Draining the swamp...

There is an old saw that proclaims something to the effect of: "When you're hip deep in alligators, it's hard to focus on draining the swamp!" Well, that's a little of how I felt as the day progressed.

No, actually...that's very much like the way I felt starting shortly after getting to work, with the water level rising as the day went on.

I'll not bore you with details. To do so might be cathartic, but it also may just get me worked up again for no good reason. About the best part of the day was finding out that I'm doing a sim starting on Wednesday night and ending early Thursday morning, only to return right after lunch on Thursday to help play out the sim until 9 pm. (Actually, the best part of the day was lunch, but that's another story.)

In the positive column, it turns out I may not have lost that source code I was ranting about the other day; it may actually have been merely "mislabeled." I don't really have the time to go examine it in any detail right now, but running the executable shows all the right signs. This "find" almost makes me ready to forget it was right under my nose when I was looking for it.

Another positive note is that the Windows box that everyone (including me) is probably sick of hearing about continues to function well. Plus I found that there is a capability to view 'uptime' in Windows...you just have to look for it. (I never had, since I never kept a Windows box on more than a day at a time anyway, but I digress...) For the uninitiated, the magic sequence is Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->System Information.

The system has accumulated 26 hours since the last reboot, with no problems, and has burned electricity for almost 68 hours without a spontaneous reboot. In the number-crunching department, SETI@Home has processed just over 41% of a data set in just under 39 hours, which is a tad slower than I remember it before ratcheting the system clock down to 66 MHz. It doesn't matter. Unless the machine decides to commit cyber-seppuku, this is probably about the last word to be said on this subject.

A check of freshmeat.net (a leading Linux site for keeping up with available software) showed up something interesting called `Agnostos', which purports to be a Web-based tool for managing todo lists. I've installed it on `kerouac', and am going through the motions of finding all of the rest of the stuff I need installed to get the thing to work. My first try at running the code yielded an error that I traced to an absent Perl module. With the module installed, the initial screen appears to load well, but there is a problem (not the least of which is that Perl scripts run a whole lot slower than PHP scripts on old 486SX boxes).

Learning as I go, I send return greetings and kudos to sanssouci for her greeting to me in one of her posts of a few days ago. Her approach solves (for me, at least) part of the awkwardness of adding - and being added as - a friend here on LJ. And thanks to her and to jennie for the reference to misheard song lyrics -- known as mondegreens. (You'd never think a phenomenon such as that would rate a word...at least not outside of a book of `snigglets'.)

Anyway...time to hit the sack. Big day tomorrow.

Cheers...