This is how I felt today: Today was an absolutely shitty day and bloody tomorrow is about as promising. And I hate all of you bastards who do not have to work for a living!

Yesterday's rainy gloomy weather had passed overnight, and work started out fine; then on to finishing two Debian updates. One box works fine now, but firefox is (not|no longer) happy with the XML namespace data being handed. (Whoever invented this XML/XSLT/XPath mess of nonorthogonal shite deserves to be disembowelled with a rusty spoon.) Opera groks the XML mess better, so \rho and I decide it's a Feature-Not-A-Bug.

Then the other box which runs our course portal seems to upgrade fine. On further checks it is revealed that most XML stuff on the thing (and there's lots of the very tentacly variety) fails now. XML::XPath doesn't behave anymore. LibXML doesn't cooperate. The homegrown data converters die. The database pretends to not hear me. Much debugging later, I have found that I can choose which elements of a long and winding pipeline I can have fail now - but of course I can't have them all work at once: any massaging of the data one requires makes the other barf now. (I mean it about that rusty spoon. Come to think of it, a bit of hot chili might be better than rust.) It's 19:00 and I'm nowhere near finished. A good part of the infrastructure is still wedged. My nose is running and I'm dead tired. I wanted to go to the movies, but it's too late for the film I'd have liked to see.

Around 20:00 I stagger out, walking home. And some bastards who're busily covering up the Gold Coast with unnecessary commercial buildings have cordoned off the path I need to take to walk home. (Quite likely not all the area they fenced does belong to them, but "it's temporary only - while construction work goes on". Yeah right.) As it is pitch-black, searching for an opening to squeeze through is a bit hard. I do it nevertheless, but what I don't realize is that the only path left open goes through a soggy creek bed - which is full of ankle-deep stagnant wetness. Which is now on my feet. Great. I'll make sure never to buy from whoever is responsible for the construction activity. I do remember such things forever.