So, I was there when this happened.  I've had about a week to reflect on the show and it's just about the most fun I've ever had at a concert.  The opening act, Paul and Storm were a pleasant suprise, since I had no idea who they were, or that they were former members of Da Vinci's Notebook.  (Heck, I had no idea that DVN had called it quits...)  Anyway, I had a Mark Portugal and two scotch eggs (note to self...one is enough), two Boddington's, loved the show and bought some merch.  Oh, and since it was at the Mucky Duck I can now say that I've performed on the same stage as Jonathan Coulton.  Yeah.

The analogy I've come up with for where I'm at at work right now is to say that we've got this car, and it appeared to be running fine in May, but we knew there were all kinds of problems under the hood, so we decided it needed a major overhaul.  So, for the last four months it's been in pieces on the floor of the garage.  Now we've got it put back together and we're trying to get it running again.  It's at a point where the engine is starting, but then explodes and takes out the rest of the car with shrapnel when you try to give it some gas.  Unsurprisingly the parts that are giving us the trouble are the parts we replaced entirely, as opposed to merely reconditioning.  Lots of lovely, classic mistakes, like forgetting that that function takes a null-terminated PWCHAR buffer so you can't just pass it the buffer from a byte-counted UNICODE_STRING structure, and blowing your stack all to hell and gone, or using an = instead of a == (there was no constant to put on the lvalue side, so the compiler couldn't catch it for us), freeing the structure we're scanning through rather than the contents like I meant to, and even some genuine logic flaws.  Some days you eat the bear, and others...well.  We have yet to run into anything that is a real impediment, but it's slow going - the test-debug-fix cycle in the NT kernel is a pain in the ass.  Crash, reboot, ponder, fix, compile, install, reboot, run, repeat.  VMWare makes it a lot easier than otherwise, but it is still tough.

I was able to remove the stitches from my finger easily enough last night.  I tried to be a good boy and set up an appointment with my regular doctor like the ER folks told me to, but he was going to be out of town, and told me to go back to the ER.  Wait four or more hours and pay another $100 to have somebody swab the area with alcohol, snip a couple of knots and pull some fancy fishing line (about four-pound test, I would guess) out of me?  No thanks.  Everything is healing up rather nicely.

The title of this entry stems from my growing realization that I've probably gone a bit overboard this year in scheduling extra-curricular activities, and I'm trying to figure out what I can shed.  The problem, of course, is that I don't really want to get rid of any of them.  I want an eight-day week.