Connections are important.

It was raining buckets when I left early Thursday morning. It was bad enough that I decided to drive in instead of waiting in the rain for 10 minutes for the bus. Of course, the rain slowed to a trickle when I got on the freeway, then stopped when I was halfway to work. Some days are like that.

There was apparently a problem with a client’s database. They’ve been having this problem off and on for months (they say). They just informed us about it. Right before everyone’s going to be out on vacation. Not just that, they can barely articulate what the problem is, can’t give us much concrete info to go on, and have given a bunch of indications that it’s due to someone fat-fingering something on their end rather than an actual problem we can fix.

Nevertheless, they expect us to drop everything and devote as much time as possible to fixing whatever’s wrong. As a result, I didn’t get much real work done on Thursday. And they called us rather late in the day with more waffling which boiled down to “a user is using password ‘f00b4r’, which expired 8 months ago, instead of password ‘b4zb4rf’, which is current, and wondering why errors are happening”. This took 45 minutes to take care of what should’ve taken 10 minutes. If I had ridden the bus, I would’ve missed the bus. As it was, I was almost too late to get to the UPS depot and pick up a package containing Christmas presents for the family.

This happens more often than you’d expect. When you create rules, you tend to create traps for yourself and/or others as well.

Pretty normal Wednesday. Well, I went and gave blood, which wasn’t normal, but went fine. The cafeteria at work reopened, and they were giving out free samples of all kinds of things instead of serving normally. I had packed a lunch, of course. I still got a couple of bite-size sandwiches and tried them. Then went to Steve’s for dinner, where we did the usual Rock Band 2 thing, except I played drums and sang instead of doing guitar or bass.

Another interesting story in that short story collection is “St. Luca’s School for Girls Who Have Been Raised by Wolves”. This story has 2 basic postulates—werewolves exist, and sometimes werewolves produce human children who don’t fit into werewolf society. The story is not great, but it’s OK. What struck me about the story was how it toed the line of Serious Literary Subjects. A sci-fi/fantasy author, given the conditions above, would generally write a story where the protagonist has Cool Adventures, or possibly a longer piece exploring how the presence of werewolves would alter human society. Nope, this author used “being a human child raised by werewolves” as an extended metaphor for “being raised in Culture 1 and having to assimilate into Culture 2.” Well, the notes for the story said, “This story began as a pretty terrible poem and was substantially reworked,” so there is that.

I’ll schedule this post for earlier than usual. If it doesn’t post at 0600 MST, I’ll have to change my morning routine or something. Sigh, I chase database and PHP bugs at work, and don’t really want to chase them at home too. . . .

WordPress 2.7 seems to have a flaky scheduling function. We’ll see how this works out in the future.

Obviously, not all bluebirds are happy. For about the last 24 hours here in the Phoenix metro area, it’s been colder than usual (high 60 F), cloudy, and drizzling in a near-constant way. Seattle denizens say, “Business as usual.” Here, we’re saying OMG!!1! WTF?? since it usually doesn’t do this. There hasn’t been much flooding thanks to the slow speed of the rainfall, at least.

Trivia: We were tied for first when I left. Zach had also decided that there needed to be a new genre of movie, the “porn musical”. Some of the more printable examples that we came up with were “West Side Whorey”, “My Bare Lady”, “Oklahomo!”, and “Swingin’ in the Rain”. We also came up with a plan to transform the Christmas party that Kelli is going to attend on Friday into a bizarre performance art piece that involved simulated violence and Jerry Springer-style confrontations. If they actually do this, I want to see video of the end results.

Finished the book of short stories. I think the one that I liked the best was “My Brother Eli”, by Joseph Epstein. That was about a successful and critically acclaimed novelist who wasn’t great with money and often treated other people shabbily. The characters in it are convincing and well-portrayed, and seem pretty close to real people. What made the story ring true for me was the very end. Eli, who’s had far more success than most people in all kinds of ways, says, “Somewhere along the way I slipped off the track. Could never get back on.” Common sentiment, well expressed. Most people who live long enough probably feel that way to some extent.

Don’t upset the beavers.

It was cold and cloudy on Monday, and it started raining at about 3:30pm. Two buses had broken down or something right next to my bus stop, and they had the police and the transit authority out there doing something. My bus was about 10 minutes late thanks to construction downtown, so I got to see that neither of the broken buses had moved an inch after 15 minutes. It was still drizzling when the bus dropped me off. It’s certainly novel having cold and rain in Phoenix, though.

Reading “The greatest American short stories of 2007″. I got this book almost a year ago and hadn’t read it until now. Well, I’ve only liked a few of the stories I’ve read in it so far. There’s “Wait”, a surreal story about a bunch of people who are trapped in an airport for weeks while waiting for a plane to take off. Anyone who’s dealt with the airline industry can empathize with that one. There’s “Toga Party” by John Barth, where a bunch of comfortable upper-middle-class 60-ish folks get together for a party and several of them commit suicide at the end. This one wasn’t interesting for the characters or the plot (all were pretty banal, vapid, or predictable) but for vague hints that in the setting, lots of people were killing themselves for tax reasons. It’s like he was trying to write a sci-fi story without any of the usual sci-fi tropes. It’s also an odd example of a story where I disliked the characters, plot, and setting, but liked the overall effect the whole thing had. I also have to wonder: Was that the effect the author was aiming for? Does it matter?

Maybe “wretched excess” isn’t the right phrase, but things are piling up under the tree already.

Not really anything to report.  Nothing really exciting happened on Sunday.  This is probably a good thing, actually.

This is partially what this year’s Christmas tree looks like. (larger version) The new living room layout means there’s only one place it’ll fit. But in what will probably be a tradition now, there are a whole lot of penguin ornaments on the tree.  It’s a bit hard to see in this picture, but Fuzzball is not impressed by the tree or interested in it.

There were a whole bunch of people at the mall on Saturday (surprise, surprise). A couple of the stores were doing liquidation sales. I didn’t see all that much that I had to have right then, but I found a couple of things. It looks like the local friends are forgoing the gift exchange and going to a nice restaurant instead of having gifts+potluck as they did last year.  That could be interesting.  I haven’t gone out to dinner very often this year, and haven’t gone anywhere that was semi-fancy.

And of course, I now have many packages to gift-wrap.  At least a lot of them are box-shaped. . . .

Seriously, I can’t think of a thing to write. But they have burritos at this place called Maria’s Mexican Grill in downtown Phoenix that are seriously good, and that’s where we went on Friday.

What else. . . gotta get the tree up, gotta wrap the presents, some of which have already started getting here. One of them had an expected ship date of Dec. 15, and it got here on Dec. 12. I think this is because Amazon has a distribution center in Buckeye (slightly west of Phoenix proper). Pictures of the tree as soon as it’s up, since it’s doesn’t exactly have a conventional decorating scheme.

The fine folks at Penny Arcade did a few comic strips on the elusive deep crow, how to hunt a deep crow down, and what hunting a deep crow might do for you.

Most days, there are some people I see every morning while waiting for the bus. On Thursday morning, we were all talking about newspapers for some reason. The New ZorkYork Times is having financial trouble, the Chicago Tribune is going through Chapter 11, readership is declining, ad sales are going downhill, all the good comic strips are available on the Net, and so forth. I don’t know how to fix that—which is a pity, as a good, cheap source of journalism is essential to the preservation of individual liberties. Some say bloggers can take over many of the functions of journalists. I don’t think that would work well—although we’ve got your LOLcat needs and your incoherent wharrgarbl needs filled, we aren’t exactly unbiased or objective. Also, our attention spans are not exactlyOMG will you look at that cute hamster!!1??

While I was waiting for the bus on Thursday afternoon, some woman stopped and said, “Is anyone tired of working for corporate America? Because I’m making residual income of $5000/month! Anyone want to know how? Anyone want a flyer?” This was sort of funny, because most of the people who ride the bus work for the local or state governments, not “corporate America”. Also, it was a rather inept multi-level marketing scam.

Somehow, I don’t think this cat will retain much of what he’s reading.

Not a whole lot to report, actually. Finished reading Matter, and found that quite a lot of interesting stuff happens at the end.  The book is oddly paced—it’s really slow at the start, and then accelerates and accelerates until tons of things are happening at once.  Definitely worth reading though.

Went to see Steve and his family, had fajitas, played Rock Band 2, which was fun. This story about a kid distributing Linux CDs and a teacher who didn’t like that caused a lot of traffic on the local PLUG mailing list. Some people thought the entire story was fabricated. I don’t know—I’ve spent quite a bit of time in various schools, and I know that there are some teachers and many administrators who are extraordinarily pigheaded and should not be allowed to run an ant farm, let alone a classroom.

College kids vs. undead Nazis. That is all. OK, it looks cheesy, but it could be fun.

This captioned cat illustrates the dumb things that can happen in the name of security theatre. George Carlin’s “airport security” monologue is just as relevant today as it was when he first delivered it.

Trivia: We were doing OK when I left.  Nathan wasn’t there, but we had everybody else.  Kelli told us about the Davy Jones concert she attended recently—apparently, it was really bad as he told really terrible jokes for 20 minutes, sang one song, told more terrible jokes, sang another song, and then talked about having man-boobs.  I can see how this would turn many Monkees fans off.  No word yet on the whole friends-in-Phoenix holiday celebration.  But I did manage to find a Toys For Tots donation box and drop off the Lego set, which is always good.

While I was waiting for the bus on Tuesday, a couple of scruffy-looking guys came up to me asking for $0.50 to catch a bus. I thought I had 2 quarters. I didn’t, I had a quarter, 2 dimes, and some pennies. I gave them the money. They started asking for more. I refused to give them any. They said they were sleeping in a homeless shelter that didn’t serve food (what?) which made me very suspicious. They eventually moved on. So two guys may have been able to score $0.50 of meth thanks to me. Dangit.