That earworm comes with a video. And a pop-up.

10:52 Wednesday, 03 September, 2014
So one of the local NASA outposts is having their 75th anniversary. Apparently their last open house was nearly two decades ago. So they're having another one. Someone brought it up on [off-topic]. I thought it was a great idea. Since I know that Purple has [off-topic] going straight to a folder, I pinged him. He thought it was a great idea. He pinged the people who he usually hangs out with on Saturdays. They thought it was a great idea. I pinged the Usual Suspects. phone thought it was a great idea. R thought it was a great idea; since the Other Guy is on vacation this week, R reserved him a slot in case he thought it was a great idea too.

I have been feeling fairly smug about this sudden snowball of latent spacegeek activation, and delighted for the chance at meeting some of the greater circle of association within the Usual Suspects network.


http://www.nasa.gov/ames/openhouse2014/


In the off chance that anyone was wondering, my reaction to seeing that someone who I haven't seen around for a while posting somewhere is shaped like "yay, signs of life from a friend!" rather than anything touching on the "but I have not been meeting my Various Social Obligations and it has all been Piling Up!" guilt spiral. Life happens. Not Being Able To Even Deal With Any Of That happens too. If you have the Even to poke your head up and say "hi! been ... busy or something, but anyway, hi!" it is always ... um. De-cocooning amnesty? idek! around here.


23:18 Wednesday, 03 September, 2014
Work was a lot of That Damn Program interspersed by other fun stuff. It doesn't put URLs in text/plain. It doesn't show the site services guys the email body when you email [function]@[company-internal], and it's not clear to me whether the problem is that the site services guys are having a hard time with the tool because the tool is crappy and therefore they aren't seeing it, or whether they actually cannot see it because the tool is just that crappy.

I finally did remember to bring the sawed-off pool noodles today.

Purple had lunch elsewhere; I joined the outdoor contingent of my team for a bit. That was fun! Later, the Stage Manager was having trouble with some new computer equipment. I pointed him in the direction of some possible troubleshooting, although I did not have a multimeter on me at the time. I told the story of one of my cousins vs. Tier 1 technical support.

This is the cousin who is the electrician. He'd just moved into the new place, and he didn't have internet. He whipped out his multimeter and stuck it across the coaxial cable. There was voltage, so he knew that it was at least connected, and so he called up the help line and told the poor Tier 1 tech that he had no internet, but there was voltage. "Oh!" she said. "You have digital! You shouldn't have voltage!" Whereupon he hung up and called back, hoping for a tech who wasn't broken.


Did have a fun parking lot conversation with Purple, involving accidental use of the word "ballgame" to describe ( genital pain )

.

( Sometimes friends have heart-to-hearts about rape culture and institutionalized sexism, and that's a good thing. With bonus earworming and happyfuntimes dick jokes. )

My tweets

• Thu, 01:01: My fitbit #Fitstats for 9/03/2014: 4,597 steps and 2 miles traveled. http://t.co/gFMrr7HEB6
• Thu, 02:33: RT @andreagrimes: .@SpiritAirlines' PR guy wants y'all to #chillout about Spirit capitalizing on predatory exploitation of women, ok? http:…
• Thu, 02:37: RT @miracleofsound: CNN's 'tech analyst' thought 4Chan was one hacker. Tomorrow on CNN: Interview with famous movie director You Tube
• Thu, 02:38: RT @esmerel: technology++ RT @abc7newsBayArea: A Washington man saved the life of a newborn with the help of a smartphone app: http://t.co/…
• Thu, 02:43: RT @neilhimself: This fortune cookie is NOT improved by adding " in bed" at the end. Bugger. http://t.co/nJ90RO34jR
• Thu, 02:47: RT @Theremina: "@looocas Don't look at nude celebrities. Look at dune celebrities." Better yet, look at nude(ish) Dune celebrities! http://…
• Thu, 04:30: "I think it’s likely that many, even most Americans would only have sex with people they feel..." http://t.co/rWh9V0BgfK

a vehicle for the transportation of butter

Yay, the team flatscreen was moved with basically no problems. I say basically. The moving crew was really sweet and left a note saying that they couldn't move the mac mini that went with the flatscreen because it was locked down. (This was a known factor.) So after lunch I wandered over to the old place, emailed helpdesk with the basic request, and popped into the local helpdesk office. Local helpdesk recognized me on sight, accepted my authority to request the move, and unlocked the cable for me.

I accidentally started a conversation about bee fellatio in #adventuresofstnono. One of our number discovered a wasp in a work bathroom. She flushed it. I mentioned that I'd accidentally blown a wasp at Purple the other day.

<@CatMonk> s/at.*//
<@AzureJaneL> that's what she said.
<@AzureJaneL> specifically, three of my friends started speculating about blowing bees
<@AzureJaneL> and that's when I went to wikipedia and learned way too much about bee reproduction

CatMonk took the opportunity to go on a wikidive, reporting various bee facts back to the channel every now and then. It was great.

In one of my less official functions as the maintainer of the team hummingbird feeder, I wound up with some maple drops (hard, rather than the soft maple sugar). I left one with everybody who was in on the team who sits in our wing.

There was an interruption in Dreamwidth service this morning. The root cause was a problem with the DNS; Dreamwidth has now switched DNS providers. There is more detail and explanation in dw_maintenance. And while I am used to describing Dreamwidth to my tech-y, non-internet-fandom friends as "a little open source project, social blogging, a code fork of the formerly open-source LiveJournal" -- the fact is that while the open source project (the codebase) side of Dreamwidth has had code gone live from 26 people in a July-to-July year span, there are some 55,000-odd active users of the Dreamwidth.org social blogging site currently. (Because it's a common misconception, open source is not the same as non-profit. Open source means that the computer code is visible and freely available. A non-profit organization has a specific legal meaning in the US; Dreamwidth Studios LLC is a for-profit company which happens to believe in reinvesting a lot of its profits back into the business and in support of the open source project, which is awesome.)

Hilariously, I tuned out for some of the evening A-Team call about one of the new procurement/travel/expense things while wrestling with the current procurement tool. Woe. Woe and shenanigans.

Mr. Zune asked if he could use one of my sawed-off pool noodles in context of some of the mildly inexplicable UI decisions of the new travel thing, so I popped upstairs for a bit. On my way, I noticed that helpdesk's door was open, so I popped in there, said hi to the guy who'd been off on another project for a while, and left some candy. It so happens that he particularly likes the peanut butter Lindor balls.

Stories which I have told to Mr. Zune include that time that O walloped F with the frickin' clue bat, that time when F didn't heed his oil change light, the time when I hid in F's closet from his parents, the time I changed the water pump in Mama's car. Also, F as compared to Purple, and why I sometimes think of them in the same metacategories. (And, surprising possibly nobody, I like Purple better, because having a good idea of how the world works and occasionally saying asshole things for the sake of humor is generally less harmful than having no idea how the world works and holding opinions which range from hurtful to harmful because we don't live in the ideal world.)

That dude dropped by Mr. Zune's office to summon him over to look at a thing when he had a minute. He complimented me on the reflector on my work badge. I explained the reflector treatment that my canes usually get, and cautioned the guy about the maniacs in the parking lot. The guy said that he knew of a particular maniac -- him! I alerted him about the big white van that cuts across the rows in a most unsettling and high speed way.

There was a notification of some more inexplicable than usual shenanigans.

Purple is not opposed to maple candy, but a little is enough because it's usually so very sweet. "This is good! Now if only there were a stack of pancakes to go under it..." That resulted in us discussing butter candy, and how you would make it. I pointed out that butterscotch is a thing which exists. Purple waved that off, and the eventual theoretical confection is composed of liquid clarified butter inside solid butter inside butterfinger inside butterscotch. (There was a discussion about the nature of Werther's, in which I exasperatedly laid out the Venn Diagram wherein butterscotch contains Werther's.)

After various discussion of food cravings, I got pho for dinner. It was delicious.

There's a new Seanan book which I must get my hands on. Perhaps this weekend.

I am attempting to reclaim my bachelor pad from the depths of Foul Bachelorette Frog territory. There's some visible progress. Latest has involved some lingerie bags, which should help both with the issue where underwear gets strewn about the bathroom until laundry day, and the issue where bras get twisted and snag on things, and elastic gets unraveled and ties up everything into a really hilarious knot that Noah would be proud of.