Spent most of Saturday with Zach and a couple of guys he knows from Zombie Squad. We went to the gun show first, where we looked around for all kinds of stuff. I was thinking about getting a holster for my Taurus .45, but there were so many holsters available and so many of them were badly classified that I decided not to. The only thing I ended up getting was some additional .38 ammo, because the can that I bought a while back is at least half gone.

Then we went to the Highland Games, even though we had to walk a few blocks to get there, and the large amount of walking was difficult for Steve. They had pipers, a parade, a guy doing juggling and comedy, and a bunch of people selling all kinds of Scottish things. Zach bought himself a bottle of Irn-Bru, which is hard to find here in the USA. I got a sausage spiced with traditional haggis seasonings, which was actually pretty good. I also stopped by the Clan Graham booth, and one of the guys there talked my ear off with stories of how my distant relatives did a bunch of stuff, like fighting against Charles I and being William Wallace’s lieutenants. Zach went to a Scotch tasting.

I took a couple of pictures of things with my phone. Then, when I got home, I couldn’t get my laptop to talk to the phone via Bluetooth. Years ago, I had no problem getting pictures off a phone with KDE 3 and obex:// .The laptop has KDE 4 on it now, and the whole KDE environment has really gone downhill in terms of Bluetooth support. So those pictures I took will show up later, if at all.

Friday was pretty good. Ordinary work stuff, then we all had lunch at the Paradise Café, which I hadn’t been to in months. I suggested it, and Sherry said, “All right!” so that worked well. They’ve got good food, and it’s mostly local, so I thought this lizard was appropriate.

Afternoon was mostly full of “What the @#%^ happened with that one bad file yesterday?” It was being requested thousands of times a second, as far as I could tell. And of course I got the whole furlough thing straightened out. No work all next week—yay, or something.

And then after dinner, I found out that all the KDE 3 stuff I’ve got on my desktop is no longer being supported, and I have to upgrade to KDE 4. Oh well. I’ll manage.

Gun show tomorrow, maybe followed by Highland Games. Should be interesting.

Classic longcat. There’s always room for the classics.

Thursday was reasonably normal except for a barrage of dumb that happened between 12:30 and 2pm. It didn’t make any sense at all, but we figured out a way that should stop it from happening again. Why was something that should’ve loaded a file once loading that file more than once? The higher-ups were happy that we fixed it, but not happy that it happened.

Met Stephanie for coffee that night. That was kind of fun, even though we didn’t spend the whole time being social. She’s got to give a presentation on Friday, and that’s sort of stressing her out. But I listened to an abbreviated version of it, and said, “As your Personal Relaxation Counselor, I say you should get a good night’s sleep!” I didn’t have too many useful suggestions for her, since I’m not an expert on solar power. Dangit.

Wednesday, they were having a blood drive at work, so I donated. I felt bad about missing the blood drive they did in December because I was on vacation. Anyway, the donation wasn’t that bad. What hurt more (and still hurts, as of 9pm Wednesday) was the finger poke they do to test hemoglobin levels. This is annoying because I use all my fingers to type with.

And I use the fingers on my left hand to play guitar/bass in Rock Band, and my left ringfinger hurt enough to make me think I wouldn’t be able to handle a normal session. Plus, it looks like I’ve scheduled much more stuff than usual for the next few days: Coffee with Stephanie Thursday night, gun show and possibly the Highland Games in Phoenix on Saturday with Zach, and then more stuff Sunday, possibly lunch and “Shutter Island” with people yet to be determined. And a lot of reorganizing/cleaning to do at home. So I said that I wouldn’t be able to make the regular meetup, so no Rock Band this Wednesday.

When I got my new phone Monday night, I ran through the activation procedure. Everything looked like it worked. I didn’t make any calls or send any texts that night, because I didn’t need to, and I didn’t expect to receive any calls, so I didn’t think it was odd that I didn’t get any. Imagine my surprise when I tried to make a call Tuesday morning, heard the phone ringing a few times, then heard a recorded announcement saying, “This account is unauthorized to make outgoing calls. If you have any questions, call tech support at. . . .”

I tried again. Same result. One of my co-workers tried to call another number, using my phone. Same result. I tried sending a text to my phone. It never got there. “This is crazy. I’ll wait until things are slower at work, then I’ll call tech support. But I’ll turn the phone off and conserve battery power.”

So after lunch, I turned the phone back on. It booted, then said, “Would you like to explore an expensive and useless net backup feature? [No.] Are you sure? [Oh hell yes.] Ok. You have 2 new text messages.” The test message I’d sent earlier had showed up, and so had another message. Apparently, all I’d needed to do was reboot my phone. I’ve had old phones with extremely simple OSes for so long that “reboot the phone” was never in my list of possible solutions. (I also work with Linux all the time, and “reboot the Linux box” is almost never the right answer.)

Anyway. Work also had a really weird permissions problem that I had to fix in a way that seems hackish, but it appears to do the right thing in the end.

Trivia: There were shenanigans. Real Jeff wasn’t there, so Fake Jeff was in charge, and there were problems with the sound system. Nathan fixed those problems (a cable wasn’t plugged in all the way), yet we still didn’t place despite a good showing in all the regular questions. Zach pulled up the hood on his hoodie and said, “This is my homeless bum costume.” “That’s a costume?” I replied. People laughed, which is what I was aiming for. Later, John offered dating advice to Kelli. “You’re taking dating advice from Tyldlesley?” someone else said. “Sick burn!” Zach said.

Mostly finalized the gun show plans for this weekend, too.

The new cellphone showed up today. It’s smaller than the old one, but it doesn’t flip. At least texting on it should be easier and faster with the keyboard. And I can assign ringtones to people now, so that I know who’s calling before picking up. This might be useful.

Also changed my phone plan, since my old plan won’t work with the new phone. I don’t know whether it’ll work better or not, since I have fewer minutes and the times when I can talk for free are different (later). I won’t know until the next phone bill. . . .

Monday had a bunch of fairly normal things at work, broken up somewhat by rain. It’s not all that common for it to rain in the morning here, after all.

Owls getting confused? It’s more likely than you think.

Sunday had some work annoyance first thing in the morning. Something fell over at about 1am, and nobody noticed until I woke up, so I had to fix that. Then I spent some time fiddling with this site, putting in a database abstraction layer, and making prettier indexes for the images from 2008 and the images from 2009. Also fixed a bug in the library DB admin tool.

Sunday afternoon, I went to the library since I’d finished Forever Peace. They’ve moved or are moving all the nonfiction books because of construction. This was a little annoying. Everything was in a different place and harder to find. But I found some interesting-looking nonfiction books anyway, then met Stephanie in the entrance, then picked out a couple of fiction books. She recommended a series that started with To Your Scattered Bodies Go, which I’ll have to check out later. Then we got coffee and talked for a long time in the café. Apparently, she’s got a big presentation coming up next month, and is a little worried about it. That’s understandable.

Fuzzball was really being neurotic and clingy all day. I made a tuna noodle casserole (mostly to get rid of the last of the giant stack of tuna I bought a few months ago when it was on sale) and gave her the juice and small tuna flakes that were still left in the cans. She slurped those right up and then zonked out.

Some artist put together a painting of Jesus showing the Constitution to a bunch of the Founding Fathers. Some random Internet person altered that painting to produce the image above. I don’t know; the US Constitution isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than the bureaucratic tangle we’ve got now.

Saturday was relatively quiet. Well, I met Stephanie at Casa Reynoso for lunch, which was actually better than the last time I went there. So we spent an hour and a half eating and talking about all kinds of stuff. And I should be finished with Forever Peace by Sunday, so I’ll be going to the library to get new books, which is always a good thing.

Friday seemed like it had a lot going on. Lots of talking, very little reading on the bus. Work had normal stuff, a completely intractable problem that made absolutely no sense, and the news that if we get new hardware, it’ll be delayed for months and months. This is not that surprising, actually.

Then there was supposed to be a dinner at Benihana, for Patty’s birthday. This was originally scheduled at 7pm. However, she mailed everybody right after I left work and said, “They said they could only give us a reservation at 6:30pm.” It was a good thing that I checked mail right after I got home. I barely had time to run errands before getting on the road and getting there at 6:30.

But anyway, everyone was there, except for Sarah, who was late because of a scrapbooking meeting. The place was really busy, but we killed some time in the bar waiting for a table to be available. Anyway, we all finally got seated, right in full view of another table full of people who had apparently taken all their fashion cues from TV shows like “Jersey Shore”. (We were mostly casually and conservatively dressed, except for Nathan, who had worn a suit jacket because he had thought Benihana’s was a very classy place, and Kelli, whose clothes apparently still smelled like dryer sheets according to everyone else.) There was some muttering about how déclassé the people at the other table looked.

But anyway, we had a bunch of teppanyaki food, and John gave Patty a card (in Spanish) that had been translated (badly) by Dr. Dave, which was much funnier than it really should’ve been. Zach said that he wanted a “volumizing beard insert”. The waitress took a picture of Patty and the rest of us, and John deliberately did some sort of weird contortion that looked pretty silly in the picture. The food was OK but kind of expensive.

It was almost 9pm when we were finished with everything, and everyone else had plans to go back to Patty’s place and have cake. I was way too tired to do that. Where does everyone else find the energy? Maybe it’s because they don’t have to get up at 5:45am. . . .

Baby wombat in a box? Yeah, we’ve got that.

Recently, I’ve been reading Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman. This is sort of interesting, because I read that book 11 years ago, and now I can look at it with a slightly more mature perspective. Haldeman’s not the world’s greatest author—not all the characters are convincing, and some details of the sci-fi are too convenient—but the book still works. Every time the main characters’ human suffering and normal day-to-day trials are in the picture, the story rings true. When the shadowy bad guys and the details of the technological MacGuffins show up, the story starts to fray. Haldeman served in Vietnam, so he gets the confusion, nastiness, and camaraderie of combat right. Julian and Amelia’s relationship works too. It’s the rest of the plot that seems sketchy.

It’d be really interesting to see a studio and a director buy the rights to Forever Peace and turn it into a movie (or a cable miniseries) without changing much of the plot. I think this would be possible, though it might be financially infeasible. Or politically infeasible. . . Amelia is white, Julian is black, Julian’s ten years younger than Amelia, and that might irritate certain people. Anyway. I also wonder what the book would’ve been like if someone like Frederik Pohl had written it.

Ordered a new phone via the Net. It should arrive here early next week. I’ll have to use my old phone until then. . . how will I ever manage to survive?