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March 31st, 2005 11:30
One of the nicest things about Harvard is that they give you free tampons.
Never again will I be stuck leaking without a quarter. At least, not until September 15th, 2005.
Yesterday was gruesome. I was posted in the Core (Day Three of Beta, remember) helping the people coming in sign up for new accounts and enter in their work requests. That morning A. and I had uploaded a bunch of fixes we had made and tested and then he ran off to a meeting.
Of course, since it is a UNIX server (and we all know that I am UNIX retarded!) given that he did the upload, he had ownership of the files. I quickly discovered that there were three small typo-type errors and one cosmetically major issue having to do with the fact that apache needs to have ownership of a certain folder which was overwritten when A. did the upload… only problem was, I had no power to change anything given that it was all owned by A.! The entire system basically became unfunctional.
It was the most frustrating thing in the world. I KNEW what was wrong, I KNEW how to fix it in 30 seconds flat, but my hands were tied. I called A., I called the woman who runs our server for us; neither were picking up their phones. Frantically, I VNCed to my desktop in my office (thank God that I am obsessive about running VNC server on all my machines) and did what I could from an SSH session A. had left running and connected as himself on my machine. Come to think of it, thank God I hadn’t disconnected his session before I left my office!
After a bit the computer woman got back to me and changed ownership etc. on things from her end. I felt like such a noodle — all these people had been coming in and being upset when things weren’t working properly, and G. picked that moment to give me a verbal beating about a design issue that he suddenly decided was the very end of the world… even though we were *asked* to design it that way!
Barrgh. I’m here again today but no one has come in yet. Nothing should be broken this time but I’m still afraid if I breathe it will somehow explode in my face.
March 28th, 2005 23:12
It wasn’t a good weekend.
I’ve been very restless and out of sorts recently. Everything seems to close, too confining. The very air feels stale. In a typical fit of spring fever, my apartment can’t be clean enough: I clean it and still it persists in being dirty. There is always fur in the air, on the rugs, dust motes too; the water comes out rusty in the tub and leaves an ugly stain, my illustrious husband makes himself food, spills it, and leaves the spill to crust on the counter, the kitchen floor looks spotty and sticky though I wipe it, and worst of worst, our dishwasher is broken, the repairman has failed to come 4 times now, and it is full of dirty water in the bottom that is stagnant and stinky and won’t go away no matter what we do.
I had bought some Mcintosh apples at Trader Joe last week and the checkout girl dropped them, apparantly, while checking out. I was going through the bag on Saturday, seeing how they were all bruised and soft where I had picked them out so carefully to be firm and smooth, and it was the last straw. I lost my temper in the most stunningly beautiful rage I have been in in a long, long, long time.
In fury, I flung apples left and right, The hit the floor with the most satisfying splat. Zaubi watched me, completely aghast, and yelled at me to stop. At last his horror turned to anger and he started flinging apples too. It was, I’m sure, a completely appalling sight, and shocking display of inappropriate bad temper.
But it was so satisfying. And it sobered us up a lot to clean up a peck of smashed apples from the floor, the walls, the furniture… I felt distinctly more cheerful after the whole episode.
March 27th, 2005 19:20
…and she wondered whether any of those thousands of eyes around her saw what she saw, and why it had been given her to see.
March 25th, 2005 13:57
I have been reading Villette, by Charlotte Bronte. I’ve always liked her books, and I do like this one, but I am having difficulty with it. It seems to be rather more complicatedly written than her others, such that you have to concentrate hard to understand what feeling or action she is describing in her subtle use of English. But a good deal of my difficulty is probably because French is liberally sprinkled throughout. While I can remember enough French to get a good gist of any French I come across in this book, it interrupts the flow of reading.
I can’t express how glad I am that it’s Friday. Even given that Monday brings the Training meeting and then the launch of Beta (ahhhh!), I am too restless to sit here looking at a screen. Even given the continuing cold dreary weather, my soul burns with spring.
Lately my chamber music group has been not so together — we lost first our violist and now our cellist, and given the snowstorms and people’s schedules we haven’t been meeting regularly like we did in the fall. So of late I have been going to T.’s house and we have been playing violin-piano duets. I’m heading over there after work today — going to try out a Saint-Saens he rented from harvard’s library. i should really be practicing! I haven’t practiced my sax in a long time — I’ve been working on piano instead, a Chopin Nocturne which fits me more stunningly than any piece I’ve played. i wish I could remember which one it was  viacimo would kick my butt. And i KNOW I should be picking up my violin and practicing it: 14 years is too much playing to let it go to waste!
Back to work. So many last minute things to do while deploying this build onto the server…
March 25th, 2005 11:31
March 24th, 2005 15:37
Just made the last build before final deploy. We are now officially in code freeze two weeks late (and a good thing since Beta starts after the training session on Monday!) I guess that tomorrow I will run through everything rigorously and give it a good once-over. Should probably also write a deployment doc.
I’m rather frustrated and discouraged with work right now but I think that is something I will have to go into in a protected entry…
March 24th, 2005 9:52
I’m in such an awful fucking mood today.
I’d like to kick the shit out of everybody.
That doesn’t even do it justice.
March 22nd, 2005 14:44
Does anyone know if there is a way to take a boat (as opposed to car or plane) from Boston to Halifax, Nova Scotia?
A good friend is getting married there in August and I think a boat would be fun. I Googled it but had no luck. Could only find these stupid 5 day cruises of New England :-/
March 21st, 2005 15:08
I jumped on my trampoline yesterday for half an hour. For the first time in a long, long, LONG time.
Now, today, my lower abdomen muscles ache like mad. Why is this? I understand why my calves ache; after all, it’s a lot of jumping, but what is this lower abdomen muscle ache thing…?
mrtee came by and told him that days like this make him nostalgic for the long ago past when I was 16 and we wandered around eating green bagels and not talking.
Before I knew anything about anything.
Did I like myself better, then? I don’t know.
I think that at that time, I liked who I was then better than I like who I am now, but looking back, I like who I am now better than I like who I was then.
Read it twice. It should make sense.
I know what he means, though. The day is grey and mild: the air is oddly still and the sky is oddly light.
March 20th, 2005 19:35
Wow, when Abraham was born, Noah (his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather) was still alive!
Lucky Abraham had, not only his father and grandfather to play with him, an entire legion of EIGHT great grandfathers too!
Imagine the stories they must have told him… When I was a boy, the skies opened, and everyone was washed away except me and my wife and my sons and their wives and a mad load of livestock!!! <<< Little Abraham listening with wide eyes>>>
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