For friday cat blogging I have stories.
Fierce Cat has a new trick. She has figured out that we won’t let her bring live mice in the house. So she hides them. In her mouth. She tucks them up somewhere and then stands by the door like she wants to be let in. Then once she gets in she gives them to George. I think she thinks George needs to be taught how to hunt, or maybe he’s not being fed well enough or something. George is insanely grateful (he agrees with the not being fed well enough assessment) and incredibly disappointed when we retrieve the mouse from the corner and scold the heck out of Fierce Cat.
But we’ve begun to get smart about Fierce Cat’s ploy because she can’t hide the whole mouse in her mouth. If you’re paying attention you can usually spot tiny mousie feet or a tail sticking out the sides. And the innocent look gives it away every time.
In the meantime we have discovered that George is actually a dog. He fetches. Repeatedly, and eagerly, and will not stop. He has one particular toy, a bunch of green feathers bound together at the end, that he particularly likes to fetch. The feather toy must be put in a secure location at the end of the day or he will demand it be thrown for fetching at 3AM. Note: closed drawers are not a secure location.
If we are both in the room he will kindly alternate bringing the toy to Eric and to me. And if you don’t feel like playing fetch he will repeatedly tuck it behind you on the couch and then pull it out again to get your attention. Meanwhile, Fierce Cat looks on disgustedly and thinks “Have some dignity, you tool.”
Perhaps she is feeding him mice to try to explain to him his rightful position as Cat.
I was in South Park on monday (the neighborhood in SF, not the cartoon), on my way to my hairdresser’s. And a nice young well dressed couple were walking along the sidewalk toward me. Her: pale, blonde, impeccably dressed, really nice shoes. Him: black, stunningly handsome. Young urban lawyers or marketing or bizdev, moving up in the world. As they passed, I overheard her state emphatically:
“No, no, its not true, I get laid there all the time.”
Did I turn around and follow them to find out what that conversation was all about? No I did not. Its been bugging me ever since. All the time? *all* the time? Where is this? What’s not true? Arrrgghhh!
Dammit, it really is true that marketing is just one big drunken sex party and only the beautiful people are invited, isn’t it.
OK, just one more post today. (I’m down to only one page of backlogged draft blog posts! woohoo!)
By now y’all have seen the footage of the JetBlue airplane that landed without incident in LAX a few days ago with the crooked landing gear. (or at least heard about it). In an online discussion about that landing elsewhere an acquaintance passed on Wade Nelson’s gripping, edge-of-the-seat account of the Gimli Glider, an Air Canada Boeing 767 in 1983 that ran out of fuel in mid-flight and had to glide all the way into a landing. How could they possibly have run out of fuel? The fuel gauge in the then-new 767 wasn’t working, so they refueled the plane using a more traditional, basic method — measuring the amount of fuel you have with a dipstick and determining how much you need based on mileage and weight. Except that the fuel weight is measured in kilograms. They did the conversion in pounds. They ended up with half as much fuel in the plane as they thought they had.
Math is hard. This page from the American Chemical Society explains the problem of fuel density in better detail.
Basically, everything totally went wrong on this flight that could possibly have gone wrong, and yet it still has a happy ending. Good read.
(click through to Bug Bash for the big comic)
I love this particular comic more than I probably should.
A long time ago I used to work for a large unix workstation manufacturer I like to affectionately call Stupid Company. Then because I was a moron I just recently went back to work for them again for a couple of years. (learning from one’s mistakes: something higher-order mammals are supposedly good at. ook.)
Like many large companies, Stupid Company has a corporate campus of many buildings arranged around a central courtyard. The courtyard is actually quite lovely; grass, benches, lots of places to hang out and not work.
Also just like every corporate campus everywhere, each of the buildings has electronic doors, so in order to get into the buildings you need your badge. However, the buildings are also locked from the courtyard side, so you need to badge in there, too. There is no way into the courtyard except through a building, so in order to get to the courtyard in the first place you would have had to badge in earlier. But no. Badge badge badge. You also have to badge into the cafeteria and the gym, also on the inside of the courtyard. Stupid Company is very secure. (well, except for the wireless network, which is accessible from the far end of the parking lot. Don’t ask me why I know this.) Oh, I should also mention: no connections between the buildings. To get from building to building you go into the courtyard and into the next building, badging in at each step. Also a whole lot of Stupid Company employees took the “no tailgating” rule seriously — they wouldn’t let you follow them into the cafeteria unless you showed your badge! No bad chinese food for you today!
When I was at Stupid Company I worked in a building that, because of layoffs, did not have its own receptionist. So if you forgot your badge you would have to go to the receptionist next door and beg for a temporary badge (see cartoon above). The receptionist would let you into that building. Then you would go out into the courtyard…and get trapped.
I forgot my badge a few times while I was there, and it’s particularly humiliating to have to
stand by the courtyard door in the rain hoping someone will come by and let you into your own building, waving your temporary badge at them through the glass to prove that you’re not some high tech courtyard vagrant (“will code for food”). I’m pretty sure they did it to make sure you were so frightened of forgetting your badge you simply never, ever took took it off. Just embed the damn smart card in my butt! I don’t care! Don’t make me stand in the rain any more!
Please note that I resisted the temptation to use the really obvious “no stinkin badges” title to this post, as appropriate as it would have been. You may congratulate me below.
A bunch of months ago we got wireless broadband Internet, and all was right with the world. Except there seems to be a rule in our world that once something goes right in our tech configuration, something must also then go horribly wrong. So after changing ISPs, getting a new mini-firewall, renumbering our entire internal network, moving our DNS offsite, reprogramming our entire spam management system, and finally getting everything working perfectly, the very next day the power supply in our main server blew up (“what do you mean it won’t turn on?” “you heard me, it won’t turn on and it smells bad.”)
While the easy solution would have been to just go find a power supply, we considered all options. Usually the death of a box is what forces us to upgrade; this box was purchased when our last server blew up a few years ago (hard drive Grind of Death). It was a decent box for its time but nothing top of the line, and it was showing its age. I began shopping for a new computer. Something in the $500 Dell range, I figured.
It was then that Fry’s began to advertise the Dirt Cheap Computer. Fry’s, as anyone from the area knows, is the local evil computer superstore. You can get anything — *anything* computer or technology related at Fry’s, and at really incredible prices. You just have to completely humiliate yourself to do it. No sales people at Fry’s know anything about the technology they sell, but they harrass you madly for the comission; they browbeat you to sell you things you don’t need; they line you up like cattle to pay for stuff and shout at you (“Line 14! Line 14!”) and then they search you at the door on your way out. And that’s just to buy things. Just try to return something (shudder). Fry’s is really evil, everyone hates them, but yet its hard not to keep going back. If you really need a null modem cable at 10PM on a sunday, they will have it. Its right next to the porn and the diet coke.
The Dirt Cheap Computer (DCC) is actually technically called the Great Quality computer. You may snicker derisively; we did. It is not Great Quality. It has off-brand parts in a no-name case. It runs linux (linspire, actually). And it costs $180. No rebate interpretive dance needed; that is the price. (you can get a slightly higher quality version, with Windows, for $250).
At the time we found out about the dirt cheap computer, it was on sale. For $150. We figured: if it blows up in a year we will just buy another one. $150. Its practically free. Yeehaw.
The DCC, it turns out, is terrific. Fedora Core installs on it with zero issues. It comes with a minimal 128M of memory (thus the price) which was fine for basic routing and web and shell access and mail until we installed SpamAssassin and then it swapped itself into a puddle. Another 512M made it much happier. Its just a server machine, but now it gronks away happily in the corner with nary a peep.