cellio | Entries tagged with fluff

In the midst of all the stuff in the world, I hope that some customer-support person's day was a little brighter for a moment or two:

Hi Chewy! This is Monica's cat, Orlando.

I'm delighted by all the goodies I got today -- I'm so glad I finally got her to do autoship so poor pitiful me never starves! I mean, there was that time that she made me wait hours because she had to go to the store. Humans -- what can you do?

I noticed something with today's boxes, and I wanted to ask if you can do anything to help. She'll never admit it, but my person isn't as young and strong as she used to be, plus she's short, and that humongous 40-pound box was a struggle for her to get in the house. And that delayed me getting snuggles and treats! I'm sure you can understand the dire circumstances here. She didn't have any trouble with the largish box that had two 15-pound jugs of litter in it, so I don't think it was the weight. I think it was that the other (bigger) box was so wide that she couldn't get a good grip on it to carry it up the steps, and she doesn't have powerful claws to help hold things like I do.

Is there any chance that, next time, you could use another box instead of packing so much into one giant one? Or should I sneak in one night when she's sleeping and change her autoship to be a smaller order sent more frequently? I worry a little that she's going to sprain something and that might affect her can-opening ability, which would be terrible. Ok, it also wouldn't be great if she got hurt, but -- priorities! My dining depends on her being fully operational!

As a token of my thanks, I would happily share the next mouse I catch with you -- just let me know where to send it.

Orlando

(I hope the human doesn't find out I cracked her email password.)

(14 minutes later:)

Hi there Orlando,

Thank you so much for meowing in! At this time, our warehouse has an automatic system which chooses which box your items are placed in. The only way we can 100% guarantee a certain item will be packed alone or with other certain items would be to place a separate order containing only those items. As long as every order reaches the $49 your human will still receive free shipping.

In the meantime, we wish you and your human family to stay happy and healthy. If you have any further questions, please let us know and we'd be happy to lend a paw. (And don't worry, we'll keep your email cracking skills quiet)

Best Whiskers,

(name)
Customer Service
Chewy

A (newer) coworker asked if he could pick my brain about a certain part of our product. Sure, I said -- and I asked some questions to figure out what he already knows (or doesn't). We chatted a bit, and then I said "Ok, I have some homework for you -- please read X and Y before we talk".

He responded with "pop quiz next Wednesday at 3".

So I scheduled the meeting. I mean, wouldn't you? :-)

Last week the director of engineering sent email announcing prizes for an "improve our tests" hackathon. He labelled one prize (about finding and fixing the most bugs) as "write yourself a minivan".

Later, in response to questions, he sent a copy of the 24-year-old Dilbert strip.

Over the weekend our CTO, in response to questions, sent email explaining what a minivan was.

I'll be over here, weeping into my prune juice and yelling at kids to get off my lawn.

Yesterday, a delivery person came to our office door asking if so-and-so worked here -- he had a package that omitted the company name, so he wasn't sure where to deliver it. The package did have the suite number on it, which got him to the right floor, but he helpfully pointed out that none of the doors in our building actually have numbers posted on them. Huh! He's right!

After he left, I took a post-it note and a marker, wrote "suite #" on it (with our number), and stuck it to the wall next to the door at eye height. (The door itself has a company name at eye height.) That was a patch.

Today someone else printed a sign with a nice, large font and taped it to the door under the name, taping on all four edges to increase its durability. That was a fix.

If somebody else decides to make it pretty, with a splash of color and art, that will be marketing excess. :-)

This morning I drove past a construction (orange) sign that said "be prepared to stop". The person in front of me at the time was driving somewhat erratically. There was no construction nearby (or anywhere on my route to work).

What I want to know is: how did they know?

What'll they think of next? Google is leveraging its cloud-based technologies in helpful new ways. Maybe they'll do Seattle next.

Watch on YouTube

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1070555.html

XKCD on carrying spare phone battery to never be disconnected

I disbelieve. How is he going to maintain connectivity while changing the battery? That takes a couple minutes (including the reboot time). He needs a whole spare phone!

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1067697.html

Me: What do we need, that is available from Amazon, that costs $4.02?
Dani: Is this what's known as a first-world problem?
Me: Not the most egregious I've seen, but yeah.

Free shipping: modifying buyer behavior since...whenever they started that. But it works because of their enormous catalogue; you can find something to fill out an order. (For personal orders this is pretty much never a problem, but I was buying house stuff and thus using shared money.)

(This post is a minimal test of Dreamwidth's Markdown support. Let's see what happens.)

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1066758.html

Today at lunch we were talking about plans for Thanksgiving. One of my coworkers, a Chinese immigrant, said that he's driving to (some town whose name I forget) in New York tomorrow. Family? No, outlet malls. Better than the ones we have about an hour away, he says.

We then proceeded to watch him extol the virtues of outlet malls, and shopping at this time of year, to another Chinese coworker. He talked with particular zeal about the "door-buster" specials for which you need to get there early.

I was going to say that when it comes to teaching visitors about American holidays and traditions, we're doing it wrong. But I guess we aren't. :-)

(Much re-arrangement of dishwasher.)
"What are you doing in there?"
"Optimizing."
"Oh, I thought you were just trying to make things fit."
"That's easy, but then everything wouldn't get clean."
"Then what you are doing is not 'optimizing'. Optimizing means taking something that works and making it better (technically, as good as it can be). Making it 'not broken' is not the same thing."

"I should run it on pot-scrubber mode."
"There are no pots in there."
"And when it's done there will be no dirty pots."

Not said by either of us, but it would fit:

"I don't suffer from overthinking, I enjoy it. Depending on how you define enjoy. And overthinking." (source)

Here are some more pictures of the visiting Stack Exchange unicorn. In this batch she picks up a little local memento, visits an SCA event, and finally (finally!) sees signs of spring in the 'burgh.

( Read more... )

These are some pictures from the Roaming Unicorn. Some silliness here, and more to come later in the week I suspect.

( Stack Exchange Roaming Unicorn )

Finally (for now), the Ladycorn joined me at choir practice, where our director, desperate to get us to pay more attention to our hypothetical audience, began conducting with her -- and I was laughing too hard to think about taking a picture. Oh well; some things will just have to be left to memory and imagination.

Today I was wearing my there's no place like 127.0.0.1 shirt, and thus found myself explaining as much of how the Internet is put together as will fit in an elevator ride in a tall office building. I explained to my inquirer that while he's used to referring to sites by names, computers also have numbers, like this, and that this particular number is very special: it refers to "this computer that I'm typing on right now". Oh, he said, like "home base". Ding.

At that moment the elevator arrived in the lobby, so we did not get into IPv6.

Apparently, what I do while in the bathroom is of intense interest to the cats: no matter where they were before (and whether they were sleeping), lately when I open the door they are both sitting just outside it attentively.

However, this doesn't work if I need to collect one for medicine or a trip to the vet.

Why their ability to read minds in the latter case does not assuage their curiosity in the former will apparently remain a mystery.

The tulips are starting to appear in my yard. We sure went from snow to spring-verging-on-summer in a hurry. But it's supposed to be in the 30s over the weekend.

The (expiration? best-by?) date on a frozen-food package is "Jul 19 2014". This raises two question: (a) such precision -- would July 20 really be different, and is July 18 better in that case? And (b) why isn't frozen food that's good for more than a few months immortal? What exactly is going to happen to my vegetarian corn dogs in a year and a quarter? (The question is academic; I'll have eaten them by next week.)

Someone on Mi Yodeya passed along these really nifty photos of a "teapot" that is so much more. He found it on Reddit, where the claim was that this was used by crypto-Jews during the inquisition. I'm not sure about that, but even if not... wow, cool. Like Russian nesting dolls on steroids. Take a look.

My rabbi blogs now, and I was particularly struck by this recent post about inter-faith relations and more. The part (attributed to someone else) about being neither jerks nor jellyfish when it comes to faith stood out for me.

I saw a job post recently for a (very) technical writer, principal-level, to do programming (API) documentation. That's pretty rare, so when something like that crosses my desk I always look even if it's neither local nor telecommute, to keep tabs on the state of the art if nothing else. On this one, as I was reading down the list of desired skills, past specified programming languages and technologies, past XML markup standards for documentation, I came to... MS Office. This is really not the tool for that particular task. It was then followed by DITA (an XML doc specification that makes DocBook look like child's play), Javadoc, and Arbortext Epic (a tool for editing XML-based documents). I guess somebody decided that throwing in more desired skills was better, or something. Either that or they're not actually doing any of this yet but they aspire to. Which is fine (I've done that), but not clear in the job description.

A few days ago Dani told me that his company, for no particularly-obvious reason, was replacing all their office chairs, with the old ones to be hauled away...somewhere. Some of his coworkers, noting that their current chairs were in fine shape, asked if they could salvage them. The powers that be said ok, anything with a "reserved" sign on it wouldn't be hauled away.

A few minutes after telling me this he asked "do you want to have brunch Sunday at (a downtown restaurant)?". Sure, I said. A moment later I asked "are we fetching office furniture?" Why yes, he said.

So um, I said, if they were likely to have any spares... "I reserved two", he said. Nice.

So I have now upgraded my desk chair (not my computer chair, which is different), finally deprecating the desk chair I obtained from the Perq Systems fire sale for, I think, a dollar. Dani's company isn't dead, so I have hopes that this chair will do at least as well as its predecessor.

(I'm actually very particular about my computer chair(s), in contrast. When I started with my current employer I spent one day with my assigned chair and then went out and bought my own (which, to pass muster with the furniture police, had to match color). All our chairs have stickers on them with their designated locations (because sometimes people "borrow" chairs for meetings and aren't so good about returning them); mine has an additional sticker, "property of (me)", and has never been absconded with.)

Yesterday morning on my way to work, someone pulled up behind me with his left blinker on. As I proceeded straight or right through intersection after intersection I wondered when he would either make a turn or turn off his blinker. He followed me for two miles that way. As we reached Second Avenue (the only four-lane road of the trip) he passed me on the right and then moved back into my lane in front of me, blinker unchanged. It was still on half a mile or so later when I turned (left :-) ) and lost sight of him.

I didn't find that worth posting yesterday and if that were the end of it I wouldn't be posting it today.

This morning I pulled up behind the same car. The blinker was on.

Dude, I get that you're very picky about your left turns, but I sure hope you find one that's worthy of action before you burn out the bulb!

We went to

alaricmacconnal's and Elsbeth's yesterday for a New Year's Day party, which meant more gaming. I had fun playing more Dixit (

blackpaladin, which expansions were in there?), and Dani played Constantinopolis, a resource-management game that sounded similar to Puerto Rico but is twice as long (or thereabouts). I haven't played it yet.

2013 was getting off to a great start but then I had to go back to work. Powerball, you have failed me. :-) (Ok, I've never actually bought my own lottery ticket, but when a group is forming at work I always buy in because I'd sure feel stupid if I didn't and half the company won buckets of money and left.)

Resolution? 1280x1024, but maybe I'll get a new monitor this year. (I think it was merle_ who inspired that idea.) Though I'd rather keep the aspect ratio I have now (i.e. I'm not so thrilled with the widescreen monitors that are all the rage these days).

Orlando is currently chasing his tail. I thought that was a dog thing. (He's got one white pixel on the end of it, but I don't think it's that in particular that he's chasing.) More generally, he and Giovanni seem to be settling in, though I still can't pick either up for more than a few seconds and I had only 50% success on last week's vet visit. Giovanni has gained a pound in the last month, so I guess Orlando isn't being as pushy about the food dishes as I thought.

Netflix only gives you about a week's notice when something is going to disappear from their streaming service. Last week I noticed that Farscape, which had been languishing there for a while, was slated to disappear, so I watched the first eight episodes to decide if I want to queue up DVDs. It looked to me like interesting characters and underwhelming plots, but I'm mindful that some good shows (like B5) took a while to settle in. To those who've seen it: does it get better?

Apparently I can't post comments on LJ tonight, so some of you will probably get some belated comments when that changes. Let's see if I can post an entry.

Going to the eye-doctor and having my pupils dilated seems to cause the day to become bright and sunny. But this is Pittsburgh, where sunny days are relatively uncommon. Does this mean that most people in Pittsburgh never have their eyes checked this way, or are we all mysteriously choosing the same few days for this?

I posted the preceding on the "great unanswered questions" page on our wiki at work. In keeping with the name, I've received no answers.

Why does Windows 8 hide the control to shut down the computer? The discussion in the (currently-)top-voted answer makes a good deal of sense. And I actually didn't know that it's now considered safe to just turn a running computer off; decades of "don't do that" have trained me not to.

Back in July 530nm330hz posted a review of a new book of lessons from the talmud, specifically tractrate B'rachot (blessings). Based on that review I recently bought the book and I'm quite enjoying it so far. It's organized by talmudic page, so I first jumped to the entries on particular pages that I know and love -- how does God pray, different themes of concluding blessings, the tussle over leadership where they deposed Rabban Gamliel (I previously wrote about that one), and one or two others. Now I'll go back and read the rest. I hope this book is the first in a series.

I forget where I came across this special "de-motivator" image, but why should I keep all the fun to myself? (Image behind cut.) ( Read more... )

There was a Halloween pot-luck at work today. Late last week we had a spectacular fridge purge -- things years past their expiration dates and quite a few "science experiments" and containers of green fuzzy...something. These ideas seemed like they should go together, so in a then-locked entry (to maintain the surprise) I asked for suggestions. Thanks to everybody who helped! That entry is now public.

I opted for "cottage-cheese salad way past its sell-by date" as closest to the fridge theme, though several other suggestions nicely fit a "green and/or fuzzy" theme in other ways. (I went for this one because it is clearly abnormal in its green-ness, unlike, say, gaucamole or kiwi.) You can't see it in the picture below, but I altered the sell-by date on the container from 2011 to 2001 -- turning the "1" into a "0" was the only thing I could do after failing to remove the existing ink with chemicals I had on hand. We have a rule that things in the fridge need to be labeled, so this morning I browsed our alumni wiki page to decide on a long-gone coworker to implicate. Ex-coworker, if you're out there, it was all in fun. :-)

The treatment was...evocative, so much so that for a while nobody else ate it. Eventually people got brave. Other offerings included cake with "glass shards" (made from sugar), a couple variations on fingers, a fruit salad with eyeballs, a greenish brain with red highlights (labeled as zombie food), and several comparatively-normal items. I consider it a success.

There is a post-script. A coworker pointed out that the person I implicated didn't work there in 2001. I knew that, but any food actually from 2001 would not have survived the office move in 2005. I was one of the people who prepared the fridges for that move; I know. So I had to choose among inaccuracies -- I could support a 2001 fridge deposit or a fridge deposit that could have occurred in our current location, and opted for the latter. If I'd been able to edit the date more effectively I could have done both. I don't think anybody was there in 2001, still there after the move, and gone soon after. Yes, I did over-think this. :-)

( photo )

Household mystery #1: Dani and I both take multi-vitamins so we just share a jar. (And by the way, do you know how hard it can be to find "just plain vitamins", as opposed to vitamins for men over 53 or menopausal women or left-handed couch potatoes or... but I digress.) I've been noticing that the level in the jar is going down more quickly than I would expect, and his perception is the same. After the exchange of "I take one a day; how many do you take?", we were left stumped. Even if the cats could reach the medicine cabinet the lack of opposable thumbs would hinder them in opening the jar. It's hard to believe that somebody is breaking into the house daily just to steal vitamins out of the jar. (If someone is and you're reading this: hey, I'll just buy you your own jar, ok?) Perhaps we have gremlins. So, a mystery.

Household mystery #2: this year more than in the past, Baldur has been shedding prolifically -- not just in the spring, but all summer too. I think he sheds enough hair to make another cat about every week. I have no idea how he manufactures it at that rate. I speculate that he has opened a private worm-hole to the planet of the cat hair and that this year he got an upgraded baud rate.

Theory: these observations are related. Vitamins support growth, after all. Cat hair goes in one direction; vitamins go in the other direction. I don't know if the gremlins are giving Baldur vitamins (and there is no worm-hole) or if they're sending them through to the planet of the cat hair, but clearly our vitamins are causing an explosion of cat hair.

I liked it better before they were messing with us. :-)

I interrupt preparations for the class I'm teaching next week at the music and dance collegium (gosh, I hope I have this calibrated right...) to pass along some random short bits.

Dear Netflix: I appreciate the convenience of your recent change to treat an entire TV series as one unit in the streaming queue, instead of one season at a time like before. However, in doing so you have taken away the ability to rate individual seasons of shows, which is valuable data. It also makes me wonder, when you recommend things to me based on my ratings, if you are giving all ratings the same weight -- 200 hours of a long-running TV show should maybe count differently than a two-hour movie. Just sayin'.

These photos by Doug Welch are stunning. Link from thnidu.

How Pixar fosters collective creativity was an interesting read on fostering a good workplace. Link from nancylebov.

Speaking of the workplace, I enjoyed reading how to run your career like a gentlewoman and several other articles I found there by following links. Link from _subdivisions_.

Rube Goldberg meets J.S. Bach, from several people. Probably fake, but it amused me anyway. (This is a three-minute Japanese commercial. Do commercials that long run on TV, or would this have been theatrical, or what?)

Speaking of ads, in advance of our SCA group's election for a new baron and baroness today, the current baron sent around a pointer to this video about an upcoming British referendum on voting systems. Well-done! (Of course, I agree with both the system and the species they advocate. :-) ) I wish we had preference ballots in the US.

A while back a coworker pointed me to how to make a hamentashen Sierpinski triangle. Ok ok, some of my browser tabs have established roots; Purim was a while ago. But it's still funny, and I may have to make that next year.

Speaking of geeky Jewish food, a fellow congregant pointed me to The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. which looks like fun. I've certainly found myself in that kind of conversation at times (e.g. is unicorn kosher? well, is it a goat (medieval) or a horse (Disney)?). Some of you have too, I know. :-)

dr_zrfq passed on this article about a dispute between a church and a bar. Nothing special about that, you say? In this case the church members prayed to block it, the bar was struck by lightning, the bar owner sued, and the church denied responsibility. I love the judge's comment on the case: “I don't know how I’m going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.”

47 seconds of cuteness: elk calf playing in water, from shalmestere.

I don't remember where I found the link to these t-shirts, but there are some cute ones there.

This shabbat was our congregation's annual retreat. We had several first-timers this year, in part due to better promotion, and I enjoyed getting to know them better. The study sessions were mostly done in small groups and we kept the same groups throughout (mostly); the other two people in my group were a first-timer I didn't know past his name (he's only been to the shabbat morning minyan a few times so far) and a second-timer I've gotten to know just a bit over the last year. While you can have amazing, deep discussions with people you've known well for years (I had a great experience like that last year), you can also have deep discussions with people you've just met, and I enjoyed that this year. The study sessions revolved around four questions in the book of B'reishit (Genesis): ayeka? (where are you?), ma t'vakeish? (what do you seek?), ha-shomeir achi anochi? (am I my brother's keeper?), and lamah zeh anochi? (why am I?).

We stayed up pretty late Friday night singing and more of the songs than usual were enjoyable to me -- a good mix of Hebrew songs and mostly 60s/70s folk music, with very few intrusions from the first half of the 20th century this year. (I recognize that older attendees feel about the music of the 30s and 40s the way I feel about music of the 60s, but I personally dislike the earlier era's music, at least what I've heard of it.)

For the torah service the rabbi did group aliyot based on how many shabbatons people had been at. (So everybody gets an aliyah, like on Simchat Torah. Nice.) I was a little startled that there were only five of us in the "10 or more" group, out of 32 people present. When did I become a quasi-elder of the group? :-)

There were other groups and activities at the campground (not surprising). Saturday morning we saw signs directing another group to the "Easter bunny brunch". It's dangerous to give a phrase like that to a bunch of Jewish geeks. We decided that while the wording was ambiguous they were probably eating with the Easter bunny rather than upon it, but that led to questions about the nature of the Easter bunny. Is it a single immortal being, like Santa Claus is understood to be, or do Easter bunnies retire and get replaced? Is there a training program and merit-based selection, or do Easter bunnies come from one unbroken family line (like kings, absent conquest) and there's always an heir apparent, or is it like the Dalai Lama and the reincarnated Easter bunny is identified in each generation? And, more specific to our group, are Elaine's iconic bunny slippers at all involved? Alas, these questions went unanswered, except that we think Elaine's slippers are likely to be innocent byhoppers.

At work, two coworkers were standing near me discussing a problem of reconciling divergent data in a system I'm helping with. Coworker 2 said "draw me a picture". On a whiteboard, coworker 1 wrote "location 1" and drew a laptop symbol, then wrote "location 2" and drew another laptop, then drew a squiggly line between them, then drew something evocative of a bicycle.

Coworker 2 asked "what's that?". I replied: "the transport layer". (Yes, really. Customer has no network availability and multiple locations.) He was enlightened about the problem of potential data stale-ness, and did not ask me what protocol is used. :-) (BCP - bicycle communication protocol?)

I was surprised and a little weirded out, the other night, when I typed "parme" into Google and it offered to auto-complete to "parmesan crusted tilapia recipe". That was in fact what I was searching for, though I was going to just say "fish", but I hadn't realized Google's mind-reading was that good. :-) I didn't remember to follow up at first opportunity from a different IP address, though, so I don't know if profiling was involved.

(My question, still not satisfyingly answered as this recipe didn't do it so well, was: how do you get the cheese to stay on the fish? I was speculating about egg, as you often do for breading, but this recipe called for olive oil. I ended up with fish and cheese in proximity to each other, which was tasty but not what I was going for.)

Larry Osterman passed along this video showing upgrades from Windows 1.0 through to Windows 7 with all intermediate steps (except Windows ME, which doesn't play the upgrade game well, it appears). It was amusing to see what did and didn't survive upgrade (Doom almost hit 100%!), and amazing that it actually worked.

Bohemian Rhapsody on ukelele (video), from siderea. I didn't think I could imagine it, and I was right. Nifty!

Cool bedroom, and not just for kids! Link from talvinamarich.

The internet is for cats. Cats in sinks. Be careful; this is like TV Tropes on four legs. Don't say I didn't warn you.

And finishing up with another one from siderea: this funny ad for milk (involves cats).

Monica

fluff break

well, he asked...

young coworkers

patches and fixes

unsolved mystery

Google Wind

interrupted!

shopping is hard; let's go...

American traditions

conversations in our house go like this

Ladycorn #2: a little local swag and an SCA event

some Ladycorn pictures

bite-sized education

silly cats

random bits

salvage

going in circles

random bits

short takes

Halloween pot-luck

household mysteries

short takes

Shabbaton

yes we talk like this

short takes

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