There haven’t been any pictures of Fuzzball for a while. Here she is doing her favorite afternoon thing, napping so she’ll be rested enough to MEEOOOW a lot when dinnertime rolls around.

I’ve had a clumsy 24 hours. Broke a glass on Sunday night, forgot my cellphone on Monday morning and didn’t remember until I was halfway to the bus stop, had to run back and get it, and then at work I spent entirely too much time chasing down a really annoying, stupid bug that was due to one bad line of code. At least the Large Shell Script has had all but one of its bugs fixed.

I also got a phonecall and an e-mail from a recruiter today, wondering if I wanted another job. It’s similar to what I’m doing now, but pays slightly better. However, it’s not on the bus route, and I have no idea what the work environment is like. It could be a lot worse, and right now I like my work and my co-workers. I was also slightly concerned by the recruiter’s saying that the cross streets for the place were “Indian School and U.S. 60 in Mesa”—those streets don’t intersect in Mesa. Well, even the best of us can be geography impaired.

Sometimes, cats will do stupid things.  This is no exception.

Reading another of L.E. Modesitt’s books, The Ethos Effect.  This one appeared fairly standard until about 200 pages in, where the author starts talking about what happens to a society where money is respected more than honor.  I’m not sure if I buy the author’s conclusions, but it’s interesting anyway.

Not an enormous amount to report.  Tried some new stuff for dinner on Sunday, a pasta dish with mushrooms and sauce.  It’s OK.  The trouble is, it’s a Tesco branded thing, and so not available at the store I usually
go to.

There are too few sporks in life, but you have to have some sense of proportion. While this looks cool, it was probably a total pain to deal with.

“Poly”: many. “Ticks”: bloodsucking arachnids. That’s what I thought while I was filling out my early ballot on Saturday. Also, some people planted signs at a nearby intersection that say, “Open Our Borders: Elect $CANDIDATE!” Since no candidate for office here actually advocates an open-border policy, I am forced to think that these signs were planted by the opponents of $CANDIDATE. There is a significant fraction of people here in Arizona who would like to summarily execute any illegal immigrants found here (or at least that’s what they say) and would totally not vote for any candidate expressing any sympathy towards illegal immigrants. I wonder if there’s a name for that strategy. Astroturfing doesn’t quite fit.

The ballot has a huge section for each judge in the superior court and about 10 other judges. For each judge, voters are asked, “Should this judge be retained or not?” With over 50 judges to consider, most of which I’ve never heard of, I don’t know how anyone at a polling place could make a good decision on each judge. I have a PDF reviewing each judge’s performance, and it’s going to be a long and tedious slog through it to figure out how I should vote. Sigh.

It’s Caturday, but the Patagonian Cavies would like it to be Cavy Day instead. And boy, do they disapprove.

Fixed the RPM problem at work, put together a script that should do a bunch of Neat Stuff, but I won’t get to test that script until next week. Also, next Tuesday, they’re sending me to a Redhat event in Scottsdale, where breakfast and lunch will be provided, and they’ll try to educate us about various technologies sell us things. That should be neat. In 7.5 years of working for the old company, I was never sent to a software training event. Well, working for larger companies has its benefits.

Other stuff: Not much. Finished Testing Testing, finally. The author’s conclusions about drug testing are probably worth looking at. He says that drug tests as currently used cost a lot of money, do little to discourage drug use, and cause bad feelings among prospective employees. What’s worse is that they perpetuate a presumption of guilt. A prospective employee is presumed to be a drug addict, and must prove that he isn’t to be hired. That’s a far cry from the “innocent until proven guilty” buzzphrase that is supposed to underlie most of our jurisprudence.

Well, companies have proven time and again that they’re willing to do tons of dumb things. This recent thread about the best and worst boss stories shows that, at least. One hopeful sign in that link is that there were more “good boss” stories than “bad boss” stories, though.

Anyone who’s ever been around young kids can empathize with this picture.

John recently got a job after being unemployed for a while. Yay! Starting Monday, he’ll be doing contract work for Comerica. Not the world’s greatest job ever, but a lot better than being unemployed. I think he’ll be working with large IBM boxes that are fault-tolerant, have Suckage Attached to Network, and all kinds of buzzwordy goodness.

I must be doing something wrong with the local RPM repository at work. Some of the packages I built are doing the right thing, and some of them aren’t. More things to fiddle with tomorrow. At least today, I was able to solve some strange PHP problems that were somewhat annoying to diagnose.

Went to a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant for dinner on Thursday. That was pretty good, and it made me realize how much I’d missed good hummus, pita, lentil soup, and stuff like that. There weren’t very many people in the place even though the food was good and the restaurant has consistently won various awards. Oh well.

Ponies make lousy car mechanics. The lack of opposable thumbs really hurts them when it comes to removing or adding components.

The usual Wednesday night Linux/video games thing didn’t happen, mostly because it was Steve’s wedding anniversary. Well, family generally is more important than friends, so no problem. Fuzzball appreciated that I was home instead of away, at least.

Work: Win some, lose some. I think I may have a solution to the stupid NFS problem, but will need some time to test stuff and see if it works. Time is always in short supply.

Books: The author of Testing Testing makes a fairly strong case that polygraphs are a load of horse feces. This is not news (or should not be news) since non-governmental organizations are prohibited from using polygraphs in many cases, and William Poundstone’s “How To Beat a Polygraph” section in Bigger Secrets should’ve clued many people in to how this claptrap assemblage of 1950s tech and 1930s psychology is designed to railroad uninformed people into doing stupid things. Most of what I’ve read about the polygraph smacks of bad science, idiocy, and false fronts—maybe that’s confirmation bias in what I’ve read, but I feel that a device which claims to detect any and all falsehood should be able to stand up to an extraordinary standard of proof. And many studies show that polygraphs are not infallible by any means.

There’s more rant potential in the author’s description of widespread drug testing and “presumed docility”, but that’ll have to wait for the next entry.

Tired cat is tired. I expect to be as well, since I have to get up before 5 am on Wednesday to kick a set of servers. Update: That went less well than it could’ve. I knew that NFS stands for Nightmare File System, but I was not prepared for the problems that the implementation in RHEL 4 has with certain stupid scenarios.

On both Monday and Tuesday, I forgot to put the book I was reading in my bag. Grrr.

Trivia: Lots of stuff happened. Apparently, there’s a big trivia contest in Denver on Nov. 16, and several of us are going. They wanted to know whether I could go, and I had to tell them I didn’t know, because I didn’t know if I was on call that week or not. I have to look at my schedule on Wednesday to make sure, but the other problems (buy plane ticket, arrange for someone to take care of Fuzzball) mean that going to this will be expensive and a pain even if I can go. Nathan wondered if it was going to be really cold in Denver in November. That’s one thing I’m not worried about; growing up in the U.P. showed me that cold is something that can be worked around given the right clothes and some common sense.

Monday, it was actually about 60 F in the morning when I walked to the bus stop. It felt colder than it should’ve. Well, I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, as I’ve done every day since March. I saw people wearing spring/fall jackets when the bus drove through downtown. I do wonder what would happen to longterm AZ natives who had to spend an entire winter in Minnesota or da U.P.

There was a lot less traffic than usual because a bunch of Fed and State government employees get Columbus Day off. We in the private sector don’t, of course. But what the heck.

An interesting article, mostly about stupid management and employee loyalty. I think that this was a really stupid decision on the district manager’s part from the article and the reader comments. I don’t know for sure. It’s too bad that we probably won’t ever know the whole story in this case.

The vampires (United Blood Services) called my cellphone the other day. Well, work is having a blood drive on Oct 22, so I might as well sign up.

Fuzzball with a camera flash reflecting off her eyes.

Currently reading Testing Testing, by F. Allan Hanson, which is an examination of how historical and modern testing has shaped culture and people. I haven’t found any great insights in it yet, though. The author is from U Cal Berkeley, though, so whatever conclusions he draws may be ideologically bent.

Not much else to report, though.

I got my Schlock Mercenary book in the mail on Saturday. Yay! And unlike last time, I didn’t get laid off immediately before receiving it. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.  It’s satisfying to read the comics all at once, instead of clicking a mouse button and waiting for each JPEG to load. Plus, I get to know that the author gets some money from the book sale, so he can keep drawing the comic.

Not much else to report. They’re having some sort of celebration thing called the “Tempe Tardeada” near the library on Sunday, and I saw all the workers setting up tables, tents, benches, and stuff like that on Saturday when I went to return my library books. I went to that last year, but I was preoccupied by a bunch of other stuff and didn’t spend much time looking around. This year, I might go and look around a bit more.