Yikes.

Booker ain't married, so mistresses aren't going to be his problem.

I am all about little rewards, except I don't have any rewards in my office. Except for some Luna bars, which get a bit boring after a while, even the white chocolate-macadamia one.

I overslept this morning and yet when I got in, the office was mostly empty anyway. Apparently a whole bunch of staff are going offsite for some project that I'm not involved in, so I suspect it's going to be a quiet, boring day.

The thunderstorm last night was pretty impressive, especially since I was at dinner in the city and had to walk in it.

The National Weather Service counted a whopping 750 lightning strikes across the Bay Area, said Chris Stumpf, a forecaster.

Holy cow! That's impressive.

Happily, TNG doesn't appear to mind about thunderstorms: nothing was destroyed when I got home, not even the expensive dog bed she started chewing on the other night. $70 for an extra-sturdy dog bed from LL Bean, and she decided she was bored at 2 AM and tore out one of the seams. I dunno what I'm going to do about that: I think I can stitch it back together, but it's not worth if it I can't stop her from chewing.

So that really was an unusual thunderstorm last night:

Daaaaamn. I was indoors the whole time watching the DVD of my last non-Theater Pub show.

Things that got hit by lightning last night: Transamerica Pyramid, towers on both GG and Bay Bridges, Cranes building the new bridge.

JOIN ME IN SMALL REWARDS TO GET THROUGH THE DAY!

I endorse this plan! I just realized I have a rewards card to the froyo place down the street that I completed the last time I was there, so I can go get free froyo this afternoon. Woo! This will make up for the fact that I decided I couldn't skip work this afternoon to join M for the baby shower his department is throwing for us. Ah well.

I think someone posted a link to Text From Dog before, but this one cracked me up:

[link]

On one development project years ago we included an alpha test, post QA, and pre-beta. We put the QAd system up and encouraged future users to try and break it. But we wanted to emphasize than problems were expected at this stage and their finding them was a good thing. A problem did not make us bad programmers or them bad users, but simply were something that at this stage were bound to exist and needed to be found by them and fixed by us. So we put big baskets of cookies in the test rooms and encouraged users to take a cookie every time they logged a problem. No there were no consequences for taking a cooking if you did not find a problem.

It worked! People actually came in and tested. And the cookies communicated that there were supposed to be problems and nobody badmouthed us when they found them.

I suspect there's a ton of pushback in the comments, but I got a kick out of professional troublemaker Nick Mamatas' post titled Let Us Put an End to Geek Pride. Such a shit-stirrer, Nick is.