09/13/2003 Entry: "Working weekend"
It's early Saturday morning, and I am at work. I was off on Friday because I had to work today, and I have been here since 6:00am. The brilliant people at our internal network decided to bring down the network for emergency maintenance... during one of our report cycles. Which means I have to be here to manually restart everything and assess the damage a total network outage wreaks when your systems are interdependent on each other through the network. So far, the damage has been contained, mostly due to my programming. I do a lot of "what if?" loops in my programming, so when something like this happens unexpectedly, it has a default action and backup plan. Being a pessimist can come in handy when programming. "What if I run, and I can't find the network?" and "What if I run, but I can't find my startup preferences?" are two I use a lot. Right now I am paring back my log files, which are filled with errors, but nothing actually broke. All WAD ("Works As Designed"). This morning was a severe stress test of everything I have built for my team, and if I may toot my own horn, it's going fairly well. I am taking this time to also to "strip and build" some old machines we have. We inherited a whole bunch of boxes, with various levels of functionability. My job is to take all the junk from boxes that don't work, and make a few boxes that do. Yesterday, I slept in late. I spent most of the day watching movies, and saw "American Pie," "American Pie 2," and "Bringing Down the House," all which I enjoyed. I was going to do more lawn work, but it started to rain again. I still have no fence, and the dogs resent being tied up when let outside. Ahfu keeps getting tangled up with the line and various items in the back yard like the deck, bushes, and deck chairs. Widget is so light, he practically is outweighed by the leash line, and has to drag his own body weight over again just to pee. I saw that they marked out a line where the fence is supposed to go, and there were piles of lumber back there, spaced in clusters. I even heard people working, but in that alley, it's hard to tell who is making what noise. And of course my backyard is open to anyone wandering around that huge alley. Someone used our backyard for a breakfast break, left some McDonald's trash, and ate some tomatoes off my huge tomato plant. I am very annoyed at this, because they apparently took some bites out of a few still unripe tomatoes, and decided they didn't like them, and threw them back in the yard. So I had three tomatoes with huge bites taken out of them. Dammit! I took some of the under-ripe ones off the vine, and we're going to let them ripen in the house (we've done that before successfully). Asshats. I have had problems with this from time to time. In one of my previous houses, all the front yards were fenced in with very tall shadowbox fencing, and apparently our house had been abandoned for quite some time, because people kept heaving trash over the fence. Back then, it was only small items, like beer bottles and cans, gum, and assorted small pieces. In this house, since the back is to an alley, we have had people dump HUGE items over the fence, like shipping pallets, home renovation refuse (countertops, sink basins, old gas canisters), and we even had someone ditch part of a bike, some orange traffic cones, signs, and of course, huge amounts of tree pruning debris. Most of that is gone now. I can imagine when they ripped out the fencing in back of us, all that avalanched down on them. Kudos to them for removing most of it (at least from my area). I can't do anything about it because I don't own that part of my "back yard" (they own everything up to the trees, remember?). One day, I fear they'll find a body there. Well, I now have to work on the next stage of babysitting. See you next entry.
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