Yes, I believe today marks the longest working day I've had at eSoft. And DAMN, I am glad it's the weekend.

Busy, busy, busy.

[Bitscape pauses a few moments to stare at the musical spectale on his tv screen that is Ozzy Osbourne. It's times like this that I wish I had a real speaker system hooked up to my DVD player. Not sure my parents would like that so much though.]

Well, today I did go the extra centimeter, I suppose. I had agreed to work until like 19:30 or so. But, nasty big ugly bugs being what they are, I really wanted to get the one I was working on finished. A monster, it was. I knew that if I left the office without slaying it, my satisfaction level would be greatly less.

So, I kept on prodding the goddamn code, which was being very uncooperative, and finally, finally! Everything seemed to be in working order. A few more tests, and then check that what I did hasn't broken any builds.

Committed my load of hacks, turned out the lights, armed the building, and left just short of 2100. (There was another bug I had been hoping to get to, which has been an evil little itch in the back of my brain, but the one I was working on had taken longer than hoped, and... Enough is enough.)

Methinks that someone in Atlanta (who will not be named, but anyone reading at eSoft will know who I'm talking about) was a pretty smart cookie to offer this "work Friday night" idea as a trade in exchange for the afternoon off on Wednesday. Instead of feeling like I was being dragged into some wretched "give of thy free time" deal, it was a fair exchange. In case it wasn't obvious already, I'm much more productive when I'm not pissed off. :)

And indeed, I did get so involved in what I was doing, that I stayed later than agreed. Left happy that I had gotten it done too. There is something intensely satisfying in the feeling of knowing that you've accomplished something, done the work, and it's out of the way.

Now, the weekend is underway, and I fscking need it! Very glad that I declined the "invitation" to come in tomorrow. Cause my brain needs the peace.

I will say this about the "Twilight Zone" phase of work these days: In doing tasks that aren't normally mine, I find that I'm learning a lot about how other parts of the process work. Things I was previously quite ignorant about. I can now begin to appreciate in a way that I couldn't before a remark a coworker once made to me: "We must be kind to our QA department." Indeed we must. lol.

So, having not set foot out of the building for roughly 13 hours (even for lunch, cause that was ordered in), it was quite a good feeling to step outside, take the helm, and get on the road with Tobias.

Drove by Circut City, but they were closed. Guess I'll be picking up my cell phone tomorrow. Came home, ate some leftover spaghetti, and was all set to begin a rambling. But when I entered the Lair, I found Dagobah having another IDE seizure. Powering down down, and cold starting didn't help. Tried several times. "Primary HDD Failure."

So it was time for surgery. Out of its little home it came. I decided it would be best to first try the old trick of switching the cable. (Since that worked last time) Couldn't find any spare cable around. So, I ripped the one connecting the cd-rom (that drive hasn't worked for a long time anyway), and used it for the hard drive.

Booted back up. And it went fine. While the drive fsck-ed, and eons passed, I decided to entertain myself by starting the Ozzy video. Although I know e2fsck can take a while, this was ridiculous. Several songs went by, and still it was going. I was beginning to wonder if things were really alright. When the bootup process was almost finished, I finally figured out why. I must have knocked the turbo switch. Flipped it back on. Duh.

So, then I started this rambling. After that little incident, I'm thinking it might be a good idea to add "backup and migrate critical services on Dagobah over to Argo", in case a greater catastrophy should occur. Amazing how many of Dagobah's parts are falling apart, broken, or in a half-working state. But still, it keeps ticking.

In my immediate, I see some content vulture-ism, a bit of just veging out, maybe a spot of quake3, and a LARGE dose of sleep. Rock.