Monday, I spent what seemed like forever at the post office picking up a package before leaving for work. And at work, there was a bizarre problem with XML and another odd problem with something that was a year old and hadn’t been updated. Found a workaround for the first one, and I think they’ve found a way to fix the second one.

And when I got home, I got to deal with a very annoyed meowing cat. And I put all the penguins I own in strategic positions near the Christmas tree for the photo to the right. (Really big JPEG.) That was about it for excitement.

There’s going to be a total lunar eclipse tonight. However, it’s awfully cloudy in Phoenix right now, and eclipse totality isn’t until 12:41am local time. I might not bother with seeing it. Depends on how sleepy I feel when the alarm goes off.

This sort of thing happens way too often, though it’s usually with people, not cats.

Sunday, the first thing I did was get up and drive way up to Scottsdale to give that old motherboard-CPU-RAM combo to the Boy Scouts. I think the person I gave the stuff to was impressed that I had all the original manuals and CDs, and that it all worked. Maybe it’ll help.

The rest of the day was mostly doing minor stuff around the house and making dinner (tuna with pasta, sauce, and vegetables). Nothing that exciting. I see the football team lost again, which is always sort of a pain.

Saturday wasn’t all that exciting. I did laundry, got groceries, wrapped presents, and sent out the last 2 Christmas cards. Yeah, I should have sent those out sooner, but I didn’t have the snail-mail address of one of the people until Friday. Sigh.

Stephanie reheated a bunch of leftovers for dinner. Chicken with black bean sauce for the win.

Not that much planned for Sunday either. Going to get up early and drive up to Scottsdale to donate an older motherboard combo to a Boy Scout organization that holds a computer swap meet every 3rd Sunday. I’d put a link to their page here, but it seems as though their domain name registration has expired and been taken over by a squatter. Sigh. The Scouts are trying to do some good for the community by recycling/repurposing/selling older electronic gear, and some asshole’s hijacked their domain name in hopes of extorting money out of them. The non-official event page, which has the correct location. I don’t know how I could help them get their domain name back, though.

This is in Oxford. Jo referred to it a day or two ago. The sculptor of this apparently meant it as some sort of political statement, which is a little strange, but whatever. At least the neighbors and the university finally decided to let it stay where it was.

Friday was a lot less evil than Thursday was. Many fewer horrible network problems, though there were problems with shell scripts. Went to a reasonably new lunch place called Viet Kitchen on First Ave, which was really very good. They had pho, which sounded like a great idea since it was cloudy and cold. When the pho got there, I decided to put a little chili sauce in it. However, I put a lot of chili sauce in it by accident. Ah well. Having your tongue in flames is a great way to spend a lunch.

Not that much else. Looking forward to a relatively lazy weekend.

Thursday was really exciting, mostly because there was a horrible network failure about an hour after lunch. And then there was another horrible network failure about 6 hours later, right after I’d finished eating dinner. So I didn’t get much of a chance to relax.

So Wednesday was pretty normal at work, with the exception of one really bizarre problem. Somehow, a ^P (Ctrl-P, ASCII 0×10) got into an XML feed, so all the client apps that were accessing that feed had a cow until we found the bad character and got rid of it. This is actually one of the problems with XML; a conforming XML parser is supposed to have a cow when it finds an invalid character instead of ignoring it or spitting out warnings the way many other document parsers will. This means that you notice errors. It also means that minor errors cause major problems. The first is good; the second is a complete pain.

Rock Band went as usual, but it was just me and Steve. Apparently, Pro mode is really difficult. Steve’s been trying it for a few days and not getting very far, even on Easy. I’m glad now that I stayed with the regular controllers. I don’t think I have enough time to spare to deal with Pro mode right now.

Tuesday had mostly normal stuff. Well, except for the presentation that contained, “We’re not sure about using this, because Ruby On Rails doesn’t scale well.” <SARCASM> Yeah, nobody’s ever built any gigantic websites using Ruby On Rails or anything. </SARCASM> I mean, where do these idiots get this level of stupid? Do they just make it up? Or is it half-remembered bits and pieces of something they heard while drunk? I just hope that the people who actually make decisions will ask a technical person with two clues to rub together before they do anything really stupid.

Trivia: Slightly different. Stephanie and I went to My Big Fat Greek Restaurant for dinner, because it’s right by the trivia place. And she had a coupon for $10 off a meal. So we had Greek food and got plenty of leftovers. And then we went to trivia, though we ended up placing 4th or 5th thanks to not knowing a bunch of the bonus questions. Kelli’s cat is apparently being a holy terror. Zach and Sarah are going to Texas for several weeks. And John is making origami Triceratops, which are pretty complicated but neat-looking.

Monday was relatively boring at work. After work, I ate dinner, then Stephanie and I set up the Christmas tree and hung all the ornaments on it. This was the result. (larger picture with Fuzzball in the background.) I didn’t see any good penguin ornaments in the stores, so there’s not that much change from last year.

Not that much else.

I wrapped up a bunch of Christmas presents today, and the roll of paper I picked out was blue. Blue Christmas, eh?

But anyway: Saturday, the big excitement was a party with Stephanie’s co-workers. We got there on time, though it took me longer than I expected to get everything ready. I said that I’d be cooking a casserole, which took a lot more time than what almost everyone else did—they mostly bought various dishes from stores. Ah well. There was a lot of food, and it was pretty tasty. After everyone had had some food, Stephanie played “Paparazzi” and “Just Dance” (Lady Gaga) on her violin. She followed that up with “Ring of Fire” (Johnny Cash), which was interesting. We hung out until 9pmish, then left.

Sunday wasn’t quite as exciting. Wrapped presents, made dinner, catered to Fuzzball, got ready to go back to work tomorrow.

I saw this on the shelf while getting some Czechvar on Thursday for the party on Saturday with Stephanie’s cow-orkers. Had to take a picture. It’s almost certain that somebody at Bear Republic knows a few things about role-playing games; otherwise they would’ve named this beer differently.

Friday, I took a vacation day. So I went to give blood. That went OK, even though the phlebotomist missed my vein the first time or something. She was new and inexperienced, and another person had to come over and adjust the needle so that blood was flowing fast enough.

They wanted to take another sample of blood to see if I could be a platelet donor. Apparently, platelets have a very short shelf life, so they need more platelet donors than you might think. I don’t know whether I could donate platelets, since doing that takes more time than donating blood, and I never seem to have enough time these days.

After that, went to Ikea with Stephanie. Bought a bookcase, which I haven’t put together yet. Well, there’s plenty of time for that. I was going to go shooting with Nacho and Zach tomorrow, but the way they’ve scheduled it, I can’t do that and go to a party with Stephanie’s co-workers that I said I’d go to weeks ago. Ah well, I’ll have to get my rifle range time in another time.