nine to five, eight, seventeen zero one

February 8, 2005

I worked today, mostly from home. I popped by the office to pick up some fastnachts. Here in the Lehigh Valley, there’s a fair amount of Pennsylvania Dutch influence. The Pennsylvania Dutch are German-descended, not Dutch, and instead of Carnival or Mardi Gras, we have Faschnacht Day. Before Ash Wednesday, we eat donuts. Gloria and I had ours today. They were good – nice and plain.

i remember now

February 6, 2005

I saw Queensryche, tonight, on their “An Evening with Queensryche” tour. It was awesome. We got to the Electric Factory at about 19:15 for the 20:00 show, and the line was already around the building. Almost as soon as we got out of the cab, some guy in line handed me a can of beer. Awesome!

candelmas, catholicism, and coding

February 4, 2005

I haven’t been to Mass in quite a while, and I got to thinking that it’s a pretty good time to try to start going again. Tuesday night while Gloria was at yoga practise, I walked over to St. Anne’s and checked out the schedule. The church was closed, but I copied down the contents of their display board.

firefighting, friends, and flushing

February 1, 2005

Thursday afternoon I moved our main production database from one server to another. We’d done that before, and it was a big hassle. This time, I had experience with the process, and I made a nice plan for how to do it. I used OmniOutliner, and I really got to see how much nicer OO3 is, even for simple things. The plan was pretty good, happily enough, but of course there were complications.

progress, virtue, and the classics

January 27, 2005  🍿 💾

Today, work was less crisis-oriented than it had been. I spoke with Duan, who thinks that the current crisis at the UK plant may have been worked around sufficietly well for now. (Note to self: write up options summary tomorrow anyway.) Trevor thinks he found and eliminated the cause of the server crashes; I’m guessing this was a success since I made it past 1900 without any phone calls. I started getting some of the databases moved from one server to another, which is not something I’m excited about doing, but so far so good.

mood adjustment

January 26, 2005

I was feeling very grumpy last night. I got a hole drilled to reduce the run of ethernet cable across our floor, and I wasn’t happy with it. I looked for a simple way to give network service to the AV equipment across the room from my Airport. Basically, I want a hub that bridges back to the Airport, but everything seems to indicate that this is either expensive or inconvenient. If I want to use a wireless bridge, I have three choices.

resident evil layaway

January 25, 2005

I have really been enjoying Resident Evil 4. It is good. I really like it. I am going to buy it.

crises!

January 25, 2005

Last night, work called. “The network is down!” I was dreading the trek in to the office, but I talked someone through restarting the downed server. It went down again, later, and it’s still not clear to me just what happened, but it was annoying. At least I didn’t need to head in.

fish, beer, snow, muffins, and not-zombies

January 23, 2005

Last night, Gloria and I went to Granny McCarthy’s for their Friday fish’n’chips. It was OK. I enjoyed it, but just as an event. I think that I prefer the fish and chips at the Brew Works, but the Brew Works is noisier and more crowded. On the way home from dinner, I ran into Penn Pizza and grabbed a six of Pilsner Urquell. Brian came by and we hung out for a few hours, talking about geeky things. I showed off Rubric and Wikalong. Brian is learning how to use regular expression, and said he’s using the Sams book. I’ve heard it’s a good book for beginners, but I’ve also heard that there is no good book for beginners. I’m waiting to hear what he thinks of it, overall.

always know where your towel is

January 21, 2005

Tonight, I knew where my towel was. It was on the third hook from the shower entrance. That’s the one directly over the plug and one to the right. It was there when I went into the shower, hung on top of my locker key.