1:05am: I have Starcraft 2!
Pardon me while I drop out of sight for a while.

8:32am: sigh
In order to try to save myself from having to be awake and getting cabs super late, I ordered Starcraft 2 off Amazon instead of doing my usual routine of going to Future Shop for the midnight launch.

So it turns out I'll be getting the game sometime next week, probably. Stupid shipping. I've since learned my lesson.

11:57pm: sigh
I can't sleep. I'm not sure why. The room isn't that hot, but I'm so warm I can't get comfortable. Normally when I'm like this I'd call Rhiss and talk for a while, but thanks to work I really don't feel right keeping Rhiss up either.

I'm not sure what's going on this summer. Normally I can't sleep when it's hot and sleep better when it's not. This summer I'm just not sleeping on erratic nights for no apparent reason. It's making it very hard to get any work done, due to how hard it is to function when I'm barely conscious.

11:39pm: Clouds
Flying home tonight, the flight was significantly delayed for some reason (that's both ways delayed this trip). The downside to that is all the time waiting and getting home much later then planned.

The upside is that I got to see a sunset from above the clouds. That was a strange, humbling moment.

11:19pm: whee, new computer!
Windows 7 is nice. It's sure going to suck using XP at work tomorrow.

9:28pm: This is not what is supposed to happen
Rough day at work today. And by rough I mean one step above total disaster. It's only a minor disaster.

A hard drive died in the development database server. That happens. Normally it's not a big deal. You put a spare in, rebuild the RAID array, and life goes on.

For reasons that we don't quite understand yet, this was not a normal situation. Write failures appeared across the board, the server crashed, and there was major corruption of the array. An entire partition went missing (we were able to recover it using a tool called Recover My Files). On the partitions that survived, there are randomly corrupted files and parts of files. We've got log files that look normal except for one section of total gibberish. Batch files that don't work anymore, data files that have one bad block out of a million, and so on.

To call it a mess would be an understatement. Making it worse is that the DBA is out due to a family emergency (and for good reason), so we're left trying to deal with it without really having the knowledge we need. Oracle is a fickle thing when you're learning on the fly in disaster recovery.

Now, this is an older server, but it's still a server. RAID 5 is not supposed to behave like this when one disk goes. Something VERY wrong happened here. My day wasn't spent trying to figure out what went wrong, it was spent trying to get things working again... which was somewhat less then entirely successful. I'm not sure it can be done without a full restore at this point given how widespread and seemingly random the damage is (one database only has tables starting with the letter A now, go figure!).

We're going to try again tomorrow, and after that we'll decide what the next step is.


ps - I hate summer.

10:50pm: I hate it when they do that
As part of their conversion of Lord of the Rings Online to a no subscription (cash store instead) game, they're running a beta. Tonight, they had a contest for people who logged in to the beta. Top prize was a video card.

That's not that unusual. It wasn't open to people outside the US. That's also not that unusual, given that we're dealing with very US centric companies.

What is unusual is that they sent me an email inviting me to participate in the contest, knowing full well that I'm in Canadian. How do I know they know? It's in my account info, right above the email address they needed to pull out of the database to email me the invite for the contest.

I was already displeased with the types of items they're putting in the store ("spend $5 to get a combat boost!" is not cool with me), but now they're actively offering me things they know full well their own rules disallow them from actually letting me win. It's like a taunt.

So, they can go sit on my list of companies I refuse to give money to.

5:49pm: Garden update
Some good news, and bad news here. I'll do it in order, which is largely front-loaded with bad news.

We didn't have the area to use ready originally, so we planted the cucumbers in a pot to get them started. They came up. We built the garden beds, and I moved them. Moving them killed them, because I'm not so good at that. I planted new ones in the garden bed recently, and they're starting to come up now. So assuming we have enough growing season (and enough sun), I may still get a crop out of those!

For the tomatoes, I got a cherry tomato plant and 3 heritage tomato plants at the market. The cherry tomatoes started off the healthiest, as the others didn't seem to like being transferred either and got wilted/droopy.

In the last week though I used a fungicide on the big ones and Liz trimmed some of the ded leaves at the lower part. Combined with some fertilizer, they've really recovered. They are looking healthy now and one of them even has a flower!

Unfortunately something attacked my cherry tomato plant and broke the stem, so it's dead. :( Might look at the market to see if we can pick one up. But at least the other stuff is growing! (And something attacking my plant isn't my fault at least.)

10:10pm: Fun with books
Here's the doll I got Liz for Christmas, wearing the dress I got for her birthday, reading the book I picked up while in the US last week.

One
Two
Three
Four

11:46am: Another trip thing
One detail I forgot. We went to Wonder Books, which is a used/old bookstore (for Fredericton folks, think a chain version of Owls Nest). While there, I got Liz an 1850s book titled "Etiquitte for Ladies".

Totally awesome. :)