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05/08/2003 Entry: "What a pisser..."

Today has been "one of those days," and proof that bad things happen in clumps.

It started off with not sleeping very well. I had a bad stomach ache, and my usual heart murmurs, so I didn't go to sleep until after midnight, and then all night I kept getting up because Widget was whining to be let on the bed, and then when you put him on the bed, he jumps off a little later because the cats are up to something, and he just HAS to know what! Then he gets so excitied, he poops on the floor. Then he wants back on the bed. Damn the constant yapping he'll do, I'm going to try and crate train him again. We stopped because he yapped repeatedly, so we had to put him down in the laundry room. But this winter, it got real cold, so we let him sleep with us. We got into that habit.

Next, everyone was grouchy this morning, and we got off to a late start. Then Christine saw in an e-mail that someone she cared about a lot, but lately has been a whining, egotistical pain in the ass, had sent out a letter on a public list about how great she is and how bad Christine's brain must be. Of course, Christine was livid, and while she's a nice and kind person... never get her mad. On top of this, it seemed we got stuck behind every bad driver in town. Weaving cars, slow cars, cars making illegal turns, and we almost got into 3 accidents because the driver in front of us was doing something stupid. Traffic was horrible.

I get to work, late, and I start up my main workstation, and I get a prompt to update my Anti-virus software. It's a work mandate, and rarely causes problems, so I clicked "Okay," and BAM! Blue screen of death! On a Windows 2000 box! So I rebooted, and everything was messed up. Everything I needed to do my daily work was hosed. I mean, you'd launch the program, and BAM! GPF. I have backup boxes, yes, but this workstation was my powerhouse. Video settings were munged, nothing saved their settings, I lost my Netscape bookmarks (which, luckily, I made a backup just two days ago, so no real big deal there), and all my programming work was... hosed since the last backup Friday. I mean, yes, it could be worse, and while I have no network connectivity to backup to, my files are still there.

On top of that, a program I built is not working on an Test XP Pro box (it works on XP Home). I can't fix it because the box I program with is not working (see above). F@*&!n' Microsoft!

I went to donate blood, and they rejected me. No, seriously! Because of the gastro-enteritus thing I had in December and I have high blood pressure. Yeah, no kidding!

It's only 11:30. I can't take much more of this.

[... several hours later... ]

It didn't really get worse, but it didn't get better, either. No one came by to fix my computer (no surprise), but I did use the time to build another Red Hat server at work and install Nagios, a sort of GPL "WhatsUp" type of program. I haven't gotten it running at work yet, but it's 7:30 and I am tired. I had this meeting today, where we got to break, and get cake. But somewhere while showing off a report, I found that Excel (again, Microsoft) was changing my neat and tidy ISO formatted dates (yyyy-mm-dd format, eg. 2003-05-08) and mangling them into the old "MM/DD/YY" formats, which suck for dates after 1999. So stuff created today came out as August 3rd, 2005. I spent the better part of an hour tracking down where that was happening, and finally writing a patch for it. Between that and Nagios, and the fact I have to do everything on older (slower) spare machines... I want to go home.

Add to that, back home my Linux box power supply almost died. It works... but the fan on the PS doesn't, and when I was doing routine maintenance on it the case was VERY hot to the touch. So I shut it off before it caught fire or something. Luckily, they are doing this huge cleanup at work, and I can bring in a used PS from the pile of trashed computers in the lab.

Then I got bitchslapped in another meeting by a normally nice person who deragatorily pointed out that "Mr. Larson, the topic which you spent that last three minutes speaking about was already covered."

I knew I shouldn't have gotten out of bed this morning.

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