I just moved my office out into the common area in the apartment. Now ying and I can work at the same time without constantly bumping into each other every time we turn our respective chairs.

Of course, nothing is allowed to go well right now, so my KVM switch broke in a completely inscruitable way as soon as I was finished moving things. Also, the cheapo network card I bought because the nvnet driver would have been a hassle turned out to be an 8139D rather than a normal, working, 8139C. This despite no external difference on the packaging since the last card that bought. She was nice enough to lend me her network card for the interim, so I am now posting this from the newly-reborn "kazekage". (For those of you following along in the book: the last machine's name was "orochimaru".)

Luckily the new, optimized network setup works just fine: I took out my old 10/100 switch so that I can transfer files between machines again at full speed. When we get tandem ('s desktop machine) hooked up to the network again, we should be able to effortlessly send anime episodes to each other.

Tomorrow I will try to pick up a new KVM, since VoIP is on windows, pairing tools are on MacOS, and development is painfully slow on everything but linux. Hopefully with the additional purchase (exchange, really) of the network card for 's machine, that will be the end of technology-related disasters for the moment.

Generally things are going great though. The apartment is really starting to be livable. There was actually enough room in the living room for me to move my workspace in there, which is saying

Since so many of you were asking, this is why I had to buy ski goggles today.

In keeping with the at-least-one-catastrophe-per-day theme of the last month, today had a pretty severe allergic reaction to what appeared to be a feather stuck to her eyeball. I couldn't make stuff like this up if I tried.

Since she was having a series of reactions from cleaning up some of the stuff that's been lying around here collecting dust for months, we decided that she should probably have some kind of eye protection. At first, we thought a scuba mask, but we have no plans to go scuba diving any time in the next millennium. However, sometime around the heat-death of the sun we may make some time to go skiing in the nuclear winter. So, ski goggles it was.

In better news, the apartment is getting a lot cleaner. Ying cleared out a lot of the major stuff which I am too much of a wimp to throw out myself, put it in bags, and had me drag it outside. After that I stacked up several of the DVDs and CDs littering the floor, and now there is a spot almost big enough to twirl my arms around on the floor of the living room.

Also I managed to get a surprising amount of work done / bugs fixed this morning. One of the bugs which I was nervous about was not so bad. There are still waaaaay too many "I can't reproduce this under the debugger" or "it only happens sometimes" bugs for my taste, though, especially for a program which only uses threads in one very small segment of the code (which, thus far, has suffered from no such bugs).

(As you may have noticed, my LiveJournal subscription lapsed and now I don't have access to the page layout that I used to use. Sorry, but this will have to do for now.)

I'm back in the apartment in Cambridge, with . I'm very happy about that despite the following:

• Orochimaru, my primary linux machine, is now toast. It was crashing sporadically before I left, and now it turned itself off while I was away and it won't even power on, let alone POST. I need to find a good bare-bones linuxable x86 setup on the cheap, very soon. (With an AGP slot.)


• The toilet which flooded when I was in NY flooded again.


• We have more laundry than we can do in about a week in our tiny washing machine.


• There is no food, and there are dishes to be done in the sink.

Luckily there are things to be done about almost all of these things. I'll be shopping for a new linux machine tonight, and if I don't find anything quickly I'll probably order online - for the moment my Mac laptop will be my primary machine. The toilet didn't flood the basement again, just a small area in the bathroom. We're going to be taking some laundry to the cleaner's today to have our first massive batch done professionally, folded and all.

So, still one minor catastrophe after another, but things are starting to settle down. I hope to be catching up on work this weekend.

Nothing smells of sewage. The heating works. My clothes are clean. According to the maintenance guy who fixed it, the water heater is allegedly not going to be exploding as planned. The insurance provider has been sufficiently browbeaten so as to provide coverage for fixing some of this.

It's been nice to visit with friends while I'm here.

I even had some time to comment upon an interesting thread on gus's weblog.

I'm returning on the 2nd: happiness is an empty suitcase.

The heating will be (mostly) out for the rest of my stay here. The repairs will be expensive and time consuming. There are even more problems with the plumbing. What more can I say.

I'd say I'm watching Mrs. Li's house collapse in slow-motion, but it's not even particularly slow...