Tuesday morning on the way in to work the bike odometer rolled 7,777.7 miles. Numbers like that look cool on an LCD readout.

They would have come up Monday on the way home, except that our entire MySQL database containing the college course catalog, web site pages, contact requests, etc., etc., all decided to come crashing down about 5pm (so Shelley came and got me a couple hours later).

It's not clear why this happened, but the central IT people who keep tape backups were able to restore our files in just a few hours. Of course there's no direct number to make a recovery request (especially after hours), so from memory of past contacts there, I used the campus directory to look up "Frank" (a previous recovery helper) and found the number for the network operations center and made an emergency request. Good thing there aren't too many Franks on campus.

We finished watching Alexander (director's cut) last night. This version's supposed to be better than the original release, but even though it's a historical piece, I won't be buying a copy. It sucked.

The weirdest thing was a switch to infrared film for about five minutes of battle after Alex failed to duck a thrown spear. Perhaps that was meant to represent his state of mind, but many of the following shots were from vantages other than his lying on the field, including aerial. Inexplicable, and most jarring.

It's not Alexander the Great. It's not even Alexander the Pretty Good. It's Alexander the Not Very Good at All.