ifics

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This evening, robot_grrl and I ended up watching Cats 101. One of the breeds they were talking about was the Abyssinian. During the segment, we saw plenty of examples of this breed, as well describing their personality and athletic ability.

As it was nearing the end, I turned to Tara and started to ask her if this reminder her of one of my cats, and she answered before I hardly got through the question.

Abyssinians are long, athletic cats, with easy to maintain coats and a dislike of being held too much. My first cat -- other than the ones that lived with my full family -- Cream Puff (1989-2002), was quite the athlete, never had any serious coat or grooming problems, but never liked to be held too much.

On the other hand, Cream Puff was a yellow tabby which is not a color for Abyssinians, and was quite the lap cat. Of course he was 100% street cat, having been taken into a shelter before or shortly after being born, six weeks before I adopted him.

But I'm now suspecting that he may well have had a significant amount of Abyssinian ancestry.

I like Christmas. I like Christmas music. I like Christmas decorations.

But... November 7 is too early for people to have already decorated their yard, like we saw this evening. It is also too early for Santa Claus to be at a mall, but they just announced that he's already at Fashion Valley Mall (at least).

Since we won't have bad weather around here before Thanksgiving, people can wait to decorate. I understand doing some setup before the weather gets too bad up North, but that doesn't apply around here.

I'll also admit I can understand retailers trying to get the shopping season moving as early as possible. But having Santa Claus before black Friday isn't necessary for that, is it?

For me, I'll wait.

I was kinda sick in the middle of the night. Likely reflux; I'm a lot better now, if not perfect. But it's scary.

Today is such a pretty day, though: mid-60s, sunshine, and the smell of wood from someone's grill coming through the window. Tomorrow is supposed to be just as nice; there will be barbecue. Oh yes, there will.

And Prilosec.

How's your weekend?

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Work was moderately productive, not necessarily much code, but a few other things got done, and I spent some happy time reading all of the GNU Make manual. I took only a very short walk; it felt like rain was in the offing. Even a short walk is worthwhile, though.

I'm back to working on moving my fileserver onto a larger drive (from 500GB to 1500). Not a moment too soon -- the big partition is 99% full. Upgrading from Etch to Lenny is another matter, but I can postpone that.

It was a good day for friendship. In the morning I mailed a package up to Promusica with a contribution for Naomi and a slug for Callie, who has been unable to make her laptop recognize the USB hard drive I sent her.

The high point of the day was when I found myself smiling delightedly after hearing about an affectionate moment between C and N. Maybe I am getting better at recognizing my emotions -- this one was definitely mudita.

Marty and Colleen were telling me how much they enjoyed the weekend when I was away at OVFF. I don't remember which of them said something to the effect of "we'll have to see about doing that every month". But that makes me happy, too.

tetralizard came over in the evening to help me with a wishlist item: sorting the health care receipts. YAY!!!

 

Elseweb, KitchenAid is selling purple mixers again!! Ricoh has put out a press release about the latest bit of cool stuff to make it out of our lab and into production. And V-Innovate, the company my son-in-law works for, has a demo of their cool stuff up (Windows only for now, unfortunately).

I was noodling around with a couple of chords, one of which I don't normally use, and tripped over a chord progression that led me to this song. And it probably doesn't sound anything like you think that it does.

I think. :) But it does have a beat.
( Lyrics inside... )

Nobody here is desperately ill, but no one is exactly well either. Katie has a loose cough, Julie has some serious nasal congestion, daisy_knotwise has been under the weather for a bit and hit the wall this evening, and I've been fighting off a cold all week.

I think I'm also about to lose a tooth.

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Official WH photographers | Samantha Appleton, Chuck Kennedy, Pete Souza

This morning as I was waiting to get of The Coaster, I noticed a new flyer in the flyer area near the exit. This flyer, which looks like it was produced either in-house or at a low-end print shop (i.e. it is 8.5x11 paper, printed and hand folded), announces "San Diego Vintage Trolley, Inc." They flyer explains that this is a new 501(c)3 subsidiary of the Metropolitan Transit System (MTS), dedicated to restoring 3 vintage trolleys to run on the MTS trolley lines near downtown. The flyer includes several nice pictures, a form to mail support (including donations) and a link to a web site: www.sdvintagetrolley.com.

This interested me enough -- largely because the map showing where the trolley would be running was not readable (or showed no actual "silver line" for the vintage cars) -- so I tried to access the website. That was were things got interesting.

When I pulled up the site, I got one of the "parking sites" that is just a bunch of links. From this, I concluded that the flyer was one of three things: a mistake, in that it was released before everything was ready; a prank; or a scam.

I did a bit more poking around when I had a brief break this morning. I was able to determine that the phone number led to someone at the MTS offices, where I left a voice mail letting them know that they either had flyers with their number on The Coaster, or that their website was down. I was also able to confirm that the mailing address at least resolves (according to Google) to the MTS offices. Based on those, I have mostly discounted the idea that this is a scam -- a scam would have had somewhere else to get mail and donations, and might not have sent the phone to someone at the MTS. (Of course a well done scam would also have had a live website since those are probably as easy or easier to set up than a PO Box).

I'm kind of hoping that this is just an early release of the flyers, a release of some draft flyers, or a mistake with their web host. Ten years ago I thought that it was neat that Melbourne used mostly vintage trams on their downtown loop (which is, or at least was, free -- something for people going to Aussicon next year to remember), and would think that this was just as neat in my city.

Yo, Rep. Akin, your Freudian Slip is showing.

Oh my filkish friends...

Some of you may know that my selection of products in Firefly Cargo Bay is becoming more filk related all the time. Plus, there's the ever growing (once Cafe Press gets their site fixed) filk designs in the the original FFCB shop . What I would like to know- as I look at the beginning of 2010's potential con dealers' rooms for me---

WHAT WOULD *YOU*LIKE TO SEE ON A DEALERS' TABLE?

As filkers and musicians and singers and fans of music in general, that is. What products and such would you like to see when you walk into a dealers' room that you currently do not see? Or, if I carry some of those products (like the buttons and book marks and tote bags, etc, I already have) what designs or sayings or images would you like to see on them?

I am open to any and all suggestions, as I'm looking to expand my product offerings. Post here or email me directly at earthgirl at kos dot net

TANX!

Here's a good article on Gizmodo about Android. Things could get interesting.

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I moved everything out of my old wallet and into a travel wallet with more slots for cards. A bit of a tight fit, though, and of course larger and heavier. So I may end up moving back. Or getting one with slightly wider slots.

It was a fairly productive day at work again. I'm not sure why I seem to have the most fun when I'm hacking on Makefiles, but there you have it. Perhaps it's because they automate so much of the repetitive, boring stuff. And also because debugging them can be... interesting.

Took a nice walk around the pond. Rather scattered thoughts, but I ended up pretty calm and somewhat refreshed.

Got a well-timed call from cflute, while we were on the way to our date-night dinner at Estrellita's, a Mexican place in Los Altos that's been there forever and has a wonderful mole poblano and excellent sangria. Also three different dipping salsas with their chips. We drove home the long way, of course.

Ended the evening making a signal boost post for pocketnaomi, and hunting down my old but still functional (and still unused) slug, since cflute's laptop doesn't want to recognize the USB hard drive I sent her. I'll send that and a check this morning.

Went to take a bath and ended up in the back tub, because I still haven't finished taking the drinks out of the front tub after our party last weekend. Oops.

... to tenderstone!!! Have a great one!!

This may be the funniest thing you'll see all year. It's 8½ minutes long, but really worth it.

My sister-of-choice, Naomi, needs help.

What would help most, of course, would be jobs for her and/or her partner Callie (cflute). But they also need to feed the kids and pay the rent while they work on finding jobs.

I figure that instead of sending money to a couple of charities working to cure diseases we don't have yet, we can send it to our friends this year.

There's an email address in her post for PayPal, or you can email her for her snail-mail address. Even a little bit would be helpful.

Thanks in advance,
==steve

Happy Birthday Happy Birthday Pain and suffering and despair, People dying evrywhere, On your birthday Happy Birthday

U.S. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama wait for arriving leaders at the Phipps Conservatory, before an opening reception and working dinner for heads of delegation, at the Pittsburgh G20 Summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Photographer | Brooks Kraft

See, this is what I see when I watch cable talk shows.

Vacuous Hostcritter: Hello, I'm pretending this is news when it's just people spouting off in predictable ways because our network realized that is much cheaper than investing money in actual reporting. I have a Republican pundit and a Democratic pundit here to blather in highly predictable ways about the election results.

Republican pundit: How is it possible to see an election where Obama's party gains another seat in the House of Representatives as anything less than a stunning rebuke of Obamacare and the entire Democratic Congress? I will repeat this much louder, with some pejoratives about anyone who could possibly disagree with this analysis.

Democratic pundit: Because I'm a Democrat, I am a totally insecure wussy who secretly believes you're right even though I can't explain why. So I will absolutely say nothing about how voters in a district Democrats could not win when the anti-Republican wave crested in '08 rejected the "Death Panel" candidate in favor of "Mr. Milquetoast I will support the Obama agenda." Instead, I'll say that the lose of two governor races where the winning candidates avoided the Republican brand like the plague doesn't really show anything about Obama. But I'll say it in such a way that everyone watching will know I don't really believe it.

VHC: Smelling blood, I will ask the DP a leading question framed in the way that shows the RP obviously has a point.

DP: Being a wuss with major insecurities, I will try to make a point about how the Republican who won with the biggest margin actually sent around a flyer saying the Sarah Palin robocalls were not associated with my campaign --

RP: What a steaming and wretched pile of feces! Everyone can see how the fact that Conservatives cost their party another seat in a district Rs have held for more than 130 years means that in 2010 districts like this will vote in droves for the type of candidate this district just rejected.

VHC: That makes sense. DP, is there anything Democrats can do to stop this overwhelming tide of dissatisfaction expressed by voting for Democrats instead of Republicans.

RP: I will loudly interrupt to say that the only thing that could save Democrats is for them to reject the policies that got them elected and embrace the policies that a traditionally Republican district just rejected.

DP: Because I am such an insecure wuss, I will get even more defensive and twisty in my body language and say that maybe Democrats should back away from everything our constituents keep saying they want in polls and in letters and start to crawl back to the conservatives who will never vote for us.

VHC: RP, would some grovelling and retreat from core principles be enough to stave off another terrible election with winning more seats in Congress.

RP: As if! Nothing can save the Democrats from winning even more seats in 2010 unless they do as exactly as I say!

DP: (breaking down completely) It's true! (sob) We're done for!

RP: BOW BEFORE ME YOU MISERABLE DEMOCRAT WORM!

DP: (Dropping to knees and trembling) Oh mercy, master! Mercy! I am a miserable worm! I promise to stop doing the things that keep winning us House seats so that our supporters stay home in disgust in 2010! Just please stop saying everything with such arrogant certainty in your voice! (sobs hysterically and begins kissing RP's toes) mercy . . . . mercy . . . .

RP: Wuss.

VHC: We'll be back after this.

You may remember last month's post about how Lieutenant Stockwell is busily saving the timestream from the Large Hadron Collider. Well, apparently he's got the birds working for him too.

Do you know how long it takes to train a bird to drop a piece of bread in exactly the right place to disable the LHC?