People can and will create all kinds of strange things when they build custom cars.

Thursday was reasonably quiet at work. At least some of the ridiculously horrible problems with the ludicrous “security standards” the Payment Card Industry has demanded are fixed. I’m sure it’s only a temporary reprieve. They’ll continue to increase the requirements until the only systems that can pass those requirements are those systems under their direct control. Then merchants will have a Hobson’s Choice; they can either pay exorbitant amounts to PCI for using their systems, or pay exorbitant fines to PCI for using “insecure” systems. It’s a monopolist’s dream, it’s costing thousands of businesses enormous amounts of money for no real purpose, and the legislators and investigative journalists who should be investigating this issue are asleep at the switch.

Finished off the leftovers. No idea what I’m going to have for dinner tomorrow. Frozen stuff? Grilled cheese? Quesadillas? Ramen with meat and vegetables? All of those are possibilities.

This morning, Moira was growling and hissing at nothing. I guess there was residual Pinto smell somewhere in the living room. Tonight, she’s quiet.

Anyway. Busy yesterday, that’s why there was no entry. The only reason I have time to write one today is that there’s no Rock Band going on. So:

Trivia: Went reasonably well. Scott was there, as were most of the group except Nathan and Troy. So we didn’t do well on sports questions, but were hanging on. Everybody seemed to be excited about some TV show or other. “I’d rather go without food than go without my DVR,” Sarah said at one point, and several other people agreed. I just don’t have time to watch TV, so I wonder where they’re all coming from.

Wednesday was. . . surprisingly less busy than I’d thought it would be. One really stupid problem that I thought would take a long time to fix was resolved fairly quickly with “oops, we spelled your username wrong on the new box, try again.” And they had a catered lunch for us and a bunch of other people, mostly because a project we launched on Sep 1 is actually working pretty well. Yay!

Wednesday night, instead of Rock Band, Stephanie brought Pinto over in his cat carrier, so he could meet Moira. This didn’t go as well as planned; Moira growled and hissed and made huge amounts of noise. Pinto was much more blasé about being in an unfamiliar house and sniffed everything. I guess we’ll keep doing this, or something, to get each other’s cats used to each other.

Monday was relatively normal at work, or at least I didn’t get a horde of people yelling at me for no reason. Apparently, some automated procedure somewhere decided that I didn’t really need my LDAP password to work, and locked me out of my network account. Helldesk call, followed by password reset. Of course, when I tried to change my password, it said, “This password is too simple.” I entered another password. It said, “This password may be too complex.” There’s no winning with automated systems that are designed to deal with lusers. . . .

Anyway, I heard from Sherry that Sushi Roku (warning: Flash-infested) was having a special all week where all food was 50% off. So I asked Stephanie if she’d like to go, and we texted each other for a while trying to figure out what the best day would be. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, we all had something going on, while Friday was apparently a really busy day for that restaurant. So we went there Monday night. The food and service were very good, and the décor was really well done. It was a good thing that it was half price, though. If we’d had to pay full price, it would’ve been 200% of the cost of a similar meal at the Tempe/Ahwatukee sushi places. The food was better than Kobe or Sushi Ken, but it wasn’t twice as good. Ah well, it was nice to taste how the other half eats sushi.

Sunday, I saw this picture (cropped to preserve semi-anonymity of the person involved). I said, “This was a Dept. of Defense project to find uniforms that’d make the enemy laugh so hard they’d forget to shoot back. Right? Riiiight?” I don’t know for sure how it all turned out. It does make the previous Bad Fashion Statement I posted here look pretty tame, though.

Sunday itself was less than eventful. I didn’t watch the football game, which was probably a good idea as the Cards didn’t exactly put on a great show (even though they did win the game.) Cooked chicken, couscous, and broccoli for dinner. Read a book. Fooled around with various software things. All in all, a rather relaxing day, which I’ll probably need when I see the various cluster@#%^s that work will bring tomorrow. . . .

Saturday had less going on than it might’ve had. But anyway, went out and got groceries, then did a bunch of software updates to my desktop and remote server. Also got the desktop to speak PTP to the new digicam, which resulted in the picture to the left. Nothing really exciting, just useful.

Went out to Sweet Tomatoes with Stephanie for dinner, then we both went to Bookman’s, where we spent a couple of credit slips that she’d obtained earlier. I got 3 sci-fi books that looked neat. That should hold me for new reading material for a week or 2. She got a magazine and a “trashy romance novel”. Of course, I immediately said, “There’s nothing trashy about romance,” since I’ve seen The Fisher King.

Why are there so many racist comments on newspaper sites? Hard to say. Well, people can be complete @#%$ers when they think they’re anonymous. That’s probably the real explanation. . . .

Friday was actually a bit less interesting than usual at work. We tried a restaurant that none of us had ever eaten at, and that was reasonable, but it took a long time for us to get sandwiches. The pizza was apparently terrible, so I’m glad I got a sandwich. They got my order wrong, though, and gave me a cheesesteak instead of the meatball sub I’d ordered. At least it was fairly good.

Also, yesterday I found out that Stephanie’s old webcam is having problems with its video feed. It identifies itself when plugged in, its mike works, but attempting to get any video from it hasn’t worked at all. Need to try one more thing, but that can wait until tomorrow.

Another picture taken with my new camera, this one of Fuzzball. She’s not happy in this picture, which should surprise no one.

Work on Thursday was somewhat annoying. The “security upgrades” that they’re forcing through have absolutely nothing to do with security. They’re only being put in place so that the Payment Card Industry oligopoly can say, “You aren’t in compliance with the latest über-paranoid security measures!!1!” and fine people thousands of dollars for problems that don’t actually exist.

So, according to our testing, with the “security measures” in place, users can’t perform a lot of actions which they could do without a problem before. I don’t have any idea what this’ll mean for us in a week’s time. Ideally, the people responsible for this cluster@#$%^ would have to personally take every single tech-support call, and be held responsible for every single dollar of revenue lost, but that probably won’t happen. No, the people responsible for this will probably be rewarded for “increasing security”, and the people on my team will probably be yelled at. When the suits want something that’s physically or technically impossible, the engineers are usually blamed.

I wish there were a way around this. However, thanks to the oligopoly the credit card industry has on payments made over the Net, there isn’t one. Oligopolies retard innovation, cause ordinary people to pay higher prices, and prevent things from progressing. They also seem to be the natural state of things. Government should be working to reduce or eliminate the power of oligopolies for the benefit of ordinary citizens; instead, elected officials are usually in collusion with them because it’s easier and more lucrative. I don’t know how to fix this. Even if I did, I don’t have the power to do so.

Wednesday, I took a personal day, so I slept late. Stephanie also took a day off, since it was her birthday. So I took her out to IKEA to go shopping for a new computer desk. She didn’t really like what they had there, so we just ate lunch there.

Then we went to Costco, where I found a replacement for my digicam. They didn’t have any really good Olympus cameras, so I got a Nikon Coolpix P100. I used it to take the picture above. It has many, many more features than my old camera had, and it can take movies with sound. Serious professionals would sneer at it, of course, but it should serve my needs fairly well.

We still had no desk. So I took her to Fried Electronics, where we found a pretty good desk. We also found that the bathrooms were being remodeled, or something, so the only bathrooms available were upstairs along a badly marked route that went by the employee break room. They were putting up more signs, at least.

I put Stephanie’s new desk together. This took longer than it should’ve. One part of the instructions was a bit unclear, and several screws didn’t want to go in. But it all worked, and now she has a working keyboard tray.

Then we went to dinner at Fired Up Grill, which was harder to find than it should’ve been. No matter. We dined on meatloaf, jalapeño crab cakes, and grouper, and it was pretty tasty and reasonably cheap thanks to the coupon I’d gotten from Deal Chicken a while back. So: Productive day. Back to work tomorrow. . . .

Capybara sleeping! I hope to be following this fuzzy guy’s example tomorrow, since I took a personal day.

Tuesday at work was a lot less interesting than it could’ve been. But boring is usually a good thing when dealing with production data. Putting new disks into the spare NFS server worked fairly well, so that’s a load off our minds. The extra disk space will help us avoid a ton of silly problems in the future.

Trivia: We were doing OK, but not winning when I left in the middle of the 5th round. In honor of Kelli’s shirt, our team name was “Godzilla vs. Puffin”. Apparently, Trevor’s planning a Bad Movie Night for Sunday, Sep 26. Don’t know if that’ll work out. Nathan wasn’t there last week; this was because of a talent show at the high school he works at. He said there were at least a couple of good acts, at least. Zach’s going car shopping this weekend, even though I don’t think anyone has any superhero costumes ready.

Monday had a relatively normal number of work things. Apparently, Stephanie was sick—food poisoning or something. Yuck. I cooked some tuna helper and helped her get groceries after work was over.

I’ve also got to get up at 5am tomorrow and do more work stuff, which should be fine, but may cause unnecessary annoyance if exactly the wrong things happen. Ah well. That’s what we have to do in this job; there’s nothing we can really do about it except hope that it’ll all work right.