The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

My completely inexplicable good mood continues, despite a few lumps. I don't know why, but it's kind of nice considering how horrid the year's been in general.

The light this morning was beautiful - all rosy-red. The sky was overcast and it was just slightly foggy, but there was still this beautiful red light filtered in through the clouds - with the trees changing colors, I wanted nothing more than to turn my car around, go home, get my camera, and take pictures all day. It's that kind of day. Alas, I must work.

Also training - the madatory online sort that does its best to convince me that paying $400 for a toilet seat makes perfect sense. Terrifyingly enough, there are times when it does. Also times when I realize that for many things, NMCI isn't charging enough. Like, say the classified stuff in the building that is going to be NMCI - they're going to need to put in a rack and one, possibly two new switches into our building, along with all the necessary cabling. Since they're not sure what to do about our security posture, they may have to run PDS directly to all the PCs - steel pipe, essentially, that has to be inspected every day. All this, for seven PCs. The switches? We're talking close to $10K, minimum, for just the switches. Probably closer to $40K.

But - this falls into the great big happy realm of Not My Problem, so I don't really need to worry about it. And speaking of Not My Problem, the big project I was working on that Fu-Master took over? I was about in the testing phase, where I was going to get loaner equipment to make sure my recommended solution would actually work while I continued to define user requirements. He...decided to skip both of those steps, and just bought all the hardware. A couple hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Predictably enough, he's running into problems making the thing work. Does he go to me for assistance, since I'm most familiar with both those labs and the equipment we purchased? No, of course not - this is Fu-Master. He calls tech support for the hardware, when the problem is the lab configuration. Cheers!

It's a beautiful day, I only have to work for for about five more hours, so I'm going to get as much done as possible before I go to enjoy the beautiful fall weather. Yay!

Ah, those quirky Japanese.

Things started getting tough for the yakuza in 1992, when the Anti-Organized Crime Law was enacted and the activities of underworld members were severely curtailed. Gangsters were required to register their membership in organized crime gangs with public safety authorities, who monitored them closely.

"Hi! I'm the member of an illegal underground organization, please monitor me! Despite the fact that I disregard other laws, I will abide by this one." Of course, being Japan, they probably do.

Congrats to "Tommy" Blackwell on his win for Essex County Commisioner of the Revenue. With four candidates running, he apparently pulled in a solid 48% of votes. Yay! But...he's so not a Tommy.

[EDIT] Yay! Stacey is going to come with me to the Wicked Winter Renaissance Faire - it may be just the two of us, because we suspect our husbands will be scared, and I haven't heard back from Melissa yet. So long as nobody asks me to model (again *twitch*), all will be well. ^_^

[EDIT2] If anyone else wants to meet up with us there or carpool, let me know. It should be fun.

The new point system on Minitokyo makes no sense to me. At all. I visit earlier in the week, and both commenting and dowloading walls suck down credits. At varying rates. I visit this time, I suddenly have more credit, and downloading walls gives me...more credit? I don't understand, but at this point I have mroe credit than I started with. Tres confusing.

There seems to be a much larger suck : not suck ratio than there used to be, though.