Another pic from the Highland Games, this one of a little dog in a kilt. There’s no end to what clothes people will put on their animals. And, of course, there was something apparently really important at work that I didn’t hear about until very late in the afternoon. Well, that’s something I’ll have to fix tomorrow morning.

Trivia on Tuesday had almost all the usual suspects. Plus Stephanie. Yeah, I dragged her along to trivia, which may not have been a great idea, but I did it anyway because I wanted her to meet some of my friends. Ah well, we had a good time and won the competition, at least partially thanks to Kelli knowing what was on George Michael’s T-shirt in the video for “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go”. Weird 1980s trivia über alles, I tell you. Zach also wants to go shooting Sunday, to try out his new M1 carbine. I don’t know whether I’ll have time to do that yet. There was a very interesting art jeep parked outside the restaurant when I arrived, and I took a few pictures, but those’ll show up in later entries as it’s late and I’m tired.

Here’s a picture of some tap dancers performing at First Friday. The picture isn’t that great; tiny optics and the lack of a flash caused that.

Monday didn’t start off all that great. My alarm went off for at least an hour before I noticed it, so I was too late to get on the bus. Ah well. I drove in, and remembered why I don’t like driving in. It was raining, which is usually welcome, but rain causes some people here to drive like idiots. Anyway, when I finally got in, I waded through the Augean Stables of my inbox and picked out the important messages. Then I took care of the outstanding problems, fixed yet another problem caused by people sending 2-digit years when we could really use 4-digit years, and troubleshot some more stuff related to a new software package another team wants to use. Pretty normal day, really.

Then after I had eaten dinner, apparently my wallet must’ve hit the “call last contact” button on my phone. I only knew this because Stephanie called me a few minutes later, saying, “You called me, but it was all staticky and you weren’t saying anything.” So then we had an actual conversation, which was nice.

Sunday, this was the view from my window. It rained on and off all dang day. At least I went and got groceries during one of the sunny periods.

Also voted in the local elections. The city council elections here are non-partisan, meaning there aren’t any “OMG! Democrats r raisin ur taxes! PANICK!!1!” or “OMG! Republicans r being idiots! PANICK!!1!” ads or partisan piddling. However, a sample news article about one of the candidates has a bunch of wharrgarbl in its comment section. It’s kind of sad, really. If one of the candidates shat a gold brick, I believe some of the people who infest newspaper comment boards would whinge because it wasn’t platinum.

Oh yeah: KDE4 apparently insists on having the “consolekit” service started, and will not let you log in via the graphical login manager unless it’s started. There are no logs or error messages about this problem either. Sigh.

Back to work on Monday. I wonder what my inbox will look like after a week on furlough.

A more detailed description of Friday: Stephanie and I met downtown at the art museum. We went to the Thai Hut, a former diner now serving Thai food, and had dinner. I had Drunken Noodles, a spicy noodle dish, she had a big bowl of chicken soup with noodles. And then we walked to Roosevelt Street, where they had blocked the whole street off, and there were tons of little stalls selling art and food. All the galleries along that area were open too.

This was one of the pieces we saw at the First Friday art walk yesterday. It’s a work in progress, where the artist, Jen Urso, does some pencil sketches throughout the day, then takes stuff she’s drawn previously and either erases it or draws over it in ink. The exhibit had a series of pictures she’s taken depicting the progress of the art. One thing that it’s difficult to see in this picture is that there are words written in places on the picture. This piece was a lot more interesting than the pretty mediocre cellphone picture here shows, actually.

Another picture we saw, which reminded Stephanie of Fallingwater.  She wrote me this:  “Trees are the essence of life.  The eyes are tearing water as if in Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterful creation of Fallingwater.  Water is flowing through a wooden, organic structure into the river of dreams.  The sun is in one eye and the stars are in another.  It’s as if elvish nature surrounds you.”

Anyway, Stephanie and I, we get along really well as far as I can tell, and so we’re dating.

Went to First Friday for the first time on Friday. That’s an event where a bunch of the art galleries in downtown Phoenix are open and there are shuttle buses that run between them. No picture yet, pictures later, because it’s late and I’m tired.

So, I went to pick up cat food and cat litter on Thursday and ran into something weird: The car refused to unlock via the keyless entry system, then when I had unlocked it, it refused to start, and began honking its horn and flashing its lights every couple of seconds. I finally got it reset and started. Don’t know what could’ve caused that, unless it was the car being started/moved/whatever via the spare key yesterday. It was a bit strange, but I got the cat food without further trouble.

Almost done with the Stephen Jay Gould compilation. It’s a lot to digest. One common thread of the essays is the sheer number of times that even respected subject matter experts are blinded by their personal prejudices when interpreting data. It’s easy for us to say “Piltdown Man? Totally fake!”, but radioisotope dating wasn’t practical at the time Piltdown Man was unearthed. Future generations will definitely be able to look at the 21st century and say, “Why didn’t they know X back then? It’s totally obvious!” Well, science is often a matter of figuring out what data is actually relevant, and what data is totally bogus. The bogus stuff tends to outnumber the relevant stuff by at least 9 to 1.

Wednesday! Not a whole lot to say, though I did get the car’s oil changed and read more of that Stephen Jay Gould book.

Also went to Steve’s for the usual Rock Band. That was fun; we got the Ultimate Rock Outfit (a “Worn in the U.S.A.” shirt and pants, oddly enough, since none of Bruce Springsteen’s work has been in Rock Band.) And we had a digression about a researcher who’s done a lot of work on the intelligence of ravens, crows, rooks, and scrub jays. Apparently, these birds can lie, cheat, steal, hide food, and remember where they’ve hidden the food up to 285 days later. Some of them can use tools and even purposefully bend wire into hooks for snagging food. Ravens can learn to recognize individual people, and the researcher had to wear a variety of disguises in order to get close enough to wild ravens to catch them. (This led to someone from her university saying, “Why were you spending research funds at ‘Party City’?”)

As for change, I’m going to start publishing these entries late at night instead of early in the morning since it’s one less thing to remember/schedule. Most of you in the Eastern time zone won’t notice much.

Tuesday, the big thing was the HOA meeting. It started on time, but there weren’t enough people for a quorum. Some people called people they knew and asked them to show up, or knocked on neighbors’ doors, and we ended up with exactly 25% of the units represented. Just barely enough for a quorum. I showed up mostly because I was sick as a dog last year, and felt guilty about that, so I wanted to show up this year. Even though it conflicted with trivia night.

Thing is, not very much got done. All the members of the board got re-elected. This figures, nobody wants to serve on it, as it’s a pretty thankless job. People voted in a one-time special fee of $35 that will be used for replacing all the mailboxes, which are 24 years old and showing their age. One of the board said that we should increase security in the complex by having an outside company do more frequent patrols. That will, of course, cost money, and the number of actual security problems here is not large. Several people on the board said that they wanted to keep property values of the community high. All bow before the great god of property values! MOOO!

Finally converted absolutely everything on my desktop to KDE 4. It’s a little clunky, but it mostly works. The only real problem I’ve had so far is that gwenview (KDE 4’s image viewer) lacks a couple of the nicer features of kuickshow (KDE 3’s image viewer).

After way too much fiddling around, I got my phone to talk to my Gentoo laptop via Bluetooth. This is one of the pictures I took at the Highland Games last Saturday. I didn’t get haggis, though, since I’d already gotten a sausage spiced like a traditional haggis. Maybe next time.

Anyway, here’s how I got the LG Rumor 2 to talk to a Linux box using Bluetooth: First, make sure all the kernel modules you need are loaded (modprobe btusb did it for me.) Second, edit /etc/dbus-1/system.d/bluetooth.conf and change the default policy from “deny” to “allow” (or add yourself to the “plugdev” group.) Third, add the line net-wireless/blueman ~x86 to your /etc/portage/package.keywords file, and the line >=net-wireless/blueman-1.10 to your /etc/portage/package.unmask file. Fourth, emerge blueman. Fifth, start up blueman-assistant and select your phone in the list that shows up. Enter a PIN and then enter the same PIN on the phone. Trust that device. Sixth, start up blueman-services and change the transfer settings so that file receiving is enabled, you have a shared directory like ~/pics/phone/ , and you accept files from trusted devices. Finally, in the phone’s menu, go to Bluetooth->Send Files, select the files you want to send, and hit OK.

This was much more difficult than it shoud’ve been. Years ago, it was much easier to transfer files from a Nokia phone. I didn’t have to screw around with settings, or install unstable software. But the state of Linux Bluetooth support has actually gotten worse over the last few years. I don’t know why this is, but it’s a tremendous pain in the ass.

(However, I was totally unable to transfer files to/from my phone using Windows, despite fooling around with it for an hour. . . .)

Ate lunch, went to see “Shutter Island”, made a lasagna, cleaned the place, then basically zonked out.  I’ve been doing a whole bunch of stuff all weekend, and I’m kind of tired.  Hope that I can get at least some relaxation accomplished this week, as I’m on work furlough.

This morning, I noticed that there was something screwed up with one of the work servers.  Of course, since my furlough started Sunday, I couldn’t do anything about it.  It was an easy problem to fix, so I’m positive that someone else fixed it. I disabled the Firefox extension that monitors work stuff, though, so I wouldn’t be tempted to worry.