Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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got that wrong
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Like my brownhouse:
   miserable monday
Monday, July 25 2016
I awoke to an alarm this morning so I could be up in time to do chores at the brick mansion before my workday began. Semi-coincidentally, the contractor we'd hired to replace the boilers and hot water heater with a single gas unit would be starting work there today. My first task at the house this morning was to try to ge a motion-activated light on the garage working. I'd brought one of those sockets with a motion-sensor that you can buy at Home Depot in hopes of just threading that in and having it work, but first I had to remove the guts of the old motion sensor (which seemed dead). And then either the threads of the motion-sensor socket couldn't reach into the now alway-on socket of the light fixture or (more likely) those damn things with sensors on them never fucking work. By this point I was drenched with sweat. Then, when I went to my car for something, I noticed that one of my rear tires was now flat. As a friendly shopping-cart-pushing homeless guy noted as he passed, that's no fun, "especially on a Monday morning." I would later extract a large fragment of broken razor blade from that tire, which I would nevertheless be able to successfully seal with a tire puncture kit (my first ever use of one). You can see the culprit here, with a 26 year old quarter for scale.

Next I went up to the apartment on the third floor, the attic apartment, to investigate a problem with the electric range. It had apparently started turning itself on. The panel concealing the rotary temperature controls was held on by something that resembled a plastic rivet that I had to destroy to remove, and once inside, I could see no way to fix anything. I'd had a shitty day and was drenched in sweat, so I shrugged and said I'd have to investigate it further. I told the tenant that, until we fix the problem, to turn the thing off at the nearby circuit breaker before going out.
After that unpromising morning, my workday began, it was somehow even worse than my unproductive morning as a landlord. For starters, the cool tools I'd been working on at the end of last week had destroyed a bunch of data in a couple tables. I had recent backups and so could restore them, but it was a pain in the ass and it kind of made me look like an idiot to the person who was using these tools. On top of this, there was something bad going on with the stability of the underlying database, which kept getting stuck in deadlocks that could only be solved by restarting the MySQL dæmon. That only took seconds, but every time it happened, all twenty or thirty websites hosted on that server would've shown errors to a visitor. It was surprising nobody was complaining about it.
Adding to the misery of all this, my gut was still far from normal. I continued to battle mild nausea and bouts of what felt like severe acid reflux (but for which there was no easy cure). The nausea kept me from eating, which made me feel weak and even somewhat woozy. I ate yesterday's leftover pasta at around noon but then had nothing else until past 5:00pm.
Then Gretchen told me that the tenant from the third floor of the brick mansion was saying that, since my visit, all the dials on his stove were malfunctioning. So now I had to make an emergency trip over there in the middle of my workday. As I set out, I forced myself to eat some food: a couple bananas followed by some peanuts.
That really helped. By the time I returned to the brick mansion (still driving on that donut), I was on top of my game. I'd brought along the things I thought might come in handy, particularly a roll of duct tape. In only a few minutes, it seemed I'd completely fixed all the problems with that troublesome electric range. All I'd had to do was add a little duct tape around the stems that the knobs go on, and that made removed all the slop in their fit. Now when they were turned to off, the damn burner or oven would actually be off.
Next I went out to the garage and completely replaced the outdoor light fixture with a remote-sensor one. It was raining at the time, but I didn't want to have to come back again any time soon. The chore only took me about ten minutes.
My workday kind of ended with a whimper, but I had a second wind at around 11:00pm, when I discussed with my boss today's server reliability issues. In the course of our discussion, I came up with what seemed to me like a brilliant plan. The site already uses locking files to keep certain things from happening simultaneously that shouldn't. Since I suspected today's problems came from several people repeatedly trying to run reports, I decided to implement locking that would prevent two reports from being run at the same time and also to prevent data-changing cron jobs from running during reports.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160725

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