It’s a good sign of things to come for the weekend when your girlfriend’s Amtrak train arrives precisely on time. Speaking of time-related luck, Dawn’s transfer this evening covered from the time we left for dinner clear until the time we got home from dinner. I love it when the bus drivers are generous, don’t you?
Tomorrow: lunch and a movie, if all goes well…
As I prepare for a couple of presumably-deserved days off, here’s the sort of stuff that I’m running across today:
And this is only Thursday the 12th. Can you imagine what Friday the 13th will bring? Can you? Wowza.
Let’s have just a good old-fashioned roundup, shall we?
KNRK’s program director called me over so I could look into why his music scheduling program was running so darned slow. He’d already performed the obligatory reboot to no avail, so I dutifully went to his office and watched the software misbehave as claimed. The problem manifested as long pauses of up to 90 seconds when performing random tasks.
I checked the Task Manager. NTVDM took up most of the CPU power during those pauses. Fine, so the Virtual DOS doohicky was working overtime. Why? My next thought was to check the program’s working directory on the server for telltale files. I found them, alright. I found four thousand of them.
VDM(hex-numeral).tmp files. All of them zero bytes in size, ranging in age from a couple of days to a couple of years. Apparently the VDM never, ever deletes these puppies. So I did, and it… almost helped.
I looked deeper. Deeper into the directory structure, that is. In one of the subdirectories I found something that really surprised me: 65,000 of those VDM*.tmp files.
Whoah.
I wasn’t at all surprised that deleting all of those files made the program work better. In fact it ran considerably faster than the PD expected, as he’d grown used to it being fairly slow. My next amazing feat will be the implementation of a timed script that regularly removes those damned “temporary” files…
I spent all day today at home. That is, the kids’ home. I saw them off to school (with some prodding, in one case) and then napped some more, after which the phone calls came. I talked to Wendi, I talked to some people at work, and I talked to Grandma Penny. In between calls I loaded anime onto the living room computer and chatted a bit online. Around 2:30 I started dinner, which was done shortly before Alex got home. The kids went to the hospital to see their mother and new sibling. After they came home we watched a couple episodes of anime and then I sent them to bed.
Tomorrow, I’ll try to stagger back into something resembling my normal routine… though I will be showing up a bit late for work. Ah well…
I just got word a little bit ago.
I’m sure that once she gets home she’ll be able to tell you all about it in her own place, but since she can’t do that today… well, here’s your announcement. Mind you, I don’t have much in the way of details beyond “it’s a boy, and everyone’s doing fine.” But hey, that’s the important stuff, right?
