Beowabbit

Too busy and tired for a real post, but here are a few scattered impressions:

• I’m going to be directing! I’ll be directing audioboy’s staged radio-play adaptation of the 1954 movie Them!. I am hugely looking forward to my first directing experience, and am very grateful to audioboy and the rest of PMRP for the opportunity. [Note to self: Post this to Facebook, too. Also Twitter, ВКонтакте, Friendster, Orkut, G+, QQ, G--, E♭-major, and Compuserve.]
• Work has been exceptionally busy and high-stress lately.
• That said, I took Friday off to make a four-day weekend which was utterly excellent. Much of it was spent with plumtreeblossom’s company, and I got to see lots of other wonderful friends, and it was generally a wonderful weekend.
• ...marred somewhat by plumtreeblossom’s phone dying. For the second time. She gets it through work and so getting it repaired or replaced has some extra layers of bureaucracy and delay. Given how panicky she and I each get when we’re having phone problems, and how flaky her phone and her service have been, I decided it was time to get us an emergency backup to share, so I did, and I’ll be taking it over to her later today.

I’m going to be migrating my mail server to a hosting provider tomorrow (Saturday the 26th), from about 10:00am to about 2:00pm or so, so email to addresses @aq.org will be delayed.

There’s an opening for a Linux sysadmin (with a bunch of user support mixed in, including Mac and Windows) in my group.

Stolen from email I just wrote for a mailing list:

My group has an opening for a system administrator (with a lot of end-user support and documentation mixed in). This is at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, based in the Stata Center (most recently in the news because a Dalek landed on it).

We are primarily a Linux shop (currently Debian; probably Ubuntu in the foreseeable future) with a lot of the sort of quirks you’d expect from an MIT lab (AFS, lots of homegrown stuff, people with root on their workstations, etc.). We also have lots of Mac and Windows machines, and the person in this position will end up doing a fair amount of supporting Mac and Windows users, as well as Debian desktop support and system administration.

Our departing sysadmin (leaving for grad school) hopes to have some overlap with the new hire. He has an excellent and patient way with users, good documentation skills (internal and user-facing), a desire to do things the Right Way that will save us work down the road, and the gumption to take on substantial projects, and we'd love to have similar qualities in his successor.

(I forgot to mention in that mail that I’d love it if we found somebody with experience administering email on Linux/Unix systems, since I’m the postmaster and if we don’t I won’t really have a natural backup/collaborator for that. We use Exim, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Mailman, and some homegrown stuff and have a slightly quirky email topology. That’s all optional, though.)

If you’re interested, you should definitely fill out the online form at that link, but you should also contact me (email if you have it; otherwise comment here or direct message here or on Twitter) so that I help make sure your résumé doesn’t get lost or delayed.

Mailing lists on lists.aq.org and polyboston.org are back up, on a freshly installed server. Most of the polyboston.org web site is still broken (and probably won't get fixed until tomorrow evening), but mail to mailing lists is working and all the list-administration web pages and stuff like archives ought to be working properly.

My phone is working again, although the whole process was not such as would tend to increase my confidence in T-Mobile.

My internet is working again, although I’m slightly puzzled that the trouble-ticket was closed with no response after my last “It’s still not working” message. But that’s around when it started working again.

That just leaves my washing machine, my housemate’s electrical outlets under load, and my brain. :-)

Due to a hardware failure, lists.aq.org and polyboston.org have been down since sometime this weekend. If you have a list on the machine, that’s why you can’t get to the web interface to administer it. If you’re subscribed to a list on it, that’s why things have been eerily quiet the last few days. Sigh.

I believe all the data on the drive is intact, and I’ve started work on bringing up a new server, but it’ll be a few days, I’m afraid.

(Many thanks to list administrator keyne, who noticed she couldn’t get to her lists and let me know.)

On Friday I met plumtreeblossom after work (see her weekend write-up here) and we took the train to Quincy Center together. We had dinner at Outback Steakhouse. I don’t like their corporate politics, but I love their food and sometimes I just need a hunk of cow. As it turned out, I’m very glad we did, because I ordered an Australian beer I wasn’t familiar with — Cooper’s Brewery Sparkling Ale — and it was so good I ordered a second, and then went looking for it at the liquor store later in the week. (If you are wise enough to follow my example, be cautioned that it’s fermented in the bottle, so there’s some sediment in the bottom; you want to pour it into a glass.)

After a yummy dinner, we went to my house and watched Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, which was very funny, and a little bit of the original 1930s exploitation/propaganda movie, which was a bonus on the DVD.

( Another few meals, another movie, some geekery, and some games with darxus and cathijosephine. )

At some point in the weekend, plumtreeblossom took a whole bunch of pictures of grim warrior beowabbit, including the one that I eventually munged into my new userpic, and I also took some pictures of her cats, who were sleeping together on her bed looking especially cute.

The one bad thing about the weekend is that towards the end of the workweek I’d been having little twinges in my hip, and they got considerably worse over the weekend. I’m going to need to drive to the T tomorrow (where parking is $7); there’s no way I can do the normally 15-minutes walk to the T station with the ice that’s on the sidewalks. I’m not sure if this is a return of my sciatica or if I did something to my hip slipping on the ice. But if a hurt hip is the price for all the joy and fun I had this weekend, it was worth it.

We just had a transformer blow in my neighbourhood, so aq.org (and my email) are down at the moment. My phone is on and has a reasonable charge. EDIT: It was back up a couple hours later.

So my phone (a Nokia E62) has been flaky for several months. ( explanation )

So, the short of it is that you shouldn’t rely on me seeing voicemail or text messages in anything like a timely fashion, or being able to tell when you’re calling. It does still vibrate, but I often don’t notice that if I’m driving or on the T, and never notice it if the phone isn’t actually on me at the time.)

Boo.

I have my old phone which I got back from cathijosephine when she bought a new phone, but I can’t find the charger for it (I know I have one; just can’t find it) or the data cable (don’t know whether I kept it or not), and since the main thing I use my phone for is internet access from the T, which requires the data cable, I’m going to keep limping along with my current phone until I can find or replace the data cable for my spare phone.

What I really want is the announced but not yet released Nokia E71, but I don’t know pricing and I don’t know when it’s going to be available in the US, so I may need to just replace my current phone.

(As a side note, I will be so happy in a couple years when my phone runs Linux and I can just sftp or rsync all my data off it. As it is, I haven’t found a way to get my text messages off the phone, so I’m probably going to lose all my LOLspeak lovenotes from plumtreeblossom when I switch phones.)

I’m too tired to do justice to the lovely time I’ve been having the past few days, but here’s the capsule version:

On Wednesday, the 26th, drove to Rochester. (Lots of happy fun stuff happened before my trip, too, but I’m hopelessly behind so I’m just going to start fresh.) Gorgeous driving weather. Arrived in time for dinner at plumtreeblossom’s mother’s house (where her brother and niece also live). Had a great time with them. Had an especially great time with Jack, their obsessive-compulsive border collie. I feel guilty encouraging them, but I love excessively enthusiastic jump-all-over-you-and-lick-you dogs.

plumtreeblossom’s mother had generously gotten us a hotel room, so we went there and had a lovely time. It must have been the free wireless that made it so delightful. Yeah, that was it.

On Thursday, I woke up with the birthday girl, and her family came to meet us at a diner for brunch. (Mykonos Café; the food was wonderful.) Then we went back to her mother’s place and had lovely hanging-out time, and then got on the road.

On the way, she returned a happy-birthday phone call from a couple old friends, P. and E., who now live in Southampton (in Western Mass), and we got an impromptu invitation to dinner, which we accepted. They are really delightful people, and their dog is a delightful dog (as affectionate as Jack, but much more calm and disciplined).

We got to plumtreeblossom’s house very late, but I didn’t fall asleep on the road, and neither of us had to work in the morning.

Today (Friday), we had a leisurely morning, had brunch at a diner near her (I loves me some diners), and then ran a couple of errands together — fixing the internet on her phone (which took the folks at the Verizon store all of 15 seconds once we got seen, and now plumtreeblossom knows the magic Just Please Make It Work Again Dammit code) and getting me an eye exam and ordering me some glasses that plumtreeblossom described as “hot”, all emphasized just like that. plumtreeblossom speaks in well-formatted, standards-compliant semantic HTML. (The eye exam was mainly for contacts, but I need a new pair of glasses, too.)

And I had crockpot Kalua pig waiting for me when I got home. And it just occurred to me that I probably also have a lot of mail waiting for me. Should go bring it in, I suppose, but I think instead I’m going to collapse into bed, collapse directly into bed, do not pass GO, do not collect $200. I am debating whether to take my shoes off. Maybe I’ll compromise and take one shoe off.