it, which sort of alarms the local management. Naturally, corporate either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that we’re losing far too many smart and experienced people.

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.

This pretty much summed up Thursday. It started off with a machine dying, then we got it back up, then an obscure important piece wasn’t working because somebody else had never set that piece to start automatically on boot. Finding this took what seemed like forever. At least I fixed the problem and got it all documented.

More epic stupid happened later, but I’m not sure how to phrase it best just yet.

At least You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, but It Helps by Tom Holt has been an amusing book to read on the bus. Colin and Cassie are both in love with the wrong people, and they’re trying to fix that, and Colin’s father has decided to sell his soul to the Devil. Also, Cassie’s firm has been acquired by some efficiency experts, so all the employees have to do assessments where they’re quizzed about their abilities to proactively synergize core competencies value-orientatedly moving forward. Some of the parody there is far too close to what I’ve heard people actually say. (Poe’s Law?) Anyway, I’m only halfway through it, and it’s got a lot of Britishisms in it, but it’s been fun so far.

Tuesday. Always fun. It seemed like there was a never-ending tide of requests and things to do. It didn’t help that one of us was sick, and one of the people upstairs is sick. Stuff is sort of coming together, not quite as smoothly or as quickly as the bosses would like, but actual progress is being made.

Then, of course, the database had a fit, and I had to get it working again. And when I was on the bus, I got a phone call saying that something really, really important had broken, and could I help fix it? Trying to talk on the phone and have someone else do semi-complex Linux tasks while on a noisy bus is not optimal. But when I finally got home and was able to look at a real computer, I found that the problem wasn’t with any system we were responsible for. Nope, some other people had done an unplanned reboot of something really important, and as a result, a bunch of stuff was completely unavailable for ~45 minutes. So naturally they called us. *sigh.

Monday had the usual raft of work-related bits of silliness. But at least I got some stuff accomplished, which is sometimes all you can do. We interviewed a guy over the phone. We really need another person since we’re stretched pretty thin. I hope we find somebody that the bosses and the team can live with pretty quickly.

And apparently my washing machine has some sort of problem with its hot-water line. I tried to do a load of laundry the other day using warm/cold, regular cycle, and it leaked water all over the floor. At least I was home, so I could mop it all up and contain the damage. I tried running a short cycle using only cold water tonight, and there were no leaks. Well, this could be a lot worse—I can still wash clothes in cold water. I wonder if I can fix this myself, or if I’ll have to call a repairman.

We’re trying to get something set up where Stephanie, Angel, Charles, and I go out for dinner this weekend. I don’t know if we’re going to the Volcano Buffet or Tao Garden or somewhere totally different yet.

Anyway, it seems like five tons of things have been happening all week, which is why there haven’t been many entries here. Let’s see. Last Wednesday, had the usual Rock Band 3 with Steve and Stephanie, which was kind of fun.

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.

Monday! This was a lot better than a regular Monday, mostly because I didn’t have to go in to work. I didn’t do all that much. Amused Moira, made dinner, checked up on Anna and Pinto. Back to work tomorrow. I’ll have a whole lot of stuff to do, plus I’ll be on call all week, but this is the price I pay for doing the job that I do, or something like that.

Quite a bit of stuff has been going on.

Friday: I almost, but didn’t quite, have the day off. I had to call in for a meeting at 10am. This only lasted a half-hour, but not too long after that, I got mail asking me to do a bunch of stuff. So I got some stuff done, but it really wasn’t quite like being off.

Saturday: Not that much work, at least. Stephanie had a bunch of books and stuff to get rid of, so we took those to Bookman’s, then took the stuff Bookman’s wouldn’t take to Goodwill. Then we went out to a Vietnamese restaurant for lunch. At least half the clientele was Vietnamese, and Stephanie said, “Matt, were you the only white guy in the restaurant?” after we’d left. I saw at least one other white guy eating lunch there, though, and the food was good.

We tried to watch “Babylon 5: Thirdspace” after dinner, but we found that the DVD was broken. Oops. So we fell back to the other DVD Stephanie had, “The Book of Eli”. This was better than I’d expected, even though the premise was ridiculous. (Over one billion copies of the Bible have been printed, so the idea that all copies of it except Eli’s have been destroyed seems just a bit unlikely.)

Sunday: Stephanie took some time off to go see her parents in San Diego, so I drove her to the airport. Then I got groceries, changed the air filter in my condo, amused Moira, and took care of Anna and Pinto. Not much else. I’m glad I’ll have the day off tomorrow.

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.