soundwave106

Since the Pepperpot mentioned it, I'll go ahead and post a little ringtone I did for the (supposed) emergency phone, for those times when "all the computers are down" (or even merely one station on the line, because the s̶p̶i̶c̶e̶ electronic widgets must flow...)

It's simply an explosion FX followed by a bit of the Warren Zevon song My Shit's Fucked Up. Now, Zevon's song was talking about how crappy one's health gets as one ages, of course, but hey, I think it fits for those all-hands-on-deck computer emergency calls too (especially those fun ones that are solved by simple things like rebooting the server.)

https://whyp.it/tracks/180620/an-on-call-ringtone-for-those-everything-is-down-moments-in-life?token=OGwZt

Playing around with ChatGPT a little. On the one hand, it's pretty impressive how reasonably conversational things are.

On the other hand, it can be reasonably easy to trick ChatGPT into being "confidently incorrect".

(For you youngsters out there, the Allman Brother's "Jessica" is an instrumental. It has no lyrics.)

Looks like the robot revolution foretold by the doomsdayers is still a long way off...

I guess I'm making an update every few months now. Life gets busy. Key things:

Africa pics: Finally up!

Had a very bad strained back issue in September but it resolved itself in a week+.

Dealt with an Ian storm (which we evacuated to Fort Lauderdale for, but it actually didn't hit here as hard as elsewhere) and a Nichole storm (which we stayed put through). Second time living here I've put up the hurricane shutters, which are kind of a pain in the butt to do. Hopefully we won't need to put these shutters up for a while.

Orchestra season has begun.

The usual Christmas plans to visit north shore New Orleans area were changed and we are now visiting the Gulf Shores AL area. We'll see how that goes.

A Richard's Run 5K was participated in, the first one since plague times. Unfortunately it was marred by Crystal tripping on some crappy sidewalks (possibly made crappy by Ian, though) while we were walking on the way to a different brewery than our usual post-5K spot (due to the real potential of issues thanks to this incident). She's fine, the beer at the new place was good, and all is well.

Politics happened, but of course the ol' Brits won in one respect: they have the best surreal memes, as demonstrated by the Liz Truss lettuce (notable enough to have its own Wikipedia entry).

This weekend was more normal. A bit of "cooking" stuff, such as making my lunch black beans and doing some pre-prep for dinner on Monday. One of the changes since the pandemic has been: since "work from home" (for my job) seems solidified at the moment (and honestly I'll push for that in the future, you don't need to go to the office to code), it frees up some time "blocs" to actually make dinner meals, usually slow cooker stuff since it fits the schedule better. The previous life of brewing beer is kind of on hold (it frees up Saturdays for movie nights, and as I get older the process I used, with lots of lifting of 5 gallon+ containers and all, seems more of a pain in the butt for an increasingly creaky body). But this sort of takes its place in a different way.

Monday's dinner for instance will be a "reasonably authentic" gumbo (dark roux, trinity, chicken, shrimp, andouille, filé), the main things that are a little different is that the roux is made with butter (but still is the standard 45 minute+ stir-over-low-heat process) and beer (Andygator) is used.

Hopefully it won't be another three months before a post. :) In the mean time, will be going to bed in just a little bit.

(A few pictures of a Kirk's dik-dik, that is...)

It's been an extended absence from posting for me... during this period, the Pepperpot and I:

Took a three week vacation to Africa (Kenya and Tanzania).
This had a lot of nice safari watching but was *very* jam packed, more than I would have done. We needed a vacation from this vacation!
Especially since one of my luggage was lot on the way to Africa.
And on the way back to Tampa.
On the way back as well, a flight from JFK to Tampa was cancelled, forcing us to scramble for a hotel at 11PM. (There was so many cancellations, Delta had no space. It was really hard to get a hotel, had to go to Midtown to find one.)
And we both caught COVID the Monday back.

So... it took a while for us to get back to somewhat of a "normal routine". (Didn't help that I did a storage unit rental reorganizing / garage clean-out as well in late August/early September, but that was needed!) I think we are mostly in sync now.

One factor is that I'm working on going through the photos (1600+ of them!) a little at a time... so no birdie posts for a bit. Occasionally I'll post a few from the trip when I get a chance.

Last photos for a little bit as the parents are taking us on a trip to Kenya/Tanzania to see various critters.

Work has continued to be a shitstorm, but at least I don't have to think much about that for a bit.

The usual bunny ends the post.

There is not much to report (as usual) except that work has been super super busy lately. Figures, always seems to work out that way since we're going on a very long trip at the end of next week, go figure. Some of these are projects that for whatever reason don't seem to end.

The backyard camera traps are still catching nice shots of various urban critters, including the raccoon above and the below bunny aw.

DUCK SEASON!

WABBIT SEASON!

... turtle season?

(Tortoise, of course, beats hare. Not sure about snapping turtle beating rabbit though.)

Not much else to report. Off to the usual Wednesday pub night, there's a Stanley Cup game going on involving the local team that will make things more lively I'm sure.

This weekend my mood at one point was similar to the angry 'pecker in these photos. One of the China sites was upgrading a manufacturing bit of software, and they needed assistance at both 12:30-2:30AM and 8:30-11:00AM or so. Put me in quite the grumbly, sleep deprived mood (I was actually pretty fuzzy in the later stint).

Fortunately, things are a little quieter this week, and hopefully I can catch up on some sleep this weekend. In the meantime, pub night beckons.

For something a little calmer, here's a bunny with a couple doves.

The world, of course, is still insane, but life goes on. The good news is that we were able to take care of several things this week, including finally getting someone to repair some concrete windowsills that were cracked. On to the bird feeder trap pics.

The Pepperpot had to stop this stray cat and our neighbor's outdoor cat Whiskey from getting into a Royal Rumble a few days ago.

This dove seems to be interested in the 'pecker for some reason.

A cardinal family portrait.

ANGRY BIRDS!

Duck Season!

Wabbit Season!

It's been Major Incident Week at work, with a 6AM wakeup yesterday for an issue (resolved only this afternoon, hopefully), and currently an issue that's been going on since about 5PM...\, along with one other major issue that ended up being not us. All standard work is on hold. This current incident seems to be infrastructure (not me) so I'm mostly sitting here, so time to catch up on some posts while I sit in a meeting.

There was a family picture scheduled for the first week of May, but one of my sister's sons got a case of what the conspiracy folks would call a case of "the 5G", so that scuttled the plans and reduced it to a dinner. At least I saw my brother for the first time in the long time, since he flew down from New York anyways. So that was good.

Nothing terribly important (unless this Major Incident affects pub time tonight, which would suck), so here's a bunny aww.

The world is generally a very silly place these days. So let's get as silly as that blackbird above and celebrate the pun-nier "fan holiday" for Star Wars fans today, by pulling up a copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special. Or, on second though, let's not.

Since detailing an API I'm working on at work would be boring, here's a picture of a red bellied woodpecker, followed by a feral Nanday parakeet having dinner with a mourning dove. Finally, of course, the weekly bunny aw makes its appearance.

"The routine continues", which means meetings at work, occasional coding to interrupt that full schedule of meetings, neat slow cooker meals (today was a cassoulet, sans the "traditional" duck (like the female Mallard above) and goose), pub trips (like tonight), and watching MST3K or related.

It's starting to become my least favorite time of year weather wise, the transition between "the dry season" (where it is often nice, sunny, and pleasant) and "the wet season" (where it is hot and muggy, but storms occur frequently and offer relief). Before the storms hit, it's often hot and muggy without the relief of those storms. Seems like some rain is coming our way this weekend though.

Some pictures to close out, the first of a brown thrasher and the second of the usually-weekly-bunny aw.

Just the usual stuff (too much work, brewing a beer tonight). So I will post some photos, including the usual bunny aw. (The other birds are a brown thrasher and a mockingbird.)

There is not a whole lot to report here, just "business as usual". Work isn't as bad as earlier this year, except for one site in China that is a bit "difficult".

Since shop talk is pretty boring, here are a few camera trap pictures of bunnies and birds (including a dove photobomb).

I think my future "back in my day" rants are largely going to be centered around the Livejournal Internet days (before it was sold off) and how crappy today's Internet is, with them upvotes downvotes like and subscribe tomfoolery. :) A few people from those days apparently still hung around when LJ was sold to Russia. I wonder how they are doing given the "current situation"...

As usual, not a lot to report from my end. Work has largely become an exercise in meetings lately. Daily standups, monthly status report for manager, bi-weekly status report for manager's manager, bi-weekly staff meeting, monthly staff meeting. On top of project meetings, meetings for questions, etc. I'm supposed to be a developer, but apparently I'm in Office Space.

We end this with the (not quite so) weekly bunny aw.

First post in a month, whee. The Pepperpot at least posts close to daily so you can keep up in more detail of what is going on. It's been reasonably busy around here, but other than some birthday stuff (both of our birthdays are in February) it's mostly been "the usual" type things.

Also, there hasn't been a really good bunny shot for some reason in a while, but one was provided this week. Yay! So given all that is going on in the world, you get a much needed dose of the cute.

Happy birthday to a Pepperpot today!
The weekly bunny is dedicated to you. :)

It's the Chinese new year, so work has been considerably lighter of late. Goodie! We've been keeping elsewise though. Last weekend involved both a symphony show (Beethoven 9) and a MST3K show. The later was scheduled in downtown Tampa, on the same day as the Gasparilla parade in downtown Tampa, which made things kind of hairy to get there. We made it, though. The show was good.

The pictures were taken a couple weeks ago, including the obligatory bunny of course (hanging with a couple of muscovy ducks). There's also a shot of an armadillo that unusually was running around in the early morning sunrise hours (normally I see them in night vision shots), and an appearance of That Darn Cat, searching for a snack.

Still on a cycle dominated by the large quantity of hours devoted to modifying crusty QC software. Looks like the continuation of early morning and late night meeting-a-thons continues at least a little bit this week.

Last week we had a bunch of odd visitors to the feeder, as seen in the picture above. These are Nanday parakeets, native to South America, but like many birds was transplanted to Florida and thrives with the population of many other feral transplants (including the monk parakeets that we've seen before). What do you expect from a town where a decade ago a feral rhesus macaque monkey made national news?

The bunny photos weren't as good last week, but you can still get a little bit of the bunny aww.

Sheesh, it's been about a month since the last post. (PRODUCTIVITY!)

Actually more like it's been busy. First, the week of Christmas we traveled to visit my wife's family. Then, the next week we were both in "relax" mode (as work was shut down for the holidays). This is good, because since New Year's I've been in a joyful mode where pretty much every day has a 2 hour 8PM "working session", working with some extremely crusty software that hasn't been touched in several years and has proven to have a lot of "pain points" updating it to do what they want, with some folks in China. Hopefully this will slow down after this week and I can resume a little more regular updating of this journal.

In the mean time, here's some photos (including a juvenile red wing blackbird). Oh, and of course, the usual bunny.