Bad start, good ending

March 28, 2008

For some reason, I’ve found that when I have a bad day at work, the Lucky Lab Brewpub on Hawthorne is where I go.  I’m not sure if it’s because it’s convenient or because I always have bad days on Mondays when they have cheap pints.  Either way, I found myself at the Lucky Lab on Monday after work.

Saturday was a very nice evening.  I was scheduled to go in to work at midnight in order to perform my monthly Windows Updates and some miscellaneous thing, so Hanne and I decided to go out and have a good time and be up at midnight so I wouldn’t go to sleep and get up to go in like I did last month.  I mean, it worked, but I got home and couldn’t go back to sleep so I was up until 4 AM that night.  No, Hanne and I decided to wander up Hawthorne and hit a few furniture stores looking for apartment fillers, then have dinner, play some pool at the McMenamins Backstage Bar, and then catch a movie downtown.  We got home and I was too tired to go back out, though, so we just watched a movie there instead.  Either way, I went in to work, did my work, came home, went to sleep.

Fast forward to Monday morning.  My boss comes in and brings something odd to my attention: one of the partners had come to him and said that a client of his had gotten an email Sunday morning that he’d sent about two weeks before  The client had just gotten it.  I investigated, and after several hours it came to my attention that when I restarted the email server Sunday morning at 12:07 AM, about 150 emails were sent out that had been caught in some digital limbo.  Most of them weren’t delivered, however, and remained in said digital limbo.  In fact, we could go back in our server logs and track messages that had attempted to send every time the server had been restarted, going back to December.

I’m not sure I have to really emphasize how serious it in when we discover that 150 or so emails sent by people in the firm were never delivered.  Didn’t even leave our systems, and there was no indication we were still holding on to them!  As a percentage it’s pretty small, but as much as this (and every) firm relies on email…erg.  So, I had a bad day.  It was nothing we could have foreseen and it turned out to be a known issue with the software we use on the email server, but I still craved a few beers after dealing with that stress all day.  Hanne was kind enough to indulge me, and we skipped climbing (especially since I got out of work an hour late) and had dinner at the Lab so I could vent and soothe my soul with some good beer.

Speaking of brewpubs and good beer, the Hopworks Urban Brewery finally opened this week, only a mere year after it was supposed to open.  The owner had had an almost unlimited bankroll to build this place, and it’s pretty much his dream brewpub.  I had to admit, it’s a really nice place.  It’s big, it’s bright, they have good beer and good all-organic/grass fed/free range food, but it’s super expensive ($27 for a large pizzza?  Come on!) and a bit out of my way at SE 30th and Powell.  Well, not exactly far away, but not within walking distance from my apartment without some planning.  My Dad, Hanne, and I checked it out their second day of operation and had some of their beer and pizza, and we’re planning a return trip next week with my grandmother.

Hanne and I got a chance to climb a couple of times this week, and we’re both getting a lot better on the walls.  I’ve begun focusing on keeping on the routes set up by the gym going up the walls instead of just getting to the top, and that’s added a real twist to my climbs.  There’s a bit more problem-solving involved now, and I’m finding it’s more difficult to get to the top of walls I bested just last week.  Hanne’s “white whale” wall was topped by both of us, but it’s still killer on the forearms–I actually had to stop three times or so just to apply chalk to my hands and rest my arms.  My arms are getting bigger.  I can actually see the muscles growing in a couple of places, which is nice.

Last night Hanne and I finished up season 5 of the TV show “Angel,” the spin-off from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”  That means that in the last nine months or so (or whenever we started the series), we’ve watched the equivalent of 12 years worth of television just between those two shows.  Somewhere around 260 episodes, which means 195 hours of our lives have been consumedjust by “Buffy” and “Angel.”

Naturally, it wasn’t my first time through the shows, either.  That’s a lot of the Buffyverse.  Hanne enjoyed the shows, but not nearly as much as I have over the years, and I think she’s happy to be done with them.  She’s made no secret about the former point, at least, and personally, I think she’s glad to be done with them just so we can focus on our next conquest, season 2 of “The Wire.”  We’re almost done with the first season, and I can see why so many people rave about it.  It’s as good or better than what I generally consider the best television I’ve ever seen (season 1 of “Lost,” season 3 of “Battlestar Galactica,” season 2 of “Doctor Who,” etc.).

This is going to be a very, very good weekend.

Posted in Beer, Family, Food, Geekery, General, Hanne