This is another catch-up post to cover all sorts of topics from the past week.

Dream

Last night, I had an odd dream in which I somehow lost a cadaver. I have no idea why I had one. I might have been a mortician or transporting it or merely keeping an eye on it for someone. (Wait–what? Keeping an eye on it? Why? In case it walks away?!) I also have no idea how one could lose a lifeless body. But I did.

I pretty much have to put the blame on this week’s This American Life: Mistakes Were Made. It was all about a haphazardly run cryogenics company in the 60s that made a bunch of choices that might have seemed good at the time, but looking back were pretty poor.

Extra points to TAL for using NIN’s Ghosts as incidental music.

Too Much Coffee Man

Saturday was the final evening performance of the Too Much Coffee Man Opera. Although I have seen plays and concerts in Portland, I had never actually seen anything in the Performing Arts Center. Presumably, it contains some pretty large halls, but it also holds a number of smaller ones. The show was in a room that could probably seat about 100-150. There were a half-dozen or so tables up front and conventional theater seating in the back.

The opera itself was quite fun. It was campy and low budget, yes, but that’s sort of the point! The adventures of TMCM and Espresso Boy, who both fall in love with the coffee shop barista, but she runs off to be a superhero and marry the leader of the evil Martians (but she convinced him to be good.) In the end, the Earth is destroyed but the coffee is saved.

Imbibe

Kim and I met up with Julian at Imbibe on Sunday (or was it Friday? It was some time over the weekend.) I used to really like Imbibe, but something changed recently. Last October they got sued by the RIAA because a live band played a cover without approval. I don’t know if that’s the reason or if it’s under new management or what. They slimmed down the menu, lowered the quality of the food and raised the prices. My $15 olive and cheese plate (which was formerly $10 or $12) was pretty skimpy (it used to be huge.) The other food our table got wasn’t particularly good for the price, either.

The one good thing I pulled away from that evening was the Gotan Project, which was playing on CD between bands. I believe the genre is called “tango fusion.” Basically, I’m a sucker for a good accordion in a modern song.

Photos

My bus transfers! Let me show you them! (Oh, speaking of this phrase, I got an email newsletter from Nintendo today about some new Pokemon game. The ALT text for the main image was “Let Me Show You Them!”)

That’s the past month or so of bus tickets–at least, the ones that didn’t get thrown away. I ride the bus a lot, but not nearly enough to make a monthly pass worth the cost.

On the right there is the flowchart that was taped to my door today. We’re in a crunch to get something out next week and I kept getting pestered with inconsequential requests this morning. I’d submit it to PassiveAggressiveNotes.com, except I already have something in their queue.

Historic Photos of Portland

I now have a copy of Historic Photos of Portland (sparked off by my “then and now” post), but have yet to really sit down and really give it the time it deserves. Initial impressions are that it’s a high quality book with some great pictures. I’ll talk about it in more detail in the next couple of days. (This weekend was much more busy than expected.)

How to derail the Engineering department in 2 easy steps:

Step 1: Have one of your coworkers announce publicly that he stealthfully gave his 2 weeks notice two weeks ago and has been keeping it on the down-low. He’s moving on to bigger and better things (going back to school) and he’ll really be missed by all. Long lunch, party with cake, great words spoken.

Step 2: Post a printout of the WeRobot shirt image so that everyone can help identify the robots:

The vending machine at work confuses me. Water is twice the price of soda. Sure, the Cokes are 12oz and water is 20oz, but it’s water! I can get filtered water for free from the refrigerator.

In other news, I went to a site with a cute little CAPTCHA today. Sure, it’s not quite KittenAuth, but it was still cute enough to give me a chuckle.

Last week, new signs were put up in the restrooms at work. I am not entirely certain why grown adults need to be told to wash their hands in a method befitting 3rd graders, but I did not question it. I wash my hands anyway and just ignored the signs.

Today, somebody put new signs up over the existing ones…

While chatting with some coworkers around the coffee station at work, I looked up and was surprised by a ceiling cat.

(sorry about the blurry)

It would appear that a pattern is available here: http://tubbypaws.blogspot.com/2008/03/meow-you-can-has-lolcats.html

I am very fortunate in that I work in a place that, while a large amount of it is writing code, there is still science to be done. I can put up with the occasional meeting full of people vying for what color to make icons because I periodically get to put on a lab coat and play with soldering irons, lasers, and circuit boards.

Also: Nacho Libre’s head on a pike.

Like all good toys aimed at kids ages 8 and up, my Triops kit resulted in a death over the weekend. Our dear Mister Triop is now in the great big sushi platter in the sky. He passed away some time during the weekend, which was not a big surprise, as he had been acting a bit sluggish the past week. There was a brief memorial service in the handicap stall of the men’s restroom followed by a tank cleaning. He lived to the age of between 57 and 59 days, not too bad considering the range of 20-90 that was originally quoted.

After playing with the new Apple keyboard for 5-10 minutes at the Apple Store the other week (the sales folks were curious as to why I was writing what looked like code into a TextEdit window), I decided to get one. The key spacing isn’t a big deal at all–they just squared the beveled edges on regular-sized keys–unless you happen to be someone who regularly hits the edges of keys (and if you do, you’re probably not typing correctly anyway.) The “play” on the keys is the same as my laptop, which is also nice–muscle memory for only one “depth” of keys/keyboard. So I took it to work and hooked it up to my Linux box.

I proceeded to set up key mappings (swapping option and command, for instance), until I hit a snag. The new Apple keyboard has a “fn” key where the “Insert” usually is on PC keyboards. It’s a “Help” key on Apple keyboards, so it’s nice that they killed off that key–it was too easy to accidentally hit and spawn the helper application.

Unfortunately, it looks like this key is hard-wired to other key combinations (the F1..F12 keys and their corresponding brightness, speaker, iTunes, dashboard, etc. functions.) It doesn’t look like it generates a keyboard scan code that can be trapped. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, but I use the “shift-insert” key combination for one particular operation that I use constantly: pasting text into a terminal window. Middle-click doesn’t always work (it depends on whether the text is in the X Windows paste buffer or the KDE paste buffer, so gives inconsistent results), but shift-insert always does what I want… yet this keyboard has no insert key!

Instead, I mapped that insert functionality to shift-delete (the key just under Fn), which does not make a lot of logical sense, but is a similar-enough and usable key combination that it works well for me. I have been using this for a week or two now, and I like it a lot better than the Dell keyboard I was using previously.

It’s another Triops picturepalooza (with video!) It shed a pretty large piece of shell last night.

“Hi, I’m a Triops. My likes are: swimming on my back, carrots.”

Triops Backstroke - 30 second video - 1.8MB

Triops With Carrot - 30 second video - 1.8MB