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job responsibility
Saturday, May 29 1999
An online friend (sorry, Bill, I'd send you a thank you email, but I forgot your address; it's at work!) sent me a CD for Red Hat Linux 6.0, so I spent most of the day getting the thing installed on my Linux box. The one thing that really frustrated me in this whole process was that I couldn't overwrite the Linux Loader (LILO) installed by Red Hat 5.1 and that LILO wouldn't boot the new system. The only solution was to reformat the drive from scratch. I had to use FDISK, since Disk Druid didn't work at a fundamental-enough level.
In the evening, I was online when I received an instant message from my boss that the company website was broken and, since the guy who normally fixes it is on vacation, it fell on me to fix it. No one seemed to know what was wrong or how it had happened, all we could tell was that an image map wasn't working. Looking at the source, I couldn't figure out what the "challenge" was. Usually when an image map fails like this, it's something simple like an extra bracket. But that extra bracket can be anywhere. Looking for it in all that source was like trying to find a needle in haystack.
When Kim came home, I borrowed her car and drove to work, entering the vacant but fully-lit offices alone. At my workstation, looking at the source, I could see absolutely nothing wrong with it. Then I tried surfing the website, and, low and behold, it wasn't broken any more! It had healed itself!
Much of the content of the main page is semi-dynamically generated, depending on the day. My guess is that there was some sort of anomalous bracket in one of the included content pieces, but that at the stroke of midnight one of my robots replaced it with the next day's content, fixing it in the process.
Kim and I stayed up super-late (until something like 3:30am) with our friends Steph and EJ.
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