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This is Buffy, who achieved honorary Jungle Cat status by making a break from his presumably comfy home to go out on safari, finally making his way to our door. We could tell Buffy was someone’s baby because he was very friendly and approachable, so we took a couple pics and posted them at the nearest stoplight with the heading: “Found: Orange/cream long hair cat” Buffy’s owner called, I told her that Buffy was still out on walkabout as far as we knew, but he had showed up two nights and would probably show up tonight too. Which he did, finally about 11:15. I called the owner again, this time getting no answer, so this time I lured him into the garage. He’s in the garage now with food, water, litter and a blanket, awaiting the owner to get the message and call me again. ...

Had dinner last night with ciannait and made some new friends. Looks like most of these were there: ciannait, gordona, lwood, ravan, wolfs_daugher, iceblink, kshandra, solkitten, gconnor, miche_connor, medancer, snowwy. I friended you (those who were not already on my flist).

Things we learned this week that should be written down… How to click through Pasadena to see Unavail images Unavail Images tab is just recent ones, not all of them Subbatches appear in portal catalina.out, from there you can tell what render node was used Render node has details of each transaction in Debug.log Everything we did while troubleshooting unavail images GRF properties file, pointing at colo-rf How to tell if colo-rf is getting 0 load How to tell if lab is getting 0 orders How to adjust pager settings in proactive How to change pager settings in sam/beholder for lab messages

I forgot to post about this yesterday, but Sophie had a full-on seizure, right in the middle of everything that was happening with Harley. This was Saturday at 3:20 pm. She started off twitching a little, and then went into convulsions with her entire body involved. I quickly hustled her into a box and started off toward the emergency vet. About 2 min into the trip she realized she was in a box (and got her wind back, most likely) and started complaining. ...

Miche already posted about this, but I wanted to post also, for anyone who is on my flist and not hers. Harley died at about 5:40 today. It became clear to us that it was time to let him go. In addition to the pretty rampant cancer (stage 5 lymphoma) he was facing additional challenges, including leukemia (due to cancer, not viral), loss of liver function, not enough protein in the blood and resulting leakage of fluid into his abdomen, and finally pneumonia. Treatment for all of these would have been grueling and the prognosis still grim. I truly believe we made the right decision to try and fight it, but the aggressive chemo took its toll. ...

Harley had his second chemo today. We’re trying to get him to eat but so far he’s not interested in any food. It’s going to be a challenge to keep him eating and hydrated. Current plan is to just keep offering food, every hour, through the night too. He has had a lot of different meds (chemo itself, steriod, anti-diarrhea and anti-nausea) that his grogginess and lack of appetite could be caused by any of those (most likely being the chemo and resulting dead cancer cells getting dumped into his blood to get filtered). ...

Harley is still in the hospital, 3rd night. His cancer is identified as one of the more serious ones (large cell lymphoma combined with leukemia). We did get to visit him again today, briefly, and he was happy to see us. Right after seeing us the doctor started him on chemo. Apparently it’s common to give chemo even if surgery isn’t done, and this can sometimes help cats get some quality of life back for a time, but it would be temporary if so. ...

Harley has cancer. This is a huge blow to us since we just lost Simon, six weeks ago. M and I are stunned and feeling broken… We’re awaiting the results of one more test (exactly what type of cancer cells), but the ultrasound suggests that it’s entwined in his lymph nodes and spleen. It’s most likely not operable, and looks to be pretty advanced. Harley is being kept overnight at the vet, a second night, due to being quite dehydrated. ...

This week at work we’ve been experimenting with MogileFS ( link) which is a “filing system” capable of storing/retrieving many files across many hosts. It’s not a true file system, meaning that you can’t mount it and look at it with “ls” or “cat” files, etc. but using a custom perl module you can put files in and take them back out. Some interesting facts about it: It’s based on HTTP GET/PUT so I believe it would be a good complement to other systems we have at work (without going into too much detail, it’s no surprise to anyone that Shutterfly receives lots of picture files from users and stores them for later printing :) Also, the MogileFS tracker module takes care of ensuring that files are replicated like you want; for example, if you want 2 copies of each file living on different nodes, after the initial upload the file will be duplicated appropriately. In the event of failure of one of the nodes, other nodes that hold the same data as the lost one will duplicate the items again to ensure replication is maintained. ...

These are my notes from reading “Crucial Confrontations” (multiple authors, Kerry Patterson listed first, more info on http://www.vitalsmarts.com/cc2book.aspx). Here’s a quick quote showing what the book is about: Behind the problems that plague organizations, teams, and families, are individuals who are either unwilling or unable to deal with failed promises, broken rules, and missed deadlines. Others neglect to keep commitments or just plain behave badly—and nobody steps up to the issue. ...