This One? No, That One.

The cookies turned out okay, but not jaw-droppingly great okay. Not that this is my goal -- otherwise, I'd spend a lot more time in the kitchen on my knees, bewailing my inability to just make a simple damn cookie! -- and then looking around for something to lean on to stand up again, because I still can't get up from being down, without doing that; a little more than before, but not much. However. I was a little apprehensive that the cookies would be like the rum ball you take at Christmas which taste as if they've been marinated in rum for sixty days, and the only reason the dough is there is to solidify the rum. These cookies weren't like that. You can taste the rum, but very, very faintly. I really don't understand what happened in their creation -- I took a cup of dry raisins (not dried so much as 'been in the kitchen cabinet for a pretty long time'), put in six tablespoons of rum, making a small, shallow puddle at the bottom of the bowl, nuked it, and hey presto -- I had plump raisins that smelled like a distillery. So, the result was okay, but it wasn't what I thought it would be.

Speaking of 'wasn't what I thought it would be' -- it's likely obvious that I'm not a McCain supporter. Nevertheless, I can't believe he meant anything by his 'that one' comment. Maybe I'm naive (no, really?), but I think he was trying to be sly; to say 'that guy over there, don't trust him'. Some Obama zealots have said that this was clearly a racial comment, but I don't agree. Cut the guy some slack - it was just a throwaway line. Although, since it led to this result, its not entirely without value.

My wife got called at 5AM on a problem that was the kind of problem I've always liked. Its weird that I do, because my ability to solve them never was all that great. In a nutshell - an application (CA-7, if you know mainframe software) was running slowly; tasks that should execute in less than a minute were taking ten minutes to complete. The monitor they were using said that the task was waiting for CPU, which usually means that there are tasks with a higher priority that are completing before the one you want. The fix for that (assuming you don't want to just live with it) is to either kill the higher priority task, or make your 'loved one' task equal, or better yet, higher priority. They tried bumping the priority, but it did not help. They also bumped the priority of a user's interactive task, and it took off. Put together, that tells me that the task wanted to execute, but it was waiting for something, and that wait couldn't be fixed by just giving it more access to CPU; it wanted something else. Occasionally, that something else is another task thats even lower in the food chain; bump that guy up, he finishes, and your task takes off. No such task suggested itself, though. After everybody looked at the tasks for about an hour, all that it needed to do finished (much later than they would have wished), and the problem went away. So, nobody knows what really caused it.
The thing is, thats not supposed to be the way it is. You're supposed to be able to look into a system monitor and see not only the obvious things, like which task is running, which is waiting -- but infer things like 'this task is waiting for that task, and that task is doing this much work, gee, thats more than it normally does, so its going to take longer, so the main task is going to have to wait'. But nobody, and I mean, nobody, knows systems in that level of detail. Unless you immerse yourself in it, actually setting traces to watch and understand the ebb and flow of tasks, you don't know what its doing; it just does. And when it doesn't, you're mystified. I always wanted to understand systems to the point where I had that immersive knowledge, and I always thought monitors should give a much deeper, pervasive, and lingering view of whats happening versus what normally happens. Neither of which came to pass, but I still wish for it. Weird.