Boudicca, Brave Hamster Queen

I checked on Boudicca (known universally as Boda) a few minutes ago, and she's passed away. No obvious cause of death other than age. I hope she died happy. If nothing else, she exceeded her life expectancy. I really miss her. :-(

Boda was a good hamster. She never once bit me, she always wanted to play/sniff my hand/walk on me, and charmed everyone into giving her sunflower seeds. I'll post a bit more when I stop crying.
Mood: depressed
Music: None

D-Day

Today is the 60th anniversary of D-Day, in which British, Canadian and American troops landed in Normandy at the start of the campaign to liberate Europe from Nazi domination. I'm sitting here remembering my visits to the war memorials and cemetaries in Bayeux. Politics and modern anti-war sentiments aside, I think that today everyone who has enjoyed the relative freedoms of the post-WWII world should stop and thank our forefathers for what they did 60 years ago.
Mood: thoughtful
Music: None

Yay!

Monday night was another Bureau 13 game. It went really well (Elaine was right, our characters emphases are sufficiently different that it isn't a problem - especially now that I have some decent skill levels in my chosen areas!); we killed a demon, beat up some cultists, and managed to avoid being in the media. Fun!

Today was a heavy programming day. Tools programming is fun in that you see immediate rewards if it works (and immediate groans if it doesn't). My 2-tier plan for a Subversion-based web management console worked very well, although there were of course some implementation hiccups (not least the WIERD behavior of Win2k with my .NET service... it worked on every other machine in the office, but wouldn't correctly report that it started on the production server; I managed to work around it, but that was just plain odd). I'm about 1/2 way through switching all of our sites over to it. One clue that it works: you are looking at a site using it. :-)

I learned some interesting things during the project. The first is that the latency penalty for remoting to localhost is MUCH less than I thought it would be, pretty much on par with FreeBSD local net sockets (that's a big compliment to MS's net code, even if its syncookie handling and sequence randomization still sucks). The second is that STDIN/STDOUT redirection in .NET works really well. UNIX well. Awesome. :-)

My Freevo box now displays TV. I'm fixing the channel list right now, and it should be up and running! Yay!
Mood: happy
Music: Fields of the Nephilim - Laura