Today, I get to experience the joys of getting up at about 4am and dealing with the airline industry all day. Well, it should build character. Plus I have Iain M. Banks’s latest Culture book to read while waiting and while on the plane. It’s from the library, though, so it’s hardcover and is large enough to stun a small poodle.

Trivia: was crowded.  It was “League Night”, so we had people from the Sceptical Chymist as well as Fibber’s, all competing for the 12-week Pub Trivia crown as well as other prizes.  There was a question about the Olympics that we really wished Trevor was there for, because none of us knew it and he probably would’ve.  Spencer and Patty said they saw me in the morning several times a week as I crossed Mill and waited for the bus.  I said I’d look out for them in the future.  And it looks like most people want to do the “get together for dinner” thing sometime on Dec. 26..28.

Updates will be less frequent over Thanksgiving since I won’t have easy access to my home machine.

Opposites. Even in the world of captioned cats, there are epic clashes between fundamentally incompatible ideologies.

Monday started with a 5am wakeup call about a wonky database problem, then rapidly became much less hectic. Even though the bus was late, it was a fairly low-key workday. Also, my upstairs neighbor ran into trouble with her car battery and needed a jump start, but I had jumper cables, so it was easy to fix.

Been reading Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer. It explores some interesting questions that people may have to deal with at some point. What would life extension mean to people? How would all your friends and family react to you if you were 87, then suddenly had the body of a 25-year old? If people who didn’t know you when you were 87 met you, how would you relate to them? What would it be like to have your firstborn child be older than you? Also, how could you express complex moral and ethical questions starting from absolutely nothing but math? Sawyer’s solution to that question is interesting: “2+2=4 : correct. 2+2=5 : incorrect.” Then: “8/12 = 4/6 : flawed. 8/12 = 2/3 : good.” There are probably flaws in this system, but what the heck.

You should never let the domestic animals make budget decisions, no matter how cute they are.

The get-together Sunday didn’t happen—too many people canceled. Well, sometimes these things happen. We’re shooting for sometime in December now, we hope before the big Christmas-type celebration that usually happens. In past years, we’ve all gone to someone’s house, everyone’s cooked something, and we’ve exchanged presents. This was called “thanksmas”. That may not happen this year. We may forgo the gift exchange and all go out to a nice restaurant instead, for “thanksdinnermas”. We did that every year in Lansing, and it worked well. The other option is “thanksvegasmas”, where we all carpool to Vegas for a long weekend. That won’t save anyone any money, but it could be a good time.

Bunday! Of course, this particular bunny disapproves heartily.

On Friday night, just as I was going to bed, I got a call on my work phone. This is never fun; usually it means that something is broken and I have to fix it. It wasn’t work—it was someone looking for Alex, who had this phone before I did. They sounded drunk, and wouldn’t believe me when I said that I wasn’t Alex, and that Alex had not had that phone for 5 months. I finally hung up on them. And on Saturday afternoon, I got someone on my personal phone wanting to know about the pizza I’d ordered. I hadn’t ordered a pizza, so I was confused. This turned out to be a wrong number.

Not a whole lot to report. The plan is apparently to get together at Nathan’s to celebrate the Rock Band 2 Track Pack for the PS2, or something like that. And we’re going to have dinner of some sort. Not sure what. Chili, possibly.

I had to do some work pretty early in the morning on Saturday, and only got 2 of 3 jobs done before it started getting on to 6am, when traffic starts getting higher. Oh well. The remaining job should not take that long.

The grocery store had none of the more expensive tasty ramen that I usually buy. So I bought this, and didn’t notice the “low fat, low sodium” labels on the package until I was in the checkout line. “Oh well, it’ll be something new,” I thought. Yeah, if flavorless noodles in an insipid broth is what you want, these will make you jump for joy. Nissin Choice Ramen may be healthy, but it tastes like wet cardboard. Scratch that, it tastes like it has negative flavor.  You could dump a pot of this stuff in a full portion of insanely hot lamb vindaloo and end up with something that tasted vaguely like curry powder.  I had to force myself to finish the pot. And I had put in vegetables and chopped-up cooked chicken pieces, as I usually do when making ramen. I hesitate to think what it would taste like without any additions at all.

What’s worse, I have another package of the stuff. It’s not really fit for human consumption. I wonder how it would do as a rifle target.

Look at the worked stone and high arched windows in this building. They just don’t make things like this anymore. That’s probably a good thing, since this building probably predated air conditioning, but there has to be a way that you can have modern climate control and nice stonework.

They’re renovating this building, as is obvious from the plywood everywhere, but I don’t know what they’re putting into it or when it’ll be done. It’s a bit farther south than my bus stop is, and I’d have to leave early or catch a late bus or something to get a really good look at it.

Finished the collection of Mike Royko’s columns. I mentioned the collection to Bill, who’s from Chicago, and was surprised to find out that he had no idea who Mike Royko was. Oh well. The column Royko wrote about “words that should not be used in journalism as they’re insensitive” is hilarious. Any monkey who can say things like “Don’t say ‘illegal alien’, say ‘undocumented worker’, because the first is insensitive” needs to be whacked upside the head with an entrenching tool and then made to use said entrenching tool on a large pile of bovine feces.

We have to upgrade a box. We tried to upgrade it last weekend. Stupid things happened, so we rolled back to the last known good version. We were going to upgrade it this weekend, but can’t, as the users have a deadline. We were going to try again Thursday night, but someone thought that was a bad idea as the users would have a cow if the box wasn’t working at full speed early Friday morning. So now the plan is to upgrade it in December. Hurry up and wait—it’s not just for the Army any more.

More architecture. Again, you don’t see this sort of thing on modern buildings.

Work was fairly unexciting on Wednesday. So after work, I went over to Steve’s, where we had spaghetti and garlic bread and played Rock Band 2. That was fun. Guitar on Hard is . . . hard. Oh well, I’ll figure it out eventually.

Been reading a collection of Mike Royko’s columns.  This collection spans his entire writing career.  I’ve only read about 2/3 of it, but the columns I’ve read have a large range. There are inspired scathing commentaries on how elected and appointed officials are not doing their jobs, commentaries which apparently lit some fires under some lazy bureaucrats and led to people actually being helped.  There are silly utopian diatribes about gun control.  There are portraits of ordinary people who lived and worked in Chicago.  There’s a story about a young couple and some cheap Christmas trees that’s either really well done or a pile of treacly Hallmark-esque sentimental glurge.

But as I get to the late 1980s and early 1990s, I’m sure I’ll remember reading some of the columns before.  The Chicago Tribune was the big-city newspaper that was most likely to be available when I was growing up (pre-Internet, hundreds of miles from any large city), so I read Mike Royko’s column pretty often, though none of his Chicago-specific columns ever made much sense to me.  Reading this collection, over 10 years since I read any of his columns, feels a bit like revisiting the past.

More old architecture. While balcony this looks nice, it’s awfully shallow, and was probably never used very much. And of course it was probably a total pain in the butt to clean this whole structure.

Trivia:  We were leading when I left.  Heard all about the various trivia tournaments everyone else attended last Saturday.  Also had to change the plans for taking care of Fuzzball some, but that should be all right.

At work on Tuesday, I got told about something that absolutely has to happen by next Monday. They’ve known about this for weeks, and could’ve given us a lot more lead time to get everything ready. Sigh. Then a co-worker said, “ARGH, this stupid thing isn’t working right! I’ve been fighting with this thing for the last hour and I need a break!” “Let me look at the error log . . . aha. It’s trying to include ../../stuff/junk on line 87, which is almost certainly not right, and if you change it to /include/junk, it’ll probably start working a lot better.” This actually fixed the problem, which made everyone involved much happier.

Another co-worker said she really likes the Twilight series. It’s surprising how much media attention that’s gotten. I suppose there has to be something to fill the void now that there won’t be any more Harry Potter books.

You just don’t see balconies, arches, high windows, and worked stone spires in modern buildings. It’s a shame; modern architecture is efficient, but almost all of it has the look of what P.J. O’Rourke called “the Brobdingnagian Lego Block”. I think most of it must be that human labor is comparatively much more expensive now. In 1900, a skilled stonemason was relatively cheap. Now, a skilled stonemason is relatively expensive, so instead of rococo ornaments, we get blank slabs of concrete.

I went to the library on Monday night, to stock up on new books. However, I was so enthused by all the books that I saw that I forgot to get the The Non-Born King, the third book in Julian May’s series about prehistoric Earth. Oh well. It’ll be there the next time I go to the library. Also, when I was leaving, a woman asked me, “Where’s the Pyle Center?” “The recreation center? I think it’s over there, to the northeast,” I said. I don’t mind giving directions, but it’s strange that I got asked for them twice in 3 days.  The number of places I know how to get to is not insanely large.

Saturday, as I was walking, a woman pulled over and asked me how to get to the IKEA store. “Oh yeah, you can’t get there from this street. Get to Priest, go south to Ruby, turn right on Ruby, go a half mile or so and you’ll get there.” I guess she hadn’t looked the place up on Google maps or something.

Just finished The Golden Torc, the second of Julian May’s sci-fi/fantasy series about a bunch of people who travel 6 million years into the past and find a set of aliens with psychic powers rattling around prehistoric Europe. It’s very entertaining; lots of fighting, lots of stuff blowing up, and some characters you can actually care about.  The author takes several scenes from ancient myth and reimagines them in ways that mostly make sense in the context of the story.  And there are at least 2 more books in the series that I haven’t read yet.  And I’ve now finished all my library books, and the library isn’t open, so it’ll be Monday night before I can get more stuff to read.