Mondays! Mondaze!

Yeech. Showed up at the Skunk Works this ayem -- fifteen minutes late, thanks to traffic and an innate lack of any time sense -- and discovered Something Very Important had failed. Well, more like "augered in short of the runway with all four engines on fire," probably unrecoverably.

This should not be a problem, as we have had nearly a year of fiddling with Something Very Cool (SVCool), which is to replace Something Very Important (SVI), not to mention most of the other systems that SVI works with. That is, it would replace it, if certain very critical parts of it actually worked. They don't. We bought vaporware. It was not represented as vaporware (what a surprise!) but that's what it was.

So, whilst various other members of the Deportatation of Train-Driving* did A) crash recovery or B) short-term workarounds, I got to string wires and do other hardware-y things to make, maybe, a corner of SVCool that does work be a kind of sort of back up to the workaround that is filling in for SVI.

Oh, yeah, and it poured down rain all afternoon.

Some fine Monday! The workaround for SVI is going to take up a huge amount of all our time until we either get the broken gadget running again (holding one's breath while waiting for that a very bad idea) or come up with some brilliant and unexpected fix. What we're doing for now is a crude expedient.

...As ever, I'd love to go into great and complicated detail about this stuff, except for two little problems: first, it is staggeringly dull when closely examined and second, this is stuff my paycheck runs though, critical stuff for my employer, and I'll not give up even a tiny detail that might give the competition an edge.

Oh, the excitement and drama and broken fingernails!
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* If I have to explain this, it will take all the fun out. Read it slowly, sideways, if it didn't make sense.