Yesterday afternoon: trying to be in five places at once. When I'm not anywhere at all. Well, trying to be in three actual places, but at two of those places I needed to be doing two things at a time, each.
Late day at ToasterCo, trying to prepare things for today's dog & pony show; I couldn't do tech support on it today, because that would have required having a bag over my head. I think we got things Working Enough.
This afternoon: only needed to be in one place, though bouncing back and forth between two projects. Other people were having chaos, some including extremely defective material from a usually-reliable vendor... with the defects having been spotted, naturally, after most of the work had been done on it by a subcontractor. Meanwhile, back at home, my workstation (the old one, that's really meant to be replaced Real Soon Now) apparently crashed, so when I got home it was sitting there being inert, and There Was Work I Needed To Get Done.
So: reboot. Wait for lengthy fsck. Login fails miserably. Hm? Oh: no NFS mounts present. That's because the only network interface is "lo". Oopsie? Reboot again; eth0 is there this time, and the NFS shares all mount.
So now I can log in. Run my unlock-mozilla script so Firebird and Thunderfox (or whatever) can be restarted. Thunderbird starts up OK. Firefox... complains that my bookmarks are locked. Something to do with places.sqlite. There doesn't appear to be any way to unlock the bloody thing, so I end up renaming it and restoring my bookmarks from this morning's automatic backup, which loses the little site icons but otherwise seems to work. Oh, and my history is lost.
Launch OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 to let it recover all the documents I had open. Oops! All the word-processor documents are "locked for editing" (by me, on this machine). Deleting the twiddly lock files is unhelpful. Turns out the solution is to open each file read-only, save it under a modified name, close it, delete the (locked) original, and rename the saved, non-b0rked file back to the original name.
Eventually, it's all back together, and I can start trying to track down a problem in one flavor of toaster firmware - I'd made a change yesterday and handed it over untested; today's testing at ToasterCo (not as part of the dog & pony show, different product) showed that the change had no effect whatsoever. Testing here? Does exactly what it says on the label. Can't duplicate the problem; can duplicate what it's supposed to do. So, I may wind up back at ToasterCo tomorrow afternoon... while also trying to be in at least two other places at the same time.
Meanwhile, I guess I should start using the "not-editing" button in OpenOffice when I'm just leaving a document open for viewing and not planning to make any changes... especially documents that get checked into Subversion and potentially become locked elsewhere.
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