A fair number of people at work (both the old company and the new one) had no idea what a turducken was. Culinary overload, people. FedUP delivered it on Wednesday, so it’ll sit in the freezer until Christmas. I got this one for 25% off, as well, which basically meant that the shipping cost more than the meat product. Oh well, the one we had last year was tasty.

I also got some good news on Thursday:  I’m getting a small raise.  This is a really good thing—much better than being laid off, that’s for sure.  I rarely got raises at the old company.

Still reading The Many-Colored Land.  I think the main criticism I’ll have of this book is that it’s probably too short.  It’s an engaging yarn, full of larger-than-life characters, evil plots, double crossing, epic fights, and so forth.  This is only to be expected, since the author says, “Some of the characters were lifted directly from Celtic mythology” in the afterword.  At least there’s a sequel.

“Snakes on a Plane” was 7 pounds of cheese in a 5 pound sack. But as the poster says, some things don’t have to make sense, and are better if they don’t.

Went over to Steve’s on Wednesday night. Had turkey burgers and heard all about the drama that’s going on in Steve’s younger son’s life. Apparently, a teacher at his school is being evil and stupid. Well, I’ve had experiences with a number of incompetent schoolteachers, but never problems like the ones he was describing. For some reason (low pay? lack of respect?) there are a bunch of people who are in education and educational administration who shouldn’t be anywhere near that field. I guess I’ve been fortunate to encounter so few of them in my life.

Reading The Many-Colored Land by Julian May. This could have been typical sci-fi/time travel hack fare, but it has interesting characters and is reasonably well written. One of the people who checked this out before I did had done something odd: On many pages where there was a “difficult” word, they’d written a less difficult word right next to it in pencil. So you’d see something like “epitaph (tombstone)” on page 161. That seems really strange to me, but what the heck.

This mouse has taken “scenery chewing” to a new level.

Trivia:  We were in the lead when I left, thanks to some lucky guessing.  Trevor is trying to arrange a trivia tournament with a bunch of teams in November, but I don’t know if that’ll work out.

Back to work on Tuesday. No horrible crises happened, at least. Well, we all got an e-mail from some suit saying, “The economy sucks, so we’re doing involuntary human resource reductions firing people.” It does bug me when people try to camouflage what they’re saying by using large words and lots of them, or by weaseling.

They have not decided who to fire, just yet. I don’t know how they’re going to do that. Maybe they’ll have to fire fewer people if we can find other ways to save money. There are ways we could do that, but I don’t know that it’d be enough.

One of my neighbors to the north has a small gazebo. Of course, this reminded me of the tale of Eric and the gazebo. But basically, not a whole lot happened on Monday. Did final post-party cleanup, got the car’s emissions checked, renewed the car’s registration, and finished reading Singularity Sky. It was fairly interesting, but I’m not sure about Stross’s conclusions. I did like how the Glorious People’s Revolutionary Council set everything on its ear for several weeks and then were rendered totally obsolete by technology.

Other stuff from the party: Just as people began to arrive, John called and wanted to talk. This would’ve been great on a normal Sunday afternoon, but I’d chosen to play host right then on that Sunday. Gah. Everything happens at once sometimes. Oh well, there’s always later this week. And I had anticipated that people would have questions about where stuff was, so I wrote “plates, bowls”, “glasses”, “forks, spoons”, and stuff like that on pieces of paper and taped those to cabinets and drawers. People still asked where the forks and glasses were. I guess people don’t expect to see labels like that in residential kitchens, so even when they’re there, people don’t see them.

Also, my Net host just got bought by Rackspace.  Arrrrgh.  They say they’re not going to make any changes, at least not yet, really, they mean it.  Please place your bets on when the service starts to suck horribly.  I’m guessing 3 to 6 months, but I could be wrong.

The party on Sunday went fairly well. The only bad spot was that Teh Nacho couldn’t attend, as his wife was sick. Oh well. We had a huge spread of guacamole and chips, fruit salad, Hearty Peasant Fare, regular salad, several kinds of wine, and eclairs.

We also had Rock Band 2, which was fun. While I was making the main dish, my friends created a character who resembled Barack Obama, named him “Ba-Rock Obama”, and gave him a silly outfit. However, when we tried to make a logo for the new band we made, we found that the peanut (present in Rock Band 1) was not available in the collection of clip art. We used the peanut as an integral component of our band logo months ago, because it was just so . . . sillly. Grrr. We settled for drawing a peanut and crossbones logo in Sharpie on a piece of paper and taping it to the drum set. I see from reading the forums that people with far too much time on their hands have done things like create the Decepticon and Autobot emblems from geometric primitives in the art creator for Rock Band. Since that can be done, I have no doubt that a peanut could also be done. It all boils down to “do I have enough time to do this?” However, all of my friends were able to unlock “Carry On My Wayward Son” by Kansas, which I had not managed to do by myself. Sometimes, you get by with a little help from your friends. . . .

I have to take my car in to get its emissions levels checked on Monday. Sigh. Now that I take the bus to work, I probably drive much less than the average Phoenix resident, but the government must have its pound of flesh.

The problem is that Saturday was uneventful. Grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning, and stuff like that. OK, the bank where I was keeping about half of my money got Borged by PNC, which might be Interesting. But that’s it. I guess there’s a Plan(tm) to try and move the November Denver TRASH Tournament to Phoenix, but that requires someone (us) to build a set of buzzer devices. This is theoretically simple (they’re not insanely complicated electrically) but practically more difficult. It requires soldering iron skills, which I don’t have. I’m a software guy, mostly, and my hardware solutions tend to have far too much duct tape, Bondo, and baling wire for serious production use.

Rock Band 2 party today at my place. I have all the ingredients for some Hearty Peasant Fare (sausage, rice, tomatoes, beans, onions, garlic, spices) even though about half of the bulbs of garlic that I saw at the local Kroger had discolored, crushed, or rotten bits in them. All I have to do is cook them, and hope they meet with everyone’s approval. I’ve only unlocked half the songs in Rock Band 2 though.

The big excitement on Friday was going with Juan, his wife, his mother, his stepdad, Mike, and Zach to a Peruvian restaurant in Phoenix. We ate roast chicken, potato appetizers, shrimp soup, and various other things.

No guinea pig though. All the USA and Mexico meat wholesalers that Juan’s talked to don’t carry cui. It’s just not popular outside Peru for some reason. Heck, spending 5 minutes with Google and a bunch of appropriate search terms didn’t cough up one place where you could buy guinea pig meat. There’s a market niche that isn’t being served—probably because it’s so tiny.

Okay, the picture is silly, but what the heck.

Thanks to some policy about vacation time and lucky coincidences, I have a 4-day weekend.  Yay!  I’ll be . . . um, not doing a lot.  Besides the get-together on Sunday where a bunch of friends are coming over, I’ll cook, we’ll eat and drink, and see just how many of Rock Band 2′s songs we can get through.

I’ve been reading Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross. Sci-fi, set quite a long time in the future, on a planet where the powers that be have restricted technology to about the level things were at in 1900.  Then an information virus and nanoassembler army calling itself the Festival shows up on this planet.  A bunch of cellphones start raining from the sky, and when some peasant picks one up and opens it, it says, “Hi.  Entertain us!  If you entertain us, we’ll give you stuff.”  So these quasi-Russian serfs and wage slaves end up re-enacting bits and pieces of the Russian Revolution, except with more rocket launchers, grenades, thermonuclear weapons, and brightly colored plastic sporks.  One of the Festival people talks to a peasant after a few weeks and says something interesting:  “You have asked for material goods.  Not art, not science, not philosophy, not how to organize your government, not information. Are you really human?”  I think that if aliens offered the average person “whatever they wanted”, that person wouldn’t say anything like “A complete understanding of applied physics” or “A workable plan to eliminate poverty, theft, murder, and rape.”  Nope, it’d be more along the lines of “A flying car”.

There’s another plot thread where the government decides to do something very dangerous (time travel) in order to prevent the Festival from giving the peasants all these uppity ideas.  For some reason, I find that thread less interesting than the other one.  Oh well, I’m only halfway through the book.

I went to give blood on Wednesday morning. It wasn’t really a problem, but the person who did my initial screen where they take some blood from a finger and test it for iron was unskilled or something. The finger she poked hurt more than any other part of the procedure, and it still hurts. OK, part of this may be because I have to use my fingers for everything.

Work was much less dramatic than previous days this week, which was nice. When I was waiting for the bus home, I ran into a young guy with multiple facial piercings whom I hadn’t seen before. He wanted to know where bus N stopped, since he was unfamiliar with the bus system. “Right here—all the Chandler, Mesa, and Tempe buses stop here,” I said. He seemed to think this was really cool, and then delivered running commentary on just about everything that was happening around us. People walking by, some idiot in a VW Bug trying to peel out, the people waiting at the bus stop. . . . It was a little odd. Oh well.

Went to Steve’s, had vegetarian lasagna with goat cheese, played Rock Band 2 for a while. That was fun. “Livin’ On A Prayer” is very 1980s, but still a good song for several people to rock out to. Then a Java problem which was surprisingly simple to solve.  Next entry:  The Sporks Of Revolution.

OK, I could afford this, but it still feels a bit frivolous. Oh well, the economy would collapse even faster if people weren’t buying things. The interface in the sequel is improved, the songs are good, the opening video is even dumber than the opening video in the first game, and they haven’t really changed the character creator. They have added “no fail” mode, which will be a boon for people who aren’t that good at the game.

On Tuesday, there was a Redhat event in Scottsdale. I went. It was more marketing than technology, but there were a few things that I heard that were useful. And they gave us coffee and lunch, which was surprisingly good. I got back and was immediately treated to a chorus of “Stuff you worked on is breaking, fix it, help!!1!” I got it mostly fixed (not 100% fixed, enough to get us through tomorrow, I hope.) Bleah. If it weren’t for the relatively nice notebook and pair of Redhat-branded flip-flops they gave me, it would’ve almost been better to have stayed at work.

Trivia: We figured out that Sunday was the best time to get together.  Zach and Sarah told us all about the stuff they did at Disney World.  Some good rides, some bad rides, a lot of stupid people, far too many stupid kids, gift shops full of merchandise that was tied to the next movie that the Mouse is producing, no merchandise that they actually wanted to buy, and so forth.  And we were trailing by a few points when I left.