It’s Caturday, and this kitty is seriously peeved.

Friday: The big excitement involved a spam filter that was being far too zealous and eating mail that was legit. I wish I could say I played a larger role in fixing the problem than I did. My co-workers did most of the work, while I helped a bit. Most of what I did was boring things that needed to be done anyway, but were not flashy. We also went out to lunch (again), which is always fun. I had a meal that looked like a stromboli, but others who got similar things described as “a pizza inside a burrito”. Whatever.  It was tasty.

Currently reading How Race is Lived in America, a book which is a compilation of NYT articles investigating what people think and do about racial issues.  So far, I’ve read the first 2 chapters, about a Pentecostal church in Georgia that started out mostly white, but got a lot of black people joining it for various reasons, and about a couple of friends from Cuba, one black, one white, who wet-footed it to Miami in 1994 and had vastly different experiences.

One part from the second story doesn’t ring true:  The black Cuban guy takes $6000 to a bank, and wants to use that money to purchase a certificate of deposit.  The teller says, “What?  But you people always want to spend that money, not save it.”  That seems insanely weird to me—banks seriously want people to deposit money in CDs and savings accounts.  I’d think a teller who discouraged a customer from taking out a CD would get A Serious Talk with the manager.  But then, it’s Florida, and there is more stupidity in Florida than there is in many other places.

Is it time to get out the pitchforks and torches yet? Farking bastiges.

I vaguely remember seeing “Raging Cow” chocolate milk on store shelves in the early 2000s. I don’t remember any of the ad campaigns which were supposed to position this milk as edgy, extreme, and the choice of 13-21-year-old consumers. This is probably a good thing. Cows, as a whole, do not rage very much, so the whole concept is silly.

What else. . . finally finished reading The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. It’s billed as a space opera, and has some similarities to one of those. However, it has a riddle embedded in it, one with a number of really glaring clues distributed throughout the book, and not very many people will be able to guess it before the answer is revealed near the end of the book. Ah well.

Wednesday was reasonably normal except for the bus ride to work.  Then, someone noticed that there was a bad accident on US-60 west, so they said, “Go around!  Take the surface streets to I-10!” to the driver.  He did this, which ended up saving a ton of time. We all gave the driver a round of applause.  Then worked, took the bus home, then went over to Steve’s for the usual Wednesday night get-together. It was slightly different this time because both of his sons are on spring break right now, so they weren’t there. This meant we could play Rock Band without having to play “Still Alive” or “Welcome Home”, their two favorite songs.

In other video game news, one of the songs from Chrono Trigger has been stuck in my head for the last couple of days for some reason. Sigh. Well, it could be a lot worse.

Who needs pants? Not this cat.

Tuesday, we all decided to go out for lunch at a nearby Irish place, since it was St. Patrick’s Day and all. We got there and found out that they were only taking cash that day, and a lot of us had nothing but credit cards. I don’t really understand that—I almost always have at least $20 in cash with me. I offered to pay for everyone and accept IOUs, but they declined. So we walked farther north to a Greek diner, where we ate authentic Irish gyros and burgers with feta cheese on them.

The database also barfed at 3am, but I didn’t learn about it until I got in to work. I’m not sure why they didn’t call me about it, actually, but they got it up and running without my help. Yay!

There are rugose and squamous monstrosities that lurk beyond angled space, waiting to devour the minds of seekers after forbidden knowledge. What is not written in worm-eaten Arabic texts written by madmen is that some of these critters are sooo cute!.

Monday wasn’t bad. Some stupid stuff early on, which was relatively easy to fix. Sherry’s trying to rent out her house, and she had to take a phone call from a prospective tenant who sounded like he was not a good prospect. And just before I left, I got the news that one of our most experienced people is leaving the company next month. Argh. This could make some things difficult. Well, we have a couple of weeks to prepare for that.

Camouflage is essential. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking, “If I can’t see them, they can’t see me.”

Sunday wasn’t insanely interesting; I went to the library and got some more books. Got a couple of non-profound entertainment books, and got a book that’s a compilation of reports on a year-long study of how various people related to race issues in New York City. That should be interesting. I’ll read those in the days ahead while riding the bus.

Also spilled far too much dried powder across the counter and stove while making pre-packaged risotto. That was annoying. At least it wasn’t as catastrophic as the time I dropped a whole pan full of spaghetti sauce on the floor 12 years ago.

Laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning, playing with Fuzzball, and playing video games filled my Saturday. There’s just nothing interesting to report about it.

A couple of people at work were on furcation this week, and another couple of them are on furcation next week. It’s a good thing that there hasn’t been a major crisis or anything.

Anyway, on Friday, we all went out to lunch. Nobody wanted to eat at the Mexican place that has good nachos, so we went to Pizzeria Uno, which is a little bit closer and has more variety. We got food and heard all about Dan’s ongoing adventures with a horde of scorpions that have invaded his house. Even though he has 4 cats, he spends a couple of nights a week patrolling the grounds with a blacklight, looking for scorpions to squish. He said he’s started a blog that tells how to deal with scorpions and exposes many scorpion myths. I said, “The Mythbusters need to do a special episode about scorpions, then.”

When it came time to pay up, almost everyone wanted to pay with a credit card. And no one had a pen. I had to pull out my Swiss Army Cybertool and get the pen out so that people could sign their credit receipts. Strangely enough, not that many Swiss Army Knives come with pens. Toothpicks and tweezers are standard, but pens are not.

The guy who draws the comic strip Wapsi Square has taken the strip’s main character and made a plastic figurine out of her. Yeah, I’ve been reading that strip for the last few years. Recently, the plot’s gotten silly, but the art’s been good.

What else. . . thanks to 2 people being on furlough, 1 person taking a personal day, and another person having a sinus infection, I was the only person in my area of the cube farm on Thursday. This was pretty odd. Also had a bizarre problem, which a user was really concerned about, but not concerned enough to mail me back with reports from trying a couple of things which might have fixed the problem. Oh well.

Cats are actually not pure instinctual hunters. If they aren’t trained by their mothers early on, they tend to be really bad at catching prey. Maybe that’s what happened here.

Wednesday had fairly normal work stuff. “Oh no, there aren’t any images showing up for this project!” “Let me take a look at it. . . no, no images will show up, because nobody has uploaded any. We’ll be cool when someone does that.” They did, and everything was groovy. Then right before I left, I got another request for something that could have been really complicated (editing a PDF.) Fortunately, it was a simple PDF, so I was able to fix it.

Then the usual Wednesday night family get-together at Steve’s. He’d TiVoed a short segment from some show called “Extreme Wreckreation” or something like that, which showed a bunch of people using homemade Tannerite to destroy washing machines, refrigerators, and cars. That looked interesting, although the show gave no specifics about the explosives’ formulation. Then we played a bunch of Rock Band. The kids really like “Welcome Home” by Coheed and Cambria for some reason.