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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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.  [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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