the everyday adventures of sabrina

My Crappy Press Release.

i crashed — damn near literally, after i almost fell asleep sitting upright in my desk chair, listening to loud Franz Ferdinand — sometime around eight or eight-thirty or so. (i’m a little fuzzy on the details.) michael had, very planning-aheadingly, brought in sleeping bags and pillows, so i swiped one and shut my office door. i would never before have guessed that i could sleep on an essentially-bare poured-cement floor, but i suppose so long as you’re tired enough (and have a pillow), many things are possible.

people let me sleep, and i finally woke on my own around 13h10. nothing had significantly changed since i went to “bed,” i don’t think; the sendmail mess tang and i had been slaving over for days now was still not working right (and oh boy do i have to write about that at some point, because (a) the sendmail milter docs are BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD and someone is going to PAY, and (b) this resulted in the absolute most fucked-up crazyniquischeme i have ever been involved with (and they didn’t earn the name crazyniquischeme lightly). fortunately it’s only on the development machine; production is still status quo. which is still kinda broken (don’t get me started) but at least the mail is delivered.

eventually.

we were waiting past midnight last night for a new rev of a product patch they wrote for us. turns out that the patch that they wrote to make the stupid thing syslog also resulted in random IMAP connection drops. and fortunately, as a pine user, i got to enjoy EVERY SINGLE LAST one of them, as when pine’s imap connection goes away, it doesn’t silently reconnect, it makes you re-open the folder. everybody using GUI clients didn’t notice, but it was making me batshit crazy all day thursday and friday. sometimes i’d go two hours without the connection dying; other times, it would die within five minutes of the last death. oh man. i’m glad they patched it. it is, however, unfortunate, that they decided to transfer the new version of the patch to us via e-mail yesterday . . . considering that the e-mail system was down. i think max was ready to leap through the telephone and bring the pain, at one point.

there was other shit going down, and i could continue to go on . . . but i really need to shut my face and get back to fixing broken shit.

i need some sleep.

it is 0657 on sunday, 27 february. i have been in the office since 0900 yesterday; awake since 0700. i went to sleep friday night at about 0300 saturday morning. before that, i had been awake since 0600 friday.

i think i am seeing colors.

sitting here listening to The Charm of the Highway Strip — which makes pretty darn good working music, by the way — and actually getting work done. feeling pretty good about today, thus far, which is odd and certainly unanticipated.

went out to kasey’s last night for beers with johnny and whirl, and unexpected others turned up, which was a good time. we talked about bingo and the shitty shitheads at insurance companies, argued over which Who album was the best (i, of course, voted for Quadrophenia, mick for Who’s Next, and whirl for Tommy), quizzed each other over various all-time favorite songs, and generally entertained ourselves. this is, i think, part of the reason that i’m in a good mood today. after-work decompression is an important part of continuing one’s ability to put up with wack-ass nonsense during the work day.

for the record, i found it extremely difficult to pick out any all-time favorite songs, but said that “Everyday” by Buddy Holly and “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead were definitely right up there, along with Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” beyond that, i found it too difficult to assign ranks, even within categories. such is life.

oh well. back to beating up on sendmail and pals for me.

Sunset City, i’ve gotta see the world;
don’t hold me too tightly, don’t whisper my name
sad-eyed baby, i’m not that kind of girl,
when the dice stop rolling, there’s no more to the game.

ugh. am so frazzled with everything at work i can barely remember what day of the week it is. much less the date; i have to look over to my calendar, then think about what day it is (usually in terms of “well, X was due today, so it must be Tuesday/Wednesday/whatever”).

today was the day whereupon we turned harper into a mailserver. that was fun. except for the part where apparently you can’t override the values that sendmail automatically populates $w with. you can add values, but i’m damned if i can figure out how to eliminate entries that it has acquired via gethostbyname(3) or other mystical means. this seems to be just plain stupid, to me, and so i figure that i must be wrong. i mean, i must be, because surely no one would be so stupid. right? in twenty years of development no one else thought of a case where one might want to wipe out $w and start over? i must be wrong. this is what i keep telling myself. and yet, and yet… if you can do it, they did a bloody brilliant job of hiding the documentation as it’s apparently not on sendmail.org, in the bat book, or anywhere google indexes.

(situation: this machine “harper” needs to deliver mail for a hostname, “cshell.uchicago.edu.” however, it absolutely needs to *not* deliver as local mail addressed to “harper.uchicago.edu.” this is primarily because for the past five thousand years or whatever, harper has been quasi-interchangeable with @uchicago.edu (don’t ask) for the purposes of addressing mail. but now harper’s a mail server for only a very few people who don’t want to leave unix mail. so all the majority of people who have been using an address @harper for all these many years are not actually “harper mail” users, so harper must not deliver mail as though they are. however, sendmail stuffs “harper” into $w and i can’t seem to find a way to force it back out. i can’t use virtusertable because that takes effect only after local deliveries; i can’t use mailertable because that only affects hosts not in $w. i can’t manually set w with a C line because that only adds values. ARRRGH! i ended up having two completely separate sendmail configurations; one in the default sendmail.cf which is a nullclient and blindly forwards everything back up to the mail exchangers, and the other is the config for the listener. so the listener believes it’s harper, but it shouldn’t actually ever *get* any mail for a harper user; meanwhile, locally-created messages get the “duh, i dunno” response and harper just passes it up to uchicago.edu. OH BOY DID I HAVE FUN WITH ALL THAT THIS MORNING.)

finally i get harper up and done (or so i think…) and we discover, via this really catty email from a user (because that’s how you get a response out of those slovenly, slacker computer people, you know; they’re like oxen, you have to hit them for their own good), that a software update i applied to puremessage last night blew away some of our customizations to the end-user interface; notably, bits of the authentication subsystem. that’s okay. people didn’t really need to log in or anything.

get that fixed, and then harper’s nfs decided to flake out, which of course brings incoming mail to a grinding halt because without home directories we can’t read .forwards, etc., so i have to drop fucking everything to reboot the machine in the middle of the damn day.

blah de fucking blah. did i mention i got to work at 2 this morning?

today sucks. i want to go home.

backstory: we’ve been having some minor difficulty with some of our anti-spam systems, because they keep running out of disk space. i opened a trouble ticket after about the third time that running out of disk space resulted in breaking the product’s update management software, requesting that they change the package manager to stop truncating its “here’s what i have installed!” file. tech support told me to stop running out of disk space. i’m kind of proud of this analogy.

I’m sorry, but from a programming standpoint, that’s not an acceptable answer. C’mon, seriously. That’s like saying that if you run out of gas on a deserted country road in east Texas on a dark moonless night and have no way to get back to civilisation, when the Beastman comes out of the woods and tears your car into bits and eats all your favorite CDs, you just have to make sure that you never run out of gas. While that’s fine advice in principle, a better response would be to be prepared in the event that the Beastman attacks you so you can recover. In real life, just as sometimes you run out of gas when the Beastman is on the prowl, sometimes you run out of disk space when ppm is trying to make a write. And much like carrying Beastman repellent while travelling through east Texas, checking to make sure that you have enough disk space to write a new copy of the ppm.xml file before you smash the old one is a good way to lead a happy, long life.

Yes, yes, there’s a backup, that’s well and good, but it would be even better if you never corrupted the live one to begin with.

(And if you can’t do that, at least throwing a giant glaring message out on standard error that says “Yo! Your ppm.xml file is now worthless! Go restore the backed up version or suffer the consequences!” would be nice.)

grumpily,
–sabrina

seriously. how hard is it to (a) write the new ppm.xml file, (b) check status and size and make sure it is what it ought to be, then (c) move the existing ppm.xml file to the backup file, then (d) finally move the temp ppm.xml file to be the real ppm.xml file? sheesh.

also, that analogy was drawn on slightly-exaggerated real life experience: i almost did run out of gas on a country road in east texas last summer. fortunately, i passed through some tiny podunk town when i was down to like 30 miles left on the tank. which is good, because i wouldn’t want the beastman to attack and eat all my favorite CDs.

i had wild boar for lunch on saturday. it was v. good.

hey bill — as it turns out, we are bad people.

i love iTunes music sharing. one, because it lets me listen to music that i don’t own — the beforementined Melissa, a little bit ago, and now eighties Michael Jackson — but also because it gives me endless fodder for mocking the students with laptops. because, you see, iTunes lets you assign your computer an arbitrary name for sharing your music. currently in the lineup i see, among others:

• ????
• allison’s musicccc — – the extra C’s stand for cwality!
• B is for Bethlehem (1949 Songs/5.1 Days) — that’s nice, dear
• Brightly Colored and Shiny — finally, a name i can support!
• Eric Ottesen (A REALLY random collection) — listen, you do the sharing, i’ll do the determining of what’s “REALLY” random.
• If you want to listen to History lectures, rock on.
• In Societ Russia, the music listens to YOU (AIM: [someid]) — one of my favorite naming trends is putting your IM handle in there. presumably so people can IM you and go “my god, your music collection is so fucking excellent that i want to have all your little babies.”
• old punks never die, sadly — i’m pretty sure that’s max’s computer…
• So much to do…So few people to do it for me. — amen.
• Thom’s got yah ass (aim: [someid]) — well, that’s good, as Thom’s apparently got no spelling skillz, and will need a career to fall back on after he flunks out of the Harris School.
• and my favorite advert-bearing title, Visit policyforum.blogspot.com — i can’t wait to open up *your* music collection and listen to all those fabulous dance hits like Henry Kissinger singing “I Wanna Sex You Up” and Sandra Day O’Connor’s “I Touch Myself.”

… oh, shit. that last bullet point gave me a really unhappy mental image.

i am in west virginia. i went to cabela’s. i bought stink bait so i can go fishing for channel catfish. i am currently steadily resisting the winsome smiles and comments that i’m mean for making kyle turn off the teevee so i can go to sleep.

i am very very far from work.

i am leaving work, getting in my car, going home long enough to (a) leave the cats a weekend’s worth of food and (b) stuff some clean clothes into a backpack, then driving away for the weekend. i do not know where i will end up. somewhere cold.

away.

once upon a time, there was a little group of unix sysadmins that ran mail servers. they did other things too, important and unnoticeable things, but mostly they made the mail go.

then events came to pass and the sysadmins were made to run mail on non-unix machines. they bought three years of service for the not-unix machines, and were sad, for they were unix admins and they liked unix, and not-unix is, well, not unix.

then more events came to pass, and one of the chiefs of the tribe for whom the unix sysadmins made mail go decided that he wanted to have exchange. specifically exchange, and none other would do, not even other non-unix products. and time passed, and there was exchange, courtesy of the little group of windows sysadmins.

then the oracle of the tribe fortold, the chief will have his other chief friends move to exchange too, because they will see his outlook and his calendar and his gadgetry, and think “wow, that’s neat, i want me some of that.”

and, the oracle continued, once all of the chiefs are on exchange, the group that runs all of the chiefs’ computers will offer exchange to everyone whose computers they run as well, because if you’ve got something you can offer, it makes sense to offer it to anyone who wants it and/or can pay for it. and people will pay for exchange, for it is shiny and they care not for quality of service but only for the shiny.

and lo, says the oracle, at the end of the three year contract for the non-unix mail machines, we will have many important people on exchange, and we will have two distinct and expensive mail systems to run, and it makes sense to only have one large expensive mail system for everyone. and since the oracle is a cynic, she commented under her breath that she didn’t think that exchange was going to be losing that particular fight.

and thus in three years, the little sysadmin group that just wanted to work on unix systems and make the mail go wouldn’t even have mail running on their non-unix systems, but wouldn’t have mail at all anymore, for mail would be in the hands of the little group of windows sysadmins instead. and although there would still be mailing list servers and usenet news servers in need of tender loving unix care, they are not so needy as to require a group of six to run them, for neediness is not the nature of unix.

and the unix sysadmins were sad at the oracle’s words, for they feared it was true, and although they liked their tribe and its pretty lands and neat people to work with, without unix they had no jobs, and without jobs they could not pay the rent on their hovels or buy jaunts of meat to roast on sticks.

now i know how roger deschner felt in 1996 when i called UICVM ‘obsolete.’

two tickets to margaret cho on 11th march:	$43.50 each.
“building facility charge”:	$2 each.
“convenience charge”:	$8.70 each.
order processing charge:	$4.35.
state/local tax:	$0.70.

$25.75 in extra ticketmaster charges, which is 36 times the entertainment taxes i’m being charged. that seems a little bit excessive. guys, i live in the city of chicago. we live for taxation. if hizzoner can find it in his heart to only charge me seven thin dimes for the pleasure of seeing ms cho live, maybe y’all are being a tad unreasonable?

• the git whose idea it was to market Clearasil when i was a teenager, claming that acne was a teenage-only problem and once i hit 20 i was home free. you are responsible for years of disappointment, sir, and don’t think i’m going to forgive it easily.
• anyone who gave me — mistakenly or otherwise — fat-free cream cheese for a bagel, ever.
• the idiot in the volvo who cut me off on the way to work this morning. actually, any idiot in a volvo, ever. especially the one i saw reading the sun-times, spread out across the steering wheel, while driving down old skokie road in northbrook, about five years ago.
• steve jobs. all other things that i like that he’s done aside, you killed the newton, you fucker!
• catgirls.

FUCK!

well, one thing i forgot to note earlier this week — since i decided that this week was pretty much shot, i might as take advantage of it and not ruin any other weeks that might not be this upsetting, so i called my mom and told her i needed her to pay rent.

i’d been putting it off for a long time because it’s extraordinarily unpleasant — the mingled irritation with her for always forgetting which forces me to ask repeatedly, which makes me feel guilty even though i know she agreed at the outset to pay for the house, but she never has, so the irritation comes back, and now i’ve burned through all my liquid and most of my illiquid savings to keep paying for the stupid thing, but i still have to keep asking her.

but also i was hoping that if i got the webadmin position i wouldn’t have to ask, that there would be at least a little bit more money so i could afford the house. of course i didn’t get it, though, so now i badly need the money and had to ask mom for it.

i’m just so damn depressed. was talking to someone last night and realized i really wanted to go on vacation, just get the hell away from everything that’s making me so sad, just for a couple of days, but i can’t even afford a couple hundred dollars to fly someplace and crash at a friend’s for a weekend, much less have a real vacation. a friend invited me to go to vegas on the spur of the moment about two weeks ago and i would have loved to have gone, but of course i couldn’t. last year, i had wanted to take a vacation and go somewhere in january, which i knew ages ago wasn’t going to happen, and then i thought maybe this summer, but that’s out too at this point.

and it’ll be like this for at least the next year, unless i leave the university and find a new job elsewhere that pays better. but even if i do leave, it’ll be probably six months at the new employer before i accrue any vacation, so basically i’m just stuck from now on.

i would dearly love to stop feeling this angry, hurt, stressed out, and depressed about everything, but just can’t figure out how anymore. my job sucks and i have no hope for it any longer, and i don’t know what i can do.

a decidedly meh weekend, a really bad monday at work, and a tuesday that mostly rubbed salt in monday’s injuries.

   ”No, it was you losing the little golden sun killed me, Shadow, killed me dead, as sure as water’s wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.”
   Shadow wanted to point out to Mad Sweeney that that was kind of a bitter philosophy, but he suspected it was the being dead that made you bitter.
— from American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

tonight, am subbing for damaged-ankly-immobile Pirate Dan at pub trivia. this should be interesting; i said “yes” before the day’s headache really unpacked its bags to set a spell. perhaps i will introduce myself as “sabrina, the judge with whom thou shalt not argue because i am *way* meaner than you, puny human.”

CRUSH ALL HU-MANS.

gosh, there’s really just nothing like being so goddamn frustrated with someone that you start crying while trying to explain something in a meeting. i feel that that probably did a lot to improve my credibility.

i wore my dragonfly socks today because i thought i would need the cheerfulness. unfortunately they were not enough, evidently.

i hate my job.

in the interest of the prevention of blog-drama: [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. [expletive]. :(

i suppose this means that the one year rule still applies, after all.

as if having a really terrible hair day today wasn’t enough on its own.

fuck.