A seething mass of turgid drama.

I lay awake for an hour early morning. This made it hard to get out of bed and I was a bit slow in my morning prep. I had a pile of work waiting so I decided to not make my standard cup of coffee so I could catch the early bus and get to the office earlier, and then catch up with mediocre coffee in the work lounge. I don't want to make this a habit as I am trying to ignore the free work coffee, but it seemed a worthwhile thing for today and it wouldn't be a second cup after all. That worked; I walked to the bus stop one minute before it arrived, and then my BART transfer was near-instant. BOOM! Nice prioritizing, me.

When I went to the lounge, the coffee machine was out of order.

Yesterday I walked to a bus stop I use sometimes - the last time was last week. It's got a sign calling it a temporary stop through April 2023, but it's still in operation. I waited.

The bus showed up, dropped people off half a block up, and drove past me without stopping.

Okay, I thought. I guess the temporary stop is no longer in service as of this week. I walked the half block to the other apparent stop. It wasn't labelled, but Muni can take a long time to get their painting and signage up. I waited twenty minutes for the next bus.

Which promptly drove past me and stopped at the temporary stop.

Fortunately there were a few people getting off and on, so I was able to jog over and get on at the last minute. Otherwise I would have been really irritated.

The smoke alarm went off at 1 AM. It told us there was a fire. There wasn't. We checked. It went off several times more. It kept insisting there was a fire (and once, carbon monoxide).

For this we had a new alarm installed?

I keep thinking about a religion with a core tenet that those who impose their religious restrictions on nonbelievers are condemned to death - but the intended audience will not get the irony.

Turns out that my lack of (home) laptop connectivity wasn't a fried wireless card. I took it to a decent local shop and they found a virus that was resetting the IP address randomly. They cleaned it off and installed a different virus-checker; I'd been using McAfee, but it didn't catch this one. As the guy said, "I see lots of malware on PCs with McAfee running."

...apparently the virus came from a recent McAfee update.
The irony, it burns.

The blog post that I mentioned here, that stole my article's information to talk about the history of copyright?
Gone. I guess my letter to the hosting provider had an effect.

We watched the pilot for Max Headroom last night. I'd forgotten about how innovative the show was using simulated computer graphics of the time. I was amused, however, that Max was done as a prosthetic addition because they couldn't simulate the human face at the time; and the remark by the boy genius that animating a whole body would take "millions of bytes of computer power".

And in the future, no computer will have that much.

I got a mailer invitation to Beta Gamma Sigma - "Recognizing the outstanding academic achievements of students enrolled in business programs." They invite the top 20%, which is not exactly exclusive. (Don't get me wrong: I would rather be in the top 20%. I may give them my $70 for the privilege of putting it on my resume.)

However, their explanation of the Greek letters is, well...
"Sigma: Sigma signifies earnestness. Earnestness is enthusiasm measured by acheivement, disciplined by reason..."

And they spell "achievement" correctly later on in the paragraph.

What I'm reading: Elizabeth Bear, Dust

I made the mistake of introducing this to my boss.
He's a drummer. He keeps this up on his desktop now so he can access it at any time.

"Six Flags says Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge to be their official vehicles."
I wish this was a joke press release (they're both in bankruptcy). The blind leading the deaf?