Schedule from hell

It's bad enough that I'll be working from 5pm Friday to Jehovah-knows-when on Saturday morning, moving our UPSes and servers while the normal world plays and sleeps.

But I just realized that I've also been scheduled to speak 10am-noon Friday in a meeting about filtering the Internet for our libraries -- which is sure to be exhausting enough for one day's work.

And there's no way around it. I'm the Guy What Knows This Stuff for both events.

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Today must have been New Hardware Day -- I grabbed our new pimp-ass Relion 240, totally tricked out (over $6000) on the way over to Clearwater to discuss the project that we're using it for. After lunch at Skyline Chili (they make a good beans-and-rice "chili" that's great in their 5-Way, which means on spaghetti, under onions and cheese), I brought it to the library. Nobody had thought to bring a laptop, so I said "This server runs Linux; it can do anything you want." Everyone seemed amazed that it could read the Windows floppy that our webmaster brought. It was a nice bit of evangelism. :)

And when I got back to the office, our loaner PacketShaper was waiting for me. It was a doddle to configure, and if I understand correctly, it just drops in between any two critical points on the network (once it's been configured). So perhaps I'll set that up one of these mornings. I'd better, as we only have it for 14 days.

The performance evaluation is actually not too bad -- I'm finding I can document a grade of "Exceeds Expectations" far more often than I thought. I've had a busy year.

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I just watched the first episode of "My So-Called Life", and I cried when "Everybody Hurts" started playing. If the other 18 episodes combined are this good, I'm in for a treat.

I'm surprised that IMDb doesn't think that American Beauty references MSCL. A teenage girl named Angela has a weird neighbor with a camera. She also has a friend with a slutty reputation who talks about how hot Angela's dad is.

I also think Angela's look owes a lot to "the eat me beat me lady" in Pump Up the Volume, but that could just be me.