Brain. Blown. Need. Caffeine.

I remember the days of yore, when being a Mac technician meant that Unix was something for the other guy, and XWindows was something you had to buy extra software for. Compiling Unix software was something you never expected to have to do, and were never expected to do.

Of course, back in those halcyon days of yore, I'd be lucky if I didn't wind up restarting my workstation at least once a week. Sometimes more often, if I'd managed to break something in the course of my experimenting. Force-quit certainly wasn't the near-painless thing it is in OS X. But sometimes…..sometimes…..I miss the fact that I didn't deal with Unix, or if I did, it was through the safe remove of a remote terminal session and somebody else had to worry about the widgets and geegaws on the other end. Nobody asked me then to figure out how to make the command line software on the server work right, I was an end user who just wanted it to work.

On the other hand, I just figured out how to compile a heavy-duty genetic sequencing package, configure it (I hope) correctly, set up XWindows to allow remote terminal sessions, and do it all from scratch, with only the combined knowledge of Google and MacOSXHints to help out. It's not the kind of thing that you put on a resume (tempting as it is to shout this particular triumph from the rooftops) but it is something to be proud of if you've never done it before. Man, does my brain feel tired.

Fun with background checks.

gave me a call today, to let me know that an Unnamed Goverment Agency had left her a message, asking questions about me. She naturally found this a little alarming, so she gave me a call to ask if I had known that the UGA was checking up on me. Yup, I did. Poor investigator must be bored silly investigating me. I don't do drugs, haven't had any jail time, haven't had suspicious foreign nationals in my entourage or really done anything that an investigator would find in the least interesting.

Pretty good day.

Tuesday, nothing had been really right with the world. Stuff that was supposed to work had broken, and I wasn't getting any good answers from anybody. Yesterday, I was out sick. Today, it's a lot better because, while I was out sick, I was able to get the world to hold still just long enough to figure out fixes for what broke on Tuesday. Funny how that can happen, isn't it?

I'm heading out this evening to finish up the mortgage refinance on the home that and I share. When we bought the place, we did it with fancy 100% interest-only no-money-actually-down financing. Now, I want to be able to keep it without worrying four years down the line that rising interest rates are going to send my monthly payment through the roof so I'm refinancing tonight with a traditional 30 year payments-and-interest mortgage. It's raising my monthly payment a couple of hundred dollars a month, but this way, La and I will know what our mortgage payment is going to be ten and twenty years down the line. With the Fed promising that they're going to continue to raise interest rates (to put a cap on inflation and crank the economy back a smidge), refinancing to lock yourself in at a good rate is a smart thing to do right now.

Head. Desk. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Yeah, it's been one of those days today. It's work though, and I don't talk about work much here. I think I'm going to really enjoy going home tonight, though, because it means I'm out of here for the day.