journal for 2003-07-21
birthday!
My birthday was good!
Gloria handed me a little wooden treasure box. While I opened it, she sang the Zelda “opening a wooden treasure box” music. I, unfortunately, did not have the forsight to hold aloft my gift as she said, “dah dah dah DAH!” I should’ve! It was the Ocarina of Time.
So far, I can’t play much. I’m getting pretty consistant at playing the theme from “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” but apart from that, I can’t play much. I played Happy Birthday when she gave it to me, and I’ve played a few Zelda songs. It rocks.
She also gave me a Game Boy Player, which also rocks, but is hard to make sound as exciting—especially since I haven’t used it much, yet. I played a few levels of Kirby, though, and it’s darn cool. I’m tempted, now, to acquire some Hori SNES-style GCN controllers. The GCN’s D-pad is abysmally tiny and the control stick is no good for digital control. It’s be nice if the Hori controller was available OTC, but I’m afraid I’ll have to import it. Still, $20 is a fair deal.
We went and rented some stuff from Hollywood. I was mildly annoyed to note that they only had the first Nightmare on Elm Street and only the first and last Friday the 13th’s. We rented none of those; instead, we got Die Another Day (it was good fun) and May (it was good weirdness) and the Hulk for GCN, which has been OK but a little repetitive so far.
We had planned to go to Tulum for dinner, but lo! They aren’t open on Sundays. We were both a little bummed, but we headed over to Ray’s and got some tasty stuff there. I was quite satisfied with my ‘boli and slice.
After dinner we watched May and ate some of my cake. Cake is good, and this cake was no exception. It’s an ice cream cake from the Hedgehog; the bottom is chocolate, then there’s some crumbled up oreos, then the top is coffee break. Coffee break is oreos in coffee ice cream. Tasty! My mom stopped by and brought me some more stuff (woo!) and I forced some cake on her and sent her home with a piece for dad.
It was a good day.
first day back
Work was nutty. At first it seemed nice and calm, but by lunch I had a pretty full plate. A few things had broken just after I left, but no one told me – presumably because they wanted to let me be. That was really nice and thoughtful of them, and I appreciate it a lot, but it means that fixing two weeks of crap was harder!
The day was alright, for the most part. I went to T.G.I. McScratchy’s for lunch and had a tasty burger. Toward the end, it got a bit annoying, though. One of the thorn-in-my-side projects got more annoying when I realized that the spec for the most recent change request had been overhauled again. I sent out a plea for accord.
After work, I came home (as usual) and Gloria had made stuffed French toast. It was phenomenal. She’d stuffed the toast (made with cinnamon bread) with mascarpone and then covered it with chopped apple and cinnamon. It was just awesome. We also had fake sausage from Boca. They make some rocking fake sausage, I tell you what.
the rain
I went for a nice short bike ride on the tow path and had a little shower when I got back. I started reading about Test::MockObjects, which looks like it will be quite useful. It started to pour down rain, and there was plenty of thunder and lightning. As I sat reading, Trevor IM’d me and asked me to check if the mailserver was down. It was, and I decided I’d really ought to go in.
Gloria insisted on giving me a ride, which was pretty darn awesome (it saved me half an hour in the rain each way). I got in and got the mailserver rebooting quickly, but I noticed, to my horror, that there was a leak in the server room and water—a lot of water—was dripping onto the phone system. Now that I think of it, I only noticed because I went to see what was in the hold music CD player; it was wet, and I looked up.
Now, phone systems are pretty volty things, so it was with some trepedation that I picked up the handset and paged the building to tell everyone that phones were going offline. Water was dripping down on the amps and spraying onto me, blown by their fans (or something). I turned off the UPS, pulled plugs, and tried to get everything dangerous out of the way. The voicemail computer, sitting under the phone equipment, was also quite wet, and I tried to disconnect it from everything. Its serial cable was screwed into it, and the screw wouldn’t come loose. I finally decided to take off the case, but the case screwed seemed to have been attached by a vindictive robot. Finally, with a wrench, I got it open and pried the serial cable look; its screw had been bent.
I got all the loose stuff into the server room and we put up a tarp. It was not a fun experience, but I’m really glad I went in; I hate to think what would’ve happened if it kept leaking on the phone system!