Monday, September 18, 2006

What a week!

I haven’t written much lately, but last week was a terrible week. Everything was going wrong, to the point that, by the end of the week, every time something new blew up, we just started taking it in stride. “What’s that? All of the plants on Earth have stopped producing oxygen? Yeah, that figures. It’s that kind of week, right?”

Right up until the deployment that I had Saturday night / Sunday morning, things kept going wrong. (Even during the deployment we had some issues, but we managed to get past them and they didn’t do too much harm.)

I still don’t have time to write, now, but I’ll leave you with a quote from Douglas Adams, which kind of sums up the week for me:

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

The good news is that it’s Monday, and the day is almost over, and it was a good day. So the “bad week” probably really was a bad week—not a bad month.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

So you had a bad week too? I'm sitting here on the other side of the planet and also try to recover from last week. Here's a snippet from my week: I needed this particular xml-book (from where I now found this blogspot, are you possibly the writer of the book by the way?) to a webcourse I'm attending at university. There were several options. I first tried the ebrary option, and tried to log on from my mac. No result. Tried from my pc, from firefox. Then I got a message that urged me to change my password at the university website. When I did that somthing went wrong and I couldn't log on again. Okay, I thought, let's find one of the two libraries that have a paper copy of the book in the neigbouring town. I went there by car and drove around without finding the library for almost an hour, until I realized that the library now had closed for the week. Okay, nothing to do but to drive back home without a book. Well, it ended well, I now have both ebrary access and a papercopy from the library (that sent the book home to me, what good service!) Well, at the end of the week here in Sweden we had general election, and the socialdemocrats lost and the crazy conservatives won. In history they have managed to ruin this country in three years, now due to a change in the consitution they have four years to ruin the country. Four years to the next election. So for us, maybe it has not only been a bad week, it might last for four years or more! *sigh*

bye bye from Anja from Sweden :)

David Hunter said...

Hi Anja. Sorry to hear that you had a lousy week, too. But I’m glad it worked out okay. If the book you’re referring to is Beginning XML, then yes, I’m one of the authors of that book. Just out of curiosity—assuming that you come back here to read this comment—do you have the English version of the book, or is it in another language?

I’m also sorry to hear that the Conservatives won your election. I feel your pain! We elected a Conservative government here in Canada, too, and they’re already trying to turn us into “Little America”.

Anyway, enjoy the book, and I hope it helps you with your course.

Anonymous said...

Yes, it's the English version of the book. In Sweden very few non-fiction books of this type, i.e. in a "narrow" field get to be translated. Either a Swede writes a book in the field in Swedish or we simply have to read the English one. We're only nine million people you see, speaking Swedish. But on the other hand in this way we are forced to know English on a high level, and that comes in handy in many situations. And the book was very helpful thank you! It was just what I needed! In the beginning of last week I felt quite a degree of panic "I'll never learn xml! I'll have to drop this course!" But now, thanks to your book, I feel completely at ease. The course I'm taking is equal to five weeks full-time studies and xml is only a fifth of this. They are trying to cram xml into one week! Luckily the course is running at 25% pace, that is not full-time. So, I'll have four weeks to sink into this subject.

have a nice week-end and I hope this week has been better for you too! :)
/Anja

Anonymous said...

Serna, I was ready to call you a world-renowned authour but you need to meet the following two requirements:

1) Be fluent in Swedish
2) Be dead

Anonymous said...

How odd... I do believe it was Tuesday night around 6PM when i asked you what you would reply if someone asked if you wrote your book. Then 2 hours later someone does. How creepy.