Let loose the hounds!

Worked out yesterday. Booooooom! Good stuff. Two really intense circuits. An hour of yoga. Half an hour of cardio. Great great great time in the gym. So glad to be back. Why wasn't I this motivated 20 years ago?

Put in 11 hours at work today. Chasing a ton of problems. All four proxy servers in Las Vegas gave us fits. They had to be rebooted before we had decent internet connections. A print appliance blew up and started ARPing like crazy across the entire local subnet. It slaughtered the Player's Club and affected everyone for hours until we sniffed it out. And our WAN optimizer started showing its age, borking up connections for our Citrix-based Property Management System (PMS!) All of that simultaneously making our lives (and several thousand end users) miserable.

My brother, Jason, has strep throat AND a staph infection. Double whammy. Triple whammy if you throw his infant daughter into the mix. Thankfully he is off work Tuesday - Friday. He'll have some time to recover. He needs it.

No job for Kimmer. No job for Romie. New job for Adam. Eventually a new job for Lisa. In today's environment, I'm not rocking the boat. South Mississippi isn't exactly a sprawl technological Mecca. But I'm giving serious thought to tilling the earth and becoming a farmer. Corn production across America is down. Corn consumption is soaring. Simple math.

Had a flashback today. Back in 2004 I had a rare encounter. While walking to lunch in Atlanta, GA, I noticed a commotion proceeding toward me down Peachtree. Lots of people moving slowly. Light dusting of police presence. And fire. Bobbing down the middle of the street, a torch. But not just any torch. The torch. For the 2004 Olympics. I stopped and stared. Less than ten feet away, the runner stopped, too. He held up the iconic symbol, smiled, and passed it to another runner. And the procession continued down Peachtree.

What a difference four years make. Now protests mar the line of runners. The police have to fight off screaming, angry anti-China, pro-Tibet protesters. While I admire their fortitude, the protesters are wasting their time and ruining the dream of countless innocent runners.
Brave, but fruitless. Our government is going to do absolutely nothing to upset the balance of power with China. We need them to supply us with cheap goods and buy our rapidly bloating debt. It is a parasitic relation. But who is sucking the other's blood?

And thus my day draws to a close. Tomorrow brings another battle. I pray for victory.