Gloria and I went to the 10:30 Mass this morning. It was full to the gills with little children. If the little children to adult ratio had been any higher, I would have suspected that I was among a bunch of Catholics! It was hard to hear a lot of what was said over the dull roar of crying and muttering. The homily was clear, at least. It was also fairly good, I thought. It got bonus points for including the word “obeisance.”

I upgraded to Mac OS 10.3.8 last night, and this morning things kept not working or showing up funny in iTerm. Then I realized that caps lock was no longer acting like control. The upgrade has broken uControl, presumably with new scrollwheel code. Richard Clamp posted a fix on the mailing list, but it didn’t help me.

I meant to get to bed just after ten last night, but I was up late writing my last entry and talking to my aunt about iPods. I was tired, but once I bed I still couldn’t get to sleep. This morning, I woke up around five and dozed on and off until almost six. I got up, got clean, and headed to Mass. Today is the Day of Ashes, which seems like a really good time to really start trying to be better at meeting my obligaitons.

Work today was OK. My ur-boss is in town, and I sat with him and went over The Big Project. He seemed impressed and enthused, which was good for my morale, I think.

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 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.