Friday: last vacation day

Well, not totally. Tomorrow is a travel day, but I get back around 2:30, and Sunday is a regular Sunday.  But my last full day on the mainland.

I probably should have a picture here, but I don't.

• Dog.
• Pizza cat is not a palindrome.
• If this is accurate, the cubs are run by morons.
• This paper.

Thursday: wings

Making sauce.

Saucing wings.

Nom nom nom.

• Cake.
• Catbus.
• Have we discussed this before?
• I waited.

Wednesday: I think this is just going to be links

I did see a squirrel today, but again, I was in the car and couldn't get a picture. Maybe I should try to sketch it tomorrow.

• Orange cat.
• Spoopy.
• Dogs.
• Sword fighting with Wonder Woman.
• Second dinner.
• The supreme court ducks.
• Bubbles.

Tuesday: I have to many tablet tabs open

There's a frog in this picture. I saw two different turtles today too, but they were in the road, and that would be hard to get pictures.

• Ice ducks.
• Cost of living.
• Dog cloud.
• Suburban San.
• Pikachu.
• Charmander.
• Pachirisu.
• This pun is here specifically for Julie to look at.

Monday: I didn't take any pictures today

So here's a picture of the top hat guy from Saturday.

• Silent Hill.
• Pachirisu.
• Words not to say in a talk.
• The Underground.
• Harley and Ivy.
• I'm curious about how they did the color on these photos, but I can't leave this tab open forever on the tablet.  I'll look it up later.

Happy Birthday Cake

Purely illuminated happy birthday cake.

Sunday: At this point, I pretty much have no idea what day it is for people not on vacation

The somewhat local Mexican place has this quesadilla. Cheese, chicken, and chorizo. I think it needs a salsa, but it's not bad.

• Mega slowbro.
• Mega slowbro.
• Pikachu stairs.
• Samurai in Egypt.
• Tear gas guy.
• A previous incident.

Saturday: more travel, this time successfully

First up, lunch at what I think was the very first place I went in Austin, Rudy's:

It was many years ago, but I still enjoy the concept of buying meat by weight.  Brisket obviously, with some sausage hiding under the paper.

Then, home for just long enough for a tiny thief to drink all my take home pop, and then off to the airport.  No trouble there, and I even got the upgrade on the flight to Houston. Sure, that's like ten minutes long, bit it's the thought that counts.

The transfer at IAH was between gates B85 and B86. It was perfect except for the lack of snacking and shopping in the Podunk end of the terminal.

Now for another week of vacation, with a lotdifferent little kid to call with. Will this week be full of Daniel Tiger's neighborhood and Dinosaur Train as well?

Friday: Last night in Austin

Pretty much forever, at this point. In a few months, I won't have this place on my list of places to schedule trips to.  It's a bit sad, really.  I also never got a chance to buy that vinegar, either. "I'm sure we'll be back later in the week." Nope.

I knew it wasn't going to be the same kind of trip when Kimchi wasn't here.

Katsu don for lunch.

• Squirrel.
• Squirrel.
• Bear.
• Did you ever read?

Thursday: you're gross, Ramona

(In case the reference isn't clear.)

Little kid music class is weird. Like it's mostly about the kids ignoring the music and stuff to run around or use the instruments as loudly as possible. You know, little kid stuff.

Dinner was from 24Diner.

So obviously chicken and waffles.

• Porygon.
• Mega slowbro.
• Rain.
• Silent Hill.
• I would not be surprised by this quote.
• Owl.
• The police.
• At least this giving mess seems to be getting better today.

Verdict on doing full posts on the tablet: possible, but link copy pasting is about ten times harder than on the laptop.  

Wednesday: wait, what did I do again today?

There was dinner at The Salty Sow. I think that was the name.

The Halloween pumpkin sock monkey had a bit of trouble with the fizzy water.

I have a pile of links that I wanted to put here, but it's far too late to deal with them now.

I also have to do job stuff tomorrow, which sucks since I'm still on vacation.

Tuesday: Some food, and some links

Noble Pig, yesterday.  There's a new location that's larger and closer to the rest of things.

Sandra Lee sells a super thin frying pan just for grilled cheese.  I can't imagine this works well.

Masala Wok.  Mmmmm...chicken tikka masala.

Then some frozen yogurt.  Because healthy.

• Mega Slowbro.
• A.
• B.
• C.
• Comic books.
• Spider-Man.
• A.
• B.
• She-Hulk.
• That guy from last week is not being dumb now.
• Other stuff.
• College Jello.
• Sean Bean.
• Hawaii primary elections.

Monday: Defense Day

So I'll just leave this one link.

Sunday: Practice talk day

And Latin American lunch. Gloria's, if I'm not getting the name wrong.

But yeah, mostly practice talk day, with a side of relearning nuclear astrophysics.  Did you know it's been eleven years since I last did that?

Saturday: Wings and links.

There were sandwiches, but they came later, and they didn't have mac and cheese.

• Food.
• This is why Japan is cool.
• This is another reason why Japan is cool.
• Breakfast food.
• Lobster taco.
• Hawaiian food.  Also, that hurricane was apparently pretty weak.
• Funny things.
• Funny things.
• A funny thing from Sailor Moon.
• Animals.
• Bear.
• No, cat.  Just no.
• Bear vs. Atoms.  It's Russian, obviously.

Vacatiopocalypse 2014: The flights from hell.

Vacatiopocalypse 2014

Definite delay. We're now at a 9:30 "decision". Which sucks, but it sounds like it's not a vital problem, at least. I guess having a three hour layover wasn't a terrible thing.

Mr "I'm maintenance in san francisco" guy thinks they're working on a window, and "that doesn't take that long." So yeah. Windows. At least if he can see it, it's on the opposite side of the plane from where I'm sitting.

Which is the floor, right next to the gate desk, because there is nowhere else to sit in this gate.

And the reason you don't put miso in a square bowl: you can't pick it up to sip, because you'd make a mess. Plus, using the spoon is impossible because it doesn't scoop.

I'm pretty sure "I have two planes to make, I have to be in a wedding on Saturday" is the same lady who had to have her giant bag of sand checked at security in front of me. Wtf, lady? Security is just going to be fine with you and you mystery powders?

Thursday: well...

I got to the airport on time.

I then had some nice, if very rushed airport sushi, leaving just as my flight should have started to board. (Caption: miso doesn't belong in square bowls.)

However, they have maintenence people onboard, and things are delayed, and I'm looking at the gate agent that I'm worried has unhappy information.

Let's see how this goes.

Wednesday: Less than 24 hours before Operation: Vacation: Escape the Hurricane

I'm packed, I'm checked in for the flight, I have pretty much all my electronics charged up.  I just hope that the stupid storm doesn't knock out my power.  It runs underground, so it's far more likely to be fine throughout the storm, but still.  The main computer should just boot back up when the power comes back on, but things could still go wrong.  I do have the webcam/twitter stream up and running again, but unfortunately that runs off that computer as well right now.

Cats are jerks.

• I like cut-away things.  This is a boat.
• Dogs, what are you doing?
• This is a great story.

Tuesday: And then the entire state went batshit crazy.

I left work tonight, and decided to stop off and pick up take out grocery sushi for dinner because I didn't feel like getting groceries last weekend since I'm leaving.  Unfortunately, the first store I went to had no parking, and people had completely blocked all the lanes, so even if people wanted to leave, they couldn't.  Second store?  Same thing, just with more crazy.

The end result is that I drove all the way back to work, because I can park at work and walk to the store.

The problem?  Everyone is treating Iselle like it's the end of the damn world.  Safeway had zero water.  No water.  All the water?  Gone.  There is no more water to buy.  The soup section?  Half empty.  Gross ass canned tuna?  Same thing.  Do people not buy anything until there's a storm coming?  I pretty much always have soup and a case of water.  It's just a regular thing to have around.  When I run lowish, I get more.  That way, I don't have to clog up all the damn stores and attempt to destroy the normal logistics systems that deliver everything.

Plus, it's not getting to Oahu until Friday at the earliest, it's being shredded by the standard trade winds, and the current forecast has it passing over the Big Island before getting here.  The Big Island, where we keep all the giant mountains.  Hilo has some justification in panicking, but by the time it gets here, it's not going to be a super disaster.

My biggest concern at this point is that my flight on Thursday doesn't get fucked up (especially since I think I can get the upgrade for at least the first leg), and that it doesn't kill the power at home.  It might not be a bad idea to grab a mysqldump of my rss reader stuff, so I can install it on my laptop and run it from there if the power goes down for a long time.

Basically, I'm saying it's not this.

• Maybe Capcom should come up with new games.  Will they just keep remaking Resident Evil every three generations?
• Bruce agrees with me.  Hush is a fucking joke.
• It's far harder to be a dick when the people trying to fuck over are standing right there.  Publicly shaming politicians should be a standard tactic.
• I was going to comment about how I could save like $8 if I could get rid of the channels I don't watch, but then I remembered I don't pay directly for my cable.

That led me to go look at things that are powerlaws, and so I plotted up my DVR channel usage ranking:

Doesn't quite match the best fit model, mostly because Cartoon Network is 51% of all recordings ever, and I didn't feel like excluding that point to fit the rest of the channels.  A quick guess suggests it should only have about 800 recordings to match the bulk trend, so it's about 6x higher than a super simple model would account for.  I wonder what this looks like in hours.