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Yesterday was my first day back after a week off sick...and it wasn't bad, I have to say. It's summer at a university, so that helps, and it was a sunny day like we haven't had in weeks, so that was even better. I'm going off on vacation in three weeks, so I'm focussing now on getting things ready. (I'm asymptotically approaching a full realization of how to plan work over long periods of time...)

There's one big project (LDAP + website + email on four VMs) that I need to hand over to the owners. I found out/confirmed my suspicions that the people maintaining it while I'm gone will be moderately technical, not administrative, so that simplifies things a lot.

There's documentation I need to improve for the folks who'll be helping while I'm gone, including network maps. Ugh...I hate making network maps; it reminds me of web design in its fiddliness (is too a word). But I will do it. (I wonder if using a tablet would help. Anyone have any experience w/that?)

Oh, and DRI...sigh. One of the groups at work uses a protein visualization program that wants to use DRI. Without it, it reverts to a lesser form of rendering that looks like a strobe light. In the X.org troubleshooting guide, they recommend a stanza that looks like this:

Section "DRI"
    Mode 0666
EndSection

I don't like those permissions just on principle. You can put in a "Group foo" directive, which changes the group ownership as you'd expect, and for some workstations that works...but for another does not, possibly because of different driver versions. This is what comes of not having fully automated installs.

And there's son #2 waking up again. He woke up at 5 but was persuaded to go back to sleep. Bad: I was up at 5am. Good: I had time to write this.