More whale flukes. The humpback was never hunted as much as the sperm whale, though, because there was so much less oil in one humpback and a dead humpback didn’t float nearly as well as a right whale or a sperm whale. And apparently, in 1930, there was a movie loosely based on Moby-Dick where Ahab kills the whale and returns home to his wife. Well, some people just don’t understand tragedy. . . .

It was cloudy and rained a bit in downtown Phoenix on Tuesday afternoon. The cafeteria has taken the unprecedented step of having chili every day this week. I guess they finally found out that the chili was really popular. Hey, I’m all for it, give the diners what they want.

Trivia: Kelli drove a friend’s young kid to school the other day. A teacher said, “Oh, we knew you weren’t her mother. Are you her grandmother?” Kelli is younger than I am, probably in her mid-20s. She was Not Amused by this. And John is now single (again), since his girlfriend broke up with him because she hates how hot it gets in Phoenix and wants to move somewhere else (what?). Zach has decided he wants to try making his own haggis, and wanted to know where he could get sheep intestines and sheep stomach. And we may be going bowling on Saturday. I don’t know. We were in second place when I left.

More marine life here. Seals seem to sleep almost as much as cats if they can get away with it.

It was cloudy for most of the morning on Monday, which was nice. Phoenix doesn’t get enough cloudy days.

I thought the enchiladas I made on Sunday weren’t the greatest. I reheated some of the leftovers on Monday and thought that they tasted fine. Maybe they need to be aged before tasting good, or something.

Had to deal with some odd OS X stuff on Monday, but the user said that stuff was working OK. It was apparently just a matter of resetting some permissions on some stuff after a system crash.

Heard from Mark, a guy I used to work with long ago. It was good to hear that he was doing OK and to hear some of what the old B-school crew were up to.

More whales. They were too far away to get really good pictures, of course.

I saw this paper a while back, and thought it was interesting. Mostly because of the subject matter, not because of who wrote it, though.

Early on in Moby-Dick, when Ishmael and Queequeg are signing on to the Pequod, Bildad says that he won’t have any pagans aboard the ship. Queequeg is allowed to sign on because Ishmael makes an impassioned speech in his favor.  Yet later, after the ship has set sail, Tashtego and Daggoo are constantly referred to as pagans.  So, how were they allowed to sign up?  Did Ahab or someone intercede for Tashtego and Daggoo?  Or is this the literary equivalent of a continuity error? (Fedallah and the other men on Ahab’s boat are not relevant to this point, because they snuck on to the ship and it’s highly probable that Bildad didn’t even know about them.)

Grocery shopping, laundry, and cleaning took up large chunks of Sunday. And I’m on call Monday through Thursday, which shouldn’t be terrible, but might be annoying. And after that, I get either the 15th or the 19th off, which will be fun. Not sure which yet.

I’ve been reading Moby-Dick, so naturally there have to be pictures of whales. These are humpback whales, though, not sperm whales.

There’s . . . surprisingly little to report. Fuzzball is being fractious. She has recently started to run outside every time I open the front door, which is inconvenient.

I bought a copy of The Teraport Wars, because I had a bit of spare cash, and I like to support artists who are creating nifty work. The thing is, the last time I bought a book from that author, the day before the book arrived, I got laid off. Here’s hoping that won’t happen again. It probably won’t; what happened six months ago was a silly coincidence.

Bad puns about old poetry?  Yeah, we’ve got that.

Friday, work was relatively normal, at least for me.  Everyone else seemed to have a lot more to do and less time to do it in, so much so that we didn’t go out for lunch.  Oh well, the employee cafeteria is cheaper and quicker, even if it’s not as good as some of the nearby restaurants.

I finished Ilium, mostly because I misspoke earlier and I was actually 75% of the way through, not 66%.  It ended rather abruptly, with a lot of unanswered questions, but there’s a sequel.  Oh well.  Not sure what to read next, the other 2 library books, or Moby-Dick.  I’m thinking Moby-Dick, because the last few books I’ve read have been fluffy entertainment and it’s time for Serious Literature.

Hmm. . . does Herodotus qualify as Serious Literature?  That guy was the father of history, but his work contained so many non-historical accounts of stuff and so many obvious fabrications that it’s more like a novel than a modern history. Oh well, if the Classics department at your local university studies the book, it’s probably not all bad.

Some people who had far too much time on their hands created anagrams for almost all of the stations on the London Underground. “Swearword & Ethanol” is actually “Harrow & Wealdstone”, “OK Turban” is actually “Burnt Oak”, “Scuba Horrors” (not shown) is actually “Crossharbour”, etcetera. Way, way, way too much time on their hands.

Wednesday, I went over to Steve’s for the usual dinner followed by Linux thing. We ended up exploring the stuff you could do with PROMPT_COMMAND, like making the prompt look different depending on whether there was a file named “foo” in the current directory. Then we discussed books, like Moby-Dick and the work of Neal Stephenson. Actually, Stephenson’s use of tons of digressive material and humor in his large books like Cryptonomicon might be analogous to Melville’s use of the same techniques. Well, we’ll have to wait at least 30 years for any English prof to be able to analyze Stephenson’s work in any serious way, but that was just my gut feeling.

Been reading Ilium by Dan Simmons. This one’s set several thousand years in the future, where there are at least 3 different societies of critters who are sort of like humans. There are intelligent machines who live near Jupiter’s moons and the asteroid belt, who spend a lot of their time discussing literature. There are a bunch of people living on a terraformed Mars who are acting out the events of the Iliad under the direction/guidance of powerful entities who strongly resemble the ancient Greek gods. Then there are a few people living on Earth who are barely educated, incurious, indolent, and not ever doing much besides partying and watching the Iliad-drama being enacted on Mars. The book’s about these societies interacting and gradually realizing that there is a Horrible Threat about to destroy Earth, Mars, and whatever else might be in its way. I’m only about 66% of the way through it though.

Thursday, I taught myself how to build an RPM from scratch. It’s remarkably finicky. I got it working eventually though. And on that day, there was chili in the cafeteria. Everybody loves chili. The bad thing is that now chili and other soups cost about $0.30 more than they used to. Next: Fun With Databases! I think I know what to do there, it’s just a question of displaying the info in a reasonably pleasing way. . . .

I’ve barely had any time to write over the last few days, and have no time now. Here’s hoping nothing interesting happens between now and tonight, so I can write about everything then without losing stuff. More updates later.

You will notice that this bus is not right. This is because both of the buses I took on Tuesday had their fare boxes broken. I don’t know, I’d think that a city would want their buses to all have working fare boxes. First get the brakes working, then the engine, then the fare boxes. . . right? Maybe not. Public institutions like the bus system can be managed in ways that make no sense to people used to private companies.

Work: Had 2 people come in for interviews. I don’t yet know which one we’ll end up picking since I haven’t seen both of their written tests yet.

Trivia: Our team name was “Thomas Kinkade Yells ‘Codpiece’!”, which is something that actually occurred at a Siegfried and Roy show in Las Vegas a few years ago. We were doing fairly well, I think. Roughly halfway through trivia, though, work called me up. A cron job that had been running at 10am was not running for some reason, and I had to restart it. After that was done, it looked like everything started working. At least I had finished eating before getting the call.

Not much else.

More mission statements should be like this. (Adam Koford of the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats again.) Too many of them end up like the mission statements described here.

A rant delivered by a professor, which is worth reading. Contains swearing, all of which is probably justified here. The comments attached to the rant cast some doubt on whether the letter is real or an urban legend, but the comments also provide a number of examples of things like those described in the letter that actually happened.

I don’t know what it is, but when you give some people even a tiny amount of power, they think that they’re always right and that they never can be questioned. I didn’t see that much when I was going to school, though. One example, which really wasn’t bad, was an English teacher who insisted that “slavering” wasn’t a word. That was the first concrete example that showed me that people in authority can be complete and total morons and that nothing I said or did could dissuade them from being such. I saw much worse in the last months at the old company.

There’s no excuse for behavior like that. It happens all the time, of course. So what’s the solution? I don’t know. While something like that pictured below would be a solution to the problem of morons with authority, it’d violate a bunch of laws and ethics.

Sunday night, right before I was going to eat dinner, I got a trouble ticket from the helpdesk. It was a legit problem, but it took entirely too long to fix and was a pain in the arse to diagnose. That’s why this entry is so short. It’s Labor Day today. . . I think I’ll celebrate by not working at all.  Well, and making those porkchops that I didn’t have time to make last night. . . .