I am feeling pretty full of beef satay and rice noodles. Today we went to lunch in celebration of Louis’s birthday, and it was good. A few weeks ago, Louis said (of my Thai red curry) something like, “I can’t imagine food much hotter than this.” We sort of gaped at him, and I think we have established as an ongoing objective, “make Louis eat spicier food.”

There are a few things I disagree with in PBP, but I’m just going to name the one that is current causing me the most inconvenience because I can’t just ignore the rule.

[ About a year ago, I wrote this to put “in escrow” until some future time. I meant to post it pretty soon after writing it, but I lost track of it. I stumbled across it recently while restoring some files from a backup. ]

Last time on “rjbs hates email software,” I was hating on Mail.app, which (as you may recall) sucks. I still use mutt for most of my email needs, but sometimes I (sort of) need to use a client with HTML support, for work. Lately, Mail.app doesn’t even start up anymore. (I probably need to go into ~/Library and delete things. Ugh.) Without sucky Mail.app, I’ve been using sucky Thunderbird.

Today was the third meeting of the book club at work. I was absent for the first meeting, and the second was a few weeks ago, for The Professor and the Madman. Today’s book was Murakami’s The Wild Sheep Chase. It was alright, but I didn’t feel like it was anything special. Murakami seems to be a very good writer, but a sort of uninteresting author. It’s an exaggeration, but not a huge one, to say that his books are like Lynch movies: well put together material that doesn’t really come together in the end. I think I was clearer at the meeting, actually: he connects a lot of the dots, but the particular set of dots that he chose to leave unconnected was really bizarre. He left unanswered the questions that seemed most unrelated, and which therefore seemed worth raising only to then give answers that would relate them to the book’s main themes.

On Friday, John came by Pobox North (my apartment) for most of the afternoon while he car was at the shop. We got gyros (at the awesome semiannual Greek Food Festival) and worked on our own projects. After work, Gloria took us to get his car. John and I headed for beers and dinner while Gloria headed home for dinner and to prepare for work. Just as we were passing my parents’ neighborhood, my brother called to tell us that he was in town, at my parents’ house, and locked out. We stopped by, helped him get his things inside, and headed over to Stahley’s for dinner. I think we had a pretty good time. Three dozen clams, twenty hot wings, a pizza, and three pitchers of beer: forty-five dollars. Even better, Steve treated!

I think the preferred term is “gaming,” but I don’t feel the need to whitewash it. I am a kwalitee monger.

Tonight, I was struck by an urge to JFDI. For a long time, I’ve wanted a better way to organize my Netflix queue. There used to be Netflix Freak, which was decent, but cost money, and I think it went away. I think it had other problems, I just can’t remember anymore.

I really like the Venture Brothers. The show has only fifteen episodes, and I have a TiVo. This should make it easy to see all of them. Ha!

I had a weird dream last night. I was writing test code for mailing list software – which is what I’ve been doing at work – and somehow found myself engaging in a game based on list subscribers. It would have had to be a computer game, you’d think, but instead it was more like soccer. You’d reach down into a manhole, pull out a subscriber, and position them. There was a limit as to how many subscribers you could put on your side of the pitch. While setting up my side, I found out a weird little exception: orphan children counted for less than a full person, so you could really line the goal line with them.