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Fire, flowers, and f- ... bunnies.
May. 2nd, 2014 12:57 amI have a lot of hair. I wore it loose for large parts of today in honor of the holiday. Today was also Very Hot, resulting in more stacking of my hair on top of my head when not otherwise occupied. It was a lot of mode-switching. It's currently insufficiently blue.
I wished Purple a happy Beltane. He wished me one as well. Then he asked me what exactly the holiday entailed. "Fire, flowers, and ... other things," I said.
"...Bunnies?" he said, with his eyebrows also.
... yes.
So that resulted in me telling him about the bunny pie incident.
Yesterday I discovered that a particular goddamn 32-bit program didn't even want to let me sort 10 rows in a 40,600-odd row table. I upgraded to the 64-bit version, which incidentally was also three model years (one whole version) newer. Since those programs come in clusters, I was also treated to the center-bulgingly flat version of the current email reader. We'll see what I think of it in a week, but it managed to touch off my sense of something being terribly wrong, and also ugly.
Purple complained about the switch to flat-and-ugly on a recent iOS update. I'd also seen that switch, and had been unimpressed but not aesthetically offended. This, at least at the outset, aesthetically offends me. Re-tuning the display helped some, but not as much as I was hoping.
There is a current vigorous debate about both figurative and literal transparency in the workplace, manifested with those with (newly frosted) glass conference room walls throwing stones. (It's not buttercream, and therefore I disapprove.) Purple grumbled. Designer Sparkles posted to not!Facebook and told me that I needed to 'like' it. (I 'like'd, and then shared it with that group with known strong opinions about frosting, #cupcake.) Mr. Zune 'like'd. Purple screeded a bit. (Good man.) My manager was tactful in her words, and emphatic in her sudden @ of one of the number one folks from HR. A facilities upper-management type appeared in response to the summons and 'splained a bit.
Mindful of my status and my desire to not rock the wrong canoes, I muttered a bit in private chat with Purple, mentioning that these were some of the things that I might not say due to my status. He allowed as how he might (giving Designer Sparkles the chance to do so first).
Intending to give him carte blanche to echo my concerns as his own, I said the following: "you are welcome to strip-mine my back-channel for anything useful, dear engineer" -- before realizing exactly how that sounded.
We have not yet received notice of the date of the impending move, which sets us back at least a week. Purple thinks the other half of his department may be moving after the Maker Faire weekend, because some people in his destination building are moving the week before Maker Faire weekend.
It is very hot. Did I mention that it was very hot? It hit 94 in Palo Alto.
I accidentally knocked my glasses into Purple's doorframe, and he teased me a bit about it. I was amused. We got into the topic of cats and the "I totally meant to do that thing" thing. He explained that there was also the "if you laugh at me I'm going to hurt you" mode -- most of his childhood cats were the sort who would come up and swipe at you, rather than hork in your shoes or pee on your bed. But many things are forgiven when you scritch a cat behind the ears. Many things react well to being scritched behind the ears! he said earnestly.
It turns out that if you scritch an engineer behind the nearest ear, first the engineer may lean into it, then other factors may catch up and he may look at you sort of funny. (It was, in fact, downright hilarious.)
I wished Purple a happy Beltane. He wished me one as well. Then he asked me what exactly the holiday entailed. "Fire, flowers, and ... other things," I said.
"...Bunnies?" he said, with his eyebrows also.
... yes.
So that resulted in me telling him about the bunny pie incident.
Yesterday I discovered that a particular goddamn 32-bit program didn't even want to let me sort 10 rows in a 40,600-odd row table. I upgraded to the 64-bit version, which incidentally was also three model years (one whole version) newer. Since those programs come in clusters, I was also treated to the center-bulgingly flat version of the current email reader. We'll see what I think of it in a week, but it managed to touch off my sense of something being terribly wrong, and also ugly.
Purple complained about the switch to flat-and-ugly on a recent iOS update. I'd also seen that switch, and had been unimpressed but not aesthetically offended. This, at least at the outset, aesthetically offends me. Re-tuning the display helped some, but not as much as I was hoping.
There is a current vigorous debate about both figurative and literal transparency in the workplace, manifested with those with (newly frosted) glass conference room walls throwing stones. (It's not buttercream, and therefore I disapprove.) Purple grumbled. Designer Sparkles posted to not!Facebook and told me that I needed to 'like' it. (I 'like'd, and then shared it with that group with known strong opinions about frosting, #cupcake.) Mr. Zune 'like'd. Purple screeded a bit. (Good man.) My manager was tactful in her words, and emphatic in her sudden @ of one of the number one folks from HR. A facilities upper-management type appeared in response to the summons and 'splained a bit.
Mindful of my status and my desire to not rock the wrong canoes, I muttered a bit in private chat with Purple, mentioning that these were some of the things that I might not say due to my status. He allowed as how he might (giving Designer Sparkles the chance to do so first).
Intending to give him carte blanche to echo my concerns as his own, I said the following: "you are welcome to strip-mine my back-channel for anything useful, dear engineer" -- before realizing exactly how that sounded.
We have not yet received notice of the date of the impending move, which sets us back at least a week. Purple thinks the other half of his department may be moving after the Maker Faire weekend, because some people in his destination building are moving the week before Maker Faire weekend.
It is very hot. Did I mention that it was very hot? It hit 94 in Palo Alto.
I accidentally knocked my glasses into Purple's doorframe, and he teased me a bit about it. I was amused. We got into the topic of cats and the "I totally meant to do that thing" thing. He explained that there was also the "if you laugh at me I'm going to hurt you" mode -- most of his childhood cats were the sort who would come up and swipe at you, rather than hork in your shoes or pee on your bed. But many things are forgiven when you scritch a cat behind the ears. Many things react well to being scritched behind the ears! he said earnestly.
It turns out that if you scritch an engineer behind the nearest ear, first the engineer may lean into it, then other factors may catch up and he may look at you sort of funny. (It was, in fact, downright hilarious.)
