Housemate: Terry, I have an amazing idea.
Me: Have you been drinking?
Housemate: Maybe I have, maybe I have a lot, but hear me out.
Me: Ok.
Housemate: I think we should get your dad another cat. Sneakers may not be around forever.
Me: So, what’s your idea?
Housemate: I’ll go to the animal shelter, find the cutest kitten I can that still has its claws and take it back to my girlfriend’s house. We’ll play with it until it’s good and tired, bring it over here, put it on your dad’s lap. It’ll fall asleep and your father will have no choice but to keep it after being hit by adorable.
Me: What if the cat doesn’t fall asleep?
Housemate: No choice.
Me: What if Sneakers doesn’t like the other cat?
Housemate: No choice.
Me: What if it’s a short-hair breed, I think I’m allergic to those?
Housemate: *whispers* No choice.
Month: July 2011
Philadelphia Walkabout
Next week, 15 folks from my Team Fortress 2 team will be at the Radisson-Warwick in Philadelphia and I really have no intimate knowledge of where the heck we’re going, so my camera and I made our way into Market East Station to figure out how long it’d take to get everywhere and I took pictures along the way.
After exiting Market East station, I had a person ask me for 35 cents to get a breakfast sandwich. Normally I’m willing to engage panhandlers up to about $5.00 if there’s a bit of showmanship but 35 cents proved to be an amount so small and also the exact amount of change I had on me that the asker was more rendering a service than an inconvenience. I hate having change in my pockets.
Near Broad and Samsom
Philadelphia is a polite city in that I think it is kind to the new arrival as it has a reasonable scope. The buildings on Market at Liberty Place are the only buildings near 60 stories and they rise gently from the surrounding terrain. One can see both the base and top of the building at the same time at a reasonable distance and the towers have breathing space. There are unoccupied spaces and broad sidewalks in most places. Compare this to midtown Manhattan where one is perpetually in an urban canyon where one feels not like the buildings rise around them but that the pedestrian is somehow buried beneath the actual cityscape.
Holy crap, unoccupied space.
Gentle Scale
The combination of reasonable sized buildings and open spaces along with most of the building boom occurring during the heyday of glass facades results in some neat light effects. Buildings reflect off of buildings off of buildings making the streets around City Hall the only ones where I’ve ever felt the term “sun-dappled” applied like some thousand foot tall semi-invisible banyan tree towered over the skyline.
Sun-Dappled #1
Sun-Dappled #2
Normally, a hall of mirrors shows you nothing as meaningless reflection bounces off of meaningless reflection, I don’t believe that applies to the second photo above. The light moves back and forth enough that the repeated iterations of scattering and diffusion create a painterly effect (rendering it to a tone-mapped HDR didn’t hurt either).
I feel I’ve been remiss in not spending more time at ground-level in Philadelphia, a place where I can get a day of photography, lunch, and train fare for under $30.00. I hope to fix this.
Obligatory Shot of William Penn Statue
Lens Maintenance
Tomorrow I do a walk-through of a Philadelphia in advance of a team meet-up and I wanted to take a bunch of pictures. The week had been long so I kicked back and decided to clean all my lens filters with more care than I normally use so instead of using just a piece of low lint paper and isopropyl alcohol, I used Windex and cotton swabs. I spent a good 10 minutes on each side and after two hours was quite happy with the result until one of the filters dried and was covered in streaks, streaks that didn’t seem to wipe out. I went to the manufacturer’s web page and found this:
“When cleaning this polarized multi-coat filter DO NOT use commercial glass cleaning agents as this may result in the removal of the polarizing coating. Only use water or rubbing [isopropyl] applied with a lint free cloth.”
So, while I engaged in destroying a lens filter, at least I engaged in the artisan, old-world, hand-crafted destroying of a lens filter.
Wawa Hostage Negotiation
A night’s rest was replaced with what only felt like a long nap so I went into work at 3 AM feeling a bit peckish. I stopped for a sandwich on the way and chose the simple divinity of the 6″ meatball sandwich which was under the auspices of Wawa’s Hoagiefest promotion. On checkout, the price was incorrect:
Me: I don’t think this is the right rate for this sandwich. The signage says $3.49, this says $4.25.
Cashier: Hm… I don’t know, let me ask my manager. *asks manager*
Manager: Ok, sir. Just stay with us and we’ll fix it. *stares at receipt* It’s tax. It’s a prepared food, there’s tax. It’s tax.
Me: That doesn’t make sense, that’d imply that New Jersey had a 25% tax [I goofed, 21%] on food.
Manager: Sir, please stay calm. I’m just trying to think. The promotions change on Thursdays, maybe it’s no longer covered and we have to take the sign down.
Me: Well, the sandwich is actually covered by both the expiring and newly incoming deal, so that doesn’t make sense. Can you give me a soft pretzel and we’ll call it square?
Manager: We don’t want to do anything rash like that. We’ll reverse the charge, manually plug in the cost, and you’ll get your 75 cents. Stupid technology, always slowing things down.
Me: I’d say on balance, technology is pretty awesome.
Manager: *narrows eyes* You wouldn’t remember.
How do these people escape into public and why is it that I seem to find all of them?
Shared Hosting Is Masochism
Team Interrobang runs off of a standard Dreamhost shared hosting instance that’s on a box that probably runs 2000 other sites. This corner of the Internet is fine and adequate unless you do something to upset the apple cart like install a shoutbox, do a vBulletin update, or hit F5 too quickly. I had thought I learned my lesson from a previous case where doing a vBulletin update cause the server to burst into flames but apparently the act of running a DB backup was enough to max-out the Triscuit that was being used as a processor within the cardboard box of a server we shared. I contacted Dreamhost to have them cut the DB connections and learned “whenever we close the DB threads new ones are opened just as fast, there’s nothing we can do.” Really? You’re physically incapable of temporarily shutting down my tiny virtual instance? The irony of this being brought about by a backup operation is what I found delicious.
So, I did what they were unable to do and closed each open DB thread by clicking the “Kill” button in phpmyadmin a little more than 400 times. Not fun, but necessary. Each time I hit this button, my internal homunculus put a tick mark in the “times I’ve wanted to drop shared hosting” tally section of my brain.  On the plus side, I was able to use iMovie to make a little Youtube video after not having slept for 28 hours.
10K Day
I was born 10000 days ago. Hazaa.
10 years ago today I was getting ready to leave for Florida Sea Base, a Boy Scout High Adventure Base. I weighted 320 lbs then as reflected by my medical form. Today I weigh about 318 so I’ve managed to lose about 2 lbs in 10 years. At the same time, in June of 2009, I weighted 420 lbs so I’ve also lost 100 lbs in a little over two years. Very small displacement, very large distance.
I celebrated this confluence by singing show tunes at the Ockanickon Scout Reservation Magic Tournament. No one would join in Brotherhood of Man.
Cleaning Visit
Sleep did not come easily or lightly and I went to work around 3 AM returning home a bit before noon. At home, my house was being purified by the sacred attendants of Merry Maids who were tearing a sanitizing swath through the second floor. They were at their task, and my office was designed off limits, so I did what any reasonable person would do and distracted them with a missed spot in the master bath, grabbed my pillow from my room and slept on the floor of my office. This would have gone smoothly but max was fascinated by having someone to sleep with on the floor, so excited in fact that he refused to lie down and kept walking in and out of my room, requiring me to open the door each time. I think the housecleaning team became alert to what I was doing as each door open was met by a slightly more disheveled me with a few more carpet marks on my face.
At the end, I had to cut a check and the service people left. I shambled towards my bed, pillow under arm, but had trouble sleeping. The smell of clean was keeping me up. It smells nice.
Ink Pricing
Dad: What did you do today?
Me: I made a bunch of prints for work. I was going to do five but I ran out of pink ink.
Dad: How much is a replacement?
Me: $12.97 for a 1/3 of a fluid oz or about $4500 a gallon.
Dad: What’s it made of?
Me: Well, four things, I think. Pigment, and some sort of semi-aqueous fluid as a suspension medium. The 3rd and 4th ingredients make up the lion’s share and are unicorn blood and profit margin. I’m not sure what the ratio is though.
Robinson Humane Society
Sneakers turns 16 this year (we got him shortly after Yitzhak Rabin died) and has aged somewhat gracefully for a cat. He still stalks the night but is much more included to spend his evening sitting in a lawn chair or beneath or tiny Japanese maple. He can jump from the floor to the countertop, although he doesn’t like to, and has no qualms meowing to wake me up to serve as his elevator. He no longer picks fights or has gotten better at hiding as he no longer returns home with claw marks on his head or bloody patches but he can still be enticed to play along sometimes and attack a shoe lace. But, over the last year, he’s started to pee on my father’s clothing. I try to claim this is a sign of endearment and my father took these urine blasts in stride as he himself isn’t as young as he used to be and he himself having had his fair share of urinary issues though of late it’s become almost weekly. A friend’s cat also started peeing on things and it turned out his cat was diabetic, requiring twice daily shots of insulin. I brought this up to my dad:
Me: Dad, I think the cat may have diabetes.
Dad: Oh?
Me: Yeah, a friend’s cat started peeing on his things and it turned out to be diabetes. I mean, it’d take a vet to do the diagnosis but I think we should take the cat in.
Dad: Ok, what’s the treatment course? He’s been a good cat.
Me: It’s not much, just two insulin shots twice a day for the rest of his life.
Dad: Nope. Put him down.
Me: You’re not even going to…
Dad: Not a chance. Not going to stab a cat twice a day.
Me: What if we…
Dad:Â We can put him down there.
Considering that Sneakers barely tolerates us in what he perceives to be his house, I have no doubt the answer would be the same if the shoe were on the other foot.
Legitimate Customers
Wanda needed an oil change so we took a lunch at Jiffylube during which I noticed a stack of adverts from Jiffylube. Many retail firms ask attendants to collect address information which can be awkward. This Jiffylube had a good way of dealing with that.
They can all vote in Chicago