InsaneJournal

Current mood:

exanimate

Well I guess I asked for that...
Wednesday! After this many years, I should really know better than to take six days off and agree to be back on a Wednesday. Especially when half the rest of the staff is off too. (End of the year, gotta use up excess vacation.) Considering that just having Wednesday off makes me feel like I had a whole week vacation...

They had two power failures while I was in Ohio. In spite of repeated instructions, verbal and in writing, of what to do if the power has been out, they didn't get all the machines restarted appropriately. (The sequence in which things are done is significant.) And no one remembered to change the backup tape for a whole week. Sigh. Oh, and the cat apparently had a furball attack on my desk.

Got through it anyway, and tomorrow is just a half day with no one else there, so should be much better. Also got a paycheck (payday came while I was in OH) and a formal notice of my annual pay increase. Still doesn't keep up with inflation but it's better than last year. On the other hoof, The price of fuel just went up by another 23 cents a gallon overnight. Then they backed it down by 3 cents between noon and eight in the evening, so the screaming must have been pretty loud.

Playing around with the Alpha at home I realized I can run a MUSH on it. After working out how to make it available most days even though we have dialup (it involves using no-ip.org and doing naughty things to the firewall here) it dawned on me that I could be running a MUSH on the Alpha at work instead. I don't think the bandwidth would be significant overall, and it would tend to peak at night when the library is closed. I've been using the Alpha DS10 there as a private test platform, but it isn't going to be put back into actual work service, and apparently everyone considers it to be my personal property now. As long as I keep using it for testing library stuff, I can justify keeping it active there which in turn would let me create a roleplaying system on it. Does the internet really need another MUSH? Probably not. On the other hand, since the demise of Wild Spirits back in 2003 or so, there hasn't been anything else like it as far as I'm aware. No point in making yet another anthropomorphic system, since Tapestries and FurryMUCK have that arena well covered. But the unique character of Wild Spirits was that there were no humans, elves, or other magical beings. The animals were natural species in their natural forms, but had the ability to talk and reason. They also engaged in a lot of pointless yiffery and drama, but I blame some of that on the administrative structure. This seems worthy of a little more thought at least. Server code is available on the Alpha platform for PennMUSH, MUX, or LambdaMOO. I've got PennMUSH up and running with little effort (well, the software that is; actually setting up the environment would take weeks I think.)

At the moment access is restricted, but if there should be expressions of interest, I'll give out connection details later.