Might be a loose interpretation of 'vacation', but I was running a marathon using my phone for tunes, when suddenly I got a call from my boss; our application server had died and he had no idea how to restart it. So while running the race I was timing my exhales to give him the step-by-step instructions for reset-to-restart. The good news is that the miles just flew by as he read the logs, and I responded with commands. Suddenly I was at mile 22 and was actually feeling pretty good; didn't finish the race with a PR but was happy with the result and did get the server back up.

Pour one out for our last VMS/Alpha computers heading to the great bit bucket in the sky.

Was decent hardware in it's day, 20 years ago, but we now run EC2 instances that are faster. 🙃

"The employee handbook has gone paperless starting this year to help the environment! Please print out the acknowledgement form and deliver to HR that you acknowledge receiving the enclosed PDF of the handbook."

Found in the trash. Powered up fine and I spent a good half an hour reliving one of the greatest interfaces created (co-operative multitasking notwithstanding). That said, I couldn't find a site that Netscape Navigator would connect to other than example.com.

Got this status from another dev:

"Other than the fact that nothing's working, everything's going great!"

Seriously, wtf give the work to someone else, claiming that "I'm too busy to do this", when all that other person does is come asking you for help, and not only do you have to figure out what needs to be done, you need to figure out how the other person fucked it up and try to fix it without hurting any feelings. Oh, and, yes, I was too busy for doing what is essentially double work.

Decided to go hardcore Vim in 2018.

beware of font choices in chat apps; a coworker joked in the room that "well, sure, of course it's okay to update in production in the middle of the day" and for some reason, the other coworker didn't see the quotes because of the weird font they use, and also didn't stop to think, and went ahead and ran the deployment script. In production. In the middle of the day. With active users.

The good news is that those folks who logged back in got to use the new version a whole lot earlier than anyone was expecting. :\

I'm all for diversity in Linux, I like that there's multiple organizations, flavors, etc., but geez, troubleshooting a huge CMake project that breaks on Fedora and not on Ubuntu because of the way Python2.7 is installed is a real pain. :(

Look upon my greatest work.

Sigh. I'm a sad, sad, little man. :(

Not been a good day so far:
1. Woke up to my Synology in a 'Volume crashed' state. Tried to contact support via web page; support web page not loading.
2. Ancient software at work stops working. As the last remaining C++ dev, I gotta troubleshoot. Original developer wrote test program...in VB6.
3. Server config file changed, but all the admins swear up and down nobody's made any changes.
4. Client calls account rep and wants to know about our security policies, so he schedules a meeting with me and client and forgets to mention until he's emailing me asking where the hell I am. From the tone of the conversation between the rep and the client, it's clear that somehow I'm to blame for being late.

Sigh.

Well, hey, at least it's Friday, right? Right?

Salesman: "The new version is super impressive for <10 minutes of verbal bullet points>"
Me: Have you fixed any of the bugs we reported in the current version?
Salesman: "Don't worry, the new version uses a totally new codebase, so there are no bugs in it."

Have a client that has a very, very large format printer (think billboards). It's on their network as just another printer, with no special security because everyone "knows" never to print to it....except the new employee who printed her direct-deposit info to it. Got about ten feet(!) into the job before someone realized it wasn't an authorized job.

(On conference call with potential client)
Me: ...yes, you can interface with our system via our documented interfaces, using either JSON or XML...
Client: That's too hard. Can I just email you guys a Word doc or something?
Sales Rep: Yep, we can totally handle that, no problem.

Seen on the subway; some folks just like using a mouse I guess...

Given that an XML parser probably/should uses a regex to find the beginning ("<--") and end ("-->") of a comment, WTF can I not use "--" inside one?

I think we were one of the tens of companies to actually pay for one of Apple's most obscure products.

It's throw-away Thursday.

"WTF? These records should have been inserted into the table!"
...Hours of checking code, trying to figure out how this is possible, can't find a way to have this scenario happen...
...Add additional debug and troubleshooting code, add more verbose logging, redeploy to all the containers, reset all the tables, many apologies to the boss for the delay....
...Co-worker comes in: "oh, hey, sorry, accidently deleted some stuff from the database last night before i left."

"Yeah, we didn't send out a notice about changing the format. We figured you'd notice when your code stopped working."

Aaaah...I just got back from a meeting because of a production data problem caused by an analyst who keeps making mistakes that screw up client data. I wrote a program to automate most of it and everybody initially accused me of having a buggy program, only to find out she wasn't using it, never did.

"Why aren't you using the program then?" was asked. "Oh, well, I just understand my way better," she replies, "When I make a mistake at least I understand why."

Pause....

"Then, um, if you know you're making a mistake, why don't you fix it?"
"Because my process is so manual and labor intensive sometimes it's not worth it to go back and fix it, because I'd have to do everything over again, and you guys are much better at fixing this stuff than I am."

I indicated that everyone is too busy to stop and fix her mistakes, to which she then asks:

"So if you can't fix my mistakes, what am I supposed to do?"

Boss: "Why weren't you in the project meeting? You were supposed to present!"
Me: "I'm not on that project, Bob was before he quit."
Boss: "Yeah, but I assumed you'd take it over. We need you to be working on it."
Me: "What? I don't know anything about it, nothing."
Boss: "Yeah, but you guys went to lunch together, what else would you have talked about?"

The problem with moving Docker containers from your decked-out dev machine to a VM on AWS when your boss has told you to keep costs down:

1. Start Micro instance, 1++ gig memory
2. Get Out of Memory error from app after 30 minutes
3. Goto 1

Sigh, all these meetings are cutting into my no-meetings time. :(

So it turns out that a lot of writes to S3 is slow, regardless of whether you spent the time to rewrite your code from SAX to JAXB, then Go, then finally C++, thinking the problem was always with your code.

macOS' Finder says I have 24 files and directories in my home directory. 'ls -lah | wc -l' says I have 172. That's a lot to keep hidden from me. :)

installing vs2015 required running one installer. Uninstalling vs2015 requires spending an hour+ manually uninstalling every stupid add-on and supplementary program that was added by that one installer.

You know that time when somebody had a problem with a system you wrote years ago, and it has taken you an hour to try to remember how to even call it, because the documentation and code didn't get migrated from svn to git, and the svn server has been shut down for some reason, and the admin is out today, and the last time you had the code was three machines ago, so you're trying to gleam what needs to be done to just call the stupid thing from log files set to 'error'?

That time is now.

I have just been given this box to work with.

Subtle geek humor