Spoonerisms: The Furminator

Spoon sheds more than any cat I have ever known. It's crazy. Super-mega-fuzzy-50%-fur-by-volume Pandora didn't shed this much. I even asked the vet about it and she said it may be toward the edge of the bell curve, but it's not unheard of. It's not like he's going bald. Of course, because his fur is mostly white, and because there's also some quality to it that makes it stick to everything (it doesn't feel "sticky" -- it's actually quite satiny smooth to pet him), his fur is everywhere. I probably have a hairball stewing in my gut as I type, in fact.

A year or so ago, I bought a special brush called a Furminator, which is actually really good at grabbing all the loose fur from his coat before he leaves it elsewhere. Spoon doesn't exactly like it, though. In fact, he has a rather ambivalent reaction. He likes the attention and full-body rub aspect, but he doesn't actually like the feeling of the thing through his fur or across his skin. He doesn't fight it, but he'll generally end up standing up and walk a foot away from me or something like that.

Since I've gone back to work, though, he's willing to put up with a lot more just to get some snuggle time. And since it's also shedding season, I took the opportunity the other evening to do some major furminating when he got up on the couch with me and nestled in. That wad in the picture is from about 5 minutes of work (including short breaks while he re-arranged himself regularly, all while maintaining physical contact) and I didn't even get anywhere near his belly.

Other: Ditching Detourage

Of course, last week I bitched about what a piece of crap Microsoft Entourage is. Today I actually found something which might make it possible for me to get the full Exchange calendar functionality, including checking invitee availability, while still using Mac Mail and Ical. It is this absurdly-klugey-to-set-up app called DavMail, but after a couple hours tinkering with it, I think it actually works. At least part of the time anyway.

Now I just need to re-do all my rules in Mail, which actually kind of sucks since it doesn't look like its logic is any better than Entourage's. But at least it has real threading. Sort of. I just get far, far too much mail at work to deal with a half-assed mail client. Let alone a one-sixteenth-assed mail client like Entourage.

News: All in Fun

I've found a bunch of funny and cute things over the past few days and thought I'd make a warm'n'fuzzy news round-up.

• First off, what killed me about this WooWork story about a waffle fire was the flying toaster screensaver homage. I had totally forgotten about it! That last Mac(Plus maybe?) I had in college as a desktop, that was the screensaver. But on my MacBook Pro, there are no airborne toasters to be found! But then I watched the post's making-of video. He used "stunt waffles!"

• XKCD nailed geek pain:


• Yes, the Library of Congress is going to keep an archive of every tweet ever sent on Twitter. (Ok, that's not very warm or fuzzy, is it? Sorry.) Well, to put it in a positive light, there's got to be at least one tweet with more literary value than anything Dan Brown ever wrote. Not saying much, is it?


• My new motto:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

• Why haven't we found aliens yet, after years of scanning the skies? Why, because they're all too busy playing video games to try to contact us! If they only knew what a great game World of Warcraft is, they'd be here in a heartbeat! (Um, only a little sarcasm there, honestly. Seriously. Well, not really.)



see more Lolcats and funny pictures
• Crap, now I'm going to be wondering what the hell Spoon is chattering about at 3 in the morning.

• You probably don't want to click this link. (This is what a product marketed by Paris Hilton for pre-pubescent girls would look like, I swear.)



• This must be where the Man-Eating Cow went when she retired from battling The Tick! (She was my favorite character...)

• "Mark Fiore can win a Pulitzer Prize, but he can’t get his iPhone cartoon app past Apple’s satire police"

Other: Why Microsoft Entourage Sucks Major Ass

I have to use Microsoft Entourage at work for my email. Well, strictly speaking, I don't have to. But while Mac's Mail and Mozilla's Thunderbird are options, neither can talk to the Exchange server to get calendar data for my co-workers so I can see their schedules when trying to fit stuff in. (I'd love it if someone told me I was wrong.) And it's not worth having Entourage open for calendar stuff but reading all my emails in another app. So, here's my list of why Entourage is crap:

• Threading. It says it has threading, but bunching messages together by Subject is NOT threading! True threading would be to read the In-Reply-To: message header to find parent-child relationships. That's what the header is there for and why it's in the 28-whopping-year-old RFC 822. Then again, Microsoft has proven again and again that they're just too special (and I mean rides-the-short-bus special) to adhere to Internet standards. Dumbasses.
• Rules. Don't get me started on Rules. Ok, yes, I need these two conditions always to be true, but in addition, I only need one of these two conditions here to be true. Nope, can't group that way for logic. That would require to much programming on their end. And I would really like to flag all messages with a calendar invite. That seems like a logical condition for a client meant to be used with Microsoft Exchange. Nope. The best I could come up with was to search for the Content-class header and see if it had a calendaritem. I'm not even sure that's bullet-proof.
• The spam filter is moronic. Um, Microsoft, you do realize that it's really easy for spammers to plagiarize the From address? (I won't even bother asking if they can check the Received: header for the "from" host.) Look, I don't know what the hell they use to check for spam, but since they don't seem to be querying spam blacklists from the Internet, it's just useless. I spent forever marking spam in my good folders and unmarking legitimate messages in the Spam folder.

Ok, those are the main three, the ones that just scream "stupid, lame, and lazy." But they're also annoying and time-wasting, and other mail clients have gotten it right, or at least significantly better, so Microsoft has no excuse.

News: Facepalm Headache

Car stuff:

• A few articles on how drivers don't seem to give a shit whether a pedestrian is legally in the crosswalk and apparently how some states don't either.
• Thoughtful essay on how many people don't consider how a long commute will make them miserable. (I learned this lesson long ago, and as I said, it played a huge factor in my job-hunting this time.)

Intermission:
This is too true:

Fakebook crap:

• This guy got sued by Facebook for crawling their data, except he claims he was honoring their robots.txt guidelines for search engines. While Facebook has once again lowered my already-astonishing-low opinion of their understanding of technical anything, I doubt a judge is going to comprehend and honor the 16-year-old robots.txt convention for guiding web crawlers. (The guy in question said he has actually notified Facebook of various security holes over the years. Because, like I said, they have no idea what the hell they're doing as far as security.)
• Facepalm Award of the Week: A 16-year-old has sued his mother for "harassing" and "slandering" him on his Facebook page.

Compucrap:

• Corporate security has more to do with making auditors happy than actually securing the data. Yes, the two are more often than not mutually exclusive in my experience, at least as far as computers go.
• Apparently a YouTube video of a teenager destroying an iPad sparked outrage. WTH? If he wants to waste $500 of his parents' money, that's their problem. It's not like he's desecrating a religious icon... oh, wait, to some Apple cultists, he probably is.
• Just the other day I was talking to someone about how this was bound to happen: a UK man is blaming Google Street View for his house being burglarized, because their picture of his home was taken when his garage was open, showing the world his possesions. Whether or not he can prove it in this case... I'm not sure Google's definition of "not being evil" is in the same reality as mine, or as many other people's.
• Required password changes are a major hindrance to productivity. I can tell you that from experience on both sides (user and administration) of the issue. And since the majority of users are no doubt just swapping in one easily-crackable password for another, there's not much point to it.

Awesome of the Week:

• A Nigerian "kingdom" has been ruled only be queens for generations because men who try to take the throne seem to die rather quickly...

Dumbass of the Week!

• A modern-day snake oil informercial "star" was thrown in jail on contempt charges after telling his fans (morons, all, I'm sure) to email the judge in his current (and there have been many) civil case. Now, who hasn't wished they could throw a spammer in the slammer? And this guy is as slimy as can be. Snake oil will do that do you.

Just plain sad:

• The National Science Foundation apparently considers evolution and the big bang irrelevant to science literacy. They left it out of their biannual report on Americans' understanding of science and technology. Words cannot express how... yes, let's pander to extremist idiots. That will make our children soooo much smarter and competitive in a technology-driven world. (The White House is saying they did not approve this omission to the report.) So much for separation of church and state.