Sad elephant!
I don’t know that I can ever go to Woodland Park Zoo again.
(The first time I was there, a Komodo dragon walked right over to say hello to me. I had a great time. 🙂 )
Monthly Archives:
July 2006Best. Programming book. EVER.
Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby — complete with Foxes!
Now, it’s not exactly Box’s Essential COM, but… So much more readable than most!
Harry Potter Meme
I usually avoid memes like the plague. But this one was too good to be true!
Congratulations, you are the personification of all that is evil. Your hobbies include killing people, walks by the lake and torture. But hey, when you’re this powerful, who needs friends?
Sitting with kittens Part II
I’m writing this right after finishing my last entry. Pixel just moved away from me… and he is lying right underneath Glitch, being groomed by my nice cat. 🙂
Sitting with kittens
I’m watching crappy television — the new “Blade the Series.”
It’s just entertaining enough that I’m going to see if it improves — it’s no Buffy, that’s for certain.
I’m reading up on CSS and XHTML — apparently, frames are a no-no — as I have to create the website for our wedding. I should probably not care so much, but I kinda liked the neatness of the Google Web Toolkit — recreating the page dynamically via AJAX seems like fun — albeit overkill. The wedding page needs things like the location and time, not fancy-schmancy effects. Note me still reading up on CSS.
Meanwhile, I have a kitten named Bit on my right, leaning right up against my leg. I have a kitten named Pixel leaning up against my left leg. I have a cat named Glitch sitting at the end of the futon. And now Bit just ran off, probably to do something she’s not supposed to do… I can’t believe I just watched 52 minutes of Blade, and only now is it getting violent. Disappointing.
My pants stay on!
After yesterday’s complaint, I feel the need to let everyone know the wonderful news that after cheating on my diet yesterday, my pants are NOT about to fall off today!
Okay, so I’m also wearing a belt, but that’s besides the point.
From free feeding
(It’s 2:30am. I want to be asleep. I need to be asleep. After tossing and turning for an hour, I came downstairs to take some allergy meds. I’m now waiting for them to kick in.)
Glitch has always been free-fed. His food bowl, as regularly as possible, has been kept filled with food. Not always to the brim, but there’s almost always food available for him. Between my work schedule and Mandrina’s gimpiness when we first got him, it seemed like the thing to do. He’s a nice, slender cat, too, so it hasn’t led to any massive weight gain.
Our two problems, however, are making me have to reconsider. Both have “sensitive stomachs,” and I’ve spent a pretty penny figuring that part out. Bit has problems with her output — as in, where it should go. She has never tried to get to Glitch’s food, however.
Pixel, on the other hand, takes the fact that Glitch’s food is up on a table as a challenge. He’s used bar stools as skipping stones. He’s leapt from the top of a 4′ high DVD rack to a table three feet away. He’s the athlete of the two — and too stupid to be scared. He also doesn’t associate punishment “properly.”
The last straw was today. Mandrina and I did some cleanup in the living room over the last week and a half. One of the items moved was the DVD shelf I eventually need to find a better place for. For the moment, it’s living in the breakfast nook. See previous note re Pixel jumping from the top. So I moved the DVD rack a few days ago so that he could no longer jump to the top of it from another table; I moved it next to the table with Glitch’s food. It worked for a whole three days. Then Pixel discovered this morning that he could climb up the side of it, using the Plastic-wrap-like substance that was used to keep all the DVDs in while we were moving. I caught him, and moved the DVD shelf so that if he tried to climb it where he had been, he would bump his head into the bottom of the table.
I came home tonight to discover Glitch needed food. Guess what! He needs food again. Pixel found another route up to Glitch’s food, I’m not even sure which one. I’m tired of trying to make Glitch have to work for his food. It might be time to start feeding Glitch on a schedule — as if I had one!
Anyone have any ideas how to change a cat from free-fed to scheduled feedings?
Deadlines
I have a deadline today. Given that I’ve missed the last two, I think I should make this one.
Unfortunately, I have only one bug left. I don’t know that I can fix it.
Why not?
I wish it was lack of competency, or lack of skill, or lack of time.
No, it’s lack of documentation. I don’t have any information on how the legacy feature I’m reimplementing USED to work, so instead I’m having to guess, time and again, on what is supposed to happen. It’s a complicated logic problem to begin with, and a lack of any clue of how it’s supposed to work is unbelievably complicated.
It strikes me, however, that this should have been done some time prior to five months before shipping. It’s a piece of legacy backwards compatibility — why on earth wasn’t this worked on previously??
Work issues
1) A “Principal Development Lead” (aka parallel to my manager) responded to an external team (still within the company) in a very technical and architecture-related email thread with factually inaccurate information. It’s basically been decided that there wouldn’t be anything gained by correcting him, but… Apparently, my lead had already tried to have this conversation with him, but he didn’t believe him. On top of that, it doesn’t help!
2) I need to finish one more bug today; otherwise an additional bug gets tacked on for each of the next two days. Then I’ll be done. Yay for no regressions!
3) A manager brought in chocolate cake today. I can’t have any.
4) My diet is apparently working somewhat. My pants are almost falling off, and I forgot a belt. Abigail thought this was funny.
5) I had actual important stuff to talk about. I forgot it.