First, you take the spray tan...

Sleep: there was something large and mechanical doing something noisy and mechanical to the lawn or something. It started up around 8. I spent too long awake, so I reset my alarms. Consequently I was later in to work than I planned. It was work's observation of Thanksgiving at lunch. Purple's team opted to go together, and early. I went in apparently just after he had gone out, based on the timestamps. The turkey and gravy and such were tasty enough.

Hooray transcription.

Partway through the afternoon I headed for the bathroom and then sort of jumped back while apologizing, because the door didn't swing freely and I was afraid there was someone on the other side, and it was making a terrible noise. Then I realized that no, it was just making a terrible noise because it was broken. So I filed a ticket; the phrase "flatulent elephant seal" was employed. I linked it in #cupcake for Mr. Zune's delectation. radius inquired whether Alaska was particularly well-equipped with flatulent elephant seals. If it is, it's not my parts of it. I then made a very ill-advised but informative trip to YouTube.

"The Penguin King 3D - Elephant Seals Extract (Cambridge Family Film Festival 2012)" (Watch on YouTube)

I was not incorrect.

I fetched dinner from the cafeteria at the top of the hill and advised Purple that if he was hungry in the next hour-ish, to ping me. He did, and we enjoyed a pleasant interlude, complete with discussion of exactly what would go into the cat-buttering assembly line construction app (at least a dollar's worth of greased feline hilarity).

Patting Purple on the head is not a valid life choice.

We returned to our various pursuits: I transcribed, Fishie tried to wrap her head around a Python quirk, and Purple beat his head against some very unhelpful compile errors.

azurelunatic: The statement "programmers are enormously clever fuckheaded dumbasses" is almost always true, and some asshole had to invent the language.
eveandriss lol
eveandriss well, that makes a lot more sense now actually...

Purple did not disagree.

A substantial amount of swearing later, Purple had got things working and was also fucking done. He showed up looking sleek and stylish and company-branded in the jacket, and we wandered out into the damp and leaf-strewn night. He had in fact been just thinking that perhaps he needed something for that middle state between flannel-or-equivalent and puffy teal grouse mode, and then, serendipity! The hackathon hoodie was a pullover, and Purple and I have similar feelings about pullovers (no). Usual engineer-level swag is the ugliest t-shirts known to man, and they'll take two, so they can look terrible twice as often.

I suggested that the default state of the shirts was perhaps not the ugliest shirt known to man, and began attempting to contextualize "The Situation" and his ab-window shirt. Purple started giggling when I got to the ab-window, and lifted his shirt to briefly expose a moderately hairy bear belly. He felt that no manager in the company would be particularly pleased with an Unfortunate Situation shirt. "If one guy does it," I started, and fairly shortly we were both on the Group W bench plotting exactly how much spray-tan you'd need to outfit a couple-ten Unfortunate Situations.

He's got an early lunch with his team tomorrow. I have to get gas (a little ahead of schedule). Catching Fire is in the offing. (Me borrowing the movie, not actual fire.)

My tweets

• Wed, 16:18: 1 inadvisable but educational trip to YouTube later: my ticket summary "door sounds like a flatulent elephant seal": surprisingly accurate.
• Thu, 01:02: My fitbit #Fitstats for 11/19/2014: 5,614 steps and 2.4 miles traveled. http://t.co/gFMrr7ZfJa
• Thu, 04:30: Photo: little-things-count-the-most: rivalfortune: megustamemes: Titanic. They better stay clear of the... http://t.co/t3lQS7KkeP

We could quibble about the definition of "blow" here.

I am not allowed to blow things with genitals at Purple. Leaves are okay. Leaves don't have genitals. Leafs, as in the hockey players, are right out. At a distance of greater than a quarter-mile, the likelihood of an exact fix is low enough as to render nearly any angle allowable. At a distance of a quarter-mile or nearer, direction again becomes important.

It took us at least five minutes to wind the conversation to a point where I was no longer laughing too hard to drive.

Purple had parked in the other direction, and asked if he could bum a ride back to his car if I'd like him to walk me out. So that's what we did.

I managed to trip on a perfectly flat section of floor in the cafeteria. Purple finds skirts impractical and feels no need to wear them.

"Cousin Purple" is having Thanksgiving with his one friend's family.

The day was transcription, punctuated by someone's network switch going spare and getting its internet taken away. Plus the inevitable fallout from same: the "oh my god I can't reach this tool it's a network problem" and the "holy shit, how do we report an outage" and the "let us contemplate the ways in which our communication between Engineering and IT is fucked" conversation -- it was a bit of a busy day.

I explained in very small words to an IT manager (on behalf of a #VirtualH and #adventuresofstnono compatriot) why the fuck whitelisting email addresses in the tool that blocks email from unfamiliar addresses and furthermore mangles unfamiliar links, will not work for the purposes of having unfamiliar links in logs from strange servers included as text attachments not being fucking mangled by the mangler. Fuck.

Apparently my arguably passive-aggressive means of getting our friend the person incoherently in charge of the helldesk software (3rd tier, I think) to admit that a function went away, is to ask her to explain how such and such a task is accomplished with that set of permissions.

Today was my second time walking an engineer through a really poorly designed form in a way that didn't make the engineer feel stupid, but did hone the rage and hatred of everyone involved. (The first time was Mr. Zune. The 0th time was me vs. the helpdesk.) I am particularly acrimonious about this particular form as this is one of the ones where my usability concerns have been basically brushed off. It's one of the things where using it as it comes naturally is not how it's intended to be used -- if you leave any text in the terrible field before hitting the search icon because your first attempt has failed, the text in the terrible field will invisibly filter the results in the popup. And there is no way to clear the terrible field from the search popup. It makes strong-minded engineers frustrated past their safety-release-valve thresholds, and it makes me incoherent with rage and hatred, and pathetically grateful when the engineers agree just how terrible it is.

It turns out that Dolohov, as he is played in Alternity (the little bits I've seen, as I'm still intermittently catching up with Year 1) makes my inner submissive look thoughtfully around for the kneepads. (Kneeling is good for many purposes, not just the ones that would make Purple look sternly at me and ascertain that I was oriented correctly away. It was only when batrachian mentioned a thing that I realized that this would have that implication.)

Purple swears he will remember the Catching Fire disc tomorrow.

Fishie is the perfect child because she loves the jellybeans I hate.

The guy who isn't usually at the burrito station cannot wrap a burrito properly. Jokes about his popularity amongst stoners ensued.

NaNo: not going so great (haven't really had the energy). I'm feeling OK about it.