This is only a test.

Fucking pager messages.

Fucking automated pager messages.

Fucking automated pager messages triggered by morons who can't leave their godforsaken asshole piece of shit IBM System 390 run a scheduled job on a Bank Holiday and don't bother letting Concerned Parties know about it.

Fucking cock-knocking IBM-knobbing assholes that have all been pink-slipped since, oh, I dunno, Christmas, yet are still expected by idiot management to do a conscientious job until their clocks wind down at the end of April or May or something. On one hand, I can't blame 'em for not giving a shit, on the other hand I'd like to kill them all by rubbing them vigourously with a nailfile until they bleed to death.

Somebody is not thinking straight here, and I'm awake at 6:30 in the morning because of it.

...if this had been a real emergency, something would have happened.

Since I'm awake... took the opportunity to check my mail, discovered Korean spam, checked my filter, discovered why it wasn't blocking it (regexp: .*(, not (.* which is completely obvious, right?), fixed it.

I need to buy a life somewhere. Adjusting filters at 6:30 am so that junk gets auto-filed in the bin is not a healthy thing by any stretch of the imagination.

Whoops!

It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to get Windows into a state where only voodoo will rescue it, for values of voodoo meaning "go into the Device Manager and start deleting things at random until Windows agrees to redetect stuff again". Yeesh. And who ever came up with "System Restore" disks that won't allow you to reinstall without flushing your entire disk should be subject to the same nailfiled-to-death torture mentioned previously.