Today was a frenzied day at work. I'm giving a talk tomorrow (Supporting Collaborative Student Writing: Veni, Vidi, Wikiwiki!) and spent as much of the day as I could working on my slides and getting other resources set up (I got phpwiki running on my laptop so I can demo it, if the network doesn't work). At the same time, I debugged and solved various crises and printing misconfigurations, I worked on coordinating an open house in the BCRC to showcase our new machines and their capabilities, and I tried to keep my staff busy getting the last two new machines set up and retouching the machines we're already using. My first crisis was when I discovered the webserver on 
snapper was seemingly down. At first, it looked like apache wasn't running, but then I found that it was just barely running, but that the children would die as quickly as they were forked. It turned out that someone (I won't mention names) had deleted the ssl_mutex lockfile. Apache doesn't like it when you do that. I restored the file and got that problem squared away. Then I spent 45 minutes trying to print something. I reconfigured the wireless gateway to spool for the new printer, but that didn't seem to work, so eventually I just printed it from my desktop machine, but that machine wasn't configured to print to the new printer, so that was another 15 minutes to get everything set up. At least that worked, after one false start. The whole day was like that.
I checked on the new homebrew. It's bubbling away very happily as the little yeasts do their work. Charlie is at a "stroke and turn" (think swimming) clinic with Alisa. Daniel and I are in the basement as I write. He's playing an ancient Macintosh game called Despair by Lloyd Burchill. It's a very interesting game that asks the question "What's it like to be a jealous god?" The main thing that the game teaches you is that its not really very interesting. If your creations can do nothing to reinforce your behavior, it pretty quickly becomes apparent that it doesn't really matter what you do. It was an important lesson, when I learned it.