Fairly Symmetrical

So this week has been all kinds of annoying. Lately it seems like something is continually going wrong; a different thing each week, mind, but continually. This week, the data drive in our fileserver--that would be the drive hosting all of our music, our nightly backups, and all of our photos--decided that it didn't have anything to live for. It's more annoying than anything else; the drive is less than a year old, so it will be replaced under warranty. The music files are all replaceable: the ones that aren't on either my Zen or Jen's iPod can be reripped as soon as I have the time. I even have most of our photos on a backup CD in our fire safe. The pisser is that all the photos I took on vacation in August are gone, since I hadn't backed them up to CD yet. Those were some of the best photos I've taken, I think, and I'm really grumpy that they're gone. Oh, I still have the ones that I posted to our online gallery, but those are all 800×600, not the original 1600×1200. All in all it's just a huge irritation that I really don't need right now.

Of course, Seagate does offer a data recovery service. I could send them the drive and see if they can pull anything off of it; they probably could. Misfortunately, the service starts at $500, and ramps up pretty quickly from there--a fact they do not reveal on the website. You have to call the (very polite and understanding) service to find out that little tidbit. Sometimes I think I'm in the wrong business. :-P

Neil is somewhat better, but still wheezing and sneezing after the first course of antibiotics. Apparently the bacterial culture revealed that that strain of bacteria should respond to these antibiotics, so we're to refill the prescription and keep going. Fortunately Neil loves the antibiotics. I am sometimes afraid he's going to bite off the end of the eyedropper in his haste to get to it, he likes it that much.

Work is kind of crazy right now. We're into the final development weeks for our next major release, and there's still lots to do. We're feature complete at least, but we're trying to get all current high-priority customer reported issues fixed in this one as well, which is going to be ... interesting.

Being a Swiss Army Knife (the analogy I always use in interviews) has its drawbacks. The major one is that invariably I end up getting thrust into new areas of our application(s) every few weeks, which means I am always trying to hoover up as much new information as I can, as rapidly as I can. I'm really good at it, something my boss pointed out directly in front of me yesterday, but that doesn't mean it isn't hard work. I always appreciate the stretches where I can relax and work on code I understand at a deeper, more comfortable level. Unless that level involves working in VB6, in which case it's kind of a toss-up. ;) Anyway, starting tomorrow I will be doing intensive work on a particular set of API objects we provide, all of which will be entirely new to me. So here's hoping iBO and I can be friends. :-P