Got up. Shambled to work.

Lennon Glasses Guy needed external speakers for something. I happened to have some of those, and conscientiously labeled them before dropping them on his desk. It's not that I distrust him, it's that it's company-branded gear at a company awash in same, and I kind of like those little speakers and would prefer that someone not think they were abandoned and pick them up and take them home.

Realized, at length, that it was 12:45 and there should probably be some lunch at some point. Pinged Purple, who went approximately, "OH CRAP!" and sent the lunch call. There were cupcakes with a really nice raspberry buttercream frosting. One of the days this week, I'm not sure which one but not today, involved a guest re-appearance of the Rollercoaster Tycoon. He's just down the street, so he dropped in to pay the non-badged lunch surcharge and hang out with the gang.

The blond bearded whitedude designers of the Monkey House have set up a Slack team for the department, in service of chatting in a more lively fashion while planning the internal conference. I immediately set up RSS integration for the related not!Facebook groups. I shall have to ask them about IRC/XMPP gateway setup.

This week's hallmark of my reviews-of-external-stuff to teammates has been bluntness.
"Maybe we could have pizza?" Madam Standards asked, at the Tuesday meeting that was meant to have been about menus for the conference.
"[catering] pizza is crap," I said, and then looked around in the hopes that nobody from catering had been walking by to overhear me.
"What do you think of [file-sharing software from the Borg]?" the shorter blond bearded whitedude asked me at the Thursday conference meeting.
"Unusable," I said. The reaction around the table indicated that they'd been expecting a much more lengthy and perhaps angry rant.

Someone at lunch also brought up the topic of catering pizza, and Purple and I reacted with horror. Purple started to explain it, but seemed unequal to the description.
"Take some really mediocre yeast rolls, about two inches thick," I started. "Smear a thin layer of pretty terrible tomato sauce on that. On top of that, some crappy pepperoni, and mozzarella--"
"Plastic," Purple added. "It's the stuff that turns to plastic after you heat it."
"And after broiling it for not quite long enough, leave it to sit for 45 minutes before serving," I concluded.

There was some discussion as to whether this was supposed to constitute "deep dish", due to the height of the bread layer. The overwhelming consensus was that it did not.

"Hitchhiker's Guide," Purple said. "Tea."
"YES!" I agreed. "It's like an alien who does not know how to cook described pizza to a robot cook who does not know how to love."

The facilities team has promised to clean the I-believe-it's-probably-not-butter off the new couch in the quiet room. Perhaps when I'm feeling a little more bold, I will inquire if there are any spare couches which could be deployed in my building's rec room. It turns out that sometimes you can get amazing things to happen if you know who to ask for them.

radius inquired after people up for a walk, as he was paying a call on a department somewhat east of the milkshake bunker, in order to collect some hardware in exchange for bugs. (This, in fact, was the event that made me look at the clock and go "oops", lunchwise.) I readied a diplomatic pouch (in the chocolate-based-diplomacy sense) and we wandered off. Notes on technology were exchanged. A lot of his expertise involves some deep file system stuff. I explained the basic concept of Slack. He mentioned that stateful implied deeply integrated logging, and how sometimes the department we had just visited occasionally said things which oughtn't to be on the record, and sometimes logs therefore disappeared. I decided to look into how that worked on Slack.

ajlunatic: also I was chatting with one of the guys and a feature that I don't know if Slack has is, occasionally there are things which get said which ought not to have been said, and should be scrubbed from the logs
talldude: hmm that's a good point
(10 minutes of FAQ-trawling)
ajlunatic: so the answer here is: if you say something which should be unsaid, please promptly unsay it, via the handy little gear.
shortdude: hah yep good policy!

The speakers worked out for Lennon Glasses Guy and his team. He returned them. I showed him my doorbell, as knocking on my cabinet will get my attention, but not actually activate my "this person is here for me" routines. He may borrow the speakers again next week. I gave him directions to find them, should I not be present: in the shelf under the flower-crowned loon head, right next to the refrigerator. Directions within my cube are perhaps not conventional.

I disappeared down the rabbit hole of attempting to figure out externally-facing website possibilities for the conference. The thing that the helpdesk pointed me at looks as though it last had its documentation updated in 2009. I may go yell into the team Slack a bit.

Now that fishie is a grown-up, she is learning that the Fishmum is somewhat more flappable than previously evident. Fishmum does in fact experience anxiety every now and then!

I like the battery capabilities of the new phone case. I do not like the implied bounce-resistance capabilities. I will be sitting down with it and some sugru in the near future. I will also have to meddle with the settings on my watch, as the replacement arrived. I got the watch bands switched over (nylon strap for me, thanks) and got the old face packed up to go in the mail.

Eventually I pinged Purple. ("Ping?") In a tiny relief to that part of me which constantly fears that being left out of one thing is a sign that I will be left out of All The Things and should take that as a signal that I am Not Part Of The Group, without overt prompting he asked if I was good with a particular dinner venue. I displayed caution over the possible V-D clogging-up of same; he figured it would be good. (And, perhaps, may have made a reservation.)

There was wrapping up. We headed out. He arrived first, and managed to score a very near parking spot. I did not score same. I found street parking, then found him inside. I hadn't felt the buzz from his text, but he'd sent a very thoughtful text about his location within the building. I'd just been wandering around looking for his hair.

Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly arrived, at length. She'd had Quite Some Time looking for a parking place. We proceeded to have a lovely dinner. Purple needed a large slab of beef in service of not being anaemic. (Anaemia: the opposite of a super-power, unless wacky magnetic shenanigans are involved.) The phrase "the odds are good, but the goods are odd" as applied to the men of Alaska, does not imply that their second and fourth balls have been eaten by bears. (N.B.: do not request oral sex from bears, unless it's the hairy gaydude sort and you have that sort of relationship.) Purple is still impressed with that conversation in which radius and I managed to not-say some really terribly inappropriate things in IRC.

The bench attempted to eat my badge when I stood up. I am happy that I picked a badge reel which is generally over-engineered for the purpose, because my stuff tends to take quite a beating.

I called amberfox; it's been a while! Phone-based hilarity prompted me to stop at the rest stop in order to call her back after a dead spot dropped the call as I drove through it, and then when she tried calling me, my headset didn't wind up picking up until she'd disconnected.

I am plotting a talk for Open Source Bridge, but so far it's not made it into words.

Tomorrow may involve touring another apartment complex, if I can pry myself out of bed.

I have trouble getting up early when it's raining, because the air is so nice and soft and I could just go on sleeping. However, up I got, and then I was pleased to have gotten up, because my fireplace had its pilot light blow out again, as apparently the chimney has no damper. I aggressively ventilate for just this reason. My doubled-and-then-some step count on top of an increased step count did not incapacitate me today, and in fact I exceeded step count today as well.

When I was about to leave for work, I had been considering taking not-the-back-way, but then there was a tweet about a road blockage, and the back way was better. Yay, twitter!

Lunch was a little noisy, and I wound up mostly in reading-my-phone world, occasionally chatting with the dudes at my table -- I pointed out that chocolate cigars are an acceptable substitute for nonsmokers at a baby celebration, and speculated that the tradition came about because in a smoking society, cigars tend to be expensive and saved for celebrations unless you're rich, and a baby is certainly worthy of celebration -- and occasionally chatting with Purple's side of the table. Eventually the noise died down and it was just Lennon Glasses Guy, Purple, and me.

It was impressively windy out. My wing got a wood chipper out front, which made for some interesting tangents in conversation.

lb and radius and I walked up to the milkshake bunker. It was impressively windy. I carried an umbrella, and spent more than half the walk pointing it like a shield into the wind. radius had to run back shortly. lb and I chatted more, then spotted the predicted lull in the wind and rain, and walked down during that.

That would have been the window of opportunity for radius to bike home, but it was a missed window because of reasons.

Finally got the I-9 stuff completed with my manager. The whole exercise involved the terrible web design of the new contractor management company, one which had previously failed to load the required state list in a way which resulted in swearing, screencaps, and a super pissy voicemail. My manager and I did get a giggle in about the concept of a birth certificate with an expiration date. Further establishing said manager's awesomeness, she is in fact acquainted with Flight of the Conchords and "The Humans are Dead", which Purple and I have been earworming back and forth for the past week or two.

Purple had brought in his brand-new LinnStrument, which is a fancy MIDI controller, and set up camp in his building's atrium next to the "fuseball" table, which is near the former break room in which someone has installed Windows XP. (If I happen on an appropriate frame, I may well make a nice error message to hang on the wall. There are talks about how to arrange for a bootup noise.) So I wandered through the beer bash, put in an appearance at my team's table, then wandered off with something calling itself king cake to Purple's building.

I poked at the LinnStrument a bit. radius appeared. The Tennis-Playing Manager appeared (a fellow from Purple's old team who's been a manager for maybe a year now). Lennon Glasses Guy appeared. There was much tomfoolery with the thing. It was great. radius fetched better speakers. At one point Tennis Manager and Lennon Glasses Guy were playing what sort of turned into a march with hilarious effect. I located the highest note on the keyboard and applied vibrato. Purple got into the settings and reprogrammed the controller to lock out the high notes. :-P

radius managed to crash some part of the setup on Purple's laptop by trying to play Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I suggested that since someone had said earlier that it looked like a super 1337 hacking keyboard, and Purple had made some (fond) crack about our security group, that it would be super awesome to bring the setup to the internal security convention and have someone bust out the Toccata, slightly evilly.



And speaking of hacking, Purple had to brave the rain to get to the local chapter of 2600. So he hugged me goodnight and headed off. I went back to my desk and got some more work done, including discovering yet another place where the helldesk software was underperforming. Can't a user just email in something with an attachment? (The reason I was emailing with an attachment is because PREVIOUSLY that was the most reliable way to get a picture uploaded from mobile, and certainly the way with the fewest moving parts. The reason I had to do that was because the power outlets the guys were trying to use seemed to have a problem with the ground part of the outlet.)

Nora called just as I was punching in my hours. Nora's battery died shortly after I got my coffee mug scrubbed out.

radius is spending the night at work, due to bike and rain. (I did offer car and rope, but that was not a super viable solution particularly as Vash has no roof rack.)

Then I went home, still in the rain. I went to bed before finishing up all my internet last night, so I'm making up for it tonight. I discovered that iTunes had fucked everything up in terms of my podcast subscriptions, and then in the process of trying to re-subscribe to everything, realized that I had logged out or something? and logging back in got me back the stuff but a lot had to be re-downloaded and really I'm in this state of YOU BASTARDS I THOUGHT I COULD TRUST YOU TO AT LEAST NOT FUCK THIS UP and I'm really not amused. Perhaps it's revenge for me watching TV last night? Or (more likely) an update and reboot fucking shit.

#bloodcannon is mild and intermittent, barely worthy of the "cannon" at all, until it is.

I was parking just as Purple was walking through the parking lot. He stopped and waited for me to extract myself from the car, then walked me in. It was a pleasant start to the morning.

The CSS wars continue. "Please advise." has been added to the Gallery of Hostile Signatures.

I arrived at work just as a meeting that I was supposed to be in was wrapping up. I didn't get to sleep until late, but I set my alarm for 10 minutes before the meeting so I could call in. But there was no number. So I emailed Madam Standards (whose meeting it was) and then the whole group, to ask for a number or if they could just call my cell from the conference room phone. But nobody remembered to. They did, however, realize they needed me, and assigned me a task in absentia which I had already started before the meeting even met. Logistics, meet me. Heh.

Lunch was with Purple's table. Lennon Glasses Guy now has vaguely better context for some of the random things Purple and I say to each other, because #cupcake.

When there is bell pepper and cilantro all up in the rice for burritos, I have started asking for the guy to use the rice from the Indian food station next door. Today I called it "uncontaminated rice", which was not the most tactful phrasing I've ever used. I'm not allergic because I don't swell up and die, but I taste that thing in the cilantro (stink bugs, not soap), and my stomach is unhappy with bell peppers in more than fragmentary form, and I associate the taste with badness.

The package has arrived with the customer. I had the emails sent to radius, not me, so he was the one to be all giddy about that.

Around 5, I realized that the Beacon (the lava lamp on the collaboration table) was not lit. I reckoned that there might only be two hours left, but I turned it on anyway.

I have had a situation going on with my right hand for the past couple days: I slept on my right shoulder wrong, which produced some upfuckery which has gone down to the flexor tendon in my right index finger (it's not like I use that all the time or anything). So I am being very ginger with my hand. Mostly I can't grasp with that finger when my arm is turned inward and bent at the elbow. Or at least I should not. So I am trying not to, because it was hurting. Whatever had gone wrong in my shoulder went *spang* sometime today and it feels normal there again, but my hand has still been somewhat tender and swollen. It's gone down over the course of the day, but I'm going to be gentle on it for another couple days.

More paperwork related to the swapover of certain management things, and oh god it's just a *pain*. Yesterday one of the people called me, and I got to speak gently but firmly about the importance of including gender identity and gender expression specifically by name in their anti-harassment document. While I largely adore my team and don't think we'd run into any such problem, it needs to be there to protect the people who really need the protection and don't have that level of knowledge and trust. I would hope they'd do the right thing anyway, but when you need that protection you don't always know, and [insert horror story from domain shop here]. And the lady on the other end of the phone started, I think, to see why it was important, and it is a document that they keep updating with the lawyers, after all.

Dear cisgender folks: one concrete thing you can do is keep an eye out for lists of people who ought to be protected, and make sure that trans* folks and other gender minorities are included where they can be. It's part of the onboarding process for me now. Check, then comment if it's not there.

My co-workers keep trolling each other with the dried durian. Sparkles got Rocky to huff air from the bag. Rocky staggered off groaning. Sparkles headed out of the building giggling. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

The fellow working from Home Office: Japan in #VirtualH has been doing botsmithery again. This time, the number of hours until beer bash. I've been running a day ahead, so I thought it was only 21 hours when the bot said 33. The Botsmith pointed out my error, and started muttering about timezones. I adjusted my math. 45. Okay. The bot was still 12 hours off. "Is it ignoring the PM bit?" I asked, because 12 is a magic number, and the math made sense if the bot thought it was 4am, not 4pm. That turned out to be the basic shape of the answer, though the details varied slightly. That's one of the things to check with datemath, if it's 12 hours off for some reason.

Fishie has taken a Goodreads book quote widget intended for a blog or webpage and is using it as a desktop widget. Then, since she wanted it to refresh on its own, she hunted down some javascript that would do that, and a refresh button, and jammed it all together. I'm so proud of her.

I checked in with Purple about where he was in the thing around 8. "Pretty close, about 10," he said. "Minutes," he added hastily. That was good, because if it had been 10pm he'd meant, I would have packed up my stuff and wandered over to give him a hug goodnight, roll my eyes at him, and head out to the parking lot alone.

It turns out that Purple and I can start from "Gosh, living in Alaska is gorgeous" to "No, even if it were lego-sized bricks, if it's square enough to work as a brick, it would hurt to poop it." Via the metal detectors in San Francisco City Hall. Conversations with us are weird, man.

I did laundry Monday. Today, since I was feeling slow and sore, I was low on steps. So tonight I sat myself down on the yoga ball and set out an outfit for tomorrow night while watching some Mythbusters. The new format is all right, I suppose, and the game episode was cute. I got my steps made. I checked my averages, and sure enough, it was up enough to progress my goals.

Earlier in the week, there was a small layoff. The unofficial communications networks at work have consequently been getting a lot of use as people attempt to figure out where the missing nodes are, beyond the obvious. There is a tradition of people sending a farewell email to their team and other close contacts. And then there are the people who use not!Facebook to do the same, and @-mention every group and individual who they can think of. Thus it was that I learned that Mr. Noise-to-Signal was laid off. Of my friends, the only person I know of who was laid off was R. There were no layoffs on my team.

R has been sent the information on where to find #adventuresofstnono. So have Mr. Zune and radius. (Yes, guys, I use an alias for this as well, and now you know where to find it. I started the practice of aliasing obscure/semi-private venues after the Incident where someone showed up uninvited in a different channel which I had mentioned, then never fit in well, angsted in-channel about not fitting in, and I eventually asked them to leave because I dreaded their presence and they were after all uninvited.)

Also leaving this week was one of the newer people on my team, whose wife got a dream job in another country, and (also as announced on not!Facebook) the second-in-command of the helldesk software. No word as to whether she was part of the layoff, or voluntarily heading for a lawn that hadn't been pissed on greener grass.

It being Friday and that point in the gas tank, I had to get gas before work, which resulted in a later arrival than would have otherwise been. Lunch was pleasant. It was the Rollercoaster Tycoon's last day (he's heading to a startup). I gave him my card.

A conference call with the vendor for the proposed new software followed. Researcher Haystack appears to have taken point on this one. His queries of the vendor's salesdudes are shaped slightly differently than mine. He's coming to it quite naturally from the perspective of the research utility of the thing; I'm coming at it from the shoving-all-the-things-in-it direction. Some of the things I had questions about had not occurred to him. He looks at the data structure of the Excel export of their template and goes "whaaaaaaaa---!!!" and I look at it and I go "wow, I would not have thought to do it like that, but I can do the thing", and most importantly the current thing we are using does not do the thing.

I still have many questions about their alleged choice of primary keys, but I think I can work with the thing.

Haystack likes Salesforce.

I made a list of my favorite software, starting from worst favorite and improving:

[that helldesk software]
[the procurement and expense software]
Salesforce
Outlook Web Access
Outlook
Kipper/Llama (fondness for the devs is coloring this)

Haystack was slightly surprised. I can't imagine why; it's not as if I haven't made my feelings fairly clear.

It was a beer bash day. I snagged a table. lb was not in, but Mr. Zune soon joined me, followed by Purple and large chunks of his team. radius also joined us. I waved hi to another friend, but the table was not quite large enough, so they sat elsewhere. Mr. Zune told college dorm tales. It turns out that when you freeze and then drop a pumpkin, shards get all over, and then they melt on your bike. This is not pleasant.

Joining #fishbrick is the fishdiscus, or fishbee -- first you #fishbrick the window, and then you throw the much more aerodynamic and prone to shattering fishdiscus through the hole. You can't really handle it barehanded, so you wear gloves. You keep the fishdiscus from sticking to the gloves with herring oil. In case they're gloves you might want to use again, you wear rubber gloves over them. A pair or two.

Shortly after Mr. Zune headed off, Lennon Glasses Guy wandered over.

radius regaled us with some of his OWA war stories. All he was trying to do was to move about 2,000 messages from one folder to another. Several months of swearing ensued. Presently, in the new folder, there are somewhere upwards of 40,000...

Lennon Glasses Guy observed that he's heard about an IRC channel driving some of this group's shenanigans from time to time, and he was curious about it. So he was issued a formal invitation to #cupcake. I think he will appreciate it, because he appreciates it when Purple and I bounce off each other at lunch, and has enjoyed the #cupcake table at beer bash.

The group split up. I went back to my desk and hammered on my inbox and the helldesk stuff a bit, although I was distracted by something terrible happening in Outlook when I tried to pick a conference room. It's always startling to watch the list of conference rooms populate and then vanish...

Presently, Purple pinged me. This time he had indeed parked in the same parking lot as I had, and we walked out. He had a banana and a tangerine; he held them both out and offered me some fruit. I picked the one that would not cause me woe. He suggested a frying pan and some rum. We chatted for a bit, and then he zipped off, as he had places to be. I chatted with Nora on the way home.

06:13 Saturday, 10 January, 2015
Further in the department of eerie similarities, Purple and I have stomachs with similar opinions about the thought of a too-early breakfast in most cases. Though I have harder limits on the other end -- if I wait more than three hours, I'm likely to also be in trouble.

00:44 Tuesday, 13 January, 2015
Things I have done: renewed my car's registration, done my smog.
Things which have not yet happened: got the stickers.
Things which have happened: got pulled over to check that everything was in order because I didn't have my stickers on yet.

My heart rate is mostly normal again (this is the third-and-a-half time I have been pulled over in ~19 years of driving; the first was a headlight out in Alaska, the second was for a FasTrak and Arizona plates, the half was accidentally getting between the cop car and the person they were actually pulling over which took *talent* let me tell you!) and now this. So I do not have experience with this. Even though I am demographically very safe as far as encounters with police go, it gives me the shakes. So the cute young white nerd-boy fencer type cop making small talk while he ran my license and confirmed that yes, I had in fact re-upped all the things and just didn't have my stickers yet, was really surreal.

My laundry will be out of the dryer in a little bit. By then I may be ready to go to bed.

So Friday had a beer bash, at which I actually didn't feel like even any of the sangria. I had a great time chatting with lb and radius and Mr. Netflix; Mr. Zune joined the table as well, with his amazingly fluorescent yellow sweatshirt with the reflective stripes. He'd said it was amazingly bright; the lint it gave off said it was amazingly bright; the lint made it look greener than it actually was. By comparison, the tie-dye orange and white shirt that radius was wearing? So very, very, very tame. Mr. Wizard Beard passed by and said hi.

"We were talking about you this morning," he said. "[Somebody] was telling me how you were yelling at [vendor], and I was like, 'That is the $NAME we know and love, that sounds like something she would do!'"

"... Except it wasn't me," I said.

So there are two $NAMEs at work who berate misbehaving vendors for great justice.


Purple had sat down with various people from his team, at the next table over. I shifted my attention back and forth, but mostly stuck with my table. After a while, Purple came over, snagging the chair that Mr. Zune had abandoned. Other people scattered as well. In the end, it was lb, Purple, and me.

I was introduced to "Fine Art", or, "Data's painting is making me dizzy." It is very much a thing that has Come From The Internet.


We contemplated going over to the fire pit. People were there. We contemplated (without going over there) the sorts of conversation which would possibly cause co-workers to scatter. "A nice coconut glaze" was involved, and phrases which might make Jonathan Swift spray coffee.

As we got up to head in various directions, one of the lights illuminating a tree shone in people's eyes, between Purple's legs. "I'm Old Gregg!" he proclaimed.

Old Gregg, from The Almighty Boosh, had been mentioned in my presence before. I then hunted down and watched the episode when I got home. I do not believe that I would recommend it to 100% of my readers.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0647529/
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xz1pqk_the-legend-of-old-gregg_fun

This thing is nearly 10 years old now. Some parts of the episode are hilarious and I would recommend them to anybody; the thing where Vince the fishing neophyte is in the boat is particularly nice. Some are ... things that I would issue warnings about.

( Discussion of the thing; involves gender, anatomy, and 2005-era clowning with same as super unfunny and harmful stereotypes. )

So ... that's a thing I saw, all right.


Saturday, I went on a shopping run with Tif. There were some bridge shenanigans, so I decided to go the long way. We did some errands in Mountain View, then went across the bay for dinner and kitty litter. Cat videos led to owl videos, which resulted in a discussion of owl cafes and how easy it is to accidentally domesticate wild owls (very; they're smart birds of prey who like to know where their next meal is coming from). Since we were on the approach to the exit I take for work (en route to coffee), that reminded me of the discussion I'd had with Purple about owls living in cardboard boxes. "So there are jobs for them if they can't work in the forest anymore," I said, and followed it up with deeper absurdity. "They can go to work in a cafe instead of being in the unemployment line."

It is good to have a cane to retrieve bags of kitty litter from the back of the deep deep shelf. I pulled another one forward for the next person, as I might as well not make them summon a minion to climb up there and get it when I had the means of retrieval directly to hand.

I am plotting a Valentine's Day hat. It has the potential to be magnificent or terrible.

We did get to see Dorothy, our favorite cashier, on our way out the door. She looked more shrunken and tired than I remember her. :(

Into the Woods' earworm duration is about a week for Tif as well. She'd managed to compound it by singing "Into the lift to leave the mall to go to dinner!" on the way out with a whole crowd of lolita-gowned ladies and one bemused guy in a suit.

Sunday I finished Ancillary Justice, which I'd started a week ago but put down when I felt poorly and started to hurt unbearably. Last week, I'd been having trouble engaging, and felt it was slow going. I also was having trouble regulating my body temperature and other unpleasant details. This week was much better, and between one thing and the other, I had to stay up until I had finished it. I must now get my hands on the next book and also start reading all the various meta which I have been carefully avoiding.

( Some spoilers, I think. )

In terms of fannish expression, I was suddenly taken with a desire to make for myself a set of small jeweled pins to represent current and past major people, places, and events in my life. I feel like icon sets represent the same sort of thing for the LJ/DW people I know, and I am super curious what sorts of pins other people would have. I wouldn't mind seeing that spread around the fandom, with or without concept art. It may help that I was decanting a whole long bunch of buttons which no longer fit my Purple Hat into a drawer that night...

Today (Monday) I joined work with Lunch already in progress. There was some giggling. Later, I did some dredging through terrible ticketage, and came up with the yelly-faced conclusion that it's not just *any* tickets we're unexpectedly locked out of, but facilities tickets, which is just a motherfucker of a situation. In IRC, I used phrasing such as "clogged all the urinals with jolly ranchers" to illustrate the sort of situation that other people in the building would legitimately need to know about, but toned it down for the ticket.

Eventually it came almost four, and that saw both Mr. Zune and me in search of ice cream. We chatted by the fire pit. The Angry Tattooed Man came by, and was introduced to Mr. Zune. It may have been Thursday that he'd recommended http://www.yelp.com/biz/rabbits-foot-meadery-sunnyvale-3 to me. I need to do another compilation of Things Azz Should Not Do At Work, as those are often amusing.

After more whacking my face against my email and the thingy, it came time to go home. I was nearly actually all packed up by the time Purple came over. (I had also figured out a thing to do with shelves, and the loon head was proudly displayed.) We chatted in the parking lot. My knees started to get mad, so we walked all the way down to Vash, and chatted some more. Ducks are terrible parents. Our geese, for all the evil inherent in the species, were good parents, and Friendly was friendly and Tou-Tou was loyal.

I explained some context around how much Thursday's casual treatment of the speech-crash-with-napkin-conversation had meant to me, including some terrible generalities about Shawn as a conversationalist. And yet, Shawn is the terrible ex I'm still willing to speak to. I explained the time BJ and Darkside met, and BJ's takeaway from the encounter. (Darkside is a half-inch taller than I am, and at the time I believe he might have been pushing 120 when soaking wet. Scrawny little geekboy. BJ tops six foot, and has a good 30+ pounds on Darkside. Somehow, BJ left with the impression of a guy who towered over him by at least an inch, and who could absolutely take him.)

It's the terrible exes who get the wacky stories. I gave a brief tour through some of my excellent to not-so-bad exes (and the two reading this? Excellent.)

I got to the takeaway place 10 minutes before official closing, but after they'd turned off the lights (it was, after all, a slow Monday night). I got a bit extra for my troubles, though the selection was what it was. They seemed mildly pleased to have an extra sale and that much less waste.

So it was even later by the time I drove home, and we know how that went. I did check the mailbox on my way up from the laundry. No stickers yet.

I stayed up a bit late Wednesday night because duty called. (Duty in the form of Yuletide. Love to Hippos.)

( Thursday morning. )

The walk back was refreshing. I wore the Festive Hat, fully lit up. That always gets noticed. I put it away, though, as next was the Dreaded Team Meeting. I told Purple that depending on how it went, I might or might not spend some of the subsequent time sobbing under someone's desk with vodka.

The bad news from Wednesday was that my occasionally frustrating but always well-meaning grandmanager the Randomizer, who has been in and out of the hospital over the past year-ish, will be stepping down entirely, due to illness. ( Read more... ) So while I'm concerned for him on a personal level because he's ill and stepping down because of illness is never a happy thing, I have every confidence business-wise.

So I came out of the team meeting more hopeful than I had been going in, which was not the outcome I was expecting. No vodka-desking for me!

I had the package tracking notification that the latest package in Syne's BPAL decant circle had arrived, so I set off to the mail room with a small bag of the good candy. It is always recommended to bring bribes of an edible nature to the fine folks of shipping & receiving, because they crave that mineral appreciate it. It was at this point that I learned that the notification is slightly inaccurate for our setup, as the arrive notice is when it hits our post office, and then our team goes over there in the morning and picks up the mail, and it didn't hit the post office endpoint until noonish. So it would arrive Friday. I delivered the candy anyway, admired their bubble wrap snowman, and walked back.

( Read more... )

Friday was another day. I woke up midway through my sleep cycle and discovered confirmation that the vendor was in the database. However, the mobile app didn't let me edit jack shit. I went back to sleep. When I woke up, I looked for a necklace, since the star necklace wasn't going to be a viable choice. The raven one looked good.

At work, the vendor was listed, so I spent a few minutes making sure the submission was set up and sent off for approval. Then I went to lunch, a few minutes after Purple's lunch call. Purple had not found time before work to get the tire seen to, but it's a very slow leak. No telling how long the nail has been in there.

I saw the table with Purple's usual crew. I saw the cluster of tables with a whole bunch of my team, including the rare sight of the Randomizer. I went with my team. Later, having finished my burrito and refilled my lemonade, I joined Purple's table. They understood.

I did a bit more candy-distribution. Having finished my bit of the terrifying procurement thing, I tracked down some software for Brutus Cochin (as that is a vaguely known thing and also vastly less expensive). The shipping & receiving guy came by with the mail cart, which included the latest decant circle. I had some more festive cheer for him. He hugged me.

Bash ensued. It took me longer to get there this time, and it was harder finding a table. I did score one, though! Purple joined me. "It's not like your hat is visible over the wall or anything," he teased. He claimed the sort-of-occupied-looking chair after I reassured him that the reason it looked sort of occupied was because I was scaring off chair-vultures. Radius and R joined us. R was late on account of a meeting, and then had to run off to wrap up before dashing off somewhere else. Radius had a bug to be stomped. Mr. Zune was off with family. lb was off with family. phone was home minding a sleeping possibly-teenager (we're a little uncertain as to the actual age of his kid). Later, Lennon Glasses Guy came by, and that was nice. Eventually we told tales of social engineering and various exploits and bugs we have known. Lennon Glasses Guy hadn't realized that I'd worked at the domain shop in the past, which was where two of my tales came from.

Midway through it all, I got an email that made me start swearing.

"Hi Azure, The user needs to be added to CC in order to make the ticket visible to them. Please refer the attached screenshot and confirm if we are good to close this ticket. Thanks, Helpdesk Guy."

Very fortunately, I am in a position where my input is respected as a bellwether of parts of my greater organization as regards this piece of fucking software. My response was brusque and to the point.

"Not acceptable. Tickets need to be visible to users not on the CC list."

Upon getting back to my desk, I added lb's Overlady, as she is the current torchbearer for our division's good fight. We've got her back, and the pitchforks. I feel like this one is important enough to hammer spikes in to any reasonably slowly moving surface and cling to them while yelling.

There has been a squeaking sound all up in our corner for days now. One of the facilities dudes has been investigating. Unfortunately his hearing doesn't go that high anymore. Most of my department can hear it. He located some vent louvers which were oscillating when they shouldn't ought to be, and a substantial leak from a pipe on the other end of the roof. The ventilation guys have been summoned.

Chatted with Rocky some. The time to be a dick about your nerf weaponry is not when you've just scratched someone's cornea. (This was a lead engineer in a place he used to work.) It was a rough work neighborhood. Rocky carried in a large nerf gun in a duffel bag, then introduced the engineer most likely to cause trouble to the business end of it...

Purple came by to head out. He chatted with Rocky and encouraged me to tell how Tay and I used to troll the roosters by crowing out of turn at them.

I'm not sure if Purple would describe himself as "a gamer", but via a link I sent him, he wandered into Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and reported back that he was impressed and generally in agreement with a lot of things, even though not 100% in agreement (and 100% agreement is rare for him). ( Read more... )

Bash was dinner enough for Purple, so he generally declined the concept and headed home. I picked up some groceries.

One of the great things about fictional multiverses is that sometimes, their universe is your universe, and if you want to do a thing which would ordinarily be a crossover or AU, it might even fit into the canon without altering the world in which they are, merely altering the universe they happen to be in.

Thus it was that I explained my fabulous hat to morbane (Sophie Hatter would whisper "fabulous trainwreck" to this collision between an Easter bonnet and a Pride parade) and we started plotting a thing where Sophie Hatter winds up in a Pride parade. Howell Jenkins is from Wales. Certainly a village in Wales might have itself an organization which might try to throw a Pride parade. Heh. Heh. Heh.


It's almost always a quieter day than it might otherwise be if Purple is out of the office. I wasn't entirely sure I felt like locating team members for lunch, even though when I have lunch with them I generally enjoy the process. So I tiptoed upstairs in the building off thattaway and joined lb's lunch table.

Beldorion was in the middle of some long-winded story or other which wound up being about knowing some guy who had been heavily involved in like doubleclick or something. One of the people I know less well at this particular lunch table started asking, well, don't you admire him?

Beldorion did not admire this guy. ( Read more... )


So there I was in IRC. The guy who had built the main IRC bot left the company some time ago, and someone else built a new one and then there was a funky data center migration issue (nobody knows what VM the thing was on originally, so after the migration, no one knows what server the thing went onto nor enough of the VM name to find it again, and if it belonged to an alumnus it may have been deleted) so the Lumberjack (a friend to #cupcake currently working out of a home office in Japan, who was recently talking about his need to build something or split a bunch of wood lying around) is re-setting-up a copy of the first guy's bot.

One of the features of the bot is financial market prices. You say ".stock GOOG" and it gives you Google's stock. This is about how that went:

Lumberjack: .stock AAPL
arewethereyet_bot: [ERROR 259 at LINE 57465534511 / NO ACCESS WITHOUT STANDARD FCP/1 20/GM.]
devpan_snarker: lol
( Read more... )


I take it as a distinct item of success that I declared that I wanted a particular dish with a side of fresh cucumber pickle salad and then went right ahead and did that thing. All that needed preparing was the cucumber, but this time I had the energy to do it and get the other groceries put away promptly (not just the cold stuff) and that was dinner. So often I want a thing, but then the energy expended to get it makes preparing it immediately impossible, and then I eat something else so I get the energy, and then I don't want that anymore at the next meal opportunity. So yay me for energy.


Tomorrow, the Party Commandant starts the plotting process for the team conference, at least, the part where we're having meetings. The wheel turns, and ages come and pass.

01:23 Friday, 05 December, 2014
Purple, Wednesday: Why is there sugar in your office?
Me: Frosting.
Purple: Ohhhhhh.

Manager, Thursday: Is that sugar?
Me: Yes. The lemon frosting for those cookies.
Manager: Ohhhh, and there's the lemon juice right next to it. ... I don't think anyone's ever made frosting at work before.
Me: Using breakroom butter!
Manager: *breaks down giggling*


22:40 Friday, 05 December, 2014
Today was the A-Team lunch to get briefing from some of the various facilities team. It happens quarterly. I had a few questions regarding the helldesk software. The new manager may be able to kick ass and take names.

I had been unable to find the festive headdress I was thinking of, but I did find another one. The one I was thinking of was sort of offensively festive. This one is merely very, very, very assertively festive. So much so that various people at work told me that I should start selling them. They have not, I believe, seen some of my other hats.

I may, in fact, have a bit of a hat problem. *eyes no fewer than three hats on top of the bookshelf*

( Read more... )

23:47 Monday, 01 December, 2014
There are helldesk software shenanigans. The rollout doesn't seem to have gone super perfectly.

00:34 Wednesday, 03 December, 2014
Rain!! It is good to have rain here. Other Bay Area denizens are not quite sure what to do with this wet stuff falling from the sky. Various teammates decided that they would be taking all their morning meetings from home until the commute from SF unclogged somewhat.

Purple made the call for lunch a little later than the 12:30 usual. I didn't have anything to wrap up at that moment other than locking my workstation, so it took me a shorter time than usual to hit the cafeteria. I popped up in the grill line right behind Lennon Glasses Guy, who had clearly been standing there for a bit, as his chicken was looking nice and grilled on the grill. Then I saw Purple breeze past, looking a little darker and harder to spot than usual because he was wearing his jacket inside (because rain).

"Hey, have you seen [Purple] today?" Lennon Glasses Guy asked, about five seconds later.
"Yeah, he's right over there," I said. Heh.

We ate inside, because of the rain. One of the guys had snagged us a table in the part of the cafeteria we usually don't venture into, partly because it's usually pretty crowded and there are a lot of us, but the main area had all the long tables claimed, so this was our best bet.

Purple asked one of the guys on our end of the table if he'd like to join the crew that was headed for Mockingjay 1, but he'd already seen it that weekend. Purple inquired after how it was, without excess spoilers; the guy had been pleased by its general fidelity to the spirit of the book. Purple has friends -- well, he has acquaintances -- who will cheerfully supply spoilers a-plenty.

The gingersnaps have been disappearing. Brutus Cochin apparently loves gingersnaps. Hmf. (Other people have been trying them also. Had they still been uneaten, I'd have thrown the rest of them out, but as it stands I'll see what's there tomorrow.)

Had to explain the provenance of the jacket to Brutus and the Party Commandant, who had heard about the lab-stealing shenanigans.

radius is not having a super great time with the helpdesk rollout. He's not got some of the same things I have, and That Incoherent Twit hasn't been helping much.

One of the guys on a team whose IRC channel is publicly logged internally, and is often full of fun stuff like a debate about whose stare is creepier, Jimmy Wales in that Wikipedia donation campaign, or the "new" (~2010) Frank the Goat 404, has been having a hard time with some stuff. Stuff which requires the high-speed application of nerf. I of course had in my cube a sawed-off pool noodle, because that's the sort of thing that I keep around. I found a sheet of paper with one blank side and nothing sensitive on the other side, and that I didn't particularly need anymore, and wrote:

"Interoffice Delivery - Weird Size Parcel" and the usual sorts of columns that one gets on those envelopes. I filled them out. Then I wrote "LART" on the sawed-off pool noodle, and wrapped the delivery form around the LART. The delivery guy (who I carefully keep supplied with candy and shoot the breeze with) was still there. I handed over the weird size parcel. He gleefully declared that he wanted to see the guy's face. Heh.

Purple recruited R to join us at the movie. We headed out with what we thought would be plenty of time. I got caught in a traffic jam which eventually involved a fire truck coming up behind; I detoured after that, and got there with some delay. Purple and R and Mr. Antisocial Butterfly were already there. I fetched popcorn while they saved me a seat. Unfortunately the seat they saved was in the middle of the house (though there was no one else in that aisle). I left a seat between me and Mr. Antisocial Butterfly because I don't know him quite that well yet, though he did take me up on my offer to share popcorn a bit, and he very thoughtfully handed me napkins.

Movie was good. It did not set off too many of my ( possibly spoily ) triggers, which was one of the possibilities for Mockingjay. (Catching Fire, the book, sets off Shawn-related surveillance triggers. It's a fun series for me to read.)

Mr. Antisocial Butterfly and Purple and R and I stood around talking for a while after the movie, then we all wandered carward. By a happy (and actually unplanned) happenstance, Purple and I had parked in the same row, so we stood chatting a while longer. It was only sprinkling a little. We saw two guys walk up, collect googlebikes from where some were parked, and wander off; we saw them bike past, dinging their bells, then we saw them walking back, carrying what appeared to be burritos.

Since Purple hasn't read the books, he had some other ideas for what might happen. ( Read more... )

Since I had not read the refrigerator (something that I keep getting on Purple about, as there's often news about events there) I hadn't realized what tomorrow's shenanigans are all about. My bad! Purple will probably keep teasing me about that forever. He does get heads-up via email that I don't get, as I am not among the anointed. Previously some of these things were making their way into my life via my erstwhile Overlady's calendar, but after I got helpdesk to turn off her broken calendar because I kept getting the invites for it even after her email address went away, of course that was no longer an option. (Oh, IT. Is there anything you can't make somewhat worse?)

Me knocking on my head for "knock on wood" resulted in dick jokes, and discussions of the logistics of owning an OEM dick and wearing pants. Apparently tight jeans and boxers can result in pinching. The more you know!

This year's "Poultry Slam" episode of This American Life promises that no poultry was harmed in the making of the episode. This implies that while there might be animal peril, there would not be animal harm. That is kind of incorrect -- Act 2 is about police shooting and killing a turkey which was terrorizing a neighborhood, and Act 3 is about the attempt to naturally raise meat geese to think that they're wild. I would have been 100% okay with the entire episode without the assurances at the beginning, but since that assurance was there, I wanted to let the internet know that it is in fact a lie, and the turkey bit is actually kind of grisly.