amy made me sit down here and go thru the 100+ pictures i'd neglected to put up. See them here... and learn to do the chili dance.

I threw my back out the other day. I hobbled about all day yesterday, and today is not much better. We should've been at Amy's aunts house an hour and a half ago. They're sleeping.

I'm wearing my christmas sweater.

the dell tech came and fixed my computer. yay.

i want me some egg nog.

oh, more pictures are on the way. maybe tonight.

It's been awhile... i've been a bit to busy to post... wanna know why?

Exhibit A

We went to the doctor today to get max's 2 month check up. He's 50% in height and 95% in weight. So, basically, he's short and fat. The doctor told us to make an appointment with a neurologist - never what you want to hear, to check out his thumperism. I'm pretty sure that's not the technical term for that. Basically his arm, leg and sometimes lower lip have a tendency to ""thump"" like the bunny in the cartoon. She just wanted to make sure he's not having mini-siezures.

Exhibit B

Work was very long and terrifying this week. On Wednesday our mySQL server crashed hard. I think this was caused by the cold weather. Well, indirectly. Because it's so cold out the building people have jacked up the heat in the building, which is great for people but bad for big ugly computers. I've only been there for a couple months, so i don't feel responsible for the fact that nothing whatsoever was backed up on that machine. So, what happened (boring tech stuff alert) is that the controller for the raid set got too hot and fried it's memory. Something that took a long long time to figure out. Like - till 7pm. Once we got that squared away we were able to replace the board (but not boot the machine because the bios copy and the disc copy of the raid config didn't match now) and rebuild and scrub the drives. This took till 11pm. Then were able to pull the memory out of the good card and put it in the bad very bad card and get on with life. yay.

Exhibit C

The next morning, another server crashed. This one had all of our MS SQL data and a couple of websites. well, lets say a couple of the websites that take all the orders and would put us out of business if they disappeared because no one ever backed anything up. What happened here: the raid config on the bios and the drives didn't match. Not a huge deal, just go into the config, pick the good one and move on with life, right? Well, no. There was only one to choose from, and it sucked. Blah blah blah - a couple hours later -- blah blah... i pulled all the drives and wiped the bios copy, rebooted to an eerie stunned silence. All the drives were ready, no config whatsoever.

So i called the old sys admin who had built them and got the old config from him, first two drives in one container, Raid 0 - last three drives in a raid 5. Set it up... and nothing. Gone. All of it. I spent the next couple hours calling data recovery places and having all the other people in the office start typing up printouts of the old code. got an estimate of somewhere around 8 to 10k on the hopeful side, down for a week, world crashes in, etc.

At 4pm the former sys admin came in and looked at the mess - should we even try anything else? what if we did and it wiped the data to an unrecoverable nothing? what if? He went into the config, and suddenly remember that the first container wasn't a striped set, but a mirror set - did the change... and glory hallelujah - the filthy beast booted. (sigh of relief here)(i backed up every stray piece of data before i went home)

Exhibit D

the next morning (today) i woke up to a scary bounty hunter like guy at my door who handed me a fifty page summons naming me in a civil suit against my former employer. the short legally obscure version: Company A, a competitor of my former employer, Company B, is accusing B of infringing copyright of some product images. As the old web developer, somehow my name got attached to this. My present boss told me not to worry about it, he gets stuff like that all the time - i'm just in the scatter blast of initial proceedings and as the former employee of an incorporated entity i'm not actionable in any conceivable way. plus i have no money. so why would they bother.

yeah, so that's why i've been to busy to post lately.

As you may or may not have noticed, some things have changed around here. I dropped the lemon yellow stylesheet as the default, replacing it with the newsy one (they're all still available in the navigation bar.) I added a quick link thing to the nav bar, which i'm continuing to tweak. It's nice because i can just hit a favelet and add it, with the minimalist comment of ""positive"", ""negative"" or ""neutral."" The code for this is based on this app from erik benson.