Usually, it’s a bad idea to mix explosives and agriculture. In a comic strip like the book of Biff, though, it can be amusing.

Wednesday had some entirely predictable work things, an entirely unpredictable long head-scratching session caused by a dumb typo that I made, and Rock Band at Steve’s. We played the Impossible Bass Challenge and got the ultimate punk outfits, which are actually kind of silly. But it was fun.

Pimping a ride requires skill. Pigging a ride requires great skill. And we’re all about skill here.

Tuesday had more than the usual quota of work things. I think this is because nobody was in the office on Monday, so the Monday got condensed into Tuesday. No biggie. The vast majority of it was pretty easy to handle.

Trivia: Apparently, Kelli put an entire box of dryer sheets in with one load of clothes, and turned the dryer on. Then when she went to get the clothes out of the dryer, she found a giant, fluffy, sticky mess of dryer sheets overwhelming all of the clothes. This was much funnier than it had any right to be. Several of us immediately contrived plans to break into Kelli’s house and put illicit boxes of dryer sheets into her dryer at random times. And we won the trivia contest, which is always nice.

What else. . . apparently, I have to upgrade my phone. It was about time. Won’t get a chance to go to the phone store until Thursday after work, though. Also, they’re having a birthday thing for Patty on Friday, which everyone else had heard about, but I hadn’t heard about, because she announced it on Facebook and didn’t mail anybody. One of these days, I’m probably going to have to get a Facebook account, because so many other people have them. Ah well. When we get to that bridge, we’ll burn it, then jump across. . . .

For years, the Nepalese Army has been investigating ways to enhance the mobility of its units in remote locations. Now, behold the ZK-3000 Rocket Yak! The enemies of Nepal will rue this day.

Monday saw the whole bathtub drain problem get fixed. It’s amazing how getting the right part can solve everything. I also filed my taxes, or tried to. Apparently, the tax provider I use doesn’t have all its code written for all the states, so I can’t file my state taxes through them yet. Sigh. Well, I should be getting a few hundred dollars back from the federal gov. Yay for tax-deductible mortgage interest, or something like that.

Spent most of Monday afternoon hanging out with Stephanie at a nearby coffeeshop. That was fun. I heard all about her adventures with water heater problems, what it was like to spend a summer doing limnology in upstate New York, and what it’s like to work for the state government. In turn, I told her all the highlights of what I’d been doing for the last ~15 years, with all kinds of digressions into whatever seemed interesting and/or funny. And lunch on Saturday is still a go.

Old video game history, as presented by the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.

Sunday, I tried to fix a plumbing problem (bad bathtub drain) by going to Home Despot and buying some parts. However, I got the size wrong, or the drain parts that are already installed are a weird size, and I’m going to need an additional part. Or two. Not sure yet. Bleah. Fixing plumbing problems is more persnickety than fixing computer problems, because physical hardware can’t be abstracted the way that software can. (This might be a good thing. How often have you heard “Reboot your toilet and see if that clears the problem up”?)

What else. . . grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, catering to Fuzzball, and spending quite a bit of time on the phone. Apparently, Stephanie texted me at 8:15am, and I didn’t get that text until 4:15pm, which makes very little sense. So I called her back after eating dinner. Hm. Early Sunday morning, I heard my phone do half of its “incoming text message” beep, but since it didn’t finish its beep or repeat that beep, I didn’t pick it up. (Maybe I need a new phone; this one’s at least 5 years old. . . .)

No work on Monday.  YAY! I know, I know, but paid time off is a luxury for the modern American worker.

Mice, unite! Put your Viking helmets on and revolt against the unjust tyranny you live under! Or something like that.

Saturday was pretty quiet. I read Stories of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang. This is a collection of short sci-fi stories, some more interesting than others. “Understand” looked like it was going somewhere, but dissolved at the end. “Division by Zero” is about a mathematician who finds a proof that arithmetic is not internally self-consistent. It tries very hard to relate her disappointment and the pain and anomie she feels because of this in terms people can relate to, but it comes up short. Maybe someone who knew more about math than I do would understand that story better.

“Story of Your Life”, though, fires on all cylinders. Here, the protagonist is a linguist who’s in charge of trying to communicate with aliens. In the course of learning their complex language, she becomes able to see the future in startling clarity, and somehow that plot works and makes sense in the context of the story. “Seventy-Two Letters” is much more like pure fun. It’s set in a Victorian England where golems work and several odd theories about life that were discarded before 1800 are actually true, and the protagonist must use this skewed science to try to avert a looming crisis.

The last story, “Liking What You See: A Documentary”, is a much more transparent what-if. Suppose people could have a reversible procedure done that made them almost indifferent to other people’s physical beauty. What would that do to the social landscape? Would some communities make this procedure mandatory for everyone? The college students in the story act in pretty realistic ways. It’s easy to say that the procedure in the story is a fictional analogue of “political correctness”, or university speech codes, or something like that. But most of the characters with power in this story appear to want to use this new technology to gain power over people, or make more money, which is probably sadly typical.

Anyway: Stories of Your Life And Others is probably the best short-story collection I’ve read in the last 2 years. Also, at least one wholesaler out there is selling guinea pig meat, though it’s not clear from the website whether you can get small quantities, in retail, shipped to your door.

There’s really no way anything like this could make sense. Right? Right.

Friday was fairly normal, even though there were fewer cars on the road than usual since many people have taken Friday off as President’s Day is next Monday. Figured out most of the stuff we’ll want to do with apache. It’s not going to be as difficult as I feared, but we will have to change a few things, and it’ll be a multi-step procedure. Went out for lunch—pizza this time. Scheduled lunch for next Saturday, which should be good. The afternoon was mostly routine, though there was a machine that freaked out.

Spent lots of the bus ride home talking with Mike, who works for the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce. They’re apparently having some layoffs because the economy is in the tank. This is not that surprising. He wanted to know if I was going out of town for President’s Day. I said I wasn’t. He seemed to think this was odd. I grew up in the Upper Peninsula, where it was a big deal to get to go to Green Bay, which has fewer people than Tempe does. As such, I don’t really know why people who live in the greater Phoenix metro area would want to leave unless they were going hiking or camping.

We’re continuing with the “silly Snakes on a Plane references” theme here. However, I don’t think that camels would fit on most submarines. There’s just not a lot of spare room on submarines, after all.

Thursday was pretty normal, minus some dumb things happening with the network, and a bad database query that caused a machine to have a fit. Moira has decided that the only place where she’s happy is sitting on my lap being petted. Trying to get the plans for this weekend set—lunch on Saturday, maybe, which could be good.

The number of silly references to “Snakes on a Plane” available on the Internet defies description.

Wednesday had an interesting problem. Another team’s init script was behaving oddly. They looked at it, and found that when it was called with “stop”, it didn’t actually do anything. When you call an init script with “stop”, it’s supposed to stop that service. It’s not supposed to keep that service running and then exit. That was probably behind most of the total weirdness they were seeing. I wonder how that bit of oddness slipped through.

We had the usual Rock Band on Wednesday night, interrupted briefly by a MySQL question. This led into router and DHCP questions. On anything running ISC dhcpd, you can bind a particular MAC address to an IP, so that a computer or device will always get the same IP from that DHCP server. This is convenient. However, I don’t think all routers expose that functionality to their end-users. Ah well.

Tuesday was pretty quiet. Well, it was quiet until after I’d gotten home from work and a runaway process or 7 ate all the disk space on an important box. I had to deal with that while eating dinner. It was relatively easy to make it so that things would work (mostly), but it took much longer to get it all fixed so that everything would be OK for another few days. As a result, I didn’t get to go to trivia. Dangit.

A guinea pig, lying on a blanket, who is probably much more relaxed than most people were on Monday. Monday was actually relatively quiet, except for a brief period where an outside provider did something amazingly dumb which broke a bunch of stuff.

Sunday, there were a couple of things that happened that I didn’t mention in the last entry. First, Teh Nacho had the floor plate in one of his cheaper magazines fall out while he was firing his AK. This was more funny than anything else, as about 20 7.62×39 cartridges just clattered to the ground at his feet when it happened. He said he wished someone had been taking video while it happened, but the only camera we had had batteries that had pooped out. I’ll have to remember my camera next range day, since mine is less hard on batteries than most newer digicams.

Second, Zach’s Jeep was built before the great labeling shift in the climate control systems in cars. Like the Impala my parents had in the 1980s, it had a single control axis, with “Off”, “Max”, “Air”, “Bi-level”, “Vent”, “Heat”, and “Defrost” positions. Modern cars are slightly more complex, since they have one control for vent position, one for temperature, and another switch for whether the A/C is on or not. Because there wasn’t a switch that said “A/C” or was labeled with a snowflake, I thought that Zach’s Jeep didn’t have an air conditioner. Nope.