I had a productive afternoon.
I got a long-overdue oil change, a car wash, and bought a new pair of shades to replace the pair I left at the Mexican restaurant on Saturday night.
(I was due for a new pair anyway. I'd had those things for three years and they were all scratched and I was missing one of my spare lenses.)
I got to cross two things off my To-Do list.
How I kicked off 2007:
With a nail in my tire.
Reading: The Areas of My Expertise, by John Hodgman
Playing: Final Fantasy 3, Final Fantasy 12, Guitar Hero 2
Julie: He-Man, Teela, Man-At-Arms...
Teela: Don't say goodbye. Say good journey.
Duncan: It is an old Eternian saying. Live the journey, for every destination is but a doorway to another.
Julie: Good journey.
This one's for Ian. You take care of yourself, old friend.
You know, there's just something cathartic about cleaning house -- about going through a few dozen old computers, finding out what works and what doesn't, wiping drives, keeping what may be of use at a later date and donating the rest. Sure it's boring and repetitive, and I inevitably manage to cut myself on something, but it reminds me of high school, and then my first job out of high school, and it's good honest work.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to do it every day, but it's a welcome break from mail server maintenance -- and a whole lot more inline with my salary, too.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda.
Reading: Neuromancer
Playing: Mega Man ZX
I drove 45 miles to plug a hub back in and came back to find all our E-Mail accounts completely wiped.
I need a fucking drink.
(Update, 11:40 AM: on reinstall, it looks like they're all back up, thank Baby Jesus. Also, thank Jewish God, Allah, and Tom Cruise with his witchcraft.)
(Update 2, 11:45 AM: somebody sent me an E-Mail page to inform me that the E-Mail server was down. Have you noticed how the vast majority of computer users do not think things through?)
Had a rough day at work. Now, I'm not a Catholic, and I never made it through The Divine Comedy, so I'm not really sure whether my day at work was Hell or simply Purgatory, but I can eliminate Heaven right off.
And I got to thinking...you know, as soon as I get home, I'm going to the fridge and grabbing a fucking beer.
But then I thought, you know what? No. As soon as I get home, I'm hitting the gym.
And I did, and I feel much better for it.
I think I'll reward myself with a beer.
It's 100 degrees out, but I've just moved into the server room, where it's chilly enough that I'm actually considering going back to hot coffee -- I've been drinking it cold ever since it got up to about 90 degrees out.
Of course, if I'd remembered to bring my towel today, I could probably use it to keep warm. Oh well -- I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Anyway. Come July I think I'm going to be really happy to be in here. But come next February, I think I'll have to bring a blanket.
Playing: New Super Mario Bros.
Noticed my interview's gone up on BioWare's site, so I figured that I should probably post something here other than my rather rude previous entry.
So, once again, welcome to my site, anyone who's here as a result of BioWare's writing contest; glad to have you and hope you enjoy it.
Incidentally, that interview appears to have reprinted my responses verbatim -- even my little tangent about that poetry professor I had -- and I also dig the new screenshot they took for it (though the PC looks a bit too much like Timothy). Kudos to BioWare.
Edit, 4:16 PM: Actually, they cut my closing comment, something to the effect of "Now if only Aurora were available for Linux." There may be more missing; I'll check later when I have my original E-Mail in front of me.
Now, just in case I've accidentally made a good first impression, read on to see yesterday's post!
I am so sick of these bastards. Nary a week goes by when I don't stumble across their shit: I have some sort of problem I need to fix, I do a Google search, and wind up clicking on a helpful-looking link -- not looking at the URL it leads to -- only to find these assholes wasting my valuable time again.
Look -- I'm not giving you fuckers money for tech support, especially when there's no guarantee that your answer will have any relevance whatsoever to my issue. All you're doing is wasting my valuable time -- frequently when I'm at work and time, as they say, is money. And how the hell do you manage to get all your crap on the first page of every Google search for every conceivable network troubleshooting problem?
It's a gorgeous fucking day. The high is 77 and there's a pleasant breeze. And in Phoenix in April, each gorgeous day could be the last one until fall: in a month, it'll be up over 100.
I was very disappointed that I ran late leaving the house this morning and had to drive instead of biking. But on the plus side, we had an employee barbecue at lunch.
Other than that, we're moving servers around. Lot of heavy lifting and interesting maneuvering. In-between that I'm setting up a mailserver.
Life is good.
Reading: Stranger in a Strange Land. Which, other than making me use the word "grok" more often than usual (though I've used it for years anyway), has somewhat lowered my esteem of Speaker for the Dead, which seems to crib all its best ideas from Heinlein. I guess I'm now down to liking only one thing Orson Scott Card's ever written.