I am really tired. Last night during my triweekly RPG in Philly, we had some work problems. After the game, I stayed up working on some things that I thought would help prevent similar problems in the future, or that would at least reduce their impact. I crashed on the office sofa, which I’ve done once before. Last time it was dreadful. This time, it was just fine. I think it helped that I had a blanket.

A few days ago, Gloria picked up a neat little deodorizer that could be attached to the air filter in the furnace. It made the whole house smell like artificial pine trees, which was mostly better than the previous “basement” smell that kicked in when the heater ran. After a while, though, it got overwhelming and we decided to get rid of it.

waste less time

I used Shadowrun 2nd Ed, because it’s the one that was in use the longest.

I’ve been re-reading a lot of old CP2020 sourcebooks. It’s sort of a bizarre game. The rules are really complicated, in my opinion, and the setting is the most obvious parts of Gibsonian cyberpunk turned up to eleven.

In “Doctor’s Orders,” Enterprise has to cross through a giant Crazy Cloud (actually, they call it Reconfigured Space, which is just about as silly). Humans who are conscious will suffer brain damage, so Phlox puts them all into comas. He and T’Pol take care of the ship while it goes through the cloud.

Today has been a weird day, full of all kinds of stuff.

In the last few episodes I’ve seen travel into the past to stop an alien plot (see also DS9 in the 60’s and TNG in 1849). There was an alternate future that undid itself by the end of the episode (see also innumerable episodes of TNG), and a few others. Now we’re back to social commentary: a group of religious zealots intent on eliminating the heretics on their homeworld (“they think the world took one day longer to create than we do”) sieze control of Enterprise by setting up a group of suicide bombers around the ship. Meanwhile, Phlox and Archer learn of dissent in the ranks when one of the women in the group wants to have a space abortion.

When I work on code, I nearly always replace UNIVERSAL::isa and UNIVERSAL::can with block-eval of a method call instead. This lets objects that overload isa or can work properly, and still avoids program death when the invocant is an invalid invocant.

We had an electrician out last week, and we’ve gotten just about all of our electrical work done. We still have our crappy old front porch light, as the one we got wasn’t going to be a suitable replacement. We found another one to use, but I haven’t picked it up yet. Instead, we got some more smoke detectors, a fire extinguisher for the kitchen, and a new doorknob. I really like the knobs we picked; we’re planning to use them in all the interior doors. They’re brushed nickel, lever-style knobs. (There are photos on Flickr.)