All of the evils that plague humanity? Or ferrets? The two may not be as far apart as you think.

Thursday: We loaded up the car with lunch and a very large turkey breast, then drove several hours to get to Sandy’s house. It was a long way to go, but we sort of had to, because it’s a tradition to see everybody.

Cousin Chris had apparently had good luck deer hunting. He got an 8-pointer, though he said he was a bit nervous about taking the shot, since the deer was looking right at him and didn’t want to turn sideways. Oh well, venison! We saw the Lions lose another football game. This surprised nobody. Most everyone is doing as well as can be expected. We all ate too much food. Then after dinner, we left, and it started raining like hell. I drove half of the way home and was glad to give up the steering wheel to someone else.

Friday: Nobody wanted to get up at 3am and go in search of bargains on consumer electronics. Probably a good idea. We spent time moving furniture and entertaining the cats. We all did end up going to Target later on for other reasons.

I also read most of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. This is a post-apocalyptic novel, but it’s a Serious Book written by a Serious Author, so none of the main characters have names, there are no details about what caused 99% of all the people and things to die, and there is absolutely no hope at all for anyone. Parts of the author’s description of the world don’t ring true. Apparently, no plants have grown for at least 5 years, and all non-human land animals have died. The worst mass extinction we have records of wasn’t quite that bad, so whatever happened must’ve been a Plot Device, not something bound by physics or biology.

Thanksgiving started very early on Tuesday with going through some unexpected construction at Sky Harbor. At least I got a parking spot close to the bus stop. Then, when I was going through security, I must’ve done something to set off the TSA guy’s alarms, because he asked me to walk backwards, then slowly walk through the metal detector without making any sudden moves. I didn’t set off the detector, though, which was good.

The flights on Tuesday weren’t too terrible, even though I had to go through O’Hare, and that’s always a crapshoot. O’Hare seemed to be getting more and more crowded as I waited for my flight, and I would’ve hated to see the place on Wednesday.

Got to the parents’ house, saw them, saw the cats, ate, and had an early night.

Wednesday: I spent a lot of time reading some of the New Yorker and Atlantic magazines that my parents have accumulated. Apparently, Pakistan’s control over its nuclear weapons is better than you might think. It would be somewhat difficult for one unauthorized person or even a team of unauthorized people to assemble a Pakistani warhead, trigger mechanism, and delivery system into a working nuclear missile, since all 3 of those components are kept in different places under tight security. Also, at least one reporter thinks that the “Prosperity Gospel” movement might have contributed to the housing crisis. Short version: “Jesus wants you to have a house! Even if you have to take out an interest-only loan that no one in their right mind would take!” I’m sure that some people did fall for bad financial advice given by preachers who weren’t qualified to give that advice. However, I don’t think that the housing bubble happened because of some pastors preaching questionable doctrine. I think the housing bubble was caused by greed and stupidity, which transcend religion and will be with humanity regardless of which religion it practices.

Flying is such fun. I hope nothing like this happens when I get up way too early on Tuesday and get on a plane to Chicago.

I’ll be in Michigan for the next few days. Updates will probably not happen during that time as I’ll have less connectivity and will only have my laptop.

Sleeping while in a boring meeting is probably a great thing. However, if you’re going to try that, don’t try the haircut in this picture. It won’t work.

The weekend was really not all that interesting. Laundry, groceries, cleaning, blah blah. I’ve been playing through “Too Human” and am 80% of the way through it. The story behind the game is interesting, though a bunch of people didn’t like the gameplay. Quite a few reviewers said that they didn’t understand the plot/story. I’m not sure where they’re coming from, since the plot is basically a pastiche of Norse mythology and science fiction. (I know more about Norse myths than the average person, though.) The unskippable 15-second movie that happens when your character dies is a bit annoying. However, the 4th level has hordes of zombies. And killing zombies is always cool. Right?

I’m still no closer to finding out what’s wrong with joystick input in the version of fceux I’ve got here. Dangit. This will probably be something I won’t ever get to, and the developers will fix it next month. Maybe.

Last week, we heard that there was no coffee on the 7th floor. That really annoyed everyone there, so we made a pot of coffee from our stash of coffee beans and distributed it. At least that didn’t happen this week. Garrett said, “I’m working from home today. My girlfriend’s truck wouldn’t start. I drove her to her job, because if she can’t open the rifle range, there are going to be angry people with guns wandering around, and no one wants that.”

So: With the rifle range situation defused, there wasn’t really a lot to Friday. The switching stuff around in the early morning worked fine. A couple of database machines had a cow, but I was able to fix that. An internal application barfed half an hour before I left the office, but that was easy enough to fix once we’d tracked down the right person.

We all went out to lunch at the Downtown Deli. I got a club sandwich. As we were finding a table, we saw that Sheriff Joe and a deputy had decided to eat there as well. Whatever.

Finished Glasshouse. The end of that book is a bit confusing, and feels like it’s been edited down from a longer set of chapters that explain more about what’s going on. Or maybe that was deliberate. But anyway, I think that Glasshouse is probably the best Charles Stross book that I’ve read. All the sympathetic characters have flaws and baggage, all the non-sympathetic characters have easily-found real-world analogues, and the message is clear: If some bureaucratic assholes attempt to stomp on people’s civil liberties, they will be defeated by firearms, plastic explosives, and plot devices. Unfortunately, that’s fiction, not reality.

Thursday at work involved a lot of being annoyed with the RPM build process. And very early Friday morning, I have to move a bunch of services from one machine to another.

Not much else to report, actually. Some ASU students seem to have grossly misunderstood the concept of the First Amendment, though.

Where this came from originally, I forget. But it makes me wonder why we haven’t seen more LOLcats in various mainstream media.

Wednesday had the usual Rock Band at Steve’s. We’re trying to get through a bunch of the challenges, though the “Infinite 80s Marathon (37 songs)” may not be doable. That’s just an awful lot of playing. We mixed it up a bit by playing some Feeding Frenzy, a relatively simple downloadable game where you’re a fish trying to eat other fish.

Guinea pigs can’t drive 55. So don’t harsh their mellow, brother.

Hm. Tuesday was relatively ordinary at work. I brought lunch, but some other people decided to go out to lunch. One guy’s moving, so he’ll spend Wednesday schlepping boxes into or out of a truck instead of being in the office.

Trivia: We won the main competition, thanks to some luck. Apparently, Dan Majerle was in the restaurant on Monday, and he said, “Take these tickets to the Suns game next month and give them to the teams that do well in the trivia competition.” So the teams that scored the most points in the first half and in the second half got basketball tickets. We didn’t win the first half or the second half, though. But we’re in the lead for November, so we may get some Suns tickets at the end of the month. (And we saw the Suns win a close one against Houston, which is always nice.)

Other: Glasshouse by Charles Stross is definitely worth reading. It’s sci-fi, and set centuries in the future, but it has a number of characters that you can easily care about, empathize with, or hate. And the protagonist is a highly technical bastard who’s also totally at home with low-tech approaches like spiking the bad guy’s coffee with Ex-Lax.

Monday wasn’t really all that exciting. Well, I started Glasshouse by Charles Stross, which has been interesting so far. Robin, the protagonist, is a 27th-century human who’s volunteered for an experiment where he has to live like a 20th-century human for 3 years. He’s not prepared for the rigors of 20th-century life, or how seriously the scientists and other subjects are taking the experiment. And, of course, there are people who are trying to kill him.

One thing doesn’t really ring true, though. In the book, a lot of the historical data from 1950..2050 has been lost thanks to encryption and media cartels, which is why these people in the 27th century are doing experiments to find out how 20th-century people lived. However, huge amounts of data about people’s everyday lives have been documented in open formats (like HTML, RTF, or MPEG-2) or formats that are pretty trivial to decode (MS Word, DVD-with-CSS, etc.) If anything, future historians will say that there’s too much data about the 20th-21st centuries, and it’s too hard to sift through it all for the important stuff.

It’s been way too long since we’ve had a Fuzzball pic up here.

Sunday: Not much to say, really. The Cardinals attempted to lose and managed to win (yay!) but I only caught bits and pieces of the game. I wasn’t watching the game because they’ve recently updated FCE Ultra, and they managed to fix the sound problem, but they broke joystick support. I thought the problem was something simple that I could fix, but my debugging efforts haven’t yielded anything useful. SDL is returning good results from the joystick, the program’s getting button/stick events, but something in the config or the code is resulting in these button presses doing nothing at all. I’m sure it’s something simple I’ve overlooked somewhere.