Morning

I’m reaching for the computer around a loudly purring cat, who has found that the best way to get a hug in the morning is to sit directly in front of the laptop. Irritating, but very cute. It’s hard to be angry at something that’s just expressing affection.

Spent yesterday fighting with the support ticket lines at work. I lost, meaning that the day ended with more support tix that were there in the morning. I know that in absolute terms, it was necessary … but I ended the day feeling “well THAT was useful” [stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp].

Made “Tea steamed fish” for dinner. I’ve been trying to replicate this meal that I had in Beijing. The English wasn’t so great, so the best I got was that it was “tea steamed fish.” I looked on the internet, and found a couple of recipes. The first involved marinating the fish (cod) in tea. The second involved making a teabag out of cheesecloth and steaming through it. The fish was tasty, but needed something more.

Been fighting with XSan, which is Apple’s SAN (Storage Area Network) software. It’s a filesystem thing: Supposedly you just plug in your hardware (of a particular size and shape) and XSan takes care of turning it into a nice high performance file server. Unfortunately, it appears that the failure mode of XSan is to reboot all the computers involved … and that the default suggestion to fix this is to throw hardware at the problem. It does, shall we say, *not* degrade gracefully.

Testing for another stripe on the brown belt at noon today. Wish me luck.

— UPDATE — Passed the test. Another band of electrical tape has been applied to my belt. Only two small injuries to show for it. Sensei is lettin’ me off easy.

Okay, back to the frickity-frack support tickets.