Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

Confession: not since high school have I had a computer of which I was the sole owner and user. Or rather, I didn't have such a computer until today.

Here's the deal: my illustrious employer will replace one's work laptop every three years; that's pretty standard. What isn't standard is that they let you keep the old machine. Thanks to my boss and alert cow-orker D, I've made the jump about six weeks early because D noticed that the development VM ran like molasses on my machine, which is of course one of the oldest on the team.

All it took to clone the old machine was a Thunderbolt cable and Carbon Copy Cloner. Many licenses worked as copied; Microsoft Office, predictably, doesn't. The cloning ran for about 90 minutes. Hey, no illegal activity here: I have no plans to use the old machine for work.

So what will I do with my old machine? The circumflatulation possibilities are limitless! Believe me, I have plans.

It all started at 0700 this morning when I checked my mail in bed, and discovered that one stage in my service's processing pipeline - one server - had mysteriously stopped talking to any other machines. OK, replace it while I'm eating breakfast.

Eventually I'm about to leave the Lake Place, when I see my bus, the 358, blow past. OK, I'll just walk six blocks up Phinney Ridge and hop a 5. Well, you know where this is going: just the street comes into view, I see the 5 pull away from my stop. Check One Bus Away. See that the next 358 will come in four minutes. Start running back down the slope. Halfway down, trip. Fall on the concrete sidewalk. Scrape both hands, bruise thigh, and tear laptop bag (but luckily, not the skirt that was cupcake_goth's). The Siberian Siren was just telling me the other day how much she hates that laptop bag.

I broke my laptop screen in the fall. Fortunately, StartupCo has some spares, and Apple's Time Machine does the right thing with respect to backup & restore. That would have been horrendous on a Windows machine. The ops guy who helped me out was planning on going to the Apple store tomorrow anyway. Thank Bob for small favors.

A different single-server pipeline stage went unresponsive the afternoon. OK, replace that one, too.

Making MongoDB scale is driving me meshuggah. I've kept the pipeline stage that relies on it disabled since Monday. A tester who I've worked with confirms that Mongo needs a fair amount of babysitting. That's no way to run a database.

My phone ran out of juice. No talking to m'boy on the bus home.

And I can't even call the waaahmbulance because a bridge collapsed some ways up I-5.

No hitting the Hill for me tonight.

Time for some treatment: a glass of wine and disco.

It seems that my son surfed his way to a malware site, probably in search of cartoons to watch, and apparently thereby infected Nibs' desktop. She called, mailed, and texted me last night and then said it's OK to fix it tonight. (?!)

Now, that machine has three accounts: one for me, one for Nibs, and one for m'boy. The first two have admin privileges, the third one doesn't, natch. So of course Nibs let him use hers.

This better be quick to fix. Between work, the Project, and the PTA, I've got too much on my plate.