A Clowder of Cats

As anybody who follows me on twitter knows, we recently caught two stray kittens who were living in our backyard for a few weeks. At first, we figured they were feral but later concluded that they were too healthy and calm to have been born and raised in the wild. The vet agreed that they weren’t feral. Somebody probably abandoned them outside near our house, and they subsequently made their way to our backyard deck, spotting our indoor cats who often sit inside near the window.

We originally planned on adopting them out, but as time went on we couldn’t bear the thought of doing that. So… now we have four cats: two kittens and two senior (12 years old) cats. The kittens are being kept in a guest bedroom until they get used to us and the other cats enough that they can have free roam of the house.

In true geek fashion, their names are Mal (named after Malcom Reynolds) and Captain Jack (named after Jack Harkness). For the record, my wife came up with Captain Jack’s name. We originally thought that Captain Jack was female, but close examination by the vet proved otherwise. His original name was Zoe (named after Zoe Washburne). Yeah, we had a Firefly theme going.

One of these days, I’ll post pictures to my Flickr account. In the meantime, I wonder if I need the “Crazy Old Cat Guy” tag in SL.

Eight Favorite Albums

In response to Josie’s post, here are my eight favorite albums of all time. Since I didn’t have Napster or iTunes (or even MP3s) during my formative music listening years, my unit of measurement is an album and not a single.

The astute reader will notice that only one album was produced after 1990. I consider the hallmark of a classic to be an album that still holds up 10, 20, or even 30 years after first listening to it. Given that criteria, my list will be skewed towards the “classics”. At least they aren’t in the classical section of the music store. Yet.

8. Soundtrack, “Run, Lola, Run” – The album I listen to when doing hard core programming. About as close to listening to Techno as I get.

7. Big Audio Dynamite, “Megatop Phoenix” - Seems to get mixed reviews, but it works very well for me.

6. Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue” – The album that turned me on to Jazz.

5. INXS, “Kick” – The album that brings back the best college memories.

4. The Boomtown Rats, “Fine Art of Surfacing” – I never tire of listening to this album. Probably the most widely underrated one of the list.

3. Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run” – Far and away Springsteen’s best album. Songs like “Thunder Road” and “Jungleland” still send chills down my spine.

2. The Beatles, “Abbey Road” – The definitive Beatles album, even beating out “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”.

1. Pink Floyd, “Dark Side of the Moon” – Yeah, it’s a cliche but still my favorite album after first listening to it almost 30 years ago. I once owned all of the Pink Floyd albums on cassette, and none have held up like “Dark Side of the Moon”. Billboard had to change the album ranking rules to get it off the charts.

In the spirit of the original post, feel free to list your favorite albums/songs in the comments or on your blog. Give yourself bonus points if you’ve heard “Dark Side of the Moon” in quadraphonic sound.

Still Hunting for the Muse

I was asked the other day when I was going to post more SL pics to Flickr. I replied that I still don’t feel like posting anything. Yeah, it’s been quite a while now.

One possible explanation is that this is one hobby out of a million different interests. While growing up, my mom made several comments about how I seemed to have so many different hobbies; however, I think this was all in the context of cleaning my room.

Another possible explanation is that I haven’t set aside any time in RL to devote to photography, and SL reflects that. I’ve noticed that there seems to be a direct correlation between actively taking photos in RL and in SL.

For now, I’ve settled on the idea that I just need a good swift kick in the ass to jump start my interest. And luckily for me, I will be going on vacation in two weeks up to Alaska. In preparation, I bought another 2 GB memory card, bringing my total up to 5 GB (which was the size of my hard drive 10 years ago). I will not have running out of storage space as an excuse. I think having some new and exciting stuff to photograph will do me a world of good. As a byproduct, I think I’ll start posting on my SL Flickr account. Time will soon tell.

Funny Work Story

This morning, while avoiding work, I was looking up people to add to my RL Linkedin account. I tracked down an old coworker named Roy who has since moved to Seattle and is now working for Microsoft. We worked together on the same team for around 6 months, but I’ll always remember him for something that happened a while back.

Back sometime in 2001, I’m in the break room talking to Roy for a few minutes. In the meantime, some woman, who is at least 6 ft tall with long arms, walks into the break room to get some ice from the ice machine. My back is facing the ice machine so I only notice her out of the corner of my eye. As the woman is slowly lifting the front cover of the ice machine, I’m exactly positioned so that one corner of the lid slowly touches my butt. It had felt as if the woman had reached over (she had long arms) and gently grabbed my ass. I’m sure the look on my face was priceless; however, Roy didn’t so much as change his facial expression the whole time he was talking to me. I have long since admired his ability to keep such a straight face.

I hope you all enjoyed this amusing little tale. And yeah, there was sexual harassment training for everyone a few months before this happened.