da | Where'd I go?

I'm quite glad to be done with the work week. I was able to finish everything I wanted to by this evening, so I won't think about work at all this weekend (I had many nights this week when this was not the case; trying to puzzle out an answer when I should've been sleeping). Aside from the annoying bits, there were some good puzzles, too; partly solved by reasoning, and partly by slugging through all the possibilities. (The most annoying of those involved copying a working computer's /etc tree onto the broken one, noticing that the broken one worked when it booted with the good /etc tree, and half-by-half, adding more of the broken files until it stopped working again. Bingo: it was Herr Doctor /etc/udev in the parlour, with a rules.d ! I'm glad there was nobody in the lab when I solved that, because they would've been put off by my cheering..)

The most satisfying problem was actually solved by: asking a student. Seriously.

I also had one moment of sub-genius that I think was funny enough to share. One bug's fix required logging out anybody sitting at the terminals. There was only one guy in the lab, so I carefully figured out which machine he sat at and ran it remotely on all the others. All of the monitors, except for his, flashed and restarted Xwindows. Including my own. Oops. (the reset wasn't interrupted part-way when mine logged me out, because it was running elsewhere via a 'screen' session, which wonderfully saved all my work and notes. So it was a minor inconvenience, more just amusing.)

This evening I also took a moment before leaving to talk to my boss's boss, who sent me an email earlier asking about the status of my current second-priority project, which I can now make a first-priority again; I'm glad I did because I thought he might've been grumpy about the status, but instead he congratulated me for getting this stuff done.

Now that the dust has settled, I can maybe pay a bit of attention to you all. I've missed you this week!

Where'd I go?

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