A captioned owl that’s using proper grammar and spelling? OMG NO WAI!

Trivia: was sparsely populated.  No Trevor, no Kelli.  But we made the best of it.  One round consisted of “given these chemical elements, write out the chemical symbol,” which was really easy for me.  Another question said, “What brand of cigarettes did James Bond smoke?”  I thought it wasn’t Dunhills, but no one else could think of anything to put there, so I wrote “Dunhills”, and that was the correct answer.  Hey, if you can’t be good, be lucky.

Work was a little hectic. Meetings, then more struggles with the clueless user that I’ve talked about previously. When you, through your own stupidity, have corrupted an entry in a database, and are unable to provide any diagnostic information at all other than “It doesn’t work! Fix it! Fix it! Am I going to have to call your manager?” then my interest in helping you is roughly zero. I finally fixed the problem, though it was rather non-obvious where it was coming from. 4 or 5 people have hacked on the codebase, and it’s a mess. The same data is stored in 2 different places, or at least it’s supposed to be the same data, but if both places are out of sync. . . . bad things happen. It has a number of hallmarks of being driven by clueless user requirements and hasty fixes. I don’t know if I’ll have the time or the political will from on high to get it into a sane state.

Economic problems have even hit the canine sectors of society.

In other dog-related things, I spent part of my day off on Monday going to the Tempe Marketplace and watching “Slumdog Millionaire”. It was an interesting and partially multithreaded story, told with almost no irony, sarcasm, gratuitous pop-culture hipsterism, or obvious catch phrases. You find at least one of those things in just about every film that comes from the US/Europe, so I wonder if people like the film because it lacks those things. Or maybe they just like the story.

There was a Bollywood-ish music video dance number over the closing credits, though, which felt a bit surreal. I thought the soundtrack was quite good. One thing that audiences in the USA may not understand, though, is that Muslims in India face a certain amount of de facto discrimination in many things. (Jamal and Salim, the protagonist and his friend, are both Muslim.) This may be one of the reasons why both of them are on the margins of society or underemployed. Ah well. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s definitely worth seeing, even worth full ticket price if you can’t catch a matinee.

Spent most of Sunday doing laundry, cooking, and my state taxes. I also found out that my e-filed federal tax return had been rejected since I had apparently entered a different PIN from the one that I had used to file my 2007 taxes. This didn’t make much sense, since I had written that down last year. The other thing that they’d accept for signature verification was the adjusted gross income declared in 2007, which I also had. I hope this works; their instructions on “how to file without signature verification” were written by someone who didn’t know English very well.

Lagunitas Brewing released a new seasonal ale in honor of Frank Zappa’s “Cruising with Ruben and the Jets” album. However, they haven’t updated their website with information about the ale. It seems odd to me, but that brewery has released a few Zappa-related promotional beers in the past according to their site.

Almost everyone gets Feb. 16 off work. This is something I’ve never had at any of my previous jobs. I don’t know for sure what I’ll do with the day off, though there are plenty of options.

Seriously, who wouldn’t want a penguin army? They’d be even better dressed than Eddie Izzard’s Action Transvestite Brigade.

It was a pretty lazy Saturday. Went to the library, ran errands, ate lunch, played some video games.

Caturday! Perfect day for a martini, right?

It’s 2009. The WWW has been around for about 17 years. The principles behind its operation have been publicly available for almost that long (RFC 1945, documenting the hypertext transfer protocol.) So why did one of my co-workers get a helpdesk ticket saying, in essence, “I posted some pictures on a web page. Other people have copied those pictures and are using them on other sites. Make them stop! WAAAAA!” All right, to display an image, a browser has to make a local copy of that image, at least in memory and usually on disk. Once that’s done, there’s no way to prevent that user from copying that image and doing whatever with it. “What the. . . This is stupid! I have a bunch of things to do, and I get a ticket about this crap?” he said.

Well, against stupidity and willful ignorance, the very gods themselves contend in vain. At least it was Friday, so we all went out for lunch. They’re having the NBA All-Star Game in downtown Phoenix on Sunday, so the streets were full of tour groups hoping to see some NBA players. Traffic was even worse than usual today as well, and the bus got me home about 15 minutes later than it usually does.

This showed up Thursday on the local news station’s website, and shows that proofreading is really, really important. Whatever a “boom squat” is, you probably don’t want one in your school. Was Taco Bell involved? Burritos of some sort? Did any detonations take place? “Bomb squat” and “boom squad” are bad enough, but when you combine the two. . . yeah. Spell check is not enough.

That was about the funniest thing that I saw that day. The bus was on time, the weather’s reasonable, and I got some work done.  Also, at 16:31:30 Phoenix time on Friday, the Unix timestamp (seconds since 00:00 UTC Jan 1, 1970) will be 1234567890.  Some people are having minor celebrations, mostly because it’s silly.  That’s roughly when I leave work, though, so I’ll have a hard time doing that.

So on Wednesday, instead of me going over to Steve’s house, Steve and his sons came over to mine. I made an enchilada casserole, and had some leftovers. The kids also drank most of the leftover Pepsi that I had sitting around, which was good. We spent most of the evening playing Rock Band 2, which was fun. I played drums for most of that.

Work: There’s a stupid user who’s really annoying me. She’s theoretically in charge of a website, yet does not know how to write simple HTML. This is like being in charge of a McDonald’s, and not knowing how to operate a grill, fryer, or cash register.

This rabbit obviously knows a thing or two about fur. Work is making almost every employee take one week of unpaid furlough. I heard that some people are calling this a “furcation”, since if you have time off work, why not use it for a vacation?

Early Tuesday morning, Fuzzball barely said a word. She always meows so much that I thought she might be sick. When I got back from work, though, she was as vocal as ever and had eaten most of her food. That’s a relief.

Trivia: I said, “I was thinking that we could make a short zombie movie.” “So where are we going to find a bunch of short zombies?” John replied. We then came up with the idea of using Sarah’s kindergarten students as zombies, and it got progressively sillier from there. In worse news, the Arizona budget SNAFU may mean that Sarah will not have a job next year, since there is so little money for education. I would hope that the first thing the school districts would do is to fire useless and overpaid administrators rather than teachers, but you all know that will never happen. Also, Kelli says her car is cursed. I didn’t get the whole story on that, though. We were in second place when I left.

In a change from the usual Wednesday night thing, Steve and his sons are coming over to my place for dinner instead of me going over to his place. This should be different, but still good.

What if Quentin Tarantino wrote an ad for PETA? It probably wouldn’t look much like this.

It was cloudy all Monday, and after I got home, it started raining again. This is reasonably unusual for Arizona in February. It could be worse; a huge hailstorm hit northern AZ and the weather forced many cars off the road. They’ve also changed the bus route from downtown Phoenix to Tempe again. Well, I read 30 pages of my book on the way in, and 60 pages on the way back, which should tell you something about the traffic around here.

Sunday in Tempe, at about 1:45pm, it hailed for about 5 minutes. The hailstones were tiny, and melted fairly quickly, but it was still unusual.

I’ve been downloading a bunch of game demos for the Xbox arcade. “R-Type Dimensions” does some interesting things to the classic “R-Type” and “R-Type 2″ games’ graphics, but has apparently not altered the gameplay otherwise. “Feeding Frenzy” is also interesting. “Galaga” was a neat idea, but I don’t know if I could get into its gameplay. I suppose I should try the demo of “On the Rain-Slicked Precipice of Darkness” next, since it’s been forever since I’ve played a new RPG.

And they’re digging up the parking lot a bit to the west. Looks like something went wrong with the sewer system. I’m glad I don’t live in the affected building.