I’m the only one here today. I at least thought my boss was coming in, but I haven’t seen him yet. Still, he keeps odd hours, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he showed up at 3:00 and stayed into the evening.
Busy trying to get a new mail server set up. Using Mandrake instead of Red Hat due to driver issues. And while things that are built in work great, things that I’ve had to configure manually have been problematic. Right now I’m fighting a PAM/LDAP bug that I hope is limited to SSH, or else the server’s going to be unusable for any sort of authentication. Beginning to wonder whether it will be ready before the current server melts down under the load.
Staying up way too late. I was the first one in this morning, and started some coffee, figuring I’d need more than the one travel mug from home. Didn’t go back for a while. Co-worker showed up a bit later: “Did you make coffee this morning?” “Uh, yeah.” “Did you get enough sleep last night?” “Uh, no… why?” I ran through my memory of the morning and while I could remember getting the filter, the filter basket, and the coffee grounds, and I could remember turning the coffee maker on, I couldn’t actually remember putting the coffee pot under the spout. Guess why.
On Monday, the uberboss talked with me, my boss, and two other co-workers about a reorganization plan. It’s a bit complicated, and involves the fact that someone from a copmany we do development for is coming out to work with us on-site for 8 months, but basically I need to pick up skills I haven’t used in about 7 years instead of doing (a) what I’m good at and (b) what they hired me for. So I’m trying to take care of various back-burner projects before I have to focus on programming.
One of those back-burner projects was a server upgrade that went wrong and kept me at work until 10pm on Monday, and took up a big chunk of Tuesday morning trying to resolve the remaining issues. I’ve still got one web project I need to finish, and just picked up a new one. And there’s the melting mail server. And we’re coming up on a 3-day weekend of which two days are already planned with various sets of relatives. Vacation? Yeah, right!