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My firm had fired and hired an entire department’s worth of people in one of the areas to which I don’t pay attention.  Any large turnover brings a change to the tenor of the building and the make-up of the fridge.  There’s more Eastern music emanating from cubes and there is much less yogurt in the fridge to the point where one can again make out the bottom shelf.  This last bit led to either a revelation or coincidence that one of my coworkers has a Batman lunch box.

Not actual box, but looks like it

This single accessory makes its owner more interesting than most people in my building combined.  I must find him or her and see which category this person falls into: new friend, or the greatest of let-downs, a hipster.

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Being a furry could be a choice, some genetically transmitted paraphilia, the next step in the teenage angsty iconoclastic arms race, or something else entirely but regardless of cause it is a lifestyle with which I feel fully in my rights to raise an eyebrow to.  My TF2 community has dealt with its fair share and I’m disappointed in that there seems to be a coin flip’s rather than a dice roll’s chance that the person in question is an absolute dick.  To not single them out, these also seem to be the asshole odds on people that claim to be high school students, independent musicians, or worse of all, people who have run other gaming communities.

One of our current community members includes a link to a fur affinity site in his steam profile and it terminated in a page of such content as to make me wish their community were either larger or smaller instead of the uncomfortable middle land it currently occupies; large enough to be a recognized group but not yet large enough to have experts in the field and large sub-communities.  After I stopped laughing at the word “fursonna”, I was disappointed by the combinations that people had chosen.   People cleaved to the powerful, the mythical, and the bizarre but there were no capybaras (adorable), dik-diks (even more adorable), or megatheria (extinct) among their lot.  The combinations were also seemingly uninspired.  Wow, an eagle and a lion… woooo, why not a combination of a cheetah and a three-toed sloth or dolphin with a bird of prey?  The former would be worthy of thought and the latter worthy of fear but these seem unexplored.

A friend of mine posits that the movement comes from the need to be “other” and with the advent of modernity, most regular wants are satiated so people are getting more creative.  This may be the case, but I have always been an advocate of realizing the here and now to the point where I may move to add a “fursonna” field to our our team’s roster page just so those of like mind can take a second and post “homo sapien” in defiance.  I wonder what patterns would emerge geographically.  Maybe there are more zebra and oryx furries in Africa and my wanted capybaras near the Andes.  Knowing that there was someone who chose adder, cuddle fish, or scorpion running about the Levant would make me smile and say “proper job”.

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The delight I experienced with each press of the Matias Tactile Pro keyboard’s keys is audible in the sense that for the first few times I squealed, and the keys are otherwise quite loud.  Loud to the point that Max won’t sit in my room when I’m typing, to the point where I can’t listen to music while typing, and to the point where my housemates ask me to close my door if I need to type after 11 PM.  For a few days, I was in keyboard heaven but the hyphen key wouldn’t work properly, nor would the function keys so I emailed the manufacturer.  The first email outlined the problem, the second email provided description elements, and the reply was a phone call.

Him: Mr. Robinson, can you read me off the numbers on the back?
Me: Sure.  *reads off numbers*
Him: Are there 3 stickers on it?
Me: Yeah.
Him: I was afraid of this.  You’ve been victim of keyboard counterfeiting.  Someone has sold you a Korean knockoff of our Taiwanese made keyboard.
Me: Ok, I bought it through Amazon, I’ll just return it and buy another.
Him: That’s not an option.  I know it’s letting the bad guys win but I just can’t let this keyboard out into the wild.  The next person may not call us, and it will sit there, performing poorly, harming our name.  Mr. Robinson, would you be willing to send it to us in exchange for credit towards a new keyboard?
Me: Sure.  I picture you guys doing forensic analysis on it or something and then plunging it into a demon-mouthed furnace as you stand around in robes sprinkling holy water as demons are freed.
Him: We have a keyboard shredder.
Me: That’s amazing.  I will totally send you the keyboard.
Him: You sound like a just and honorable person.  We will send you a new keyboard for the price difference of what we retain for and what you paid if you promise you will destroy the keyboard.
Me: I will find a suitably neat way of destroying it and post it on youtube.  I think I can make a cannon that can…
Him: Iiiiiiiiiiiii’d prefer you not do that.  Something tells me, not everyone will pick up that it was counterfeit and will just see a video of you destroying one of our keyboards because it didn’t work.
Me: Gotcha.

I’m going to find a good way of destroying the keyboard, I just haven’t figured out how yet.  My fingers await a mechanical keyboard that will not pollute with ill-gotten mechanical switches and keys molded by the hand of Satan.

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The firm for which I work was holding an all-day seminar about changing work place culture and to make the environment more welcoming, the front of our building was decked out with large bowls of fruit including pears, which I rarely see at work functions.  Pears may be my favorite fruit, and if not favorite, they’re at least top shelf along with bananas, Granny Smith apples, and clementine oranges.  I enjoy them more than most people and it’s also the only fruit I like overripe.  I’ll eat a banana when it has the consistency of a plantain but pears need to be tender to the point where they’re bruised by light pokes and braising insults.  Each time I walked by the lobby two more pears disappeared into my lab coat and I racked up about 16 by the end of the day.  After the seminar series was over, I talked to my coworkers who, on the whole, thought the event went better than expected and “didn’t involve falling asleep too much”.  The visit probably cost us in the mid-six figures from what I gather but to me it was entirely worth it because of new pear stockpile.  The rest of my firm got life-affirming advice and the tools to become the best person they could be.  They can keep that.  I have pears.

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My mother’s quitting smoking again and each time she does some basic skill set is temporarily lost until she feels nicotine-free.  This time, she warned me, it was her math skills and she’d been making numerical oopsies for the last four days.  She insisted that event tickets she bought for her and my dad reduced the amount of spousal support she was due rather than increasing it and after a dinner where I tipped $10 on a $50 food charge was met with “why the 50% tip?” I realized she was right.  After returning to my mother’s house:

Me: Happy day after mother’s day (that’s when we traditionally celebrate to avoid crowds).
Her: would you like to come in?
Me: I need to to use the rest room and I dare say your toilet is too…. dainty.
Her: Oh, ok then.
*I walk out, she sees me to the door*
Her: BE CAREFUL!

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A friend of mine is going to be a biological father soon and I wanted to thank him for the many times he’s housed me while I was traveling by sending him a care package consisting of the things he’ll need as a daddy like cookies and girly magazines hidden inside of parenting magazines.  The latter was more complicated than I thought as it was no mean task to just remove pages and paste the new magazine in.  First, the magazines had to be shimmed to the same size and the band saw did not do nearly as elegant a job as I would have wished.  Instead, a rotary trimmer was used and then gaps or misses were fixed up a with a razor blade.  Then, I tried one of two tactics:

Tactic #1:  Glue job – I cut out the appropriate number of pages from the parenting magazine to make room for the squared off girly magazine pages and doused both sides with a heavy coating of rubber cement before joining the two together and clamping it in place.

Tactic #2: Embedded Magazine – In this simpler scenario, I kept the entire inner magazine whole and just pasted it inside after shimming.

The first method appears to look better but the second delivers a much better binding.  Keep this in mind next time you need to hide one magazine inside another.

The NSFW Part

Continue reading

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10 AM to 11 AM – Polish sunglasses, remove scratches
11 AM to 12 PM – Very leisurely salad production and consumption
12 PM to 3 PM – I don’t really remember, but it wasn’t terribly productive
3 PM to 5 PM – Clean out Wanda with a compressor
5 PM to 7 PM – Set up Crashplan, set overly complicated backup regime
7 PM to 10 PM – Bake cookies to send people as thank you gifts
10 PM to 2 AM – Bullshit on Vent, use treadmill

Weekends. Are. Awesome.

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My brother turns 30 in a few days and he’s not 30 yet in my mind having “just” landed a reasonable job (really 3 years) and “just” getting married (really 5 years) of which neither matters as the calendar is unapologetic in keeping track of time.  I talked to him a few times over the evening, mostly about photography, as he and I have little to talk about besides our parents and sometimes computers.  I brought up something that’d popped up recently:

Me: A friend asked me to be the photographer at his wedding.  What do you think I should charge?
Him: Run.  Get as far from that shit as you can and then keep running.  Unless he’s blind, say no.
Me: Why?  He seems to like my pictures and his standards will probably be forgiving.
Him: If my best friend was the photographer at my wedding and screwed them up, I would remove his balls with my bare hands.  I have been in 1 fight in my life and while i like guns I’m not violent.  But the man who fucks up my wedding photos should use the money I paid him to buy a life insurance policy because he would be a dead man.
Me: Maybe I’ll decline and just offer to do some portraits.
Him: Now you’re thinking.

Maybe my brother’s wiser than I thought.

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For the past few days, I’ve been working on getting a jukebox plugin functioning on my team’s servers which would allow players to stream music to their client while playing.  After doing what I thought was the correct setup work, I kept getting bizarre errors which I thought came down to low volume and odd characters in names.  Air Supply was then loaded as it was the first alphabetically and upon not hearing anything, I wanted to drag someone in to make sure it wasn’t just meuntil I thought about the possible outcome.  Me dragging another man into an otherwise empty server so I could play Air Supply’s “All Out of Love” to him.

Maybe it’s better that the plugin wasn’t working.

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“Stress to muscle failure to maximize mass gain”, got it, old SGU episode; lift until you can’t lift any more.  Done.  Arms hurt.  Got it.  Later, my nose itched.  *lifts finger to about mouth level.  Arm gives out.*  *tries again with other hand*  Fail.

*pan head left to right*  AHA!

*scratch nose against 600 page Objective-C programming book on desk*

Let’s see you do that, Ruby on Rails.