The weekend
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Tag Archives: computers
Not bad
I took another look at that list of projects that I mentioned earlier today. I have finished 11 out of 14. Of course, I can think of a few additions….
Half belted plaid
Now that’s a PLAID. I followed the original discussion on the Scotattire list with considerable interest and had already planned to make something like this. Now I am even more excited about it. Alas, sewing projects seem to be slipping to the bottom of the queue, even though I have made considerable progress on other parts of my list.
Queue? List? Stack? Heap?–what is the appropriate data structure :-)>
I wants it, my Precious
Small, light, cheap, solid state storage (no moving parts), a keyboard, and Linux: The Asus Eee PC 900.
Also available with Windows XP, but why?
Another lap in the race to the bottom. Faster! Faster!
Tedious necessities
Today’s snowstorm (this is Minnesota) meant that I was an hour late getting home. Also cold and wet. I immediately had to load some dead computer stuff (4 computers, 1 monitor, and 1 scanner) into the car for recycling tomorrow. Then I had to type up, edit, and submit the minutes of colgaffneyis last Board meeting–the next one is Tuesday. I finished that just after 8PM. Next I had to do taxes. I had done most of the work last week so I was able to finish a little after 9. And I think it is finished. The returns (one for us and one for J) have been submitted electronically and I have saved backup copies of the files (I work in systems administration–paranoia is my profession). The only possible issue is that a return might be rejected by either the IRS or Minnesota. This is unlikely. TurboTax is quite good and our tax life is not that interesting. Just sometimes painful.
What the user wanted
I received a couple e-mails today about the rewrite of a computer system that I am involved with (not at work). They reminded me of these classic sketches.
My weekend here
mia_mcdavid is in Michigan for the weekend and the first couple days of next week. Her aunt died after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s. She has posted about it, most recently here.
I cleaned off my workbench this morning, and am trying to make some progress on at least some of my unfinished projects. Quite a list
An evening in a DBA’s life
I got a call a little before 8 last night from the Windows OS staff at my job. A routine patching process (Microsoft systems need so much patching you might as well make a routine of it) had failed. They could not get the database system to start up. Under the gun
Tom and work
mia_mcdavid just wrote about what is happening with Tom. I will be taking the day off from work for this. Fortunately, my cred at the office is pretty good right now. The weekend’s server work was way more exciting than I like–there was a really obscure problem with different versions of Microsoft software, but in the end we opened for a normal business day this morning (as a branch of government we were closed yesterday, although I was still working).
Preoccupied
Thomas, our younger son, has been hospitalized. Mia has been writing about this:
- Worried about Tom (Feb. 11).
- Tom update (Feb. 13).
- Today with Tom (Feb. 13).
Also, my mother is in the hospital. Her hip popped out on Sunday. That was quickly fixed, but she was kept in the hospital because of congestive heart failure. It sounded like another episode of the trouble that caused me to make an emergency trip to see her back in September. I called her at the hospital. The reality is not quite so alarming: The congestive heart failure is the same issue as last year. At age 82 it doesn’t really go away. She was actually in good spirits, in a hospital room with a great view of the Rockies.
On a totally different front, I have to work on Sunday, thereby missing the second day of colgaffneyis at the St. Paul Scottish Ramble. I have two big system implementation projects to complete. These are the sort of thing that can only be done outside of business hours, and require extensive coordination with my co-workers. So scheduling is always hard, and compromises have to be made.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 