crazy day

how do i best describe today in one word? NUTS.

on the bus to the base this morning, i was totally engrossed in oliver twist, and had my earphones in, bopping my head to wicked beats. suddenly one of the earphones was ripped out, and the strange girl in front of me was waving a newspaper under my nose.

"you want to read the paper?"
"i can't read hebrew."

i replaced the earphone. 20 seconds later there's frantic movement in my peripheral vision. i look up, and she's waving a stick of gum at me.

"no, thanks."

geez.

on base there was plenty of work, we were completely swamped with many different and unpleasant things the entire day. most of it was developer, and i managed to get the rest of the team scratching their heads and thinking "where did we go wrong?" :) [that smile's for my not being alone]

just before lunch, we had a farewell ceremony for one of the tech-support commanders. it was nice, and the food was good. what was really weird was afterwards running into one of her soldiers - i asked him why he hadn't been there, and he mumbled something about "why should i have been?", before scurrying off.
personally, as much as i hate my previous commanders, i'd still go and do the official goodbye thing. strange.

---lunch was amusing. a few of us from the section went to the mess hall, and ran into s'belle and a friend of hers. we were both on top form, and we all spent lunch (which wasn't too good, but not the worst i've ever eaten) in hysterics. afterwards, she was frantically messengering me [is that a legitimate verb now?] to find out if my friends also think that we look like a couple. i used a lot of little-people's words to explain to her that i've been out of primary school for a while, that i'm not interested in anybody else's opinions of me whatsoever, and that the only thing i'm interested in when it comes to her is sex. and i'm still not sure she grasped all of it. it may have been too much at once.

just after lunch, the new girl came up to me with a forlorn expression on her face. she's heard me ranting and screaming in frustration, so what does she say (in a soft, sad voice) when i ask her what's up?

"i hate developer, too."

now if that didn't start the funniest series of quotes and arguments, i'll eat my own head. *thump, thump*

i was informed by the other south african that we were to meet in the afternoon with somebody from the airforce about aerospace software engineering. hell, i'd sign on extra years for that!

two minutes before we were scheduled to meet, he postponed. buggrit.

i went to work, and got busy fixing a bug from last night. it drove me nuts, especially when i found it and it wasn't at all related to the problem area i'd been looking at. urgh!

after sorting everything out, we began moving it all to linux. that was fun. what wasn't fun was its not compiling at all. when we figured out that the problem wasn't on the coding side, we also discovered that our support had forgotten to inform us of a new version release. we installed the new version, and suddenly NOTHING compiled. so much for backward compatibility. i hear that the development team got into deep shit when we alerted them of the problem. our side was filled with sardonic laughter.

i dealt with it anyway, only to discover that they'd introduced something called log4j, which needs to be initialized in a certain way. and if it's not correctly done, it screws up everything. much time wasted on fixing that, then discovering that JApplets don't run on remote consoles. i'm learning more things all the time.

by the end i managed to get the most crucial application running and loaded on the server, and i have a good idea of how to correct the same problems on the primary application. but i have to be done by tomorrow, and that's probably going to result in me working late. TGIT (friday's our day off, don't forget).

on leaving the premises, i suddenly registered that the reason i'd been struggling the entire evening was that somebody had changed my resolution to a setting that should have been labelled "ridiculously high - too high for a small screen like yours". and i hadn't actually noticed.

tomorrow morning i get to miss inspection, i'll be sorting out rent subsidies. sounds like fun.

---waiting for the bus after work, i was accosted by two arabs. i had no problem with giving one of them a cigarette, but i was put immediately on guard when they started taking an interest in my service. i managed to brush them off with bullshit, but i was ready to deal with an attempt at kidnapping. not a nice feeling at all.

and just before the bus came, they started telling me about heroin and how i should stay away from it. having a cousin who enlightened me from his first-hand ordeal about the horrors of getting hooked on that shit, i'm in no particular need of guidance from strangers. especially ones i'm already wary of.

---my door wouldn't open when i got home. i forced it, and discovered that they've got loose cables sticking out of the new hole in my floor. tomorrow's talk is going to be interesting. but i do have electricity!

anyway, the positive has outweighed the negative on this one. i absolutely loved returning to development under linux, and i've achieved a lot in relatively few hours.

who's cool, and has two thumbs? fonzie... and me!