I forget who is attributed with the original phrase... something along the lines of "those who can combine their vocation with their avocation are truly blessed". I think "blessed" was a typo, they probably meant "cursed".

Here's my story...

Last night, Tod and I went to a small LAN party. For those who are interested, Serious Sam 2 is just aweshum for deathmatch. The level with the santa claus dropping presents around the little alpine town was just insanely fun for the four of us. The gathering wrapped up at about 3am as usual. We packed up and headed out, I dropped Tod off at his house and was on my way home at about 4am.

I just happened to have the radio on and was listening to a news/talk station. The ABC news report was on, and they reported a security hole in some server product. "Big deal," I thought, "that stuff happens all the time," but then they said the name of the product: Black Ice Defender. Uh-oh, Black Ice is the only thing currently protecting one of my company's critical web servers.

I scramble into the house (suddenly a lot more awake for some reason) and inform my wife that I won't be climbing into bed just yet. She recommends that I use her laptop to check the bulletin rather than trying to hook my computer back up, bless her heart. Sure enough, this report describes a buffer overrun bug which contains the four most fearsome words in a network administrator's vocabulary: "execution of arbitrary code".

Of course the day of/after a security bulletin is usually when the script kiddies do most of their hack attempts on new exploits, so there was no time to lose. Instead of climbing into a warm bed after an all-night LAN party, I had to drive 20 minutes in to my office to go patch our web server.

I fully expected to arrive to discover a hacked web server, but it seemed all was well. I patched the server and was back in bed by 6am. Even managed to sleep until noon or so, despite being awakened intermittently by my neighbor's chainsaw.