I have to take Muppet to the vet's to get her teeth cleaned. This means no breakfast this morning, so I've locked myself in my room to avoid the irate feline emotion on display. Happily, I can go get dressed right now and pop her into the cage, and whisk her off to her DOOM.

I feel like such a traitor to all that is cat.

That's because it's the middle of the night where you are!

Yeesh. Like a compression fracture, in reverse. But the real question is, what is a preteen doing racing cars? If he can't get a driver's license, how is he getting on the NASCAR circuit (or whatever they have in Britain)??

Jeff Gordon was racing USAC midgets when he was 16 years old. He was racing full sized sprint cars before he turned 18, too. And those things go over 100 mph. Gordon started his racing career on short dirt tracks in Indiana before he had his drivers' license.

Heh. Photoshopped chimeras. I like the parrot. And the penguin.

Oh, hey, is Lee around? I did finally start reading those Nora Roberts books, and do you still have the third one? Because now I need it. No one told me if I read three more pages, they'd be in NYC! I was afraid it was going to be all swirling capes and ancient cliffs.

Wow. Those photos are cool, but some of them took me to a very Uncanny Valley sort of place.

No one delivers beer? That's a market waiting to be exploited.

Well, I think Peapod does, but I wanted beer when I got home from work, not the next day. So I stopped at the corner store on the way back from the train. By the time I got back to the apartment, I might have been in severe pain and yelling obscenities about the god damn cold, but at least I didn't have to worry about the beer getting warm.

Jesse, I have the third one. You want I should pop it in the mail? (I'll want it back at some point, though, else the other two will get lonely.)

Thanks, Amy. The two that I have now are formerly Lee's, so I could keep that set together.

I couldn't decide if this was better placed in Tech or in Movies, so here it is in Natter -- What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies):

1. Code does not move
In films and television code is always sailing across the screen at incredible speeds; it's presented as an indecipherable stream of letters and numbers that make perfect sense to the programmer but dumbfound everyone else. I understand that to the non-savvy person the abilities of a programmer might seem amazingly complex, but do they honestly think we can read shit that isn't sitting still? It'd be like trying to read six newspapers flying around in a tornado. Sure, I can watch a kernel compile, tail a log file, or simply monitor the scrolling output of a program - but the most value I get out of those activities is when execution stops and I can actually scroll back to read what the hell happened (unless the output was going slow enough I could read it as it happened).

5. Code does not make blip noises as it appears on the screen
This goes for ANY text, not just code. When text appears on my monitor it doesn't make blip sounds - this isn't 1902 (or whenever monitors used to do that). This is one of the most common offenses in Hollywood films, almost every movie that has a scene where a character is composing an email or surfing the net has the text make blippity-blip sounds as it appears. Do they have any idea how fucking irritating that would be in real life? This article alone would be like thirty thousand blippity-blips