(kiss you kiss you dark and long)

So I haven't finished this article about a white supremacist festival yet, but it's pretty good.

We are having the coolest thunderstorm right now. Lightning, and long, slow rolls of thunder. One was about 45 seconds overall. Yay.

After a long and painful battle over the past few weeks at work, I have declared victory. I've spent the past three days staring at an oblique Oracle database error (is there any other kind?), and finally tracked it down to an extra carriage return in a file. Yes, that's right, I wasted three days due to a blank line and software's utter inability to produce a helpful error message. I hate computers.

However, once that problem fell to my rapier intellect (next to the slain and bloating corpses of its comrades), it was pretty easy to get the whole application working, and now, finally, I can work on something else. It was an interesting problem: move this application from one machine to another. I was the only one to do it, and it absolutely had to be done, kind of like my parents making me sit at the dinner table until I ate all my food. It would have been a lot more fun if it were just a bit more tractable: there wasn't anything obvious or documented about the application, and there seems to be a fair amount of internal pressure to get it finished (said internal pressure is deflected by pointing out that everyone has had at least a year to mention that this application needed to be moved, and given the thoroughly obscure nature of the beast and the fact that its creators have all left the company, some forethought might have been nice). But there are some cool people involved, too, and on the technical end at least everyone is a lot more mellow than our typical user.

And then a full two hours of aikido. I think it's time to pass out.