Chad Vader - Day Shift Manager

The good news is that some people who have too much time on their hands also seem to have a little talent.

Lost in the desert.

Very bizarre: I open my email program, and there's no new email for me. There's been only a couple of new emails since yesterday morning. And none of them are the ones I'd expect to receive even if my correspondents were all on vacation: daily news summary emails, wine lists, spam.

Hmm: the only email I've gotten since 3 a.m. Saturday has been addressed directly to my ISP account, and everything that's missing would have been addressed to my alumni forwarding service at Duke. Hmm.

So I've left the Duke IT people an on-line "problem sheet" and they've sent me an automated email that they'll get to it when they get to it.

If you've sent me something recently and I haven't responded --> I'm using this as my excuse.

Update:
Yes, the email link above works fine.

The Duke IT people got around to it. Well, what they actually got around to was telling me that they aren't responsible for the alumni forwarding service - the alumni association is. And to be helpful, they give me the snail mail address for the alumni association. Thanks. A lot.

I've been busy.

Yes, yes, I know. I haven't been writing much here of late. I plead overwork and silly deadlines at my horrid job, and many hours of watching World Cup matches and referreeing domestic feline disputes. I'll try to be better, but I make no promises.

Customer "service", AOL-style.

You know, not unlike the way that a bull services a cow.

Very funny article in the NY Times yesterday about someone's attempts to cancel his AOL account. Funny, that is, so long as it doesn't happen to you. It took a 21-minute phone call, 15 of which was waiting to talk to a live person. The best part was the conversation with the customer service person, also known as a "retention specialist", who wouldn't let the customer cancel even though the customer used the phrase "Cancel my account" (and close variations) thirty times in that five-minute conversation.

How do we know about this conversation? The customer recorded it. At the moment, the customer's website is down because of all the hits it's received, but YouTube has an NBC news story about the conversation, including a lot of the call.

Field trip.

Saturday, three of the kittens went for a ride. They came in to my contract attorney job with me, as the warehouse we laughingly call our "office" is somewhat more relaxed on the weekends. (Any actual employee of BigLawFirm is off at the beach, sitting under an umbrella with rum drinks in their hands, in preparation for a federal-court-imposed deadline of June 30 to produce a boatload of documents. But we are exhorted to work harder. Go figure.)

Just as with last year's kittens, the three chosen kitties were there to show off to prospective adopters how cute they were, to get some exercise in a room other than their current prison (aka my spare bedroom), and to gain exposure to people other than me, the better to socialize them. Not surprisingly, they were a big hit. Cute and furry and ready to play with anything that looked like a toy, how could they not be?

And just like any good kitten, they ran and played and ran and played until they conked out, and then went to sleep in a heap. And they stayed asleep for an hour or so.

Thus, they were good and rested for the ride home, where they serenaded me with their songs of woe of the terrors of being in a cat carrier.

First in war, first in peace.

I went to the Nationals’ game on Sunday. Good game, as they beat the Phillies 6-0. And the meaningful runs were scored the old-fashioned way: with two outs, they put together a couple of walks and a couple of doubles for the first three runs; all they needed.

My first time to a major league game in ten years. And my first baseball game at RFK since the Senators left in 1971. I don’t know if the game has changed that much since the game I saw in 1996, but the ticket prices certainly have. Good seats, and all, but for forty-five bucks, I’ve come to expect scenery, stage lights, and either an orchestra or a playwright at some point in the production.

Lights! Camera! Inaction!

If a movie producer is the guy responsible for getting a movie made, then Sunday I got to be a movie anti-producer – someone responsible for keeping a movie from being made.

Over the past couple of weeks, they’ve been filming Evan Almighty here in Richmond (among other places). A sequel of sorts to Bruce Almighty, but without Jim Carrey or Jennifer Aniston, whose agents were apparently good enough to preclude a ”must appear in sequel” clause in their contracts for the first movie. Morgan Freeman and Steve Carell are the stars in this one, which has a “Build me an ark!” theme.

The past two weekends, they’ve closed down Main Street in front of the building I work in. We haven’t been able to park in front of the building as usual, but the weather’s been nice enough that the three-block walk we’ve had to take has been a pleasant stroll.

Saturday, they were filming scenes with a Hummer. All I saw was prep work, as I needed to go inside and get to work. (Okay, okay: “to go inside and clock in.”) From what I could see, it looked like they were getting ready to do closeup shots – presumably conversations within the Hummer – with at least one dolly shot coming up to the driver’s window.

Sunday, though, was a bit more exciting. I got to the office just a few minutes too late to see the buffalo, sheep, and goats running up the street. And just the same few minutes too late to be hassled by the movie production folks and the Richmond police, who were keeping people from walking along the sidewalk to the sole entrance to their place of work, some for over half an hour. (By the time I arrived, all the animals were gone and most of the movie folks were on a lunch break, so I was able to walk right up to my building.)

Five of us left work at the same time later that afternoon. Out the door we went, scattering in four different directions. About five steps later, I realized that there were a lot of people around who looked oddly out of place for a Sunday afternoon, because they were dressed in business attire – not the t-shirts and shorts that we and the production staff (and anyone else in his right mind on a beautiful spring afternoon) were wearing. Scattered along the sidewalk, in groups or singly, talking to each other or in mid-stride – and all perfectly still. Hmm, I thought. “Extras. Set up for the next shot, and waiting for the director to call ‘Action!’” Well, no matter: we’re already in the middle of their set-up, we might as well keep on going, and thereby keep them from the shot for another minute or two. (It didn’t occur to me until later that we might not have been in the middle of the set-up – we could just as easily have been in the middle of the take, as they could all be frozen in place though actions of Evan. And if that’s the case, maybe we’ll all show up in a gag reel for the movie.)

They got me back, though. I was parked on a one-way street and needed to cross Main St. to get out of downtown – and the police were keeping traffic from crossing while a take was underway. I had to sit at the intersection through two more takes – maybe 10 or 15 minutes – before I could go on my way.

A cat in the hand.

They're two and a half weeks old now, and while they're starting to walk, they aren't too thrilled about the concept, preferring to stagger instead.

I have good leads on adopting out three of them, and I haven't yet resorted to taking them in to work to show them off.

Mosby is a bit more restless mother than Outdoor Cat was a year ago, and has taken to demanding short releases from her prison into the rest of the house. Much hissing ensues when she spots the Resident Cats. And her forays into the rest of the prison are fairly short, as she suddenly remembers that her kittens are alone.

Open for business. Again.

It would appear that John's Home for Wayward Cats is open for business again.

Mosby gave birth to her kittens about 10 days ago, in a place unknown to me. And it's taken me this long to find them.

My neighbors' house has a flower box built into it - a five-foot high set of walls underneath a kitchen window, open at the top and with metal bars across the top of it that you could put smaller flower boxes onto. Mosby discovered this, and discovered an opening that she could jump down to ground level inside those walls. A safe place to have kittens, she concluded. Mostly protected from the elements, and close enough to my basement door that she could hear me when I came out to feed her.

I think she was surprised when I showed up this afternoon to remove the flower boxes at the top and try to get her and her kittens. She wasn't all that difficult to coax out - it just took some wet cat food. The kittens were a different story, though. They were too far down to reach, and the metal bars would prevent even a skinny person from getting into the structure to get them.

So I had to go fishing. I tied a string to a bucket, and lowered it to the kittens' level. When they didn't rush into the bucket, I encouraged them with a yardstick. Eventually, I was able to raise all five of the little kitties.

They're now in the same luxury hotel suite - known to me as my spare bedroom and to them as a prison - that the Outdoor Cat had last year.

And I'm willing to bet that "fishing for kittens" is more unusual than what you did for Mother's Day.

Good news, bad news.

Well, the good news is that Mosby isn't pregnant.

The bad news is that two days ago, she was.

The worse news is that I hadn't been able to convince her to stay inside, so she's had her litter outdoors, under an azalea bush or something.

With luck, she's had them in the crawl space under my house, which will make it easier to find them and corral them all so I can take the kittens inside, thereby making it easier to convince Mosby to stay inside with them.

I guess I have my weekend exploring all set out for me.

I've seen fire, and I've seen rain.

The aroma of burning pine logs is a distinct and pleasant one, and the smell of that smoke conjurs up images of campfires past, of camping trips taken with the family or with Boy Scouts. A very pleasant trip down Memory Lane – until you realize that you’re smelling that pine smoke while inside your house, and you don’t have a fire going in the fireplace.

It was about ten days ago, when a line of powerful thunderstorms moved through the area, bringing the first measurable rainfall in months. Lots of lightning strikes nearby – almost enough to read by inside. Then one of them knocked out the power. Only for three seconds or so, but that was long enough to reset all the electrical appliances in the house. (Most notably, it reset the DVD player, and I’d gotten through almost all of the interminably long – 13 minutes and 20 seconds – end credits to the latest Harry Potter movie. Over 13 minutes! Of end credits! Gah! But that’s a rant for another day.) I wandered towards the office to check on my computer, when I started thinking about campfires of yore.

When I snapped out of my reverie, I realized that I was smelling the smoke while in my basement; with no doors or windows open. That got me moving. I quickly checked around inside to see if I could find the source of the smoke, and when I couldn’t, I went outside to look for flames. Glowing embers, at least. A quick check of my house and my neighbor’s didn’t reveal anything, so I went back inside for a raincoat. (It was still raining pretty hard, of course, but the need to quickly find the fire overrode any desire to stay perfectly dry.)

The smell of the smoke was very strong by my basement door, so that’s where I started my search. In a couple of minutes, I was 75 yards from my house, still looking without finding anything. I ran into some folks from around the corner and down a ways, who were searching from the other direction. They hadn’t seen anything, either, but had called the fire department. Indeed, we could hear the sirens, on the other side of a small woods. “I bet those sirens are from my call,” the neighbor said. “This street has two parts, and they’re not directly connected. They’ll have to go on a three-mile route to get from that part of this street to this one.” Sure enough, about six minutes later, the fire engines roared up. (You know, I’d be concerned about that response time and the fire trucks getting lost, if I lived on that street.)

The neighbors confirmed that they’d made the call, and everyone looked around for the source of the smoke. The firemen told us they’d gotten a lot of phone calls from the area, but no one calling in had actually seen the fire. Another report on the radio revealed that other firemen had now seen the fire, about 3 blocks away from us, across the woods. And with that, these fire trucks turned their sirens on and zoomed away.

By now, the smoke had dissipated, so I went back inside.

Four for the road.

It turns out that the reason I had to watch the borrowed movie is that the guy who loaned it to me was leaving the project, and while he’d forgotten that I had the movie, I hadn’t. And since I didn’t want to admit that I’d had it for months on end and hadn’t yet watched it, or to give it back to him and then get it from Netflix, I needed to watch it right away. Well, first I needed to find it.

At any rate, last week was an interesting week at the project, as four of the thirty or so of us on the project quit during the week: one to concentrate full-time on his solo practice, one to go to a different project (one that pays more, alas), one to work as inside counsel for a large Richmond company, and one to do, well, not much of anything, it would seem.

It’s always interesting when someone leaves our little project for a real job. You’re happy for her, of course, but that happiness is tinged with a feeling of “Why didn’t they pick me?” (Okay, the answer to that question usually is “Because you didn’t apply for it,” but still.) It feels a lot like what I imagine being in an orphanage is like: you’re glad that someone got adopted out into a family, yet at the back of your mind, you wonder whether you weren’t picked because you’re not pretty enough, or something.

That little box.

A few – okay, six or eight – months ago, someone who works on the project at BigLawFirm with me loaned me a movie he thought I should see, “True Romance”. An early Tarantino script, with an ensemble cast including folks who have become a lot more famous since (Brad Pitt, Patricia Arquette, Christian Slater, Gary Oldman, James Gandolfini) and some old favorites (Dennis Weaver, Samuel L. Jackson).

Between the time he loaned it to me and last week, I had forgotten that Tarantino was the writer, and somehow thought it was going to be a relatively light flick, somewhat like “St. Elmo’s Fire”. And since I didn’t look at the box or read the description on the back of the box as I was pulling the tape out, it was a bit of a surprise to me when the movie turned out to be, well, more like a typical Tarantino movie. Still pretty good, of course, but not quite a light romantic comedy or family fare.

In any case, it dawned on me as I was putting the tape into the VCR that the last time I watched a movie on video tape was probably over six years ago, and that this was the first VCR movie I’ve watched since I bought a DVD player. Amazing to see how quickly and thoroughly a new piece of technology (the DVD player) can change one’s habits. I still use the VCR all the time, but only to record stuff from the TV that I’ll watch later. And I bet that when the day comes that I get a DVR – shortly after I get an HDTV, I’m guessing – I’ll stop using the VCR altogether.

Introducing ... Mosby.

It's official. She's Mosby. The winner should contact me soon for official transfer of his or her prize. Bring a cat carrier.

Many of the suggestions were good. I've already had a "Misty" and didn't want to tempt fate by giving her name to another cat who lives outside and could thus share the original's demise by being hit by a car. Decided against "Empress" or "Palpatine" because I just didn't want her to continue working on her Dark Powers to cause lightning to shoot from her paws. Figured that "Erdos" wasn't appropriate because not only could she not write a mathematics paper (or whatever the Cat Equivalent thereof is), she couldn't read one either. (Remember, this is the cat who declined the opportunity to sleep inside the house when it was fifteen degrees outside.)

She has, however, slept inside the house a couple of times this week, and has been introduced to the Inside Cats. Sami is always happy to find another cat to play with, but O. Henry wasn't too pleased at the idea of sharing her house with yet another feline. Not that it mattered much: Mosby was too busy growling and hissing to really tell what the other cats' reactions were.

No topic is too trivial for me to discuss.

For instance, the NCAA pool at my office. 17 of us are taking part. 16 of us are dead for the coming weekend, having predicted as winners in the national semi-finals and finals none of the teams that made it to the Final Four. And the 17th person picked UCLA to win in the semis and lose in the finals. Seven of us correctly predicted exactly one of the Final Four (six, myself included, picked UCLA, and one picked Florida); everyone else was 0-for-the-Final-Four.

The good news is that the final rankings in our pool are almost set: if UCLA wins its semi-final game, the guy that picked them wins the pool; if they lose, he comes in second. And whatever happens, I come in third.

Idle speculation leads to the next question: what are the odds of perfectly predicting the entire 64-team tournament? This article indicates that if every game were a 50-50 proposition, the odds of a perfect bracket are about one in nine million trillion. If you factor in the observation that, more often than not, favorites win their games, the odds are somewhat more reasonable: estimated at between one in 150 million to one in a billion.

Good enough odds that various companies - including AOL and PapaJohn's - have contests promising huge prizes (a million bucks, or a million pizzas) to anyone who correctly picks the entire bracket. They won't have to pay out this year, as no one in any of the contests got through the first weekend with perfect picks.

Still, I'd liked to have picked as well as this guy (who is leading in the Washington Post's bracket contest). Perhaps I could get him to pick stocks for me.

Here are the new resident cats.
This one is Sami, and he's 13 years old.

And the other:
O. Henry. She's about eight.

There and back again.

I've returned from a quick trip to Florida to pick up my father's cats. Not a terribly exciting trip as these things go, although I suppose that's a good thing. Good weather, both ways, so that was a plus. But a one-way distance of 860 miles, with all but the first 2 miles and the last 3 on Interstate highways (or their equivalent) through a relatively flat landscape with no view of mountains or ocean makes for a pretty boring drive. South Carolina is especially interminable, and it's less than 200 miles of the trek.

The cats were very well behaved on the return trip: Sami complained for five minutes every half-hour, and O. Henry complained for the first twenty minutes of each day and not at all thereafter. And they have taken to their new home as though they'd lived here for years. The as-of-yet-not-officially-named gray cat was happy to see me return, bag of cat food in hand. That didn't stop her from giving me a lengthy piece of her mind waiting for the cat food to hit her bowl.

One of the highlights of the trip was seeing a school-bus-yellow Hummer. (Well, a Hummer H2, like the one above, which I guess is the SUV version of the Machomobile for idiots.) Very bizarre, indeed: why would you buy the vehicle in the pretense that it makes you as rugged as the Marlboro Man, and then paint it to look like a school bus? I suppose it allows you to sneak unseen through the school bus yard on the way to your secret manly spy mission.

The best part of the trip, though, was a 20-minute piece of highway theater in Florida. I'm cruising along at 2 mph over the speed limit in the middle of the three lanes going in my direction, and am passed by someone going perhaps 10 mph over the limit. Then I'm passed by someone else doing 10 miles over the limit - and it becomes pretty clear that this second car is an unmarked police car. (No markings, no lights on top - but a big star on the license plate and a uniformed driver kind of give it away.) The first driver tumbles to the secret and slows to my speed, as does the cop car, now 5 or 6 car lengths ahead of me and no more than 2 lengths behind the first driver. Someone else goes around me pretty quickly, and slams on his brakes when he recognizes the license plate as being the police. I drift over into the righthand lane, the better to watch the vehicular interaction. The first car slides into the middle lane; the cop immediately slides over right behind him.

Cars keep getting added to our little Kabuki group. Someone zooms up in the middle lane and starts to go around - and slows abruptly when he's close enough to see the star on the license plate. Forty-five seconds later, someone else zooms up behind him and starts to go around, only to stop when the immediately previous car slides into the right lane ahead of me, revealing the cop car.

A couple more cars join our pack, always doing the same: overtaking the back car and weaving their way through all the cars going the same speed, until they spot the cop car and slow themselves down. And the whole time, the cop car is no more than 2 car lengths behind the first speeding car.

After about 20 minutes of cruising along like this, now with 12 or 15 cars in our convoy because no one wants to speed past the police car, and with all traffic ahead of our group having gone out of sight long ago, the policeman finally decides to stop messing with the head of the driver in front of him, and pulls into the right lane and accelerates away from us.

A piece of pi, to go.

Tomorrow is World Pi Day. Why tomorrow, of all days? Because you can write "March 14" as 3/14, which ought to look familiar to fans of pi.

A much bigger version of the pi poster above can be found here. Much bigger - a file size of 1.7 mb and what looks to be about 65,000 digits in the background.

Yes, I suppose it's all somewhat irrational.

Name that cat!

It's contest time, here at the Cellars. The little gray outdoor cat needs a name; something better than her temporary name of The Gray Ghost. We've decided that she is, in fact, a female, although that need not limit your choice of a new name for her.

She continues to be skittish, although as The Provider of Food, I am permitted to pet her and briefly pick her up. But I think she's also getting a bit used to being around people, as she seems to like my company for substantial stretches, so long as I'm between five and ten feet away.

The deadline for entries in the Name that Cat! contest is "soon" and all decisions will be final and arbitrary. The winner's prize is yet to be determined, but will include having the winning name given to the cat. And if you live close enough and are easily persuaded, the prize may also include the cat herself.