Other: Merry Freakin' Christmas!

No, I haven't finished making my presents this year, let alone giving them out, so until it's safe to post the round-up, I'll leave you with these:


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With bonus stupid criminal, holiday edition:


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News: 301 Moved Permanently

When I mentioned the HTTP Status Codes illustrated by cats in my last post, I lamented that 301 "Moved Permanently" was absent. That situation has been rectified:

News: Geeky Kittehs

• Another feline FreeBSD user!
  
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• Best Bug Report Ever! Note the photo link!
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• Click on pic for more awesome kitteh starships!
  
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• HTTP status codes illustrated by cats! Except they're missing 301 redirects, which is the bane of my existence. Maybe I'll have to make my own...
  
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Minecraft: Perler Bead Sheep

I've posted the charts for my perler bead sheep pattern.

News: The Alcoholic Edition

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And finally, this is totally me:


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Knittin' Crap: Where No Man Has Gone Before

In this episode, Captain Kirk is exploring an oddly fuzzy planet, when he realizes... it's alive!

Spoonerisms: Gift Ideas for Your Cats!

For the cat who has everything, make him a Roly Poly Kitty chin rest!



Spoon was only supposed to be modeling this one and got cranky when I took it away.

News: It's Funny 'Cause It's True

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Minecraft: The Spoon Biome

After a few prototypes, I finally have a 3-D perler bead sheep that is pretty accurate to the proportions and is structurally stable.



I'm not sure why Spoon is so worried. Maybe he's afraid he's going to morph from chunky into blocky.

Minecraft: Kids React

These are cute and funny.





I <3 Morgan. "Oh my god! How did you make the farting cat?" She's a major drama queen, but the bit in the second video where she's wondering if she'll need to build a roof to her shelter... that's how a Minecrafter thinks :)

Minecraft: MineCon!

One of the myriad munchkins in attendance at the only event where wearing a cardboard box on one's head makes sense.

I just arrived back from MineCon in Vegas!

I will admit, I didn't go to many of the special events. Relaxing/recovering from work was primary, while waiting in lots of lines with a surprisingly large number of hyperactive adolescents was not high on my list of priorities.

And there were a lot of kids, although overall the attendee demographics definitely favored males in their teens and 20s. Geeky males. Most of the women my age were accompanying an adolescent son (although that doesn't mean the mother doesn't play, too; the game apparently has a large family fan-base.)

There I was, minding my own business, when I suddenly heard a SSssssss sound coming from right behind me!

MineCon marks the full release of Minecraft 1.0.0. After Notch pulled the lever and zillions of kids raced to... where, exactly? I strolled up to my room and met all kinds of glorious creatures like Magma Cubes and Blazes and... yeah, that was about it. I'm too wimpy to visit The End yet.

I also partook of some other typical Vegas pursuits, although in relative moderation: some slots, the buffet, Bloody Marys for brunch... The last night, I was at the sushi bar in Mandalay Bay, having a discussion with the man sitting next to me. He said that there were about 5000 people around attending a conference for a video game. I said I was one of them. He seemed grateful that there was an adult there who could try to explain the game and its appeal with a vocabulary that consisted of more than Star Trek references spliced together with "like." (I can apparently "pass" for "normal" if I'm careful.) Another group of adults had stopped me earlier, seeing my badge, and asked me the same thing.

Me knitting at the Curse Minecraft Forums photo booth!

Anyway, it was a nice trip, a generally pleasant crowd. Mandalay Bay was an interesting place to stay, as I had never done the big resort thing before.

News: Stupid and Punishment

• Yup, we're talking Florida here:
  
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• I bet this cat is also from Florida:
  
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• Amazingly, not Florida, but close; Georgia:
  
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• ...And some more classic Southern stupidity:
  
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• But this is from Canada!
  
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• An infographic on the punishment of various crimes in societies throughout history
• People who get computer malware are also more likely to get mugged in "meatspace."

Other: Buh-bye, Shared Items

Since Google now wants you to share stories via Google+ instead of the "shared items" system I'd been using in Google Reader, I can't add new stuff to my shared Reader list anymore. So, I'm retiring the widget on the side of the blog. Here's the link to stuff I had "shared" before the change.

Air Journal: Duct Tape and Glitter Glue

I finally got a replacement for the carry-on size suitcase I'd had for the better part of two decades. I just didn't feel safe putting my stuff in something being held together by duct tape and glitter glue:



The glitter glue has mostly rubbed off, but it used to be much brighter. I will always smile when I think of the first time I flew out to visit my parents after I applied it. My mother was appalled. “Mom, you’ve never tried to find a black suitcase in LAX baggage claim. Deal with it.”

Good times.

Buh-bye, old suitcase!

Minecraft: Young Frankencreeper

Minecraft: Look Behind You, Dip!

Minecraft: Perler Bead Madness!

I have a new craft addiction: perler beads.

I missed perler bead fun when I was a kid, but when I saw these instructions for making a 3-D perler bead creeper, I had to try. I finished one today!



And because I have a bunch of other colors since I bought one of those buckets, I'm figuring out how to make a Minecraft sheep:

Spoonerisms: How I Know Autumn Has Arrived

1. I wake up wedged in by cats.

2. Feline geopolitical tensions are escalating because both sides have re-entered the DMZ¹.

3. Dipity has started napping in the electric lap again.

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¹ My bed, which makes me the 38th parallel.

News: Compucrap... with Cats!

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• The Canadian Prime Minister is using Google+ for its most transcendent purpose: posting pictures of his kittens.
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Spoon can't even fit on a 17" MacBook anymore, but he was trying pretty hard yesterday:

Minecraft: Super Blinky Light Tower!

Minecraft: Super Blinky Lights!

Minecraft: Misadventure Update

There are buttloads of commentaries on the Minecraft 1.8 "Adventure Update" out there, but not mine... until now!

In a nutshell: thumbs down. The hunger/food-no-longer-heals-directly thing is annoying. (There's a mod that reverts back to the old method, and it will probably find its way onto RavWorld.) The additional time it takes to eat and to pull the bow are also annoying. Experience orbs are killing performance for a lot of people; that's more of an implementation catastrophe than a broken feature.

What really gets me, though, is the people who bash on people who don't like the changes. They forget that one of the reasons Minecraft has been so popular among so many different people, from hardcore gamers to people who are usually meh about video games, is that different people enjoy different aspects of the game. Some people like exploring, some people like killing monsters, some people like building grand structures, some people like building mechanisms, and some people like different combinations of the above. So here's my solution to people who don't want to read forums posts from people saying they don't like the changes: don't read the forums. And maybe realize that just because someone else doesn't play the game the way you do doesn't mean their way is less valid, dumbass. As far as they're concerned, someone broke their favorite game.

Other than the hunger thing, most of the changes are cosmetic: new biomes and other landscape features and terrain-generation improvements, plus abandoned mineshafts and strongholds. The things I like are actually small and silly, maybe because they don't break anything else: giant 'shrooms, the "so-and-so died in such-and-such-a-way" messages, and some of the attractive caverns created by the new terrain generation methods.

Spoonerisms: Prepare for Cute Overload

I would totally watch that show.

Spooning²:

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I would totally buy one of their phones.

Other: Date of My Last Tetanus Shot

Sept. 21, 2011

So, Monday morning I was walking to the bus stop and this ninja tree root just came out of nowhere and tripped me and I went flying.  I was in the dirt when my bus went by. But after taking inventory, I realized my right knee was butt-ugly, my left elbow was a little scraped, my left palm had taken some impact, but other all parts seemed to be attached and I managed to get to my feet and walk the block home moderately normally.  I washed everything out with soap and water, liberally applied Bactine, and logged back into work.

Yesterday my right knee was stiff and bruised but didn't look like it was about to fall off.  This morning, though, it didn't look any better, and since I was also pretty sure I hadn't had a tetanus booster in this millennium, I made an appointment with the urgent care center and went this afternoon.

The bad news:

• Yup, it's infected.  The doc gave me a prescription for antibiotics, both oral and topical, in addition to a tetanus booster.

The good news:

• I didn't faint after the tetanus booster, or even come close, even though the other nurse was scrubbing my tender knee at the same time.  (My last few episodes with medical needles had not ended so well.)
• I was out of there in an hour.  That's pretty efficient.
• I took the bus to the pharmacy that's about a mile from home, got my prescriptions, and walked home, stopping at Zankou for a tarna wrap...
• Where they were having a falafel special.  Mmmm, their falafels are yummy.

Spoonerisms: Happy 5th Spooniversary!

5 years ago today, Spoon moved in!


Then:



Today (well, yesterday):

News: Geek-O-Rama

This was very much how Spoon was behaving yesterday when I was trying to WFH:

• The geekiest keychain rack ever (but very clever. May even keep the cats from hiding my keys every night.)
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  ** I swear I've never done that. It's not my fault I have a girl's name!
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  The Troubadour was the first place I saw Throwing Muses play, back in, I think, '94. Anyway.
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