I thought my day was full and interesting before the six datacenters in my building (along with a big chunk of the rest of Cambridge, and most of the rest of MIT) lost power. That happened around four thirty. Power came back around six thirty, and we all dived into bringing servers and services back up. I got home around eleven thirty ( Read more... )

So I ended up having to speed up the mail server migration because of what might either be a failing hard drive or a garbled filesystem. (I discovered that the filesystem was corrupt and the old machine wasn't functioning properly *as* I was synchronizing data, and rather than wait and do a final synch today as I had planned, I went ahead and ( Read more... )

There’s an opening for a Linux sysadmin (with a bunch of user support mixed in, including Mac and Windows) in my group.

[Read on if you’re interested, or just check out that link]Stolen from email I just wrote for a mailing list:My group has an opening for a system administrator (with a lot of end-user support and documentation mixed in). This is at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at ( Read more... )

I hurried home from work to meet a potential renter, and on my way home noticed that Venus and Jupiter were very close together, and on the other side of the sky was Mars, along with the Moon. I was running a bit late, but I couldn’t resist pulling out my binoculars when I got home (could see a couple of the moons of Jupiter ( Read more... )

Yesterday afternoon I got to see the birthday girls at Diesel, with treasonx and inkedandkinked, and it was great to see them. (Aside: The Diesel has changed a lot since I was last there! I should go some Tuesday.)

Then they went off to a fancy dinner while I met plumtreeblossom for a yummy but much less upscale dinner at Mike’s before the show. Had a great time being all shmoopy ( Read more... )

My replacement phone arrived, and I believe I’ve restored all my stuff.¹ Yay!¹ Except for a very few commercial apps which seem to have been stored in such a way that they weren’t in my backups, and I haven’t yet tried to migrate the text messages that arrived on the flaky temporary backup phone I was using while I waited for the replacement to

1. If you have a Dreamwidth account as well as an LJ account, and I’m on your Friends list on LiveJournal, could you add me there as well? That way I can comment there when I see cross-posts. (I’m beowabbit there as well as here.)
2. The coffee-flavored jellybeans were not the high point of my evening, but they were definitely up there. I knew the ( Read more... )

( Ignore unless you are in the market for an Android tablet. )

(This was in response to somebody asking for Android app recommendations, but it was too long for an LJ comment, and I figured other people would be interested too. This includes Free, free, and for-pay proprietary apps; the links will tell you which is which.)
( Some of the Android apps on my phone, with notes. )

I’ve been meaning to post links to these blogs for a while:

• A Gay Girl in Damascus
  What it says on the tin. Amina lived in the US for several years, and then moved back to Syria a while ago. I found her blog a few days ago thanks to a link from a coworker - around the same time the secret police started looking for her and she went underground. ( Read more... )