Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

It’s reached the point in the year where frozen berries in the morning smoothie are no longer just a tasty addition (fruit! vitamins! flavor!), but a necessity (cold!). Better tasting than adding ice cubes, but still good at bringing the temperature down, post-workout.

I’m trying hard to be stoic about the fact that I live in an older building with a combined either-or air system that hasn’t yet changed over to cooling, despite 90 degree temps over the weekend and the next two days. I’m trying, but I daresay not succeeding terribly well. Let’s hear it for unseasonably warm temps after unseasonably cool temps. Not that I’ve run the heat in the past month, but hey. It’s made sleep somewhat elusive, as it does every year when this happens (and it does happen every year, which is why I’m trying to be stoic; I’ve had to deal with it for a decade now, so you’d think it would be easier). Hopefully the run this morning and a swim this evening will help with that tonight.

Speaking of the run, on my run this morning I saw: 1. lots of pollen; 2. the sun rise over the Washington Channel; and 3. a Decepticon sticker on the hood of a parked car.

Odd, odd dream last night (sci-fi geek alert). Was at a university, a graduate student. There were folks in the world with mental abilities (a la the beginning of the first X-men movie), and I was one of them. Somehow got wind of the board of directors, because of defense contracts & security concerns, voting on a proposal to have people at the university mentally screened (presumably by someone with telepathy whom they trusted) before working on certain projects. I got into the meeting just before it began and accused them all of advocating the equivalent of rape, that they couldn’t possibly know the violation of having to submit voluntarily or “voluntarily” to have their mind probed. It was a huge mess of a fight with several members of the board. And the rant I unleashed on their general counsel for giving in to them and telling them it was okay was truly stunning (ethics much?).

Why yes, yes I am a big ole geek at times. Even in my dreams.

In many, many ways this past year stunk on ice (the break up and my foot injury being the most notable). As many others are, I’m hoping that 2009 will be a better one for me and for those I know and love.

I’m working on an Uberlist now for 2009. I didn’t do one the past two years, after doing them the 2 or so years prior to that, and I think I miss the structure it imposed upon me, to think about where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. Having something written just helps, so I’m at it again. Hopefully it’ll be complete by the weekend and I’ll get it up once it’s done.

Until then, have a safe and happy new year.

All in all a very good Thanksgiving day. Was nice and quiet for most of it. The store this morning was uncrowded and uncharacteristically quick to get out of. The cooking went well, and I took the better of the two batches of cupcakes with me (made 2 dozen). Unfortunately I’ve broken a ring on my icing piper, so it was slathered on by spreader rather than piped nicely, but they did fine.

Side note: I really, really want to make the margarita cupcakes I found in the cookbook while flipping back to the buttercreme frosting recipe.

The dinner itself was fantastic. I took a zucchini risotto as well as the cupcakes (the mushroom selection stunk, so zucchini it was). The bird came out perfect, which the host was rightly proud of. He also thoughtfully saved me a batch of potatoes sans butter/milk, which was much appreciated. The other selections were equally tasty, with lots of good vegetables.

Some Wii was played, and I set Jon’s Wii up (he hadn’t played with it since he’d moved – in June). Next thing you know he’s going to be getting messages via the Wii from a certain someone who will have him registered here shortly. Bwhahahaha. We did warn him what the blinky blue light on the front means now, too.

Got the kitchen cleaned up just now after getting home, so no mess in the morning. Off work early tomorrow, and will plan to stop by the gym after that, swim, and hand in my receipt for the new shoes & lock. Wonder how they’ll do the credit.

Got the news that early registration for the Nation’s Tri opened for DC Tri Club folks, so signed up for that tonight. Hopefully with the stretching I’ve started doing on my feet will keep the PF under control, and keep it from recurring, and I’ll be able to do the race this time around.

Picked up replacement shoes (shower and gym), as well as a new lock this evening. Both pair were on sale, which is always good even when someone else is paying. Still, the replacement costs is going to be almost as much as they make from me for a year’s worth of locker rental fees.

Quiet night. There are happenings around town, but I got home from the shopping, laid down for a quick nap and woke up an hour later feeling pretty cold (for no apparent reason), so I stayed in and behaved myself. Earlyish morning tomorrow to pick up some last minute food needs for tomorrow night’s dinner, then it’s some cooking and some time spent in Crobuzon (aka my town in Animal Crossing: City Folk) before I zip down to Alexandria.

Friday in the office should be nice and quiet (I hope!). I’d like to get filing done and clear a ton of shit off my desk.

The computer arrived and is now all set up. Oh, I need to back up.

Ordered a new MacBook last week. The iBook was completely out of memory, and things were running noticeably slower as newer protocols came out, so it was time to move up. A late birthday present to myself.

Anyway, so it arrived yesterday, and after much gnashing of teeth and scrambling to find an extra ethernet cable, all of my settings and files transferred over and everything is all well and good and nice. The screen is wider than the 14″ iBook, at least in appearance (the screen resolution is better, 1280×800 versus 1024×768), even though it’s a smaller screen (13″). It feels more “widescreen” than the iBook did, and I’ve had fun stretching the winders out to match the edges.

The thing that has surprised me the most about the move over was that it moved all of my programs over as well – not just the user data associated with them. So I did not have to go buy a new copy of MS Office, I didn’t have to redownload all of the chat programs, though I have had to upgrade some of the programs as I’ve run across them because this is on the newer Mac OS (10.5), and it’s intel chips versus powerpc chips.

Enough of that for now.

Work was, wow. Had a meeting with another BGA where, after much invoking of the names of senior officials of the other BGA, we got ourselves to where we needed to be (namely, getting the fucking money out of their little paws – hence my involvement). It was fun to get over to a different BGA, see their security procedures, etc. The building reminded me of my co-op, lots of aluminium and glass, very mid-century. Fun stuff.

Then, another agency was getting snippy with us over some policy calls, so I ended up hunting down crap for the political head of our office to go over and give them the smack down. That actually started before I even left home, and I ended up stopping in with our budget office and telling them I didn’t care what a budget analyst at the other agency thought about our legal authorities, and that we weren’t going to play telephone if her counsel’s office had a problem they needed to contact us directly. Which was partially aimed at my own budget office, because they have a ton of new hires, and we might as well set them straight from the beginning, otherwise my head deputy will jump down their throat the first time one of them dares to utter (or even worse, repeat) a legal opinion from a non-lawyer (he’s really touchy about our office’s prerogative there – I’ve seen him summarily dismiss opinions from non-lawyer peons from other agencies and ban them from future meetings, and he gets his way there. Yowch).

So, was running around like mad on those and a couple of other things, which was both fun and exhausting. I like it when we’re that busy, it’s so much more engaging and satisfying.

In other news™, I ordered a new MacBook this evening, which hopefully will arrive early to mid-week next week. The current computer is completely out of hard disk space, despite my best efforts to transfer unneeded backup files over to my portable drive. So, it was time to upgrade from the iBook to a MacBook. It’s sad but I think I’m more excited about the fact that the new one will have backlit keys than anything else.

Hadn’t upgraded the iBook to the newest version of Mac OS, either, so that should be interesting to get used to. Debating dumping a paid account I keep in favor of a MobileMe account, too. While I do most of my email through my domain, it is necessary at times to have an email which is independent of that, and given how mac-centric I already am, it would seem to make sense to go that way (and go ahead and get push email for the phone). We’ll see.

Let me preface my remarks here by saying that I use gay.com (and other chat programs) a lot to keep up with friends online. I’m on regularly 4-6 nights a week, and I happily pay gay.com for full access to their site. But I am incredibly displeased with this new implementation they’ve brought up this week. Unhappy enough to consider dumping the subscription if they don’t get it fixed.

I think I spent a grand total of 40 minutes on “the new gay.com” this evening in two different installments, after it seemed like I spent about the same amount of time trying to convince the web site that no, really, I didn’t have a pop-up blocker stopping their wretched pop-ups from popping up. Verdict: It sucks elephant butt.

Let’s catalog the deficiencies:

• It runs too slow (to be expected with a new system).
• There’s no way to ignore bots in the chat room now.
• There’s no way to turn off the entrance and exit alerts, so you frequently end up with a screen full of “so-and-so entered,” “so and so left” crap that you don’t need.
• You can’t zip through the list to find folks easily by hitting the first letter of their screen name – you’re forced to scroll through the entire thing.
• It takes forever to bring up a screen name when you want to click on their profile or view their photos.
• No clicking through to links in chat, you’re forced to cut & paste.
• Because it’s run through the browser, if someone sends you a link in another program (AIM/Yahoo/MSN/etc.), chat ends up getting shut down if you click on the link in the other program because the new page opens in your chat browser window (or whatever window you have open).
• There’s too much wasted space in the windows – they take up too much screen real estate.
• Even after full disabling the pop-up blocker and getting their pop-ups to work, Every Single Window that popped up continued to display the “you need to turn your pop-up blocker off” message, blocking the screen that I was trying to see until I could hunt down the tiny little “X” that would turn the message off.

In other words, the thing sucks elephant butt.

I’ve left feedback with them, and will continue to do so. The stand-alone chat program worked so, so much better than any browser based crap they could throw up there. I can understand that perhaps they wanted more ad revenue by bringing users back onto their site, but there are ways to do that (force users to go to the profile page on their site to see pictures – more ad revenue/hits right there, without breaking up the other features that made the program work so much better) and still make the experience user-friendly. I realize the company is (probably still) losing money like mad, but driving away core, long-time users by making the site unusable is not the way to fix that.

Got completely and utterly soaked on this afternoon’s ride. It had been threatening rain on and off all day, and I’d been a zombie most of the day, so I finally got going around 4 or so. Was great for the first 2 long loops, then a little over halfway into the third the bottom dropped out. Not much to do but keep riding at that point, and it’s not like I’ve never raced in the rain (Mooseman, Richmond Powersprint, anyone?). Did an additional short loop – was considering going for the long loop again as it started lightening up, but then the bottom dropped out, again, on the backside of the short loop, so I headed in after that one.

Yesterday was all about being a slug. Got up late, knitted (per the previous post) & caught up on TV. Played Bioshock. Made pancakes. Was fantastic, especially after the chaos of the previous weekend, and the mess of the work week.

I feel very, very sorry for our IT folks today. Our network connections (email, internal drives) went down sometime right after lunch, and stayed down all day (and, from the lack of email on my work crackberry tonight, looks to still be down). Not fun, and I’m sure they were sweating buckets trying to get it all back up.

In the meantime, with no access to pretty much anything I need to actually write things, I worked for a brief while on a presentation I have to give next Friday (before that program seized up and refused to play nice, thankfully after I’d saved my work to the desktop), and then I ended up leaving early along with most of my coworkers since there wasn’t a hell of a lot we could do. I played a lot of Bioshock once I got home (needed to just kill time & monters), and enjoyed the fruits of the slow-cooker’s labor all day, a garlicky chicken stew, which needed a touch more salt and a lot more garlic; eight cloves was not enough to make something ‘garlicky’ in my book.

Cleaned up the slow-cooker and prepped veggies for another batch of stew tomorrow, this time a peanut sauce, after I’d bagged up today’s stew for the freezer. Saved one serving for tomorrow’s lunch.

Finally updated WordPress this evening, both on the main CountFour home page and on the /legalmoose site. Got tired of the constant “a new version is out, update today!” warnings that have been there for a while now. Also popped in some more plug-ins, to make viewing the site friendlier for mobile browsers (thank you for that example, Brian), and to be truly obnoxious and make Twitter go off when I post new things here as well (thank you Brian and Fredo). Put in a new cross-poster for LJ which seems to work better than it had before (since my preferred one stopped working a couple of iterations of WP ago), even if the text box is a bit much. I suspect that’s editable, but I’m not going to worry about it tonight.

And with that, I’m off to bed.