Steve Brinich's Journal

Home From Concertino

2012-07-03T03:46:30Z

starmalachite and I got home a little while ago. We were one of the houses that didn't lose power; when thelongshot called and offered to check in on the cats we invited him to camp out at our place if so (which we didn't know at the time). He tells us the cats were clingy and glad for the visit.

The con was a lot of fun, but I'm too busy falling asleep to comment on specifics.

Con Crud

2011-07-11T17:34:10Z

I picked up some kind of scratchy throat and headache bug that caused me to mostly miss Saturday at Shore Leave. I felt a bit better yesterday, and attended the con Sunday, but started to feel sick again after the Mystery Trekkie Theater presentation of "The Way To Eden". This was obviously cause and effect (I mean I probably should have gotten more rest).

I took a sick day, and seem to be throwing it off finally.

Baltimore/DC Housefilk -- Sunday June 26, Randallstown, MD

2011-06-25T05:01:16Z

(Notice from Steven Joel Zeve, also posted to starmalachite's LJ)

In honor of filker Dave Clement's visit from Winnipeg, Steven Joel Zeve & France Andrews are hosting a housefilk at their home this Sunday from 2PM till TBD. Don't be shy if you don't perform -- we need audience members too!

Dave is a wonderful singer & guitarist, & a heck of a nice guy to boot. If you've never met or heard him, do yourself a favor & come on by.

Relevant info below, cut & pasted from the local housefilk mailing list:

Decadent Dave Clement is visiting, but he has commitments that
require to be back to Winnipeg before Contata, so we're having a
pre-Contata house filk this weekend.

Sunday June 26, 2011 starting @ 2:00pm

Directions appended below.

		Steven Joel Z.

>From the West:

o	Take I-70 east to I-695.
o	Take I-695 towards Towson to exit 18 (essentially, you're
	going north but given that 695 is a beltway, the direction
	labels are never really useful).  
o 	Take the exit 18 ramp towards Randallstown.  This is the second
	ramp.  This will place you on Liberty road heading west.
o	Continue on Liberty Road directions.

>From the North:

o	Take I-95 (or I-83) south to I-695 towards Towson.  
o	Take I-695 (outer loop) to exit 18 (essentially, you're going
	west but given that 695 is a beltway, the direction labels
	are never really useful).  
o 	Take the exit 18 ramp towards Randallstown.  This is the first
	ramp.  This will place you on Liberty road heading west.
o	Continue on Liberty Road directions.

>From the South:

o	Take I-95 (or BW Parkway or I-97) north to I-695 towards Towson.  
o	Take I-695 (inner loop) to exit 18 (essentially, you're going
	west but given that 695 is a beltway, the direction labels
	are never really useful).  
o 	Take the exit 18 ramp towards Randallstown.  This is the second
	ramp.  This will place you on Liberty road heading west.
o	Continue on Liberty Road directions.

>From the East:

	I have no real idea.  Pick your favorite route to I-695.  Pick
your favorite direction on I-695.  On the outer loop, follow the "From
the North" directions.  Otherwise follow the "From the South"
directions.

>From Baltimore City:

	There are so many ways to get to beltway!  Pick one and take
the beltway to the west of the city.  On the outer loop, follow the "From
the North" directions.  Otherwise follow the "From the South"
directions.

Examples:	Take I-83 north to the beltway inner loop.
		Take I-395 to I-95 south.  Take I-95 to beltway outer loop.
		Take I-95 south to the beltway outer loop.

	For the truly ambitious, find your way to Liberty Heights Rd.
Take this west.  Eventually it will become Liberty Road and pass under
the beltway heading west.  From here, follow the Liberty Road
directions.

>Liberty Road west (outwardbound from I-695):

o	Take Liberty Road, outward bound from I-695 about two (2) miles 
	to Brenbrook Rd.  This is at a stop light.  
o	Turn right onto Brenbrook.  Take Brenbrook straight through the 
	teensy traffic circle at Chruch Lane and back to Meadow Heights Rd
	at the second intersection with 4-way stop signs.
o	Turn left onto Meadow Heights.  Go two short blocks to the
	stop sign.  We're the house immediately to your right when you
	stop at that stop sign.

		8914 Meadow Heights Road
		Randallstown, MD
		(410)521-2882
		(410)521-0770
		(443)791-1102 (my cell #)

ONOZ! The End Of The Noms Is Near!

2011-03-10T12:46:02Z

Heidi (the elderly Maine Coon mix tortie) has a long-standing habit of complaining about the food bowl as soon as she can see the bottom, regardless of the amount of food still in it.

Kimba (in userpic) seems to have learned it from her over the past few months.

It's Not The Noms, It's The Principle

2011-02-27T15:32:09Z

After her latest vet visit, we've been giving Heidi (in userpic) glucosamine supplements. She's in good shape for a 15ish-year-old cat, but definitely starting to show her age.

The cats mostly get dry food, but the powder works best with soft food so that it will stay on top instead of falling to the bottom. Whenever we give Heidi her special meal, the other cats come crowding around to demand their share. I put some of the soft food aside for the purpose and offered it to the other cats... who turned their noses up at it and continued trying to get at Heidi's.

It could be something about the smell of the glucosamine powder, but I suspect it's just annoyance that one of the cats seems to be getting special treatment.

Seems To Be My Day For Annoying Little Computer Issues

2011-02-04T01:58:58Z

After the service call for the computer at work (see post from earlier today). I got a call from starmalachite that the desktop at home was making unaccustomed noises. From what I could hear over the cell phone (and remembered from a brief intermittent incident last week that I never got around to following up), it seemed like a fan issue. I suggested shutting it down until I could get a look at it.

When I got home and opened up the case, I found (eventually -- let's just say that it if karma works, the designer of the fan casings will one day have charley-horses in both hands that respond only to medication that comes in a triple-sealed childproof bottle) that a couple of the front fans had some dustbunny bits wrapped around the spindles. Also, the power connection to the main fain at the side was loose, so the front fans had to do all the work. The problem seems to be fixed (though, like the one at the office, it's one of those intermittent things that can't really be confirmed fixed for a while).

Dear Tech Support....

2011-02-03T20:12:09Z

...if the original problem was that my computer randomly reboots every once in a while, up to twice in one day, it doesn't do either of us any good to ask whether or not the problem has been fixed half an hour after the tech leaves. Try looking up "randomly" in the dictionary.

Gah....

Toronto Boardgame Cafe

2011-01-28T00:31:05Z

An item from Toronto, by way of thelongshot :

New Board Game Café Welcomes You, But Not Your Laptop

Ben Castanie's new Koreatown café, at 600 Bloor Street West, just east of Palmerston Avenue, will emphatically not have free Wi-Fi. In fact, laptops and their attendant air of isolation are completely counter to what Castanie is trying to do. "I just don't want people sitting staring at their screens," he says. Then he starts explaining the system of categorization he'd used to organize his café's library of 1,500-plus board games....

With luck, it might catch on closer to here....

The Wonders Of Modern Technology

2011-01-27T16:44:52Z

From a Washington Post account of the latest snow mess:

Salt trucks that might have mitigated the effect of the fresh layer of ice were trapped in the same traffic jams that drivers were. And very quickly those trucks were stuck behind cars that were spinning their wheels on hills and buses with modern technology that caused them to shut down when they lose traction.

WTF? Why would anybody think that's a good idea?

Just Plain Dumb Customer Webservice

2011-01-20T00:18:35Z

1. As I finish converting my contacts over to my new e-mail address, I got to the Recycle Bank customer credit site -- which lets you change everything in your profile *except* your contact e-mail. That, you have to do over the phone. Great way to introduce transcription errors. (I set my username to my new e-mail address and told the rep to copy-and-paste that.)

2. I managed to misplace my copy of the Dominion rules. Fortunately, the publisher has a PDF of the rules on its website. Unfortunately, it includes the full-page background graphics, which are pretty when reproduced on a high-res commercial printing press but a text-blurring waste of ink/toner when reproduced on the kind of printers most people have at home. Fortunately, I have a PDF editor program and was able to strip them out (after which I decided to just manually copy-paste-and-reedit the base rules and the tweaks added in each expansion into one document, rendering the previous process moot).

stevemb @ 2011-01-18T09:06:00

2011-01-18T14:06:06Z

Another WikiLeaks story:

A former senior Swiss bank executive said on Monday that he had given the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, details of more than 2,000 prominent individuals and companies that he contends engaged in tax evasion and other possible criminal activity....

If you thought he'd caught a lot of flak for exposing The Powers That Be trash-talking each other like so many feuding SMOFs, you ain't seen nothing yet....

Home From GAFilk

2011-01-11T18:02:10Z

starmalachite and I are back from GAFilk after the fourth flight booking finally got off the ground. We arrived back in the DC area just as the first flurries started here (it looks like we'll avoid the brunt of the storm, with just 2-3 inches expected).

Feline Pecking Order

2011-01-05T12:49:38Z

When I got up this morning to go back to work after vacation, I filled one of the cats' water dishes. Dorothy (in userpic) immediately started drinking, while Kimba (one of the Siamese-mix tabbypoints) waited patiently in line.

The amusing thing is that Kimba is 19 pounds (all muscle and frame, according to the vet), while Dorothy is maybe 10 pounds soaking wet (not that I've dared try that experiment).

Changing E-Mail (Watch This Space)

2010-12-07T19:25:30Z

Our service from Speakeasy has been getting increasingly flaky, with more outages in the last couple months than in the previous few years. The last straw was that messages from addresses that are in the spam filter whitelist have been repeatedly dropping into the spam bucket anyway (and attempts to re-enter them into the whitelist don't work); the dreadful webmail interface to fish through the spam bucket is just the icing on the cake.

After considering the range of "competition", such as it is, we're going to Verizon FiOS. I have some misgivings, but they seem less bad than the alternative (Cox cable internet). The scheduled install is in two weeks; once I verify that it works I'll distribute the new e-mail address.

Back From OVFF

2010-10-26T16:11:01Z

starmalachite and I got home last night to four very needy cats. The two new arrivals took the first prolonged absence of their humans better than I was expecting, actually. It helps that the household has settled into two pairs: Vir and Dorothy are the two psycho cats who chase and wrestle each other; Heidi and Kimba(in userpic) are the two sedate cats who keep each other company and generally ignore anything they consider beneath their notice.

Dorothy Kitten

2010-09-24T02:20:55Z

We acquired a fourth cat at the local gaming convention over Labor Day weekend.

There was a gray kitten hanging around the hotel parking lot, approaching cars and people (possibly looking for her people, who either lost her or -- more likely, given the lack of habitation in the area -- dumped her). A bit reluctantly, since we already had three cats including one fairly recent addition who was only just learning to fit in, we decided that if nobody else took her, we would. Several people at the convention were willing but unable for various reasons, so we started making preliminary plans.

We heard unconfirmed reports that someone had decided to take her in, and she wasn't hanging around as usual Sunday night, but we swung by the hotel Monday after dance-group practice to be sure. Within a few minutes, somebody near the Outback steakhouse pointed the kitten out to starmalachite, and we got her stowed away in a duffel bag that was emptied into my suitcase to serve as an impromptu cat carrier. We got her home, set her up in a walk-in closet isolated from the other cats, and did the decontamination routine of dumping all clothes right into the wash and showering.

Fortunately, the vet found nothing worse than some fleas and a nasty ear mite infestation (she had a punctured eardrum, but no apparent damage to her hearing); we were apparently successful in keeping them away from the other cats. After getting a clean bill of health and a spaying, she was introduced to the other cats. Heidi generally ignores her (she was an only cat for years, and tends to be a bit reserved toward either humans or felines). Vir bonded with her easily, playing tag and wrestling (a good thing; the vet says he could stand to lose a bit of weight). Kimba hissed and growled at her for a week or so (he was probably feeling insecure, having barely settled in himself), but is getting more tolerant. The kitten takes all this in stride, including being growled at by a cat three times her size.

Everything is going smoothly, with a couple of minor difficulties of feeding her kitten food without letting the older cats (especially Vir) get into it and keeping her inside. She got out at 5 AM Sunday when starmalachite went out to the car to retrieve something and led us on a merry chase around the neighborhood until I caught her. We're trying to get her to accept that she's an indoor cat now, but she's stubborn.

After a bit of dithering, we decided on the name "Dorothy". I'm sure the experience for her was not unlike being dropped into Oz. :-)

The Force Is Weak With This One

2010-09-16T19:02:24Z

A poster boy for the caption on this userpic:

Ferndale police collar 'Darth Vader' hold-up suspect

After arresting a suspect last night for the armed robbery of a convenience store, Ferndale police observed in a statement that "[t]his is one of the world's dumbest criminals."

The suspect took an undisclosed amount of money from the clerk at knife-point, wearing a Darth Vader mask that completely covered his face. The fatal flaw in his plan was that he entered the store before donning his disguise. That meant that the store's surveillance cameras contained images of the man's face....

Kimba Settling In

2010-08-11T03:32:04Z

Kimba (left) poking at his wheel-ball cat toy as Vir (right) looks on:

When they were kittens, they were so hard to tell apart that we suspected that they were identical twins; this seems unlikely now. ("You're not clones; you're just garden-variety twins!")

Heidi (as usual) prefers to stay aloof from the undignified display.

Kimba

2010-08-06T19:32:56Z

Last weekend, we took in one of Vir's littermates -- his human has been out of work and in bad health. There was some posturing and hissing at first, but Kimba (we kept the same name; he has enough other stuff to adjust to) has been warming up to the new humans and new cats.

One of the first good pictures we got (after some redeye correction) is under the cut-tag; you can see how much he resembles Vir (in userpic), except for being bigger and darker colored:

Attack Of The Sinuses

2010-07-11T15:47:05Z

I'd been feeling a bit congested and generally "off" yesterday, but thought it was just the usual hotel-air issues (I'm at Shore Leave this weekend). I was functioning pretty well through the afternoon, winning a game of Dominion narrowly and Ticket to Ride in a blowout (in the initial deal, I got three tickets each from the northeast corner of the country to the southwest corner, a recipe for either glory or disaster if I kept them all. I did, and it worked out).

After dinner and the masquerade, I felt a more congested and a bit lightheaded, so I went looking for a place to rest a while. Once starmalachite got a look at me and felt my temperature, she insisted that the EMTs have a look. There was no sign of it being anything worse than a nasty sinus-infection flareup (she had a bad cold last week; I seem to have gotten it worse), and everything tested normal except my blood pressure being a bit high (not surprising under the circumstances; she was clearly worried and I was still thinking clearly enough to realize that the situation just might be worse that it seemed). I was starting to feel better, but she convinced me it was probably best to head back to our hotel.

I'm feeling better now, and the fever is broken, so I'll be back at the con. I may decide to take a sick day tomorrow to fully recover, though.

Headed For Conterpoint

2010-06-24T13:45:51Z

I'll be spending the rest of the morning checking that we have all the stuff we'll need for the con ready to go, and then we'll be headed out to check in, start picking up guests, and hauling the bulk con suite supplies.

The cats have figured out that the humans are getting ready to shamefully abandon them again....

MOAR COFFY PLZNTNKU

The Illusion Of Listening

2010-06-21T13:54:52Z

An example of why it's sometimes a bad idea to even ask the question if the answer is going to be something you don't want to hear:

Last month, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio and his lieutenants launched "America Speaking Out," a public outreach campaign involving an interactive website and town hall meetings with GOP lawmakers. Its stated purpose is to provide people with "a new platform to share their priorities and ideas for a national policy agenda."

Thousands of people posted ideas or voted on their favorite suggestions. But the project's usefulness in shaping a Republican agenda is questionable.

Last week, the top five entries in the "Liberty and Freedom" category were: ban handguns, "drop the idea that we're a 'Christian' country," declare abortion "none of the government's business," allow gays to serve openly in the military and legalize marijuana.

Imagine my surprise at the next statement in the article:

Republican leaders mentioned none of these when they began highlighting proposals from the project.

Unknown, Or Just "None Of The Above"

2010-06-10T17:04:25Z

From the Washington Post account of the winner of the South Carolina US Senate primary:

Alvin M. Greene never gave a speech during his quixotic campaign to become this state's Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate. The mystery man of South Carolina politics didn't launch a Web site or hire consultants or plant lawn signs. There's only $114 in his campaign bank account, he says, and the only check he ever wrote was to cover his filing fee.

Indeed, in the course of a rambling, repetitive and frequently inchoate three-hour interview, this jobless military veteran could not name a single specific thing he'd done to campaign for lofty political office....

Now that people are paying attention to him, matters have taken a turn for the worse:

Things have gotten even stranger since Greene's startling win. First, the Associated Press reported that Greene faces pending felony obscenity charges for allegedly showing pornography to a University of South Carolina student. Then, the state's Democratic Party chairman called on him to withdraw from the general election. He's been accused of being a Republican plant and listened to his victory explained away as a fluke that resulted from his name coming before his opponent's in the alphabet....

I suspect that the real explanation is a less comfortable one for the state's Democratic Party chairman, and everyone else in the political establishment -- as an unknown, Greene was effectively a protest vote for "None Of The Above". (Of course, one can reject the candidates and/or the system generally by declining to vote at all. The disadvantage of that is that it produces the same result as not voting for any other reason, which dilutes the message.)

If nothing else, this ought to cause some amusing Headless Chicken Syndrome symptoms in the local political establishment.

British Airways Newsletter Punked

2010-06-02T20:23:33Z

LHR News, the internal newsletter of British Airways, illustrated an article on mobile-device boarding passes with this example:

It remains to be seen how or why this happened -- speculation centers on the possibility of a prank that got out of hand or a gesture by a disgruntled employee.

Back Up And Do This Right

2010-05-17T02:37:51Z

I set up a backup to portable hard drive to run tonight so I could park it at the office as an off-site backup. It worked, except for two little details:

1. I should have run it from the master admin account so it could access the data files on both my and starmalachite's accounts. The log had a long list of "could not access file..." complaints.

2. Turning on the encryption would probably be a good idea.

The process seems to run about four hours, so I can try again tonight and have it ready in the morning.