Whiteboard Jungle: My Week

I just finished my first week at my new job. Yes, I am once again gainfully employed. This time I'm at a large Internet company. Of course, they tend to take it easy on you the first week, and you're mostly dealing with new hire bureaucracy, but I'm feeling good about it so far.

• Commute is easy, less than an hour each way by bus.
• Fridays are generally telecommuted.
• The things I'll be doing are somewhat different from my past jobs, even though some of the skill set is the same. I'd been getting bored with the same-old systems stuff after all those years. While there were always new technologies to learn, and I liked that, it was also a lot of monotony.
• The engineers actually seem to get respect, rather than being treated like interchangeable automatons. (Not that I'm, uh, saying things weren't that way, at, oh, a place I may have fled in recent memory.)

So, I'm pretty excited. There is one thing that bothers me, though. My laptop is a MacBook Pro. While many people are envious, I had barely touched a Mac (at least not for more than 2 minutes) in, oh, almost 20 years.¹ "But Karen, Mac OSuX is based on Unix!" "Yeah, then I'd rather just be running real FreeBSD. No self-respecting OS builds in a GUI!"

Yeah, the multimedia stuff is nice, but I'm not a computer illiterate and I actually like being able to go in and tweak low-level things by hand, without a GUI dictating what I can and cannot do. At least we do have VMware Fusion, so I can and will have some Linux and FreeBSD virtual machines as those are the main platforms I'll need for development and testing, but they're still limited by what is my biggest complaint about Macs: Why the hell haven't they built in the second (let alone third) mouse button????²

P.S. And I had to turn off those damned bouncing icons. The Yahoo! Messenger smiley face kept looking like it was mocking me somehow.

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¹The only real exception being at my job at a computer animation company about 10 years ago. Mac OSuX was in, well, basically alpha, but as they were porting animation software to it, we were "testing" it. I'm not even going to go into the brokenness of the most basic things. (Ok, for starters, the loopback network interface was broken. Alpha-release or not, how the hell do you show a Unix-like OS to anyone without the loopback interface working? (For computer illiterates, you don't unless you don't expect the computer to do, well, anything, even if you don't expect it to talk to other computers.)) Um, yeah. What a headache.
²Yes, I know there are ways to simulate a right-button click on the touchpad, but that's a pain in the ass. Many Apple cultists refuse to admit it, but Steve Jobs is as dictatorial about how we will use his computers/phones/toys as Microsoft. If not moreso.

Spoonerisms: More Siamese Tails

Tiger, patriarch of several generations of my family's cats

Earlier I wrote about the genetics of Siamese cats. While I certainly should have known if I'd spent more time thinking about it, I'd always seen the Siamese breed as, well, existing because of one gene. Which is absurd thinking, even if I was a biology major for only 5 minutes, give or take a year. I'd grown up with Siamese cats, and I think it's probably one of those ideas from childhood, beliefs that you acquire while young and never really give much thought to later, even though you subconsciously know it's false. They have a set of traits, but of course those traits are spread across multiple genes, and, particularly if there's even one non-Siamese cat in their recent ancestry, they may lack that trait.

My mother's Siamese is a standard apple-headed seal-point Siamese in almost all respects, except he has the wimpiest voice. Siamese tend to have a lower, throatier voice. Now, maybe his voice was, at least as much as cats are conscious of their behavior, a conscious decision made because that's the voice that gets him the most attention. Who knows?

On the other hand, while Dipity with her tabby stripes is far from being a pure Siamese, she has most of the standard traits, including the voice. Spoon is about 50% larger than she is and he has this completely wimpy, high voice. However, as I noted, while her head is vaguely apple-shaped, it's just not quite there. She does have the lanky oriental body type, though, with the very long, thin tail.

Anyway, I keep thinking back to the bit about a standard seal-point Siamese is really just a green-eyed, solid black cat. A single gene just keeps the color from developing normally. And Dipity, well, (to the old Transformers cartoon theme):

Dip'ty kitty
Tabby in disguise...

Knittin' Crap: Sharin' With Karen

Ravelry recently added a feature where project pages could be viewed by non-members. Up until now, you needed an account to browse other Ravelers' stuff, but now users have the option of allowing anyone to view a project with a special link or of making the page completely public and crawlable.

I'm starting with baby steps, though. You can give it a test run by checking out the project information for Brad's birthday present.

News: A Few Items

Not as much has caught my eye in the past couple of weeks, but here are a few things:

It's All Facebook's Fault (Still):

• Public health officials in the UK are blaming a rise in syphilis rates on Facebook. While, um, you'd think Facebook sex would be safe (if highly distasteful sex, and probably with the privacy controls set all wrong), no, people are using it for real-life hookups. Facebook responds: "As Facebook’s more than 400 million users know, our website is not a place to meet people for casual sex – it’s a place for friends, family and co-workers to connect and share.” And play stupid games, and get stalked by burglars, and get scammed...
• ...and get your personal information given to websites you never said you trusted...
• ...and get spied on by your employer...

Misc:

• Some dude who has played over 2300 hours of World of Warcraft claims the game is our future. The lengths to which some people will go to rationalize their addiction...
• The University of Wisconsin at Green Bay has declared that it will save $10,000 a year in printer ink by changing its default email font. Here's a novel idea: remember the 'e' in email stands for 'electronic' and don't print it out at all! That would save lots of trees in addition to all those squid!
• Dumbass of the Week: A man fleeing police scaled a fence to get away... only to find himself in a prison yard. Yes, he was apprehended... and probably mocked ceaselessly by the arresting officers.

Spoonerisms: Siamese Tails

While I knew Siamese cats get their coloration pattern from a mutation of melanin (actually, as I found out, it's tyrosinase, an enzyme involved in melanin production), I decided to do some more digging to find out about lynx-points like my Dipity. The short-lived biology major in me got excited about some of the things I found.

Basically, Siamese have partial albinism because of an ancestral recessive mutation in tyrosinase. The enzyme breaks down at higher body temperature, so areas like the belly don't produce melanin while cooler areas (the "points") do. A seal-point (the darkest coloring) is just a solid black cat, as far as the color genes are concerned. The black is incompletely expressed because of the broken pigmentation production. Furthermore, all Siamese have the partial-albino blue eyes because of the same mutation. Judging from the other oriental breeds which probably have a common ancestor, pure Siamese probably have genes for green eyes.

Now to the lynx-point. Tabbies aren't a breed, per se, although what constitutes a breed can be rather arbitrary. Their markings come from the combination of two genes. The first is an autosomal-dominant gene which alternates pigment production at various points of a hair's growth, resulting in the striped single hairs Dipity sheds on me. Solid-colored cats actually arose from a recessive mutation in the ticking gene. After all, domestic cats descend from striped and spotted wild cats. The tabby gene mixes these ticked hairs with solid hairs in the classic tabby patterns. These genes were bred into the Siamese line to produce lynx-points. Lynx-points would have to be at least 3/4 Siamese by breeding if bred from pure Siamese, though, since the Siamese melanin-deficiency comes from a recessive gene.

So that explains a lot. Dipity definitely has the partial albinism of a Siamese. She also has the voice and even slightly-crossed eyes. She, uh, seems to lack the typical Siamese intelligence, though, although she does have the sociable disposition. She's already occasionally attempting to be a lap cat, which usually starts in older cats in my experience. I'm not sure if her tendency to get into everything is due to Siamese curiosity as much as her youth. Her head isn't really either of the standard Siamese shapes (the "traditional" apple or the "modern" pointy triangle), though, more like a slightly flattened apple. But she's still super-cute!