https://blorbo.social/@azurelunatic/113365361076765740

Did a photo shoot today for the cover of the blank book. Is it the best? Who knows. But I like it.

...

So, pretty much the only place you see Palamades without Camilla is in the River bubble, where his only source of entertainment is the same 3 books. The one he talks about is "The Necromancer's Marriage Season", which is a crappy romance which I immediately discerned to be in the Regency-adjacent category.

Therefore, to distinguish the costume from any other grey-robed bespectacled wizard type in the absence of a Camilla, we need the book.

I have been collecting objects for a photoshoot for this book's cover for An While. I didn't put all the things in the box that I meant to put in, but I think I got a pretty decent picture all the same.

"Interesting shirt," I said politely* to Purple as he sat down at lunch.

* It was not actually polite. I should, instead, have made no remark.

"Interesting? I thought it was actually pretty bland," he said. 'It' was a heather grey and burgundy sweatshirt with a polo collar, in a pattern that only made sense if you were an athletic supporter and those were your team colors.

"Well... what I meant was, that is not the sort of thing you usually wear and it makes you look like Soccer Coach Dad," I said.

We proceeded to clown around with the character of Donald Trump, Soccer Coach Dad ("Ice cream is for winners!") and Hippie Soccer Coach Dad. Good times were had by all.

Apparently he has a number of cool-weather shirts that he doesn't get the chance to wear very often in Silicon Valley weather. What he misses are sweaters. I narrowly avoided walking into a wall at the thought of Purple in (possibly terrible) sweaters.


This is not a picture of the actual shirt. This is a picture of a similar shirt with the pattern colored in. The back of the shirt, of course, is plain grey, adding to the confusion when you see it from angles other than straight on.

(pic)

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Apartment remains cluttered but Less Dire. Attempted to get up at a vaguely diurnal time. It didn't happen. Went to work. Noticed that my friend the Singing Project Manager had dropped off one of her spare ice packs with me. (She'd advertised on [off-topic], because she gets one of those recipe subscription things, and they come with hella ice packs.)

Purple had the thing he was doing with new hires, so I dragged lunch back to my desk. I poked at conference stuff. My manager had questions about some equipment ordering, and dispatched me to go talk to our desktop support guys and ask how exactly the best (for them, since they get the brunt) way is to order a hella number of equipment. I detoured by the desk of the Singing PM and gave her some chocolate. She said if [off-topic] hadn't claimed the rest of the ice packs by the end of the day, she'd leave them with me. Local helpdesk was not in. I dropped some diplomacy off with Mr. Zune, and agreed on a time for milkshake.

I came back to #cupcake to see:
(14:31) radius: [local cafeteria] milkshakescapade at 2:40-ish?
(14:36) radius: Maybe that was not sufficient advance notice... 3:00ish instead?
(14:37) zune: 3ish sounds good to me
(14:37) ajl: 3ish was the time I proposed to zune, so sounds good to me also

radius joined us, and we soaked up a bit of sun, then went to see whether the new couch in the quiet room had been cleaned. However, there was someone being quiet in there (on something with a bright screen) so we detoured to the pinball room instead. Mr. Zune played a round of pinball, and radius and I demonstrated our mutual incompetence at foosball. We didn't keep score. The game was eventually called on account of me collapsing against the wall in giggles.

( Couch. )

The quiet room was empty, so we poked our heads in. The stain is still visible, but less visible. radius tested whether it was him-sized (he is hella tall). It was! Instead of napping, though, he let me in on the method of getting up to the mail room ceilings (counter-scrambling at dawn).

#cupcake:
(15:09) pkeeper: heee
(16:19) ***ajl eyes pkeeper
(16:19) ***ajl proposed milkshake, not propositioned marriage :-P
(16:21) pkeeper: well, unless his GF is REALLY open minded, I kinda
figured out what you meant
(16:23) ***ajl isn't looking for that level of committment at the moment
(16:29) pkeeper: that said I don't want to venture what a milkshake proposal might be a euphemism for...
(16:29) ***ajl whacks in pkeeper's general direction with a pool noodles
(16:29) zune: oh my...
(16:30) ***radius waves a crayfish.

Conference stuff is poised on the edge of the call-for-papers, and the flurry associated therewith. I tripped over a bit of Slack UI weirdness and dutifully reported it to their people. Since "their people" and the set of people allowed to read my locked stuff has a slight intersection, while the account is in my workname, I signed it, "Love, Azure Jane L." in the hopes that if the intersection did hit, it would be a friendly little cupcake moment. I also sent a somewhat more exasperated request-for-improvement to not!Facebook, because I'd just run into a thing which didn't work on mobile. Pro tip: when your fucking dialog overflows the goddamn edge of the motherfucking screen, it helps absolute none when you can neither scroll nor fucking resize. I figured I'd just rotate the screen. It was still too goddamn wide. Snotfuckers. I ran into that bit while eating ice cream in the courtyard, and my sudden explosion of profanity clued Mr. Zune and radius into the likelihood that either there was an email from somewhere in the depths of the helldesk, or I'd run into another fine little bug.

Earlier in the day, Researcher Sweatervest had sent out a New Year's email announcing that he'd left honey dates on the collaboration table, with many pictures of ... rams? goats? sheep? and general celebratory sentiments. The actual leaving of dates was somewhat more afternoon-ish. One of the designers had been sad about missing the dates when she hadn't seen any earlier, so I brought one for her. She traded me for huckleberry saltwater taffy. I saved one for Purple.

Outlook Web Access and Firefox are not getting along. Specifically, when you put deliberate whitespace in an email, OWA + Firefox don't let you, instead of going along with the whole non-breaking-space idea or whatever. The fix is some back-end thing that has to be applied to the server. Earlier this week, I came back and found that the mofo had been closed. I re-opened it and requested that we be given insight to whatever it is that they're using to track the issue. Yesterday I called and asked for an update and to be added as a watcher. This morning, I found they'd closed the mofo again. radius said this afternoon that it was open. I looked and it was still closed. Turns out, the parent ticket was closed while the second child incident was open. I called the helpdesk to find out what the ever-loving *fuck*. I was not especially convinced that the helpdesk guy's claims that the closure of the containing unit would leave the internal items in a state to be acted on, as it had the distinct sound of this-fact-i-just-made-up. But it was re-opened, so that was good.

You can add custom emoji to your Slack instance. One of the guys has already added Kool-Aid Man. I was looking for pictures relevant to pool noodles when I ran into something that I couldn't emojify, but that did make me laugh for longer than 15 seconds, and made me feel all warm inside. I'm part of a community. Then I had to explain "LART" to Purple.

The Singing PM came by with the unclaimed ice packs. Unfortunately, one of them was sliced. I'd just cleaned up the leaking gel from a hole poked into the first one (and patched it with packing tape). The new one got a glorious mess of gel all over, and after disposing of it, we repaired to the bathroom to get it off us, our clothes, and her scissors. I reported back to IRC that ice packs were the new couchbuttering.

Someone has driven some sort of power lift inside the building. Apparently there's about 2-3" of clearance for it to get through the double doors, and you have to tear down a cube or two to get it inside. It was a topic of discussion on [off-topic], so Lennon Glasses Guy and I went to see it. Later, I came back to take pictures for posterity. It's not every day, etc. etc.

( Lift. )

It felt like a Thursday, even though it was the Wednesday of a week shortened on the front end. Purple walked me out as per usual. He walked me all the way to my car, as my knees and ankle were all feeling somewhat poorly. There was silliness, including South Park on plastic surgery, some inadvisable forms of counterweight bra, and some relatively serious breast reduction chatter.

I was short on laundry, so I put it in despite wanting to make a relatively early night of it. Then I vacuumed and tidied a little bit more, both while the laundry was going and after. Soon, it will be time for showering and snoozing, and then see what time I can get up in the morning.

Such wrangling with helpdesk. First the guy with the Fear & Loathing poster who fled the Monkey House had an entanglement with helpdesk.

Things I did not say to Helpdesk included: "Just because I write 'Dear Santa, I've been a very good Lunatic this year. Please send me a shiny new Macbook with all the trimmings! Here is a picture!' on the whiteboard, doesn't mean that Santa will have gotten the message; your ass is supposed to know how things are assigned to Logistics, and just because Chip wrote a Dear Logistics note in the ticket doesn't mean that they got it."

Things I did do: give Fear & Loathing some chocolate: some for him, some for Chip.

Lennon Glasses Guy is dabbling gently at bitcoin mining. I had some "helpful" ideas. Purple pointed out that the usual suspects for bitcoin mining are probably against all parts of the concept of a solar-and-bike-powered miner.

After lunch, a helpdesk guy had just pinged me about a particular contentious open ticket when a senior engineer commenced letting off steam about a known issue in IRC.

The helpdesk guy thought I was talking about another thing. I helped him see what I truly meant. He had thought I meant I couldn't see un-triaged tickets at all, which was wrong. What I meant was, if a person makes a ticket and adds me to the cc, I need to see it before it's triaged. He tried to make such a ticket and failed because that is not a thing helpdesk can do (it makes them triage first). I walked him through creating it like a normal user. He sounded shocked and hurt when the ticket he created didn't appear on my board.

He had to go rethink everything. Next, the very angry engineer. It was a known issue: helldesk notification emails were sending bad links.

Senior Engineer: WTF is with helldesk? I don't understand any part of it, and the link they gave me is 404-ing.
Azz: hang on, I'm chatting with helpdesk about another thing right now, but after that I will be right with you.
Senior Engineer: wtf wtf wtf do they even have QA?
Azz: *grimly* I think we're their QA.
Senior Engineer: *further detail about the 404 shenanigans*
Azz: Ugh, right, that one. I've CC-ed you on the ticket I've already filed, here is the ticket number, here is the link to the less-broken view of helldesk, and here is how you get back and forth.
Senior Engineer: I think you mean, *you're* their QA.
Senior Engineer: Thanks, this is a lot less broken. I'll bookmark that.

Much later, Researcher Polkadot said something hilarious in email. A crudely made animation ensued.

( animated gif )

Later still, the guy who empties the bins came around. A brief but surreal chat about names ensued.

Purple was summoned. We headed out.

I do not know what the m2ma would say about off label uses for extra large finger cuffs, but they had best not have splinters.

Purple cannot have fruit punch on account of it punching back.

(image hosting is hard, y0.)
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