Historic inauguration, with a pretty good speech and a lousy poem. Seriously, they should’ve gotten someone who’d won at least one poetry slam in there for the poetry part of it. Or KRS-One or Chuck D.

Ah well. I don’t think anybody got a lot of work done while the swearing in and the speech were on TV, since all of us were watching it. Also, I am highly suspicious of the part in Obama’s speech when he said “Where the answer is no [programs are not working], programs will end.” I have never seen a politician willingly end a government program, so while the President may want to cut things, the House and Senate will refuse to do so.

Trivia: Patty, Sarah, and Kelli all really liked Michelle Obama’s dress, and were really impressed because she walked the entire parade route while wearing heels. When I left, we were in 3rd place, but last week, we won the “Best Team Name” prize with a name of “Billy Jo-Elle’s Sax-off-onist”. (The quizmaster tends to mispronounce words. He’s called Billy Joel “Billy Jo-elle” and pronounced “saxophonist” as “sax-off-onist”.) Well, you take what you can get.

In more local political news, several candidates for a city election here are apparently incapable of reading their e-mail or filling out a web form. This is only to be expected.

This has to be a joke, right? I mean, the general idea doesn’t sound too horrible, but the description makes it sound like the textual equivalent of the picture above. Except much, much sillier. It’s like bad writing that’s trying really hard to be bad, which makes it less hilarious than bad writing that’s trying hard to be good.

I’m glad I don’t live or work in Washington DC right now. The inauguration is going to be even more of a zoo than it usually is, possibly worse than anything since Andrew Jackson’s big White House party.

Justice is one of those things that’s difficult to pin down. Fortunately, when the law system and courts fail, there are captioned cats working as costumed vigilantes.

The big excitement on Sunday was the football game. The media pundits all said, “No way the Cardinals can win.” WRONG! Well, during the first half, the Eagles were playing more like the Detroit Lions than like a pro football team, and no one expected that. So the Cardinals are going to the Super Bowl, which everyone thought was impossible when the playoffs started.

I have the day off today, which is always nice. Not sure what to do, but will think of something.

Guinea pigs don’t usually care that much about birthdays, but this one seems to be having a good time.

We all met at Trevor’s place yesterday, then had dinner at a nearby Nello’s (local pizza chain, which is surprisingly good.) We had a vegetarian who didn’t like salad and another vegetarian who will eat invertebrates in our group, so only one of the pizzas we got had meat on it. Zach had an idea for making stuff and marketing it to teenagers, but I don’t know that it would work unless we could think of a catchy name for it.  He’d also need to get some vapid celebrity to wear one of the things on national TV, which might be harder than it sounds.  There are multiple articles in the local media about how people are cutting back on restaurants and going out. However, every table in Nello’s was full, and there were about 15 people outside waiting.

Then it was back to Trevor’s for dessert, wine, and trivia. Almost all of the questions involved movies, TV, and pop music, so I didn’t get a whole lot of them.  Trevor also said that he’s moving to a new, larger apartment in a couple of months, which should be great for him.

The Cardinals are in the NFC championship game.  This is pretty amazing considering their rocky performance throughout the season.  I might have to go to one of the local sports bars and watch this game, since I have neither antenna nor cable.

Friday, when I was riding the bus home, it rear-ended/sideswiped an SUV. I was reading a book, so I didn’t see exactly what happened, but it wasn’t really serious. The police showed up, asked a bunch of questions, and another bus came to pick us up. This took about 40 minutes. I felt bad for the bus driver, who may not have a job next week because of this.

Not a whole lot else. We’re planning to do some sort of low-key birthday celebration for Trevor today, probably involving going out to dinner at a fairly cheap restaurant.

Stealth fighter? Yeah, we’ve got that.

There were a lot of little annoyances that I had to solve on Thursday. At least none of them involved getting up at 4:45am or staying late dealing with badly formatted, badly specified files containing important info. However, there are a large number of knobs, dials, levers, and settings in your average php.ini, and some of them can interact in stupid and non-obvious ways. But I didn’t have to do anything or go anywhere Thursday night, which was a welcome change.

Reading Factoring Humanity by Robert J. Sawyer. This is a little different from his other works as it focuses on people, rather than on people interacting with alien societies. OK, there are aliens in it—the plot involves aliens sending a coded message out via radio. The female lead figures out how to decode the message, then builds the device the message describes. This leads to a bunch of other stuff happening, including the solutions to several family problems, the total revamp of all existing encryption schemes, and a bunch of really annoyed psychiatrists. Unfortunately, the scientific backing for the technology the main character unlocks is pretty tenuous, but the story still hangs together emotionally. I’ve got about 25% of the book left to go, so the ending could still be horrible, but it was good so far.

Sometimes, it’s like this. After the great database fiasco of this morning, I did ordinary work things until right before I was going to leave, when I had to stay late to fix a b0rken spreadsheet that somebody else had generated. At least I was able to verify that the data in the database was all fine.

Then when I got to Steve’s, we did the usual Rock Band 2 thing. Except we’d set the Xbox up vertically, and one of Steve’s less bright dogs knocked the Xbox over while the disc was spinning. This essentially carved a big trench through the middle of the game disc, and the console said, “This is unreadable. Can’t continue playing. Game over, man, game over!!1!” We took the bad disc to a nearby Game Crazy, where they had one of those buffer machines. The employees buffed the disc 3 times on the highest setting possible, and it looked like the game was playable afterwards. Yay for error correction.

I never think about stuff like this because we’ve always had cats. Cats are typically not clumsy enough or heavy enough to knock things over. Well. . . bad dog, no biscuit. And bad me, for not setting the console up in the less vulnerable horizontal position.

The database stuff that I was supposed to do this morning took much longer than it should’ve, and annoyed a few users.  Who knew an obscure table in a disused database could totally hose everything if it was missing its .frm file?  More later, maybe, as I have to catch the bus.

Somehow, I don’t think this really happened. Sheep are really not very good at rampaging.

Not really a lot to report. Finished Spin State. It was a cut above the norm, if only because at one point, Cohen said, “We’re going to take the specs to (technological Macguffin) and open-source them! Then the government won’t have the power to restrict artificial intelligences from doing (plot stuff). . . .” There’s a sequel to the book. I wonder whether it’ll be as good.

The local paper said that beer was on sale, which is actually more important to a lot of people than you might think. And of course, today I got confirmation that I’ll be doing some work stuff really early on Wednesday morning. It should all be easy and go smoothly, but it’s still annoying to have to work at 5am.

The big excitement on Sunday was having the CPU fan in my desktop fail miserably.  I had a spare, but it took a lot longer to get it fixed than it should’ve.  The 1.5 hour downtime on Sunday night is why this entry is so short.