I thought these guys slept standing up. Guess not.

Voted right after lunch. I thought it was a little strange that after I’d filled out my ballot, I had to run it through the scanner face-up. That meant the poll worker by the machine could easily have looked at the ballot and seen how I voted. While I’m sure he wasn’t going to put that info to any use, and may actually have been forbidden to do so, there’s got to be a better way to do this. Secret ballots should be as secret as possible. Otherwise, you can end up with problems like the ones mentioned briefly in this book. In the 1880s, workers in some company towns in the U.P. had to ask the poll workers for a red ballot or a blue ballot, each color ballot representing one of the major political parties. If the worker asked for the “wrong” color of ballot, that worker usually got fired within a week.

I think every poll worker there was over 65, and they were all bored to tears. I was the only voter there at the time. I chatted with them for a bit after filling out my ballot. About 80 people had voted that day, and over twice that number had turned in early ballots. They wanted more people to come in and vote. While Googling for the rules that Arizona poll workers are supposed to follow, I found a bunch of articles like this one, talking about all the problems that AZ has been having. At my polling place, everything was working great. Show ID, get looked up in election roll, sign election roll, fill out ballot, scan ballot, done. No problems. Of course, this was a local, non-partisan election, so turnout was low and there was no hassle about registering as (R) or (D).

Another post tomorrow morning about Fuzzball’s medical problems.

Giraffe drinking at the Phoenix Zoo.

If all goes well today, the vet will have fixed the air compressor and they’ll be able to see what’s wrong with Fuzzball’s teeth. About time.

Things got added to yesterday’s post late.  So if you read it early yesterday, read it again.

Yesterday, I went to the Tempe Marketplace to spend the gift card that I’d gotten. I went there because it was the closest B&N store to my place. I was surprised that it wasn’t a standard mall, but an open-air pedestrian mall. This isn’t going to work that well for them in high summer, when it’s 110 F. They seem to have designed the walkways fairly intelligently, with lots of shade screens, but in June or July it’ll be really uncomfortable to walk from one store to another. Maybe they’ve planned for this and they have misters concealed in the tops of the screens or along the edges of the buildings.

Finished Pohl’s Annals of the Heechee last night.  It was interesting in that the conclusions he drew were exactly opposite from the ones that Zindell drew in War in Heaven.  Whatever the real answer is, I have a feeling that it won’t matter very much to anyone who’s alive right now.  Technology is marching too slowly.

Whales feeding off the coast of Juneau, AK. I have another shot where you can see a whale and a bald eagle in the same frame, but it’s a lousy picture.

Fuzzball started yowling at me at 4 am. I don’t know why she does this. It never works, I never get up before the alarm goes off.

The last time I went to the store, a gallon of milk was $2.89. A half gallon of milk was $1. I don’t know what could’ve caused that strange pricing, since it costs more to package a half gallon than a gallon. Or they had overestimated demand for half gallons previously, and had a huge surplus. Or the Vampire Lizard Sloths are putting radioactive potassium in the milk supply to corrupt our precious bodily fluids, and the strange prices are a result of that plan.

The portage system has real problems dealing with the expat XML-parsing library. I don’t know how to fix those problems for good, all I know how to do is work around them. So far, it’s worked.

Politics: Finally found the campaign websites for the mayor (who’s running unopposed) and the 7 people running for city council in Tempe. One of the candidates’ websites was set up incorrectly on that page. I don’t know if a guy who can’t get URLs right is capable of being on a city council, but then he probably had nothing to do with the .gov page and some poor shlub working for the city government fat-fingered it. 2 of the incumbents had pitiful websites that did not explain the politicians’ positions or plans. A couple of non-incumbent candidates had websites that went into reasonable detail about what their plans and priorities were. That combined with my gut feeling of “Throw the incumbents out, they probably bloody well deserve it,” will drive how I vote tomorrow. Too bad that all the politicians’ sites used lots of weasel words. It’s also too bad the mayor’s running unopposed. I’d like to have some sort of choice there, but my vote will not matter in that election.

It’s actually refreshing to see an election where none of the candidates are saying “OMG teh evil gay terrerist liberals!!1!” or “OMG teh evil warmongering corporate welfare conservatives!!1!!“. Then again, I get all my news through the Net, so I’ve missed any TV/radio coverage that could’ve had those things in it.

The cat food pictured is apparently really tasty in addition to being high in calories. Yesterday, Fuzzball ate all of the food I put down and spent the rest of the day sleeping. Must be nice to have that option.

Saw an article yesterday about someone who’s starting a fantasy fishing league. OK, keeping stats on and “recruiting” a bunch of people who are catching
fish? Something’s not right here.

On the other hand, that made me get up and walk to the library.  I would’ve done that soon anyway, since I’d read all the books I got last time, but that article made me think that I needed to do something real as soon as possible.

Fuzzball in her cat condo. She seems to be saying, “I do not approve of this, puny human!” Cat owners get that a lot.

Susan and her husband came over for dinner last night. They brought their dog, who’s old and recovering from an illness. Fuzzball didn’t get that upset at the dog, which surprised me. It helped that the dog stayed in a travel bag most of the night and didn’t move much. If he’d been healthy and running around barking, my cat would’ve either had a fit or hidden under the bed, even though the dog’s pretty small.

Apparently, things are going from bad to worse at the old company. Stupid politics, morons in management making decisions they’re not qualified for, lousy communication, people doing pointless make-work, and people doing the “This is not my fault! It’s someone else’s fault!” dance. It used to be a good company to work for, which is sad.

It’s 9:21am and I’m still not completely awake yet.   I can’t even blame DST because there is no DST in Arizona.  Bizarre bumper sticker I saw yesterday: “My Other Car Is A The Chariot”. English. You Are Fail It.

This North American Fuzzy Penguin is relaxing with a beer and the TV remote after a hard day of catching fish.

Fuzzball’s vet specialist appointment is at 9am today. I hope they can figure out what’s wrong with her if they can’t fix it.

Got a callback from one of the jobs I applied for. This is a good thing. No idea if they’re going to schedule an actual interview or not.

One of my neighbors said that a local employer was always looking for programming talent. He said that they don’t care much about the specific languages you know, more that you can design things and build things intelligently, exstensibly, and maintainably, and listen to the users and the testing team. Of course, he left the company in the early 1990s and things might have changed. Many companies now want to know if you have 10 years experience with a technology that has only been in existence for 7 years. It’s still something I will be following up on.

Susan and her husband are coming over for dinner. Yay! Instead of filet mignon, we’re having my signature beans, rice, tomatoes, sausage, onions, and spices meal. It’s good hearty peasant food, but not haute cuisine. I offered to cook any of the other things I know how to cook, but she said that’d be fine. So there you have it.

UPDATE: vet’s air compressor was broken and they didn’t know when it’d be fixed. So Fuzzball is going back on Tuesday. The main thing they could tell me was that she had a hairline fracture on the tip of one canine tooth. But no X-rays or anything today, since they can’t actually do anything. They also gave me 2 cans of high-calorie cat food since she’s lost weight. Ah well,

Evil cyborg kitties? Yeah, we’ve got that.

You probably have too few penguins in your life. Steve and Samantha were planning on taking more pictures of their stuffed penguins, but it was too dark last night for serious photography. Later there might be pictures of penguins with sunglasses and penguins in pirate outfits up there or in their store. In 9 days, you could have a penguin in a toga saying “Beware the IDEs of March!”, but that would be … silly.

I spent some time yesterday sketching and scribbling on scrap paper. I’m out of practice. Most of the drawings that were posted here are at least 10 years old. Going to college and then getting a real job left me with much less time to draw stuff.

These cats belong to my parents. The Siamese is huge at 16 pounds and is the quietest Siamese cat I’ve ever seen.

Too few people for a quorum showed up at the HOA meeting.  So practically nothing got done.  I did learn that there are some people up the street who are annoyed at the free Orbit shuttle bus service that the city’s been running since mid-Jan, and they’re trying to shut it down.  I don’t get that.  You can get on the bus, go downtown, not worry about the exorbitant parking costs, and your property taxes have already paid for it.  Then again, there’s nothing so useful that some vocal people with nothing better to do won’t oppose it.

The HOA also said that people were going to have to register their pets.  Mostly because there have been a lot of complaints about people not cleaning up after their dogs, and dogs running around without leashes.

After the meeting was adjourned, I got a call from Zach.  “I don’t know that it’s on for tonight, because the place is so packed there’s no table where all of us can sit,” he said.  Usually one of us gets there early and stakes out a table before the rush.  Not this time.  How annoying.  Next week, if nobody else can get there early, I’ll go.

If you haven’t read Flapjack Canyon, why not?  OK, it may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s one of the most inventively weird webcomics I’ve seen in the last few months.

This rather silly game gave me an idea for something I’d like to try.  Further details when I have something more than a scribbled half-coherent mess of concepts that may not work properly.

An old-school Mini from the Woodward Dream Cruise. This car was small enough to fit in the back of a mid-sized SUV.

Apparently, Fuzzball needs to see a veterinary dental specialist. FSM only knows how much that’s going to cost.

Condo association meeting tonight, which overlaps with trivia night. It’s annoying, this cuts into time spent with friends, but I have to go. The last meeting was actually OK. Most of the other owners were fairly reasonable people with reasonable concerns and problems. Popular stereotypes say that HOAs are full of annoying whiny nosy people who want to regulate what color your walls are and what kind of car you can drive. There was only one person like that at the last meeting–she complained that her daughter’s parking space was 4 inches narrower than some other parking spaces in the complex. Never mind that over half the parking spaces in the complex are that size, and everyone else can deal with it. Maybe if fewer people drove gigantic-ass SUVs then they’d have less of a problem with parking.

African otters from the Phoenix Zoo. I fiddled with the Levels tool in Gimp for about 5 minutes and couldn’t get the picture looking any better than that. Widely varying light levels can cause problems for cheap cameras—go figure.

Fuzzball is sick again. She’s eating, but eating obviously causes her pain. Last time something like this happened, she had a sore inside her mouth which had gotten infected. And it was expensive to fix that time. Now… I don’t know. We’ll have to see what the vet says.