. . .normal service will be resumed shortly as I was up until 11pm on Friday and need some sleep.  This entry may have an update on Saturday, after 8:30am MST.

Update: On Friday, after work, I went out to dinner with Reuben, Michelle, and Ed from the old company. We talked about regular life and the old company, which from outside appears as messed-up as it ever was. And Ed apparently got laid off a couple of weeks ago—yikes. But anyway, we had a large amount of sushi in Ahwatukee. “You bought a Yakima rack from Craigslist? What’s that?” Ed said, as he wasn’t familiar with those. “It’s a rack you keep Yakimas on,” Reuben deadpanned. Then we compared horrible car stories. I didn’t have anything to say there, but Reuben’s old blue truck had recently been hit and the rear left wheel well had terrible cosmetic damage.

Then I joined Trevor and Nathan at the new Wild Horse Pass Casino, which had just opened that night. It looked like everybody and their brother wanted to be there. The traffic was horrible, and everything was really crowded. I finally found Nathan and Trevor, and we sat down to play blackjack for a while. I slowly lost money, Nathan won, several other people lost quickly. Then Nathan set off to cash his winnings in and I tried to find Trevor, who had gone to find a video poker machine. I couldn’t find Trevor even though the whole casino isn’t insanely huge and there are not that many video poker machines.

Anyway, by about 10:30, I was tired, and texted Nathan to let him know I was leaving. I took a wrong turn out of the entrance and got a walking tour of the whole hotel-casino complex before finding the parking garage. Got home, slept.

Saturday: Put Fuzzball out into the living room because she woke me up at 5 am again. Then I got a trouble ticket from work, where an important box had fallen over, and it took much longer to resolve and required more phone calls than it should’ve. Arrrrgh.

Sometimes, even the Corgis disapprove.

Almost nothing happened on Thursday. Nice change of pace, that. I left the cube farm at the usual time, then had to turn around and go back for my jacket. I haven’t worn a jacket since early February, so I’m out of the habit of wearing one. The high was about 62 F today, but it felt colder while waiting for the afternoon bus, since there are so many tall buildings around that bus stop.

A bunch of the people from the old company are supposed to be getting together Friday night for dinner in Ahwatukee.  That should be interesting.  It’s been a long time since I’ve had sushi in the company of friends.

We’ve gone right past ridiculous into ludicrous. Most guinea pigs won’t sit still for this sort of thing.

Wednesday had all the usual stuff, except that I poked my nose out the door in the morning and said, “Dang, it’s cold.” So I wore a jacket to work. It was about 52 F. This is what I get for living in a hot climate for years; a reduction in moral fiber when it comes to cold temps. Did normal work things, then went over to Steve’s for Rock Band, except this time it was Rock Band: Beatles. There’s a lot less customization and variety in that game than there is in the other Rock Band games, but you get a bunch of Beatles songs, photos, trivia, and psychedelic background videos when you’re playing the Sergeant Pepper-era songs.

Tuesday was actually reasonably good. There was only one annoying bit, where someone burned popcorn and set off the dang fire alarm, which wasted 15 minutes of everyone’s time. Also, I think I got 3 trouble tickets in the span of 10 minutes that afternoon. They weren’t that difficult to fix, just disconcerting in that my phone kept ringing.

Trivia: Was awesome, since we had everyone except Patty there, and a lot of the questions we got were about 1980s culture, really cheesy pop/country songs, and horror movies. There’s apparently a TRASHionals competition in Berkeley on November 22, and they wanted to know if I wanted to go to it. Also, John Prine is apparently playing somewhere in Phoenix on Nov. 20, and some of us are going. We won the trivia competition fairly easily. Some of us said that next week, we should call ourselves “The @#%^ing Yankees” because we’ve won so often and everyone probably hates us. Also, we heard that one of Zach and Sarah’s wedding photos was made into an oil painting, and that the guy who did the oil painting is currently in prison. Hm.

This image showed up while I was searching for completely different junk on Wikipedia the other day. For years, I could see this disused shafthouse from the attic window.

Monday was OK. However, for some reason, they didn’t plug the network cable into the new machine we got. This makes doing things with it somewhat difficult. A machine that shouldn’t have been running Apache was running Apache, which caused all sorts of consternation. That was easy to fix, at least.

Still reading The Big Con. The number of people, the acting and improvisational talent required, and the amount of effort that went into the old-school con games were all huge. Nigerian 419 scams and selling heroin are comparatively easy and require much less talent, so it’s not surprising modern criminals have mostly abandoned the big con. Part of the middle of the book still rings true, though. “Once the mark has convinced himself that the con is for real, he can probably be played for another score given enough time and the right set-up. Some con men have actually found it difficult to get rid of marks.” Well, there are a lot of people who aren’t very bright out there, and more of them than you might think have enough money to interest con men.

Sunday, I got to play the demo for Brütal Legend. That was actually a pretty good demo, containing humor, action, and an interesting approach to the game’s rating. Right before the main character starts swearing, the game pauses, and you’re given two choices: “I want to hear every swear word” or “It’s funnier if it’s all bleeped out”. A bit later on, you get a similar choice for blood, gore, decapitation, and dismemberment. So: Definitely worth downloading even though it takes at least half an hour.

Not a whole lot else to report for Sunday, although the Cardinals looked like they were trying to lose another football game. They managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, though it was a bit closer than it should’ve been.  I’m on call this week. Here’s hoping it’ll be uneventful.

Last week, apparently Patty and Spencer had some sort of event. Of course, they didn’t e-mail or call anyone; they sent out invitations via Facebook. I don’t have a Facebook account—I have this dedicated virtual host, where I can run whatever I want and post whatever I want, and no disinterested corporate entity can delete my posts, mine my data, change the user interface, or send spam to me every day.

Hm. Saturday, I went to the library and got some more books. They’re doing a lot of construction on the library now, so the southwest portion of it is blocked off and the book drops have changed places. I got some coffee at the coffeeshop, and also got 15 minutes of loud yakking from 4 people who didn’t understand the concept of “inside voice” and were apparently thinking of selling screen-printed T-shirts. I know a few things about screen printing, so I listened in at first. After a few minutes, I wished that they would shut up, because they kept repeating themselves, were overly optimistic, and had a business plan that was either insanely optimistic or relied on a bunch of stupid people buying the stuff they were selling.

Reading The Big Con by David Maurer. This book was published in 1940, and is an interesting historical overview of confidence games as practiced in the USA from the late 1800s to the 1930s. The specifics don’t translate to the present—most of the schemes outlined rely on outdated technology—but the general outlines of the scams are still valid. Basically: Take your mark, rope him in, build up his confidence by having him obtain some money in carefully staged shady dealings with shills, then get him to put up a large amount of money. Then separate him from that money using a number of strategies involving fake violence and/or threats from the police. At all times, the con men must appeal to the mark’s greed and pride. The cons described in the book are far more elaborate than anything Bernie Madoff ever did, yet the con operators got far less inflation-adjusted cash than Madoff managed. I’m not sure what that tells us in the long run.

I downloaded the demo of “Brütal Legend”. Well, it’s still going, since it’s 1.5 G and going quite slowly for some reason. I guess I’ll get to try it out tomorrow and see what an RPG inspired by heavy metal is like.

Caturday, and the cats who got dressed up are very irritated.

Friday was pretty normal. One of the database machines hiccuped, and dealing with that took some time and effort. And then we all went to lunch, which was fine, except that I ordered a combo meal that cost $9.50 and I only had $9 in my wallet. Oops. Hari lent me a dollar. We spent lunch talking about media bias and why so many people hate the Dallas Cowboys. Then after lunch, a routine job got stuck, and the users noticed, and I had to find it and unstick it.

For the first time in a few weeks, I don’t have anything scheduled for Saturday. Think I’ll go to the library and get some new books.

Always be careful when bathing your capybaras.

Not much happened Thursday. I guess this can be a good thing. Nothing fell over, most crises were averted, a few things got done, and so forth. An electrical fire caused an ammo+fireworks explosion, which might have been newsworthy, but caught my eye because a couple of people I know live close to the reported location.

I’m out of library books, so I’m reading Driving Like Crazy by P.J. O’Rourke again. Though the author describes himself as a “Republican Party Reptile”, there’s very little politics and a lot of humor in this collection of car-related columns and stories.

Cats can sleep in the strangest places.

Wednesday, I spent some of the morning at the bloodmobile giving blood. They usually take over one of the conference rooms upstairs, but they had a bloodmobile this time. I think the people they had running the show in the bloodmobile were a bit more experienced than usual, as donating took less time and I barely felt the needle go into my vein. Then in the afternoon, I tried to hash out a problem with a 3rd-party security application that’s been throwing up rather stupid errors for no reason that we could see. Nothing made sense, but I’ll leave the extensive monitoring in place for a few more days.

Did the usual Wednesday night Rock Band thing with Steve. Even though I’ve been practicing on Hard, I can’t play a lot of songs on Hard without failing miserably. And then we tried to play one of the harder things in the game, the “Global Promotion Showcase”. It selected “Let There Be Rock” and “Green Grass and High Tides” as our random songs. Those are quite difficult to play and pretty long. So we didn’t get through that.

ABLEconf is this weekend. I may be too tired to attend it.