I'm having one of those days where I just feel absolutely irritable and aggravated.  I have a stack of endless tasks to dig through, and the first thing I walk into the office everybody descend upon me like vultures onto dead meat, both in person as well as via IM.  "Can you help me with this?"  "This is not working, can you fix it?"  "What does this mean?"  "Guess what?  I broke that, help!"

Usually I just take it in stride, believing that the more I answer their question, the more they'll learn.  But sometimes it feels absolutely futile, like the knowledge is just not sinking into their heads.  Or they're not trying hard enough to tough it out before coming to me.  The worst is when people just interrupt me in the middle of writing some complicated algorithm just to tell me some marginally relevant stuff or to ask me a question whose answer can be easily found by the good ol' RTFM method (you can search for that acronym).  The least they can do is ask me, "Can I have a moment of your time?" instead of just firing off their questions/demands like I'm their personal concierge.

BOOM!

It blew up good. The software release it is. Still fixing it at 1am. Got some duct tape...will fix more tomorrow...

Relatives showed up...at the wrong terminal...at the exact opposite side of the airport. Alex wanted to run a different direction, so my wife and I went in opposite directions. Fortunately SFO is actually a circle (hence the O), so everybody converged at the same point.

Good thing is that dinner was pretty good and Alex was nice enough to sit through all of it. It's good to finally have a decent Cantonese restaurant downtown. But why is it that other relatives invite themselves to dinner? The bill was $200. I paid. Nice.

One more thing from the concert on Saturday. Just before Dream Theater's encore, they played a fan video inspired from an unholy mix of Super Mario Brother's and Dream Theater's song "The Dark Eternal Night'.  Aptly it's called "The Dark Nintendo Night". It's absolutely hilarious.

So the weekend plan went without a hitch. We got to drop off Alex at the inlaws on Saturday just after noon. The plan is to stay at a hotel near the BART station in Pleasant Hill so we can take a train into scary Oakland.  The hotels was excellent, and we got a discreet, corner suite that we can use for any nefarious reasons ;)

We had a great dinner afterwards at a Cuban restaurant in downtown Walnut Creek.  They had a great halibut ceviche and tasty mojitos, but unfortunately something did a number on our stomachs. That delayed us hopping on BART to go to the concert, and as a result we missed the first band (called 3) on stage. Slight bummer, but no problem. The main attraction is yet to come. 


So overall we had a great time at the concert.  We got back to the hotels at midnight, and went to sleep by 1:30am. I was in bliss not having the baby boy stick his foot in my ribs or my head (or even worse places). We woke up at 10am and went to brunch in Walnut Creek at a place called the San Franciscan. The food was good (I had crab cakes Benedict), but then it was time to pick up Alex. So we showed up at my inlaw's house. Alex was pretty good with them, but he was ready to go home. So we got home and all was well. I made a teppanyaki dinner again because naiad8  wanted to go to Benihana earlier but the idiots wouldn't open for lunch until 1pm.

The weekend was great, but the week is going to be crazy.  It's already started crazy.  Alex woke up at 2am and didn't go back to sleep until 5am.  So I'm pretty tired this morning.  My company is having a software release today, but I'll miss that because I have to go pick up my relatives at the airport.  A cousin of mine is graduating from UW Pullman so her brother and mom came from Costa Rica, who will then go on the coast-to-coast tour of America with stops in San Francisco and New York.  The original plan was for my mom and I pick up at the airport, but a phone call last night drafted naiad8 and Alex in the second car because apparently my cousin at Pullman decided to send two suitcases worth of crap with her mother and brother back to Costa Rica.  So they'll have like 6 pieces of luggage and carry-on, and there's just no way it'd fit in any of our cars.  Don't you just love cheapskate relatives?  How hard is it to ship her crap to Costa Rica?  It's not like it's a real third-world country.  Jeez!

Anyway, back to work.  It's gonna be crazy.

Software release day is next Monday. Same day I got relatives flying in and I gotta pick them up in the afternoon. This means that the rest of the crew gets to do the upgrade without me. I think I need codeine to get sleep between now and Monday night.

Not that I've been sleeping much lately. I've been up until godless hours working on ten man-days worth of work that needs to be done in two days. Yeah, it's that good.

Stress, what's that?

At least this weekend Alex will be with the grandparents so we got to go to Prog Nation 2008 with Dream Theater and Opeth. Oh yeah! Plus we'll get a nice dinner by ourselves and a night w/o He-Who-Uses-His-Mom-As-Pillow-And-His-Dad-As-Foot-Rest.

And why am I using my Cylon icon? Because of this:

New Basic Element For Electronic Circuits: 'Memristor' Could Give Computers Memories That Don't Forget
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080501155234.htm

Current computer memory is either stored in magnetic wells on your hard drives (slow) or between capacitors as in main memory (volatile).  This new memristor is supposedly both fast and non-volatile.  And really small.  5 nanometers, about the size of a sugar molecule. 

While I do nominally hold an electrical engineering degree, I have to say that EE people needs to come up with better names.  "Memristor"?  Sounds like a bad marketing move from 1999 for some failed dotcom (like the ones I was in *hides in shame*).

OK, back to work.

Spring is upon us. It was 80° F and sunny in Mountain View, California, and allergens are freely roaming the air...*eyes water* *itches back* *sneezes*

Another sign of spring: A mommy duck and ten ducklings waddling down my street. We followed them until they safely got inside a RV lot. Alex must've really liked them because he kept saying "ducks come back!" The blue jays are also stealing the coconut husk fiber from our hanging plant baskets to line their nests. In general nature is gearing up for new life.

I even got some time to work on AncientScripts. I just added the Lycian page, and found some source material for Carian and Phrygian. Hopefully I'll be able to fully cover the whole of ancient Anatolia. 

And I just made a teppanyaki dinner better than any Benihana can ever make. Hah! Rocky Aoki, eat your heart out.

If there's one thing to tamper the good weekend is that I have to read 250 pages worth of my deposition transcript to make the court reporter got all the technical lingo correctly. If there is one thing more boring than getting questioned for 8 hours by a lawyer on technical details, it is having to read the transcription of those 8 hours. Blah...

My office went out to play laser tag today.  Apparently we finally got some entertainment budget.  Still waiting for that promised Wii...

Anyway, that was really cool.  It was the first time I've played.  I actually didn't do too badly.  At least I wasn't at the bottom :P  The only thing I didn't like was the size and layout of the place.  Everybody just ended up staking out a corner on the 2nd floor and sniping everybody else.  While that's how real-life combat works it's not as much fun as running around guns ablaze like Rambo.

And now they expect us to work after that.  Bah humbug!

Yesterday I spent a full day in a small conference room with three lawyers and a court reporter. By the end of the day it felt and smelled like I've spent 11 hours cramped in an airplane. My throat was pretty shredded from talking non-stop for seven hours. But I'm glad it's over. In fact, I was so happy when I left with my lawyer that I said, "That was almost fun...almost." She laughed.

Anyway, I'm still tired from yesterday if you can believe it. Thankfully, it's Friday. The weekend is coming, and hopefully I'll get some downtime.

Work is quiet today. People are either on vacation, sick, or working from home. Of course, there's only a software release next Monday. Yeah, no sweat.

I found some work-in-progress on my computer for AncientScripts that I've forgotten. So I'll probably add some pages soon once I write up the usual boring drivel to accompany the graphics.

And finally, Friday music again. This is a fun video. Alien abduction. Men in black. Cheesy effects. If only all heavy metal music is that much fun.

Artist: Bruce Dickinson
Song: Abduction
Album: Tyranny of Souls

*peeks out*

I've been swamped at work this week.  I have to deal with a bunch of lawyers plus it's the week before a software release.  So yeah, it's a bit crazy around here.  On top of it all, a lot of people are on vacation.  Which means less people to work on the release.  For some reason I don't feel any panic right now, but come next Monday night I hope we're not in the sh*t (as Gordon Ramsay is so fond of saying). 

And, oh yeah, I absolutely adore BBC America.  Three of my favorite shows are on it: Top Gear, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and Last Restaurant Standing. 

Absolutely no progress on AncientScripts.  The weekend went away like the Road Runner escaping the Wile E Coyote.  You blink and you'd miss it. 

And finally, here's the picture of the day from Kilauea, Hawaii.  The crater at the summit, Halema'uma'u, has been steaming for a week but then last night it started to emit ash and even small amounts of lava.  If it goes into full eruption at the summit with a lava lake, I need to get myself a ticket to Kona. 

It's raining cats and dogs here in Northern California, although it's not as bad as it is right now in Southern California where they're getting tornadoes touching down. Yeah, tornadoes all the way out here in sunny California.

And, by way of SoCal, a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Julz cuteej4.

Back up here, for a change I got a couple of nice things going for me:

#1. I got nominated and won the employee of the month in my company. I got to keep the rotating trophy for a month and $50 for a nice meal somewhere. Now I get to figure out where to take naiad8.

#2. My new work computer arrived, and although it's a lot of work to transfer all my stuff over, I feel much less vulnerable from the old (5 year old) computers that I've been using.

#3. I'm very happy that I've taken up AncientScripts again. I guess New Year resolutions do stick more than passing thoughts. I've finished the font for Nabataean, and made a graphic that shows the transition from Aramaic to Nabataean to Arabic. All is left is the writeup and then I can upload it.

#4. It's Friday music. It also happens that today MTV has posted the newest video from my favorite band Dream Theater. The song is called Forsaken and it's about vampires. Yeah, heavy metal and vampires, what a groundbreaking concept! Sarcasm aside, it's actually pretty well done, all done in an animation style that's a cross between anime, A Scanner Darkly, and the original Heavy Metal movie. Slightly cheesy, but the calories and the calcium will help you neck bones to headbang better.

I'm in the Matrix again. I see code streaming down my screen. For some reason though I can't defy gravity or slow time down, but whatever...

Our esteemed DBA's (database administrators) forgot to create database tables for 2008.  Like they had previously forgotten in 2005 and 2006. We screamed and then we reminded them in 2007, which went OK. Then this year, we let them slip, and I'm staying up again putting the Matrix back with glue.

Happy me!

And for some strange there's an electrical whine coming from, of all places, the wall heater. I think it's picking up alien signals or something. I think I'm slowly being reprogrammed too. Maybe it's the Google Brainwasher that comes through with Google WiFi! Maybe Larry Page is an alien. Or Sergei Brin.

My brain's melting...

Blah! Looks like I'm be working tonight because some dude accidentally unplugged the wrong server at our data center so now I gotta pick up the pieces. Fortunately the number of accounts affected is very small so it shouldn't take me the whole night to fix them.

And it was just a few days ago that I was talking to my boss about how it's hard to trust the people at the data center because of n00bs unplugging the wrong servers. She countered that nobody has made a booboo in nine months. Well, looks like heaven agrees with me and sent her a sign.

So in preparation for my unpaid overtime, here is another video for October. The band is Tool, and the song is called Schism. They play alternative rock/metal with complex math (yes you read that right).
And on top of that their guitarist is also a visual effects artist who's worked on Star Wars and Terminator so he makes their videos like creepy surrealist paintings coming to live. They might just give you nightmares if you watch them too late at night.

Blah...

Tonight was one of those planned, quasi-emergencies at my company that supposedly fit neatly into one of those "scheduled maintenance window".  Unfortunately, we've already stepped out the window and we're free-falling.

The worst thing is that we're busy waiting.  A lot of nailbiting over a server taking its time checking its disks.  Of course, it's a few terabytes (that's 1,000 gigabytes), but still...

I just started something else that hopefully will get us back on our feet faster.  But it's going to require a lot of manual labor.  It's not going to be pretty. 

So, while I'm waiting, I'm doing this meme: 

1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song. Or your favorite kind of sandwich. Something random. Whatever you like.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You WILL update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.

Answers for blackthornhiei: