Another computer that is.  This morning I started mine up and went about my business.  I can back into the room and the screen was still black.  Staring back at me in bold white was:

…
…PXE-2.0(build83)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable.
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel PXE ROM.
Boot failure: System halted.

From the little bit of research I did this morning while I was waiting for my mortgage refinance application to process it looks like I may have lost my hard drive.  Oh joy!  Once my closing costs are paid I will have to look into replacing “Pa” as I called him.   Makes me sad, but considering he was my gift to myself when I started my masters degree (2000-2001 timeframe) he has had a good life.  R.I.P. Pa!

Today we had some training in one of the rooms in the basement of our building.  About 5 minutes in we heard what we thought was a rat running through some duct work above our heads.  It stopped just above me and almost sounded like it was repeatedly running into the wall of the duct work.  We all kind of sat there staring at the ceiling as the sound got louder and the contact more and more violent.  Finally the panels in the ceiling actually raised up.  We all jumped up and moved the the perimeter of the room at this point.  The ceiling tiles almost seemed to pulsate and finally the started falling from to the ground followed by the light fixture that I was sitting directly underneath.  Needless to say my heart was racing.  Turns out it was a constractor doing work in the building that was yanking a piece of fiber optic cable from several floors above us.  It got caught in the light fixture above us and and instead of investigating what it was caught on they decided to just keep yanking until the wire was freed.  Of course to do that it had to take the ceiling of the room we were in with it.   Needless to say our building operations manager was none too happy!

At about 12:30 this morning I heard a thud. I woke up and realized I
was stretched out completely on my bed. I sat up and looked
over the side of the bed to see a very confused Tillie laying on the
ground staring back at me.  They look on her face was a half asleep “Hey Mom, what’s the big idea?!?” kind of look.  I think I stretched out and in the
process kicked her off the side of the bed. She doesn’t appear to be
hurt, but I gave her a few extra milkbones this morning… just in
case.  For Tillie milkbones fix everything!

One day last week we decided we needed to restore one of our databases.  Turns out the SCSI card on the UNIX box went bad, so our DBAs had to jump through some hoops to get the database back to where we needed it to be.  For those not tech savy the DBAs worked some magic.  When the database was back I sent an e-mail to the group stating that “After a herculean effort on behalf of the DBAs…” we had our database back.

A member of our group ran with it and took the body of Hercules from the Disney cartoon and photoshopped the heads of the DBAs on it.  I went ahead and printed them out and made them into paper dolls that I then handed out to various members of our group.

Yesterday the DBAs ran into a Java problem.  It was my turn to help them, which doesn’t happen too often.  After solving the problem I returned to my desk.  One of the DBAs walked up to my cube and says to me “Thank you for your hermaphroditian effort.”  He repeated it one more time before the other DBA hopped him and asked him if he knew what he was saying.  He was trying to say “Aphroditian”.  I was laughing so hard I had tears just running down my face.  I really haven’t laughed that hard in years.