News: There Will Be Cake!

Transportation stuff:

• A dumbass who (allegedly) killed a man because she just had to update her Facebook page while she was driving (I'd love to see that update) is being sued by the victim's family. The defendant is arguing that she posted the update a few minutes earlier but server lag kept it from getting posted immediately. Seriously, though, the source of truth would be her phone carrier, which knows when the phone is in use. Techno-ignorant lawyers and journalists not asking the right questions once again make me want to smack them.
• Yes, this totally qualifies as transportation. A baby elephant becomes a pedestrian! It's amazing how all the adults are swarming around, helping support the baby.
  
• This one leaves me speechless:
  
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• I guess there was nothing in the original Oregon Trail game about getting hit by someone (allegedly) updating their Facebook page while driving, so dysentery will have to do!
  
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• A 2-year-old bus-loving Seattle-area boy got this awesome cake for his birthday:
  

Lolcat break:

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Stupid criminals:

• This dumbass (from Florida, of course), kept calling 911 to check up on local deputies. The 16th of these phone calls, when he got drunk and dialed 911 to tell the police to arrest "the media," got him arrested for making false 911 calls. The very same day, a woman in the same county was also arrested for making false 911 calls after she got into a scuffle with her nail technician and kept calling even after a deputy had arrived.
• This moron in Maryland was stealing jewelry from a home when the owner arrived. The burglar fled, but forgot his phone, which he had left plugged into the wall because his own house had lost power in the severe snow storms a month ago.
• YMD (Young Male Dumbass) burglars in the Chicago area killed 3 goldfish because they "didn't want to leave any witnesses."

Those morons could all take a lesson from this cat:

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Minecraft: Build Mania

I started playing on another server associated with Ravelry a couple weeks ago. I've built a glass McMansion, complete with greenhouse wing, petting zoo wing, and giant weird water-and-lava globe:









Yesterday, thanks to this sudden sore throat which left me without enough energy to leave the couch, I finished my giant gumball machine:



In other minecraft news;

• This awesome live-action Minecraft short:
  
• Minecraft has hit the big time! It's had its own xkcd strip!
  
• I am totally adding Minecraft to my resume:
  
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Metro Journal/Whiteboard Jungle/Other: Highlights of My Day

• It started raining during the night. Walking to the bus stop this morning, I forgot about this spot on the sidewalk which always aspires to be the Marianas Trench. Forgot about it until I stepped in it, I mean.
• A guy sleeping on the bus apparently woke up after his stop and started yelling at the driver to stop immediately.
• There was a woman on the bus with two young, loud daughters. At some point I heard the mother say, "How can you be afraid of something you've never seen?" Somehow, this sounded profound. The one girl starts saying, "I'll punch the alien! I'll punch the alien!" Then the other daughter said, "I'll kick the alien! I'll kick the alien!" "I'll punch the alien AND kick the alien!" And so on.
• Because of the rain, my bus was running late, and I had another 10AM deployment. I had to take care of some stuff first, so I pulled out my craptop, turned on wi-fi tethering on my phone, and logged in over the VPN. Further proof that I am an Über Cool Nerd Goddess.
• I actually got all the approvals I needed a whole 12 minutes before the scheduled start time! A miracle!
• So, of course, the deployment craps out and we had to roll back.
• Someone at work sent me the following IM: "I have the dry runs!"
• During the weekly projects meeting, I got asked when I would get a project done. "After they add another day to the week." Today I didn't even have time to eat lunch.
• On the bus home, a guy sitting in the very back was snoring.
• I just saw a recipe for gin-and-tonic cupcakes, but considering that all the gin is in the icing, and even gin-less icing is the best part, I see no reason to make the cake part.

Metro Journal: Feb 15 One of Those Mornings

I was supposed to be at work by 10, well, before then, because I was lead on a deployment. My first bus was fine, but of course, the 94, which is rarely more than 5 minutes late, was 10 minutes late. And full. And proceeded to stop at Every Single Stop, and there are a lot of them. For instance, it stopped at that stop just north of the 134, where it never stops. So I managed to snap this picture of the Verdugo Canyon Wash, close to where it empties into the Los Angeles Drainage Ditch.

With all the stops, I started getting worried. We were getting later and later. I would have gotten there 25 minutes before 10, but my buffer was shrinking. When we were finally getting close to my stop, I noticed this ad: Um, if the best the gnomes can do is to get me to work what ended up being 15 minutes late, gnome power is extremely underwhelming. Which generally means that Congress will decide to subsidize it.

Spoonerisms: Self-Tinting Dipity

This morning, I was looking at Dipity lolling around in one of her bizarre positions in the electric lap, and I started wondering. As happens with all cats with the Siamese phenotype, she has been getting progressively darker, particularly on her back, as she's gotten a little older. The Siamese "point" pattern is caused by a mutation in the gene for tyrosinase, causing it to break down at higher body temperatures and thus preventing the proper manufacture of the melanin pigment. So, now I'm wondering if she likes to lie on her back in the electric lap because she's trying to lighten her fur....



... Or maybe she just has a cold back, which is why the fur is getting so dark in the first place.

Asshole du Jour: Composting on the Bus

Last night on the Metro 780, I came upon the only empty pair of seats not all the way in the back, and found out why they were empty:

Asshole du Jour: Intro

This section will be dedicated to those, well, impossible-to-overlook assholes. Our first asshole du jour: the person who works in my business park who thought it would be cute to put his (playing the odds here, people) cigarette butt out in a flower:



And, while I certainly personally know too many assholes, I'm not going to make these posts about people I know. At least not intentionally. Or until I change my mind.

Minecraft: My Doorbell

Knittin' Crap: My First Animated Gif!

WEEEEEEEwooooooooWEEEEEEEEEwooooooooo!