Month: March 2007

Vacation: Week 1

Long story short, alenxa needed to use up some vacation time, fast, so we ended up taking two weeks at the end of March.  Unfortunately, we didn’t realize until later that our tickets for Wicked were smack in the middle (tonight, to be precise), which meant no two-week trip because I didn’t want to go through the hassle of trying to exchange the tickets.

We’ll be going to Las Vegas next week.  This week was mostly hanging around, not having to go to work.

Saturday: Helped andrea_wot move into her new apartment.  Later drank my annual Murphy’s Stout in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

Sunday: I went to Wizard World LA.  My con report got linked on The Beat.

Monday-Wednesday: Expeditions to Halloween Club (Katie’s planning a new costume for Comic-Con) and Fry’s (new video card).  Hooked up the spare monitor my brother gave us when he moved to Florida.  Discovered our current switch setup couldn’t handle more than 1024×768 without serious ghosting.  Back to Fry’s for a new switch. Watched several more episodes of Battlestar Galactica season one.  Invented a drink: 1 shot mango rum, splash of orange liqueur, fill the rest of the way with 1 part pineapple juice, 1 part cream soda, leaving room for a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

5 Minute Wait!Thursday: Disneyland — for the first time in maybe 5 years.  There are definite advantages to visiting in the off-season, during a weekday… like the 5-minute wait for Pirates of the Caribbean.  Thankfully, the changes to align it with the movies were minimally invasive, and the last view of Jack Sparrow demonstrates some seriously impressive motion capture.  Some other nice updates to Haunted Mansion and Jungle Cruise.  The new “wildest ride in the wilderness!” recording at Big Thunder Mountain, however, is a travesty.  Splash Mountain and the train were closed.  They seem to be piratifying Tom Sawyer’s island.  Pirates, Indy and Big Thunder kept breaking down, but we still managed to hit all three (some of them twice).  It was odd to see fruit carts all over the place.  It’s actually possible to eat mostly healthy food at Disneyland now.  Finished off the day with dinner at the Blue Bayou.

Friday: Took the car in in preparation for the road trip.  Then spent the rest of the day hanging out at home.  I mostly worked on my website, while Katie mostly tried out new games.

Now I’m looking at the pre-trip to-do list, trying to figure out how I’m going to get everything done in the next two days and go up to LA tonight and get together with friends tomorrow.  (And yes, “post to LiveJournal” is on the list.  One item to cross off!)

Leading up to Sunday

Spent Thursday and Friday at home, sick. What started as a “mild cold” ramped up to a more moderate cold-like thing, which refused to disappear after 2.5 weeks. So, stayed home, went to doctor, got prescribed stuff. Spent two days alternately sleeping and lying on the couch reading, chugging water and juice (I went through two bottles of Trader Joe’s pineapple juice in two days), checking my temperature and taking tons of medication. Since I gave up my lunch hour to resolve the near-disaster on Wednesday, that means I still haven’t taken care of the errands I was planning to do in the middle of the week.

Half the office has been out over the last week or so, probably with the same thing. When I emailed in sick on Friday, my boss wrote back a note along the lines of, “you should hear the people who *did* come in!”

Meanwhile, UCI Drama’s doing a production of Sunday in the Park With George, one of my favorite plays. Reprise Theater also did a production last month, and I considered going to both… until I found out the cheap seats at Reprise were $70, and I could get tickets to UCI’s production for $14. So back in January, I bought tickets for Saturday night.

Amazingly enough, I managed to keep the coughing under control until we walked out of the theater after the show. (Which was quite good, though they made some really odd choices for “Putting it Together.” Everyone was dressed in some costume from an iconic 80s movie, and instead of propping up cardboard stand-ups of himself in all the different conversations, George removes an article of clothing and leaves it with each one. And it was kind of unnerving that they managed to cast leads with similar vocal qualities to Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters. They had distinct voices, but especially in Act 2, as Marie, the actress could have been channeling her.)

OK, I’ve finished my tea. Time for bed.

Current Music: Putting It Together (in head)

The glamorous life of a sysadmin

The middle of the day was mostly spent trying to recover from a server crash. In theory, the fix was simple: Boot to the recovery console, then run chkdsk. Of course, that meant getting the right CD to run the recovery console for that version of Windows, waiting for it to boot, finding chkdsk (or rather a utility that chkdsk depends on, which the console couldn’t find on its own)… and then waiting for it to examine the entire RAID array (a process which took up most of the time).

All together, that “simple fix” took about 3.5 hours, during which we set up the higher-profile sites on a backup server (a process that also took longer than it should have, for other reasons).

Periodically I would walk out of the server room to answer email, run downstairs to grab lunch, or run back to my desk to eat a few bites of that lunch.