Important Memo: What Disney Princesses Teach Girls.

State Farm accidentally stole $20,000 from several customers.

Nobody gets to draft my account.

When you coldcall me to try to sell my company something and suggest that “my company president said we should call you,” it’s more convincing if you can actually NAME the president in question.

When I ask that you email me your information, it’s also better if your PDF of talking points has actually been proofread, explains what you’re selling, and has a clear pitch the explains why I want it. A shotgun approach of unconnected capabilities and features is rarely the way to a sale.

Finally, if I reply with questions and explicitly state at the bottom of my mail that you should reply in email, not call me directly, why on earth would you call me? And when I point out your failure to honor my request, maybe it’s not a good idea to get defensive and suggest that you’re somehow doing me a favor.

Wow. Just wow.

Well, not the whole thing, really, and also not for everybody — but if you’re like Official Heathen Counsel Triple-F, your pancreas is all jacked up on account of the sugar diabetes. Jeffrey Brewer wants to give you an artificial one instead.

For it is a day of great rejoicing.

(File photo.)

The NYT’s Ethicist says “Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform.” in response to a question about the ethics of downloading an illegal digital copy of a book previously purchased in hardback.

Cohen gets it. Publishers don’t, at least not yet. Here’s the whole bit:

I bought an e-reader for travel and was eager to begin “Under the Dome,” the new Stephen King novel. Unfortunately, the electronic version was not yet available. The publisher apparently withheld it to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip. I generally disapprove of illegal downloads, but wasn’t this O.K.? C.D., BRIGHTWATERS, N.Y.

An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical. Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.

Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability.

Unsurprisingly, many in the book business take a harder line. My friend Jamie Raab, the publisher of Grand Central Publishing and an executive vice president of the Hachette Book Group, says: “Anyone who downloads a pirated e-book has, in effect, stolen the intellectual property of an author and publisher. To condone this is to condone theft.”

Yet it is a curious sort of theft that involves actually paying for a book. Publishers do delay the release of e-books to encourage hardcover sales — a process called “windowing” — so it is difficult to see you as piratical for actually buying the book ($35 list price, $20 from Amazon) rather than waiting for the $9.99 Kindle edition.

(There’s more; click through.)

Hey, dude, check out Bant. Of course, the better option would be one that interfaced with your existing equipment…

Anything worth doing is worth doing again. I present the following for your amusement. Many of you are in these pictures, but (to a first approximation) none of you are with the right boyfriends or girlfriends. Except Eric and Lindsey, God bless ’em. Anyway, what follows is more or less the text of the original photodocumentation of this party from spring of 2000. Back then, there were no Flickr; we rolled our own and we liked it, so these were on the unfortunately defunct NoGators.com site. Since a server crash took it down, they’ve been tragically offline . . . until now!

In Which We Review Photo-Graphs Taken at Birthday Festivities in March, 2000.

Some time ago, I turned 30. (March, 2000.)

What follows is something like a photographic record. These shots were taken by my brother, who was apparently flummoxed slightly by his new camera; they’re a bit hot in places. Additionally, the photolab transfer to lo-res .jpg files didn’t do them any favors. Even so, however, here they are.

They are in no particular order. Though it should be rather clear which are early and which are drunker (er, later) in in the evening.

• Part the First: In which general party groups are documented, some better than others.
• Part the Second: In which events in the back yard are investigated, and a lapse in judgement is forever preserved in kodachrome.
• Part the Third: In which things are set afire and carried forth in shopping carts, much to the consternation of neighbors and miscellaneous civic support organizations

UPDATE – 2003

Yeah, now I’m even older, but in reformatting these pages for use on the new server, it occurs to me that a monstrous number of these pictures are, well, waaaay out of date. Certain people have gently pointed out that, well, their sister is my girlfriend now, and she even lives with me and stuff, and why is that other girl in my 30th birthday pictures?

The answer, gentle reader, is that Erin wasn’t even AT my 30th birthday party. So there. I mean, there was an Erin, but not THE Erin.

Also, I intend to keep these pictures up long enough for them to be embarrassing to certain children whose parents are shown here (when you’re old enough to read the Internet, kids, give Uncle Chet a call and he’ll tell you stories about your parents; Eva, Matilde, and Hadley, I’m talking to YOU).

UPDATE AGAIN – 2010

Now I’m even older than I was when I commented in 2003, but I’m not sure I’ll cop to wiser. Anyway, these pix have been forgotten for years, but looking at ’em now made me smile enough that I wanted to put them back online. But the bit about your kids calling me for an explanation in a few years? That’s still TOTALLY on, except now we have to add Gwen, Carl, and Layla to the list.

I’m a lucky, lucky boy. Cheers, friends.

Today, I’m 40. Which means ten years ago, this happened:

A somewhat more modest festival is planned for this evening. If you know where I live, odds are you’re welcome.

You will never be as awesome as Peter O’Toole.

Static + Balloon + Cat == hilarity.

Prompted by this post, I have just revisited my backup strategy. You should, too. Here’s what I do. Listen to me. Seriously.

• Because I’m on a Mac, I can use Time Machine. Whenever I’m at my desk, my laptop is plugged into a 1TB USB drive and is backed up incrementally every hour. With TM, not only can I immediately recover from “oh shit!” moments, I can also “scroll back” and pick up prior versions of files. (Cost: Free with OSX.)

• Because that’s not enough, I also create a complete clone of my internal drive about every two weeks using SuperDuper. I’m sure there are Windows versions of this tool, but the Mac makes it pretty easy. (This utility is also super-handy for hard drive upgrades; $27.95 for the full version.)

• Because I work on multiple computers, I also keep nearly all my current files in my Dropbox folder. Dropbox costs money every month, but the peace of mind is worth it. When I make changes to a document on one computer, they’re almost instantly sync’d up to the Dropbox server, and then sync’d down to any other computers I choose to associate with my Dropbox account. This is immensely powerful stuff. Bonus: I can also grab any file from my Dropbox account from any Internet-connected computer simply by logging into the web site. Oh, and there’s even a friggiin’ iPhone client. Booyah. (Free for 2GB; $9.99/mo for 50GB; $19.99/mo for 100GB.)

• Finally, I’ve just signed up for Crashplan after basically giving up on Mozy. Mozy was kind of early in this market, but they’ve suffered from software maturity issues on the Mac side pretty much the whole time, and I’m actively trying to find an online backup tool that works not just for me, but also for my company’s mobile professionals. Crashplan looks much better. Like several other tools, Crashplan backs your designated folders up to the server, which is how you get protection from catastrophic issues like fire or (more likely where I live) hurricanes. It also provides file versioning, which is a great boon and hedge against creeping data corruption. The downside (to all such services) is initial backup speed: I’m about two days into a 39-day initial upload. :( (You can pay them to send you a drive to seed your initial backup, but I made the command decision not to bother with the cost.) (Crashplan’s online option for individuals is $54/year for unlimited storage; other options exist for local and even enterprise backup.)

There are two kinds of people: Those who have had catastrophic data loss, and those who will. Protect yourself. If you can’t tell someone clearly how you back up your pictures, your documents, your financial data, etc., then you’re not backing up well enough. Give it some thought. Sign up for a cloud service, and get a big-ass backup drive at the very minimum. The data you save may be your own.

See Also.

The thing in Massachusetts sucks out loud, but we’re still fantastically better off than we ever were with Bush. Yes we did.

Amazon alone wasn’t quite enough to kill it, but Amazon and ubiquitous computing and connectivity might.

My printer needs toner (not ink; it’s a laser). OfficeMax has the cartridges, but they’re $70 each, which seemed high. I checked the Amazon iPhone app, and found that yes, that IS very high; I’ll have one by Friday for $36 delivered.

“By the way, the Latin word for yam is ‘dioscorea’.”

New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths.

29, again, I understand.

Precis: NatGeo photographer goes to the antarctica to shoot leopard seals. One of them decides he looks helpless, but isn’t food, so apparently the right option in seal culture is to try to teach him to hunt over four days.

Celebrity amputee — now there’s an interesting category — Aimee Mullins gives us a rundown on choosing your prosthesis over on Gizmodo.

However, it’s possible that your parents may have been awesome. Vintage young couple pix, supplied by their children. Enjoy.

In general, I don’t mind getting older. I feel like I get a little smarter — or, if not that, wiser — every year. Consequently, I feel little real trepidation about closing in on 40 next March. There is, however, something really awful about this particular time.

Most of my friends are pet people. Lots of them didn’t get their own animals until they left the chaos of college, so put the average puppy or kitty adoption date at around age 22.

Now, not quite 20 years later, they’re all dying.

In the last year or so, I’ve seen an inordinate number of these faithful companions pass away. Joy’s Katya was probably first, but Frazer’s 20-year-old cat Christine passed just this summer, and then dear Bob, and Laura Sneed’s 19-year-old Tigger slipped away just yesterday.

At lunch, just now, I got an another awful email. In 1994, when I was making friends with the Rice crowd and, eventually, moving over here from Tuscaloosa, one of the Rice folks was also moving back after a grad degree at Georgia. Jamie had a young dachshund named Annie who was smart as a whip and completely delightful. She was ever-present at social events starting even before I actually moved here, and remained so until the late 20s happened and people got old and less drunk and, in some cases, moved away to Austin or the Woodlands.

Annie’s been having a hard time, the mail said. She was hurting a lot, it said. So today she had bacon and roast beef for breakfast, and then they went to the vet to say goodbye.

I haven’t seen Annie in years, and I know this is hitting me harder than it should precisely because it’s so close to the loss of Bob, but it sure seems like there’s been a bit of an epidemic of this lately, and I for one am not at all pleased about it.

Dear science: Please make longer-lived pets. KTHXBI.

And cheers to our forever-loved four-legged friends. They are, to a person, much better people than we are. Hug ’em if you got ’em. It turns out 20 years happens way faster than you realize.

So, earlier this summer, we dropped a few grand on the Heathenmobile to return its a/c capabilities to a level Stuttgart intended, and figured that was enough HVAC work for the year. It sure FELT like enough.

Oh no. Not even close.

The house unit’s been kinda puny lately — taking a longer time to get the job done, creating higher bills, etc. The unit’s from 1997, so it’s not surprising for it to need some work (it’s been perfect so far), but we were kind of surprised to discover that it had basically failed while we were at the best concert ever last night. Thermostat setting? 74. Household temp? 82. Uh-oh.

It didn’t get below 80 all night, and crept way past the end of the dial during the day today. Ick. The a/c guy finally made it over about 630, and gave a potentially expensive diagnosis inside 20 minutes.

• The system wouldn’t start up at all at this point. Fix: a $150 “start kit”.
• It’s now on, but won’t cool. Whups! Out of freon. $125 later, it’s no longer out of freon.
• Since the lack of freon is certainly because of a leak, let’s add in some dye to help us find that pesky bastard later. $72.50 for the dye, natch.

The story goes a little like: lower coolant -> harder working compressor -> higher bills and overheating -> Profit! Well, for the AC guy, anyway.

The leak diagnosis is a good new/bad news kind of thing. The bad news is that they’re almost always in the coil, and leaks in the coil can’t be repaired. This means we’re about to spend real money.

The good news is that, if we replace the coil, we’ll get an efficiency boost not just because the new one won’t be leaky; SEER ratings for new units are much higher than whatever the rating is on my 1997 unit, so next summer we’ll get equivalent cooling efficacy for fewer kilowatt-hours of work. That’ll help take the sting out of the check I suspect we’ll be writing between now and Thanksgiving. Yuck.

Halloween is completely safe:

Lenore “Free Range Kids” Skenazy points out that there has never been a single substantiated incident of a kid being sickened, hurt or killed by doctored candy handed out during trick-or-treating in the history of America.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Owl in a Box.

Well, most of you will agree, anyway. Here you go.

This is Bob.

Bob was the only kitten they had at the Tuscaloosa County Humane Society one May morning in 1992. Scrawny and underfed and, frankly, kinda ugly, she was still full of personality. She reached through the bars of her cage and meowed louder than you’d think reasonable when I got close, and when I picked her up to take her home she started purring louder than any cat I’ve heard before or since.

When we took her to be vaccinated, she was still purring so much the vet had to thump her on the nose so he could hear her heart. As a kitten, she was obsessed with open mouths — what IS that? Can I see in? — and with long hair.

Bob was actually a gift to the girl I was dating at the time, since her cat was dying of feline leukemia. I kept her in my place since, for a little while, we had poor, doomed Hudson in Cassie’s apartment (conveniently across the parking lot). When we moved in together a while later, Bob learned what Cassie’s car sounded like, and would leave my study to wait for her at the front door every day when she came home. The apartment faced a parking lot; cars came and went all the time — but Bob knew which one was Cassie’s.

Bob and I moved to Texas in 1994 — somehow I got custody when Cassie and I split up — and Bob became a bit more reclusive and a bit more owner-focused. If I stayed in my car to listen to the end of an NPR story, my roommates would complain because Bob would meow at the back door until I came in. She took a dim view of other animals, including, memorably, a certain husky who desperately wanted to be her friend — and, more hilariously, a friend’s labrador who’d come to visit. With people, she was just selective; I’ve had friends over the years who didn’t know I had a cat. When I was single, she made it very clear she thought one brief relationship was a bad idea. It cost me a comforter.

Knocks at the door and doorbells always freaked her out. She’d run to a hiding spot, growling slightly under her breath, until the threat passed — or until she realized the visitor was on her short list of other acceptable humans, like Eric or Lindsey, or Sharon or Greg, or — oddly — my infrequently visiting mother, whereupon she’d remerge and be social.

The doorknocking thing also came in handy for me, since I frequently have things delivered. Bob started correlating the arrival of a big truck outside with impending knocks, so I could tell if the UPS guy was about to show up and knock on the door by her own little growly-retreats.

Bob’s always been all about me, so when Erin came around in 2002, we decided to let Erin be the foodgiver. That worked out fine — Bob loved Erin just as much as me pretty quickly — but had some unintended consequences. Bob had learned that waking up Chet was not acceptable, as I’d just shove her off the bed, but Erin was a soft touch, so Bob developed a habit of tapping Erin on the face when she was hungry. Tap tap tap. Wait. Tap tap tap.

When I started working at home after the tech crash, Bob was understandably much happier. She’s spend most of the day on the desk, sometimes on a pile of “decoy papers” I’d lay out to distract her from my actual work documents, but eventually she figured out that the cozy spot formed by the back of the keyboard, the edge of the desk, and bracketed by my forearms was just the right size for napping. I do a lot of writing in my work, so I’d be pretty still for long periods. That suited Bob just fine. She’d tuck her head into the crook of my left elbow and, as God is my witness, snore.

At night, she’d do kind of the same thing. I tend to sleep on my back, so she’d wait until Erin and I were settled and then come and curl up between the crook of my right elbow and my armpit, usually with her head resting on my arm, sometimes under one of her own paws. Other times, like in cold weather when Erin and I were given to spooning, she felt most comfortable as the “innermost spoon”. If she awoke to find herself facing a back, she’d get up and crawl over us in a way I swear was meant to be indignant, sometimes with grunts, until she found her way to the concave side again. And she always figured out a way to take way more than her share of the bed; quite a feat for an 8-pound cat on a queen-size mattress. But of course, we are talking about an 8-pounder who went all Matrixy on a lab, so there you go.

Bob got sick a long while back, in 2000 or so. She picked up a herpetic sinus/eye infection when I boarded her one Thanksgiving, and it’s been a battle ever since. The sneezing — sometimes productive, unfortunately — was chronic and pretty everpresent, but the real nastiness was in the flareups. When they happened, she’d get really horrific swelling on the right side of her face, centered around her lower and third lids, sometimes obscuring the eye entirely. We got to be good friends with a local veterinary ophthalmologist, who managed to knock the flareups back pretty handily with a complicated cocktail of drugs delivered by ointment, food supplements, and pills, and they typically did the job pretty well. One of them I got pretty good at popping down her throat until a few years ago, when I figured I’d let Bob smell the quarter-pill first. She sniffed it twice, and then ate it out of my hand. Well, there you go.

A few months ago, Bob stopped coming down to my office as much. She was quite happy to “help” me if I worked on the couch, so I didn’t think much of it. Then, while I was traveling nearly full time, Erin noticed she was bumping into things; we think she gradually went blind, and had started avoiding the less-predictable layout of the office as a consequence. Oh well, we thought, she’s 17.

About two weeks ago, though, she had another flareup, the first in years. This time, there were more problems. Her blood pressure was very high, and they worried about renal problems — a common endgame for cats. We went with the usual wonder cocktail, but it didn’t help as much or as quickly. Late last week, she was clearly not well, and stopped coming upstairs to sleep with us. We hoped the meds would help turn her around.

Then, at the worst possible moment, we had to leave town for a funeral. Sharon took care of her for us, but called us Monday morning with bad news. Bob was much worse. What vet should she take her to?

The specialist could do little for her, so he sent her to our nominal “general” vet. That vet quickly sent Bob and Sharon to the internal medicine people for around the clock care. The situation was grave, but not without hope.

Hope left late yesterday. I flew home from Kansas early today, and my driver took me from the airport directly to the specialist’s office, where we met Erin and Sharon. We held Bob one last time, and then let her go.

Bob was nearly 18 years old. I got her when I was 22; I’m nearly 40 now. I can type all this out just fine, but I can’t begin to talk about her. Erin and I are shattered and heartbroken, and the house is horribly empty without her on the couch between us tonight. And I don’t know what else to say other than I miss her horribly.

Heather Armstrong fucking WINS AT THE INTERNET.

I wrote this last September 18, on the Well, after a bad week for Houston.

My friend Cary died on Tuesday. He’d been fighting cancer for a while but his most recent and dire prognosis wasn’t common knowlege. He was locally famous in Houston and Austin, partly for being in a band called Horseshoe, and partly for his years of association with Houston’s Infernal Bridegroom Productions. IBP was, until its own unfortunate and premature death in 2007, a tremendous and inventive local theater company devoted to doing the weird, the underperformed, the new, the avant garde, and doing it very, very well. Cary’s only acting was with them, but his roles just got stronger and better with time. He started with their very first production in 1993 with an original show, but was best known for star turns in productions of the Kinks’ “Soap Opera” (2002) and, in 2006, something called “Speeding Motorcycle.”

If you asked Cary the most important, biggest, best thing he ever did on stage, he’d answer quickly that this show, based on the songs of Daniel Johnston, and done partly in collaboration with Johnston himself, was his pinnacle. Already sick by the time the show went to Austin this summer, he cut his chemo short so he could reprise his role (all three “Joe the Boxer” actors made the move).

Ike’s made it a rough week or so to be a Houstonian. You still can’t go to the grocery store, mostly, or buy gas like a normal person. More than half the city doesn’t even have power yet, which is astounding. Galveston is still flat, and will stay that way for a while. We got lucky in that we had no damage, little to clean up, and good friends a mile away who never lost power and opened their home to Erin and I as well as two other couples and a singleton from our social group. We called it Camp Ike, and tried to make the best of it — but even in a largish house, that many adults is tight, so we were very happy on Tuesday when we got word our block had power at around 8pm. In the midst of dinner when we got word, we didn’t end up coming home until nearly midnight. Sitting on the bed in our delightfully re-lit house, waiting for my wife to join me, I idly checked my email on my phone, and the four-hour everything-is-finally-fine holiday I’d been enjoying evaporated. Cary’d had a seizure Tuesday morning, and was in Ben Taub. I should call for more details.

I think I knew what those details were before I clicked Jason’s number. Cary’d never regained consciousness, and passed away around 1130pm. Erin and I didn’t go to sleep for a long time, watching video I had on my laptop from a still-unfinished and unreleased DVD version of SM. Also on YouTube was this performance of Cary doing a cover of a Johnston song that didn’t make the final show. Cary liked well enough to work up for a post-show performance one night, after his much-loved singalong of “Brainwash”.

Cary Winscott was 38.

Why corporate IT should unchain our office computers lays out the very convincing case for less lockdown on workplace PCs. I’ve been on consulting sites where users couldn’t change their wallpaper, for crying out loud, and the true reason for this is not quality of service, or protection, or SarBox; it’s a failure of IT to view their job as enabling the workforce.

Big Corporate IT says “no” unless someone above them forces them to say “yes.” Their default mode is obstruction — for outside contractors like I’ve been for most of my career, and also for employees.

I had a long sequence of very odd dreams last night, only one image of which I remember well at all. For some reason, Mrs Heathen and I were having dinner with LeBron James, who was unaccountably dressed in a vintage Kansas City Royals uniform that included snowshoes.

My subconscious is weird.

Four decades ago, human beings did the absolute coolest thing ever.

Y’all please wish Chief Heathen Health & Legal Correspondents Triple-F and Boogielips a happy seventh anniversary!

FirstNephew Jackson entered the world, or at least Florida, at about 2 this morning Eastern time. Seven pounds seven, 21 inches, and all is well. Pix, we’re sure, are forthcoming.

He was your Elvis, and when your Elvis dies, so does the private lie that someday you will be young, and feel at capricious intervals the weightlessness of a joy that is unchecked by the injuries of experience and failure.

Here.

This makes two:

Followup, as promised. From the archives, before Heathen existed as a web site and I was forced to share my wit and wisdom via the mailing list named below. Arrant Knaves, represent!

From: chet@netexplorer.com Sun Jul 26 22:36:12 1998
To: “Some Arrant Knaves I Know”
Subject: David Fucking Carradine

So I’m sitting in the bar in the Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin, right? Not at some nebulous point in the past; right the fuck NOW. Jan Watson and I are over here for some client meetings, and rather than zoom over at some godawful hour of the morning, we came over on Sunday night.

So we’re all checked in, and have retired to the aforementioned bar for an aperitif whilst we revisit the documents for Monday’s meeting. It’s a quiet night at the Driskill; we’ve got the bar to ourselves. The bartender’s a chatty kid who’s quick to refill our Shiners, and we’re actually getting some work done.

A guy wanders through and asks the bartender if it’s a nonsmoking bar. Of course not, says the bartender. So the new guy leaves, only to return moments later to sit down behind the grand piano and begin tickling the ivories. At this point, Watson and I notice something unusual about the impromptu pianist. He is, as it were, David Carradine. David “Snatch the Ivories From My Hand, Grasshopper” Carradine. He of a thousand episodes of two (count ’em) Kung Fu serieses. He of (no doubt) an eminently forgettable series of movies running on USA even as we speak. A genuine B-Movie Icon. Playing occasionally bad jazz piano in the Driskill Hotel bar at 10:30 on a Sunday night, apropos of nothing.

I love Texas.

Godspeed, Grasshopper.

Online acquaintance Laura Lemay details her ongoing problem with deer in her rural California garden. Enjoy.

The Clayton iHouse.

In Belize. On the beach. No software in bait shops. No airports, either. And only bugs I can physically quash with one flip-flop.

Bait shop.

Where babies come from!

So, Heathen Central has always had an alarm with these people. Over the weekend, we had enough heavy weather in Houston that we lost our regular phone line, and the alarm started telling us about it by beeping.

Ever ten minutes.

Without stopping.

Clearing the error doesn’t work; it tries the phone line periodically to check, and as soon as the test fails it starts beeping again (unless the alarm is actually ENGAGED at the time, in which case the alarm goes off; this is less charming than beeping).

I called ATT, sure (we don’t actually use ATT for voice; the POTS line exists only for the alarm and failover reasons), but in the meantime what I needed was a way to continue to set and use the alarm, even in the absence of a phone line for monitoring.

Well, it turns out there’s no way to do that, and this is bone fucking stupid. An alarm works on several levels:

1. The big ADT sign does some deterrence;
2. If some douchebag breaks in and the alarm goes off, there’s a nonzero chance the miscreant will just run away. Someone DID try our (unfortunately unlocked) downstairs patio door at one point, which is on a zero-delay switch. They got it open half an inch and the alarm went nuts; exit bad guys.
3. If both of those fail on you, then yes, the alarm DOES use the phone line to alert the monitoring service, and the monitoring service will dispatch the authorities.

By making it impossible to turn off the phone line check (for situations such as the one we’re in), ADT has made the alarm system 100% useless until ATT gets off its ass and fixes my POTS line. Given the power in case #2, above, that’s just dumb.

(Well; the signs still work; call it 95% useless.)

I think it’s probably time to shop for a new alarm system. In a city with a history of heavy weather, a system designed like the one I have seriously needs to get fired.

Longtime Heathen “Attorney” writes to inform us of the untimely passing of the Chief Mastiff Correspondent Pomplemoose, late of the Sue Barnett district of Heathenstan. Here he is, all ten stone of him, enjoying his native Texas Bluebonnets.

Pomplemoose was not yet 10 when he bounded off this mortal coil on Tuesday, quite unexpectedly. We’ll miss him, as we know all the Acostas will as well — particularly Miss ~.

Today is the 99th anniversary of my great-grandparents’ wedding; visitors to Heathen Central can see an April 3, 1910 picture of Ike and Dell Farmer in our entryway.

Highbrow British shirtmaker Thomas Pink now has no-iron traveller shirts.

Check it out.

Hey, deal with it. I’ve been up since 5.

So, I’m sitting here minding my own, and my phone rings.

It’s someone I was dear friends with (a vanishingly small number of you will care, but: Paul McMullan) in like elementary and middle school, and still friendly with in high school (different circles by then), but I haven’t seen in 20 years. He was driving to work this morning, and when the radio DJ said something about it being “Friday, March 13,” it clicked in his head that it was my birthday. So he called his mother, who called my mother, and in an hour or two he had my cell number, and twenty minutes ago he called me to say “hey, happy birthday, and by the way how’d the last 20 years go for you?”

That’s kind of cool.

I can’t share it off Facebook, apparently, but there is video of the Albany nieces actually singing Happy Birthday to me, and it’s heartmeltingly lovely.

I love my life.

Her Aunt Bo found the Socktopus for her.

Thanks, Layla. You’re the awesomest.

This one. (From this set of sci-nerd tatts.)

(Of course, had our RFID firm actually made money, or my stock been worth anything, I might’ve felt differently.)

Since the meltdown began, I’ve been studiously following a practice that I was actually first advised of in a far better market environment: Do not open your retirement statements.

Well, at year end, you sort of have to, since they send you tax info that you’ll need for the 1040 process.

Ouch. 12/31/2008 value? About half the 12/31/2007 value, even in a mix of fairly conservative funds also age-indexed to gradually reduce risk. Christ.