Month: November 2008

Saved by the gPhone

The last several times I’ve gotten my car washed, it’s always been less than 48 hours before a rainstorm. (Which gives you an idea of how long I tend to put off getting it washed.) And it really needs it again. I’d planned to get it before work last Friday, but didn’t make it, and figured I’d take care of it this morning after dropping alenxa off at work. (Which was an adventure in itself, mainly because neither of us realize how mind-bogglingly bad the 55 south is during morning rush hour.) Then I realized I hadn’t checked the weather forecast this morning.

Well, yesterday I finally talked myself into getting a T-Mobile G1 (I’ve posted my first impressions of the phone at K2R). One of the apps I’d installed pulls data from the Weather Channel. It took me about 15 seconds to discover there was a 70% chance of rain tomorrow.

Saved!

Decompressing

Just finished fighting with a Linux server that somehow ended up re-activating a service which it didn’t need, but which interferes with a service that it does need. *grumble*.

Boss returned this morning from a week out following back surgery…and has jury duty. Figures if he actually gets called in, he can easily get it dismissed, but for now, the only number he has is for the automated message.

Managed to mostly avoid fire+smoke problems this weekend, except Sunday afternoon why my eyes just wouldn’t stop itching. A co-worker had to evacuate his parents from Yorba Linda on Saturday, but their house made it through okay.

Got together with andrea_wot, wayens and gasean for Andrea’s birthday and monopolized a table at Cosi for about 4 hours on Sunday. Fortunately they didn’t seem to mind!

Caught up on comics & Netflix over the weekend. Read Crecy, about the 1300s battle in which the English longbow triumphed over vastly superior French numbers. Mostly about medieval war tactics, swearing, and xenophobia. Narrated by an utter bastard who breaks the fourth wall a lot. Did I mention it was by Warren Ellis? Also read Chrono Mechanics, about a squad of techs whose job is to repair time. A bit too crazy even for me, and I loved Tales from the Bully Pulpit. And finally Harley and Ivy, a collection of stories focusing on Batman villains Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, which was great fun.

As for TV, we’ve finished season 1 of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. I also wrapped up watching season 5 of The Batman (though I haven’t watched the earlier seasons, and based on this one, probably won’t). And then there’s Stan Lee’s Lightspeed…I had to watch it because it’s about a speedster, but OMG it was awful. At least now I know Netflix’ "Watch Instantly" service works well with our system/connection. Snarky commentary will go up at Speed Force in the next week or two.

We’ve backed off on the house hunting for a bit. We actually got a counteroffer on one of the places we looked at a few weeks ago, but decided not to take it. We need to reevaluate what we’re looking for before we dive back in.

Drove alenxa to an interview this morning. Thought it was in one of those two new buildings by the spectrum until she told me the address, and realized it was actually across the street from where I work. Highly convenient for today, but the actual job location is off in another direction.

Fire and Dreams

So, this morning I read that there were a bunch of fires around LA.  Hardly a big surprise, given that we’ve had a really dry year, and it’s insanely hot for No-frickin-vember, and we’ve got genuine Santra Ana winds going.

Except that last night I dreamed I was on a ferry returning from Catalina Island, and saw smoke coming over the mountains, to the north of Saddleback.  I thought there must be a fire in the Santiago Canyon area, or possibly on the other side out toward Riverside, and this being a dream I had some way to get higher (Plane? Helicopter? Really high hill that doesn’t exist? Balloon? Don’t remember.) and saw the huge conical volcano that had sprung up out of nowhere in the hills southeast of Corona.

I also dreamed that I left the laptop computer on a table at In-N-Out as I left, walked back in to grab it, and was convinced that someone had swapped it for an identical one during the 30 seconds I was away from it.  And then it turned into one of those extremely tiny portables that only have half a screen and sort of fill the gap between smartphone and notebook. And I couldn’t find where they’d put the period key, which really bugged me because I wanted to use proper punctuation.

Writer’s Block: Wild Rumpus

A lot of characters in kids’ books have it pretty good, from calling the start of the wild rumpus to ordering room service from their hotel suite. If you could be any character from children’s literature, who would you be?

I’m not sure who I’d want to be, but there are plenty of times when I feel like Alexander, who had the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.  Maybe I should move to Australia.

[checks Internet] Holy crap, they made it into a musical.

Current Mood: 😐blah

I think I want Monday back

Seriously.

Yesterday morning I got a tetanus shot.  No pressing reason, just it was time to renew.  By lunchtime it hurt. like. hell.  To the point where I was using my right hand to position my left arm on the desk so that I could type without moving anything above my elbow.  Driving home was “fun.”  I think it was worst last night — trying to find a comfortable sleeping position was “fun” too — but it’s not exactly fantastic this morning either.

I seriously considered staying home if it was still bad enough to make driving difficult, until I remembered it was Microsoft Patch Day.  Then I started seriously considering looking up the bus schedule.  It seemed to go better this morning, but that was under the influence of aspirin.

This morning I got in and discovered that our database for spam filter training had collected enough bad data that it was consistently labeling a ton of spam with a 0% rating. Trying to reset it led to ~45 minutes of various services either not working or having to be disabled so that other services could work, and of course phone calls. (In the middle of that, alenxa  called and I had to cut her off.  Sorry!)  On the plus side, it looks like part of the performance problems we’ve been having are related to the large size of the database, so it should run more smoothly for a while.

Edit to add: Also, got a response from a customer to whom I asked several questions in the for X or Y? — all of which were answered “yes” or “no.”  Yes to X or yes to Y?  *grumble*

Email seems under control for now.  Off to deal with patch day.  *Le sigh*

Current Mood: 😡stressed

Writer’s Block: Ten for the Tenth

Some people spend their whole lives preparing the answer to this question: What albums are on your personal all-time Top 10 list?

Tori Amos: Toss-up between Little Earthquakes* and Scarlet’s Walk
Vertical Horizon: Everything You Want*
Aimee Mann: Lost In Space*
Conan the Barbarian Soundtrack
Liz Phair: Somebody’s Miracle
Garbage: Garbage
Gin Blossoms: New Miserable Experience
The Nightmare Before Christmas Soundtrack.  (The special edition has some decent covers, too, though only the Fiona Apple version of Sally’s song really made an impression.)
Nina Gordon: Toss-up between Tonight and the Rest of My Life and Bleeding Heart Graffiti
Evanescence: Evanescence (I almost listed the Rent cast album instead, but when I thought about it, there’s still a lot of recitative on the recording.)

This is mostly in no particular order, but the ones that came to mind immediately are marked with asterisks.  I made a point not to list more than one album by the same artist, but it was tough to pick a favorite Tori album — and I can’t quite choose between the two Nina Gordon albums.

Overall, these just don’t have a single bad track on them.  Though I’ll admit I don’t have “Me and a Gun” in rotation on my playlist — it’s just not a song you want to hear unexpectedly…kind of like Vienna Teng’s “Passage.”

Halloween

Thursday night we went up to Anaheim to see a showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas.  It was the new 3-D version, and it was at a theater (Cinema City) that looked astonishingly like the Irvine Spectrum theater on the inside (in decor, not layout), but wasn’t an Edwards or Regal theater.  We wondered if it had been built or renovated right before the whole industry went through its consolidation phase a few years back.

There were maybe 12-15 people in the theater by the time it started, all adults  Perhaps some high-schoolers at the youngest.  Naturally the pre-movie programming was aimed at children.  It’s animated, right?

The movie was good, as always.  It was the second time we’d seen the 3D version, which works quite well, though there was one problem with the presentation: This theater uses all digital projection, and the resolution isn’t quite as high as it should be.  In scenes with high contrast or fast movement, we could see the pixels at the borders.

Halloween itself was a bit of a bust.  alenxa had made herself up as a vampire, and we’d bought three bags of candy, but I was so exhausted when we got home that I flopped onto the bed for "10 minutes" that turned into an hour and a half.  But the entire evening, not a single trick-or-treater knocked on our door.  Katie saw groups tromp up and down the stairs right next to us, but they passed us by entirely.  She figured there must be some sort of signal you’re supposed to put on your door to say, "We accept trick-or-treaters," and no one told us.  So I figure I’ll just take most of the candy into work on Monday.  It’ll go pretty quickly.

Saturday we ran some errands down in Lake Forest (among other things, checking for post-Halloween sales at Costume Castle) and drove through a No On Prop 8 rally on the corners of El Toro & Rockfield.  We waved, honked the horn, and Katie woo-hooed.  [Edit: forgot to mention, there was at least one person holding a handmade sign that said something like "Christians voting against Prop 8."  Nice to be reminded that not everyone falls for the false dichotomy.] We had lunch at the original Peppino’s (a bit expensive for lunch, but the leftovers will feed us for 2 more days) and realized that we hadn’t been to one since the restaurant in Tustin closed.  Then I spent the afternoon doing laundry catch-up, while Katie got started on Nanowrimo.