entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

Visible Path laid off most of its US office, effective tomorrow.  Cash severance: $0.  I'd be feeling worse if i hadn't decided yesterday to start looking for a new job.

My boss's boss just caught one of the product guys and the office manager trying to edit one of our internal wiki pages in Microsoft Word.

OK, you know when a bug is filed and steps to reproduce it are actually, helpfully, miraculously attached?  It would be in one's best interest to FOLLOW THEM.  Instead of taking the developers at their word and starting down a path that involves rewriting cookies at the load balancer as well as editing the application server's configuration, when faced by my cosysadmins' emphatic insistence that the load balancer cookie is not used by the application, i suggested that we reproduce the bug.  And as we take the steps, i see that the link that's being followed is going OFF-SITE, to one of our static content sites.  SO OF COURSE IT'S NOT GOING TO WORK.  NOW I SET EVERYONE ON FIRE.

Turns out i'm pretty good at horseshoes.

It's a little difficult to track down errors in your application when, given three integration servers and four QA servers, no two servers have the same Java and Oracle memory settings.

It's my day off, seeing as how i spent an hour yesterday shutting down and unplugging all office equipment due to a planned building-wide power outage, and five hours today bringing it all back up.  Four power supplies decided they liked the rest too much to get back up again, so i had to go vulture some from the ranks of the undead computers in the back office.  One CAT-5 cable decided to spontaneously die, too, and the rigor mortis didn't let me extract it from its jack without specialized tools (a knife).  For bonus points, the outage was scheduled from 16:00 Saturday to 04:00 today, and they kindly called me just after 04:00 to let me know it all went well, and i spent the remaining hours of sleep dreaming of wholesale failure at work during today's activities.  To top it off, i woke up with a stiff neck, which made lugging around dead computers extra fun.

At least yesterday wasn't too bad; it was only an hour, Kim kept me company during that time, and after that we went for Peruvian food at Machu Picchu Restaurant.  I had anticuchos (skewered chunks of marinated beef heart), sopa a la minuta (soup with ground beef, noodles, potato, and a few spinach leaves), and fried plantains.  Kim had a steak dish where the steak was cut into thin strips and tasted just like the steak my mom makes.  Good food.

One of the product people at work sent this link around.  The quote she passed around sent me straight into throat-punch mode:

Myspace is the digital ghetto.  It's ugly, nasty, and brutish.  But it's got soul and character.  Interesting conversations happen there.  In other words, it's messy.  And, in large part, that's why it's rocked - messiness explodes value creation at the edge.

LinkedIn is clean, smooth, and streamlined - and utterly devoid of any possibilities for meaningful interaction.

But this in itself begs a deeper question. Why didn't LinkedIn ever learn to get messy?

[16:20:59] IT Mangler says: is that the usual process? {CTO and VP Engineering} sign off on the final build before it goes to staging?
[16:21:25] rone says: i'd guess so, although i'm guessing they're focusing more on it today given that we're on our third RC
[16:21:30] IT Mangler says: yeah
[16:21:40] IT Mangler says: i think you're right
[16:22:40] rone says: i'm always right.  ask my wife, she'll vouch for me.
[16:22:58] IT Mangler says: calling her right now....
[16:23:14] IT Mangler says: uh... she has a slightly different story
[16:23:28] rone says: man.  this is why domestic violence never ends.

During one of my cleaning binges, i emptied out the box that contained all the stuff from my Macromedia cubicle.  In addition to an ApacheCon spiral notebook that contained notes to a talk by fanf, i found my old nameplate.  So i updated it and stuck it on the window next to my office door.

Yes, that's the now-famous "Make me a sandwich" cartoon by xkcd.

Wow, it's 01:00 and i'm being micromanaged by the boss's boss.  I'd forgotten what micromanagement felt like.  IT FEELS LIKE DIGGING THROUGH MY OWN SHIT TO SEE IF I CAN RECOGNIZE WHAT I ATE.  I'M NOT EVEN ON CALL, GOD DAMN YOU.