m13b.net

About 3-4 weeks or so ago, Laura and I noticed that we were getting insect bites on our arms and legs, and it appeared to be when we were sleeping. As time went on, the bites kept persisting, although we had never heard or seen a mosquito nor spied a flea. (We had both had fleas at previous apartments, and were pretty sure we knew what we were looking for.)

Still clueless as to what was going on, I decided to flip and vacuum the mattress and wash the sheets today, as a preventative step. I caught a bug shoot across the corner of the exposed mattress that I was able to stop and kill. The tissue I used to kill it was marked by a tinge of blood. This was not good.

These are bed bugs.

Now, I’ve never experienced them before, but from what I’ve read so far this afternoon, they’re not going to be easy to get rid of.

Spent the rest of the day doing three things:

1. Washing all of the bed linens through the hot cycle.
2. Being thankful that no signs of the bugs are in Henry’s room (he shows no bites either).
3. Freaking right the fuck out.

So far, this has been an absolute nightmare. I realize that these little bastards have been chomping on me for about a month. But what’s kept me sane is ignorance. Without that as a shield, it’s becoming very difficult to deal with psychologically. As I type this, Henry is asleep in his room, and Laura is out trying to find king-sized mattress and box spring covers for our bed, on the advice of the one pest control guy who found it in his heart to call us back on a Saturday and offer help.

He’s coming Wednesday morning for the first of three planned treatments. No, they aren’t cheap. No, I don’t care. Wednesday morning has never felt so far in the distant future.

Meanwhile, we’ll be sleeping in our bedroom. Apparently, it’s not a good idea to retreat to another room in the house, as the little f-ers get wise to that quickly and could spread themselves around the house. I’m already freaking out about where the eggs might have already traveled to, so I need the thought of spreading them further like I need a hole in the head.

Wish us luck. This is going to be rough.

Ordering… Drum set…

Yesterday afternoon, a strong thunderstorm rolled through the area where I work, and of course, knocked the power out. This came as little surprise to me, as our connection to the local electrical utility has always been rather frail.

Luckily, the majority of the servers were shut down gracefully. I say the majority, because one of the six UPS boxes we use didn’t hold its charge. So that’s one piece of hardware I’ll have to replace. The office closed early as a result, but I knew that I’d have to come in early today to assess any further damage and get things back online.

So that’s what I did. Rolled in at around 6AM, and got all of the servers back up. So far, so good. Unfortunately, when I went down to the first floor, none of the VoIP phones had any power, and on the third floor, no one had any phone service.

Went to check the switch, and it was dead. No ethernet, no PoE. I had some older non-PoE switches, so I was able to get everything back on the ethernet—including phone service—but without PoE to power them, the phones on the first floor are worthless. I called our phone vendor, who said that the switch only had a 90 day warranty and that they’d have to order and configure another.

These damned things were new as of last November, but that’s not even the real kicker here. When I left the office late yesterday afternoon, the switch was up and running and the storm had passed. The switch is on a UPS with the rest of our telco equipment, so I was able to make calls over it yesterday once the power had gone out. So somewhere between the time that I left the office to when I returned early this morning, the switch called it quits.

Thankfully, that’s the worst of the damage. *knocks wood* We should have a replacement here early next week, and everyone will be back up and running again. In the meantime, they can use their cellphones or run up to the third floor if they need to call someone.

I suppose it was inevitable, but Criterion announced that they’re going to start releasing the Collection on Blu-Ray, as well as standard DVD.

Looking at the premiere list of titles, not a whole lot jumps out at me as cause for a double dip, but I’m sure there will be more to come. Walkabout should be an especially interesting choice, as I don’t remember the DVD looking all that great to begin with.

Meanwhile, if you don’t already have The Third Man or Wages of Fear, you now have something to look forward to for your Blu-Ray player PS3.

Today is Firefox 3 “Download Day”, where the Firefox team hopes to break/set some kind of goofy 24-hour download record and get their name in a book filled with other meaningless trivia created purely to settle bar bets.

What this REALLY means however, is that at 1PM EDT we get a new version of the best damned browser around.

I’ve tried a pre-release version, and while the toolbars were a bit different, the only thing I really didn’t like is that Google Brower Sync didn’t support it, and even worse, has been abandoned. We’re supposed to instead migrate over to Mozilla’s upcoming Weave, which is at the highly mature release version of 0.1. Damnit.