It’s the night of The Big Game. Starts in 11 minutes, I think. I don’t have ESPN anymore, so if I do watch it, I’ll be doing so through the free portion of the ESPN app, which follows all of the action using only those overhead cameras that zoom up and down the field for the whole game. No commentary at all. Believe it or not, I prefer to watch the games that way, so it works out for me.
Should you not know, The Big Game is the championship game of the joke of a college football playoff known as “The College Football Playoffs.” The actual college football playoffs, which has 24 teams and determines the actual Division I college football champion, ended last Saturday, with North Dakota State eking out a win over James Madison University. I watched it. It was a good game. I might, as I said, watch a bit of the game tonight between Georgia and Alabama, but it’s not something about which I’m overly-excited.
I had a decent day at work today. Knocked out a couple of problems that had been bothering me for the last week and continued to slice into my mountain of open tickets. I was not helped by the fact that – yet again – one of the Level 2 people ran updates on numerous firms yesterday and didn’t bother to fully test said updates; so that, when we arrived at work this morning, there were already more than 25 of said firms who couldn’t use one of their most vital applications until we, the Level 1 team, manually patched all of their servers.
I don’t understand this trend – and it is a trend. It happens all the time. Somebody who has the job of updating applications does so, but doesn’t take the simple step of launching the applications after they’ve been updated. I know that they don’t take this step because many applications will give a pretty obvious hint (i.e., they won’t launch) if you haven’t completed the update successfully. Rule #1 for all application updates, going back to the dawn of the computer age: have a rollback plan. The X-Company just doesn’t seem to grasp that concept; and, frankly, it really pisses me off. It’s tough to guess just how many man-hours are lost – by us and by the clients – every time they do this, and they do it at least twice a month.
Enough about that. Today’s featured photo is of my boy Joshua. The tiny little runt of a Maine Coon who I chose – with no close second – out of a little of 11 when he was two days old. He and his brother, Chamberlain, are coming up on (I think) their fourth birthday next month. Both tilt the scales at around 15 pounds and, while both are incredibly sweet and loving, Joshua is still the daddy’s boy that he was on the day I brought them home. The photo up there shows Josh lounging on my Kelti 20-degree sleeping bag on a Sunday morning a few weeks back. He was there because…well….because I was there. Joshua wants to be with me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He wakes me up every morning, he follows me around the house until I leave, he sleeps on my pillow. If I’m in a room, there’s a 95% chance that he’s in the same room. At the moment, I’m at my desk and he’s on his little cat tree about three feet to my left. A few minutes ago, I went downstairs to get a drink, and he followed me down. When I came back up to my office after all of 5 seconds in the kitchen, he came back up with me. There is no dog more loyal to his master than Joshua is to me.
He also plays fetch as well as any dog, and it is a constant source of amusement and, in a way, solace for me when I come home and find one of his favorite toys (he has three that he prefers far more than the 200 or so others in the cats’ toy box) at the top of the stairs or on my bed – evidence that he’s been entertaining himself while I’ve been away, by playing a game of solitaire fetch. Every night before bed, he begs me to throw just a few tosses down the stairs. He is a remarkable little animal.
So is Chamberlain, and Chamberlain will get his own write-up one of these days.
It has been outlandishly chilly in Atlanta for an extended time, and I’m almost ashamed to admit that. I generally like to be a bit chilly. I hate being hot. I’ve got no problem with camping in the mountains in the winter or driving to the Upper Peninsula in October. This month, though, has been different. It’s just been cold. It reminds me of one of our last winters in Shoreham, when Dad commented to me something along the lines of, “It hasn’t gotten really cold – like 20 below – this winter, but this month-long stretch of 5-degree days really takes it out of you.” Well…this month-long stretch of 30-degrees has really taken it out me, too. To that end, I broke down last week and bought two pairs of flannel-lined pants from Duluth Trading company.
Naturally, they make me sweat. But they’ll be good for winter camping.
Well, I must go watch a bit of this Big Game and fall asleep. Joshua will be waking me up in just under 9 hours.