Author: Joe

Weekend report

Another long and varied post. Oh well.

Apparently wordpress publishes posts dated for when you first started the post. The last two posts I made showed up out of order and several days earlier than I actually finished them. I started them with a list of notes I intended to write about figuring I’d finish them over the weekend and post them on different days, but it didn’t let me.

I just got up for a minute to take the trash out and Talore stopped pretending to be asleep and stole a slice of bacon off my plate. At least she’s mostly stopped trying to steal my food when I’m there.

Since the first one didn’t really have a lasting effect I gave Talore a proper bath last night. She was curious while I was filling the tub, but not curious enough to step in it. When I put her in she was trying to keep her feet first but not have any foot touch the water. That would have been a great video, but I only have two hands and didn’t have a good stand in the bathroom. Her lack of traction on the bottom of the tub meant it was fairly easy to keep her there, but a good bit of water got splashed over the edge when she’d flail around trying to grab hold of it. I didn’t have any cat shampoo, so I just rubbed her with water where she wasn’t low enough to be in it.

She complained a little, but when I was talking to her and petting/rubbing her (even with water) she was somewhat calm. Toweling her off also went much better this time, though the fact that I had her in the bathroom and could let go of her without her fleeing helped. I did get a couple of scratches from not having trimmed Talore’s claws, but that was just when she was flailing with her claws out, not because she was trying to climb up my arm. It turned out much better than the first attempt: even without soap her fur is much fluffier than it was.

A week or two ago there were noises of someone moving stuff around in the apartment next to me before I went to work. I’m guessing they moved out, because since Thursday I’ve been hearing a beep on an 11 second timer, and I’m pretty sure that it’s the smoke detector in that apartment complaining that it’s low on battery. If I’d guessed that’s what it is before late last night I’d have gone by the apartment office yesterday to ask if they can do something about it.

I forgot to pick up for the roomba today. Apparently the first thing it did was back over the elastic cord for that cat toy as it was getting off the charging dock and declare itself stuck.

It’s come to my attention (see the next paragraph) that I need to dust most of the surfaces that the roomba can’t get to. Unfortunately I got the roomba because I don’t bother to clean as often as I should, so my desk is probably the only thing that will be dusted with any regularity.

Last weekend I was compressing a screencapture video for posting on youtube, so I was using my old desktop. That computer is still set up for transcoding videos, and it prevents the processing time that takes from affecting what I’m doing on my main desktop, even if it takes longer to do it that way. Apparently it had been far longer since I used that computer than I thought. I swiped ram and a power cable from it when I built my server, and I left the side of the case off for a good while. That let a significant amount of dust in, so when I turned on the power supply after plugging it back in and the computer turned itself on I got a face full of dust as the vent fans ejected all of it out the back of the computer. Talore was sitting next to me watching and she fled instantly, but I failed to react that quickly.

The ebook section of the library I live next to now has a decent selection of at least the newer Terry Pratchett books. Last time I checked for ebooks I only found a list of about 100 books, none of which I was interested in, so this is a big improvement even if I’ve already read all of them. Actually, about half of my search results are e-audio books, so it’s not as large a collection as I thought, but still better than I found a few months ago.

Downloading a book (Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson) was relatively painless, though it helped that I already had an adobe id for Adobe Digital Editions. Adobe Digital Editions appears to be a flash application, so right clicking anywhere brings up the flash settings menu, which is extremely annoying when you expect a useful context menu to be there. I did eventually figure out that the book could be dragged from the library section to the nook icon on the left, but that wasn’t obvious to me to start with.

Claw trimming time

It’s probably about time to trim Talore’s claws. She hasn’t scratched me, and never tries, but when she’s sitting on me she tends to knead, and most of her claws are about as sharp as they’ll get and pointy enough to hurt. She probably won’t mind me cutting them, but I would imagine that not being able to snag things with a single paw won’t be appreciated.

She did manage to get away with the toy on the elastic string the other day. When I put it down Talore chewed almost through the cord next to the handle where I didn’t expect or check it, then the first time she caught it after that it broke off when I pulled. That toy is now missing a significant amount of fur (the flap holding the back half on came off) and doesn’t get chased as much in the mornings.

Talore seems to have stopped picking at my furniture, or perhaps she’s careful to do it when I’m not around. At one point it seemed like she was listening for me to turn my chair and stick my hand in the cup of water, because that’s all it took for her to look at me guiltily and prepare to run. She still drinks the water out of the cup on my desk, and I’ve now had two almost empty cups of water swiped off my desk because they were so light it didn’t take much (and because they’re on the edge away from my computers). The third is about at that point now, perhaps I’ll refill it.

I finally managed to get into my apartment in the afternoon without Talore meeting me at the door. I got home over an hour earlier than usual, and both the roomba and the air conditioning were on providing a high enough ambient noise level for me to sneak in. Talore still managed to be sitting up and looking at me when I walked into the bedroom though.

Talore had finally stopped seriously trying to wake me up in the mornings last weekend, but then I had a few days when I had to get up before it was fully light to get to work early. Now Talore again insists that as soon as there’s light it’s time to get up. She’s attacked my feet a couple times recently (with sharp claws), but I promptly pushed her off the bed both times and hopefully she’ll stop that.

Cube races

We’ve got a new way to race rubik’s cube solving. The old way was just to have everyone start solving at the same time and keep track of the order people finished in. That’s not near an even race with six or seven people, so the order of finishing was mostly set before it started. Now we’re doing relay solving, where we split into two teams and the teams race each other, solving in sequence.

Friday at the end of the day was my first chance to join in the fun. I suspect the teams would have been more balanced (or at least easier to balance) with Jeremy there instead of me like it’s been the previous times they raced like that, but the first round was pretty close. The most entertaining part was when Ryan showed up in the lab with the cube transport, meaning he had a lunchbox with everyone’s cube in it so nobody would have to walk through the halls just carrying a rubik’s cube. I always take my backpack to work and carry my cube (and lunch) in that.

I don’t feel like my rubik’s cube times have been improving lately because my timed runs (of which there haven’t been all that many) haven’t come close to my best time or even consistently faster than my 3 of 5 average. On the other hand, my average seems to be approaching my 3 of 5 average very slowly, so eventually I’ll probably get lucky and beat it if I do enough solves.

My efficiency is improving on my slow solves at least, and I’ve had several solves where I made less than 60 moves. If I could just learn to spot things faster I might be able to use move optimizations for speed.