Drove the Volt to dinner tonight. Asked it what it thought of the names. It did not, inconveniently enough, respond.

However, I did feel, while driving it, that 'Fulmen' was not appropriate.

On the drive back, I decided - given that a) 'Deckard' feels very male, given the origin and all the associated harrisonfordness and b) the car hasn't really demonstrated a gender preference in its personality - that 'Zot' was the only name we've come up with so far that really fits in any reasonable way.

So, that is the name of my new Volt. 'Zot'.


Tomorrow I need to call and make sure the loan actually went through properly, so I can /keep/ the car...
And then I need to order an FSM fish, a spaceship fish, new license plate holders... and a 220VAC charger.

Final voting on the cars name: http://martian.at/car.cgi

I won't necessarily go with the highest vote, but I value you opinion.

So, for the zero of you who read my lj but not my twitter or facebook, yet still care about what I'm doing... I bought a car yesterday. Hadn't planned to do so quite then, but we did get a pretty damned good deal.. Black 2011 Chevy Volt, with a payment bigger than I was hoping but smaller than I expected. loree brought them down about $18k from their original proposal, bringing the before-fees price to less than their (official) invoice price. It isn't /exactly/ what I wanted, but exactly what I wanted would have cost at least $15k more, so I'm happy with it.

It hasn't told me its name, or even its gender. I'm calling it Morpheus for now, having realized Giskard did /not/ fit.
Nothing I've thought of really seems to fit. "Geirrod"? "Hœnir"? "Yaluk"? "Huraqan"? "Rai" or "雷"? "Vigg"? Suggestions welcome.


Meanwhile, we need to figure out the parking situation. The Volt can't make it into the right side of the garage. The Prius /just/ barely can, but scrapes VERY badly coming out. We /think/ we can get away with grinding down the corner of the concrete... anybody have tools appropriate for doing that?

So, today loree and I:
1) Got gas
2) Went to Sawdust Supply. Their website lies about their saturday hours, they're closed.
3) Went to a specialty bathtub store, got the sales pitch, drooled at an awesome shower unit.
4) Went to Cash 'n' Carry for cherry syrup.
5) Went to the hardware store for automatic watering timers
6) Went to Costco for dogfood and drugs.

All of that was accomplished in less than 2 hours, ~1p to 245.

7) Went to Zippy's for lunch. I hadn't actually /been/ since they moved. Very sad for me.
7.5) Sat and watched some TV while cooling down.

8) Did a lot of plumbing work on the yard. The roses will now be automagically watered every morning before dawn, and the plants on the front porch are kinda sorta almost set up for a drip irrigator, tho it doesn't work very well and we'll probably replace it with something else. That took something like 3-4 hours.


We are tired and sore. But at least the roses should survive.

I never finished my senior year of high school. So I went back to do so.
There were a surprising number of people I knew there, including people I went to school with (makes sense) and people I used to work with (doesn't).
Once I saw what the workload was going to be like for the math and language classes, I started freaking out. There's no way I could keep up a full-time work schedule for a west-coast company while also going to school full time in Kansas. I was going to have to cut back my hours, which would also mean a cut in pay. I couldn't afford this!

I woke up just as I realized I /could/ afford it, if I sold my private jet.

Data:
* I want to buy a Chevy Volt
 - Actually, I never thought I'd own another american(-brand) car.
 - But I like it
 - I like it better than the Leaf
  - for reasons I've muttered about at length
   -(you can't walk to the gas station and bring back a battery)
* They are not available in WA
 - Yet. They've finally started saying August.
* Local (to WA, anyway) dealers are buying them from dealers in CA.
 - For a $4k mark-up over MSRP.
 - So their sticker starts $10k over MSRP, and there's no haggling them below that $4k markup, no matter how many Customer Service Avengers™ I throw at them.
* I could fly to the bay area /this weekend/ for $400, and it drops to $300 and $200 at one and two weeks out.
* Driving back would be between 800 and 900 miles, depending on route
 - which is three tanks of gas.
 - At $4.50/gal, the gas would cost $135.
* There's a $7,500 tax credit, which starts shrinking after they build a certain number of units.
 - And I can't find a reference to where they're at with that number

So. I could fly myself and a spare driver to the bay area, buy the car, and drive back for $1000. Or I could probably fly just myself down and do the same thing, staying somewhere cheap for one or two nights.

Checking my math here, I see that $1000 is less than $4000. Hence, The Oakland Plan.

1) Check with BECU, to see if I /can get/ a loan for an adequate amount at acceptable terms.
2) Go back to the volt "find local inventory" search and see if there are any dealerships with the specific options I want on-hand. If so, call them. If not, pick a few and call them. Find out what the sticker price is. If nobody has the options I want, find out what would be involved in ordering one, when it would be available, etc. Maybe put loree on the phone as needed.
3) Go back to BECU. Get loan.
4) Fly to california
5) Buy car
6) Drive home, probably via 5-hours-longer coastal route.

There is an alternate plan (we'll call this The Boring Plan:
1) Wait until August, saving what I would be paying on the loan to add to a slightly larger down payment.

And, of course, there is the failure state:
1) Discover that nobody will give me enough money at acceptable terms to buy a car.


We'll ignore the last one for now, since there's nothing to be done about it.


Benefits of The Boring Plan:
* Slightly smaller loan
* Don't need to take a day off

Benefits of The Oakland Plan:
* Road trip
* Slightly-more-immediate gratification
* Road trip!
* Unlikely to miss out on the tax credit
* ROAD TRIP!
* I've yet to drive the coast highway, except in WA, where it's mostly dense trees with beach on the other side.

Downsides to The Boring Plan:
* Boring
* No road trip
* I hate waiting
* No road trip!

Downsides to The Oakland Plan:
* Complicated
* Have to deal with getting the loan /beforehand/
 - without a car or a vin or anything in hand.
* "Seriously, are you insane?"


So, I'm still leaning towards The Oakland Plan. I need to move on to step 1 soon.

Watching the final episodes of Stargate Universe. They have a definite vibe of "You cancelled us. Fuck it, we're gonna say what we want.". Re: Muzak, Captain Kirk, Pittsburgh, etc. As loree put it, "I gotcher 'notes from the network' riiiight here."

So, it's been a while since I last checked my credit reports. This time, Experian and Transunion coughed up reports, but Equifax refused (mail us this form, for security reasons). I went ahead and paid both for the credit score as well, since I'm looking at applying for a car loan. Experian gives me 832, and Transunion says 827. Both grade 'B', and better than 69% and 59% of the populace respectively. (That implies that 10% of the populace scores 828 to 831. Or that it's all bullshit.)

So, to recap:
April 2008 => 698
August 2008 => 836
July 2009 => 721
June 2011 => 830ish

Interestingly, the Transunion and Experian reports agreed on what accounts I have open, which they've never done before, and neither showed closed accounts (they used to). Neither shows the Amex (I'm a secondary user on Loree's account, but I seem to recall it used to be listed). And, since I don't have any credit cards at the moment EXCEPT the Amex, I'm getting dinged on my score for that. Right now it's just the mortgage, the credit line for the bed, and the paid-off-still-open credit line for the appliances.


All this comes up because I decided yesterday that the only thing standing in the way of The Oakland Plan was the money. Flying to California without a car loan in hand and expecting to be able to get one while I'm down there after negotiating for the car is a recipe for sadness, so my plan was to go to BECU and get one from them, fly down there with the money in hand, and drive away. Now that I know the scores, I have a better idea of what my chances are looking like for the loan.

So, you know SEOmoz, that company I've been working for the past year, that finally hired me on perm? We're hiring. Like mad. My boss is spending most of her days locked in a little conference room doing phone screens. We're looking for both programmers and other things.

It's a cool environment, cool people, good parties, they feed us regularly (but not /too/ regularly). The office is a little bright for my taste (the lights are off, but the windows are huge), but most non-cavedwellers would like it.

If you want to apply, especially for one of the software engineer spots, I would encourage you to use this link, as I (should) get credit for the referral.

And, of course, I'm happy to answer questions about the place, if you're interested.

So, I'd planned to replace Joshua when he was ten years old. That would be Feb 2013. I'd planned to replace him with the latest model Element, with whatever the best trim package was. Well, Honda has discontinued it, so that won't be happening.

After I got into my little Accident last month, I was pondering what I'd do if they totaled it. I'd been pondering the idea of an all-electric-drivetrain car for a while. Right now, for something that would meet my needs, that would mean the Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Volt, or the Tesla roadster. There are some other options, but nothing really adequate to what I'm looking for. Now, the Tesla is what I /want/, but I'm unlikely to afford it any time soon. We test drove a Leaf a few weeks ago, because Sound Nissan has one. There's a year-and-a-half waiting list for them, IF you can get on the waiting list. It's all-electric, and with no backup. It's got a 100 mile range, which is plenty for my regular activities, but - and this seems to be the standard I'm applying to such things - I can't drive to Portland without stopping to charge. It's got a 440V super-fast charge port, which will get you to 80% in 30 minutes, so I could stop in Centralia and get lunch each way, but that's not the same. Gas, for all its faults, at least makes for a really fast recharge when you're out of motive energy.

The Volt, on the other hand, is an all-electric drive train, BUT it has an on-board gas-powered generator as backup. It's only 35mi range electric, but the gas backup gets you another 300 or so miles, on less than ten gallons of gas. The electric range is enough for damn near everything I need to drive for, but the gas backup let's me drive cross-country in it if I need to.

I also like how it feels, and how it handles, and how it performs. I'm not /thrilled/ that the window height is such that I can't comfortably hang my arm out the window, but that's not a significant negative point. It doesn't have a huge amount of ground clearance; about one of my handspans.

So. By itself, as a vehicle, I like it. I would have no reservations about buying a Volt that relate to the car in itself.

However.

The ground clearance is a concern. If you've seen our garage, you know that one side has a rather steep approach, requiring a fair amount of ground clearance to enter. Joshua has no problems. I doubt the Volt would make it. The Prius /might/, we'd need to test that, in which case loree and I could switch sides.

The next concern is the price. Because Chevy hasn't started selling them here yet - and doesn't currently intend to until late this year - the dealership we visited is buying them from dealers in california, at a markup. A $4000 markup. The MSRP is about $42k, so their /cost/ is 46k, and their unhaggled list price starts at $52. Um... yeah. It would be cheaper to /fly/ to california, buy one there, and drive it back.

Finally, and this one is kinda stupid... I honestly didn't think I'd ever own another american car. I'd be tempted to wait until Honda came out with an equivalent of the Volt, except I just /know/ they'd build it on the Civic base, and I hate the Civic.


So. Yeah. Pondering, pondering.

Meanwhile, I should go check my credit score.

Two weeks ago tuesday, I was just starting to settle into my two week vacation, and looking forward to Norwescon. Then I got sick. Then I spent the night in the hospital. Then I slept thru most of a day, woke up, and went to con, where Time Works Different. Then I came home, and - while happily consuming solid foods and walking around without much risk of randomly toppling over - spent the rest of the week largely absent, cognitively, while acutely aware of the fact that I had Things I Need To Do. But the body and brain said no. Then friday I went to join in on a departmental lunch and my first company all-hands. And started coughing. Didn't think much of it; it was just the exertion of speed-walking to the office from where I'd parked, so soon after the whole death-flu thing. Except I spent the weekend tired, achy, full of goo, and trying to cough up major organs. I didn't even try to go into the office on monday (I usually go in on MWTh), and only managed to vaguely poke at work stuff. Dragged myself in yesterday, got in by 9, and then left at 1, feeling like being hit by a truck would be an /improvement/. Was very glad I'd found a closer place to park.

In short, I've missed most of the last three calendar weeks.

---

I woke up this morning when the power went out and things started beeping, about 5 minutes before my alarm was set to go off. Oh, hey, I can kinda breathe. Aweso*coughcoughhack*. Damnit. Call city light. Check breakers. Start shutting servers down. Tweet about it. Start wondering what to do. I was supposed to go into the office. I was supposed to take the dogs to school, so I could go into the office. I can't get into the garage, and thus can't get my car out of the garage, with the power out. Thus I can't take the dogs to school. Thus I can't go to work. Can I work from home? I have my laptop, it's got a long battery life, and most of the things I need to work on can be done offline. And I have my cellphone for those things I need internet for. City light was saying 1pm for restoration, and it was a quarter to 8. I was in the process of composing an email to work, saying I'd be working from home and they should call me for the two meetings I was going to miss, when the power came back. I waited a while to make sure it /stayed/ on.. we've been tricked before, with the power coming back, seemingly for good, and going out again /just/ as I started bringing things up. Got all the servers back on, and discovered that one of my 8port gig-e switches was dead. And it's the one the steamcon reg server is plugged into, as well as my wireless bridge. I poke at it and discover the power light is JUST BARELY flickering. Ok, it's a power problem. Is the switch broken? I go upstairs and grab a new switch, still in box. Only a 5-port. It'll have to do for now. I try, out of insane hope, swapping in the new power supply on the old switch. It works. Great, that'll do. Make sure the server is up, the wireless is up, and go to take the dogs to school. Traffic is inexcusably bad, and I didn't feel like committing the /actual/ murders I would be emotionally required to commit in order to deal with it, so I stopped at Chelan for breakfast, failed to enjoy my french toast, and continued on to work.

But remind me not to park in Century Square anymore, unless I get in before 930.

So, I expect you've all heard by now, either thru loree's lj or my twitter.. Tuesday and Wednesday were the anti-fun.

So, over the weekend, loree came down with what we initially /thought/ was food poisoning. She got over the worst of it quickly, and was able to go to work by noon on Monday. But then /I/ started feeling sick. I had breakfast Tuesday morning, and took my shot to compensate for it. Then developed a stomach ache. Wasn't long before I ... un-ate my breakfast. About an hour later, I'm still feeling like crap, I'm weak and shaky and sweating a river.. and I realize that my blood sugar has tanked, because the breakfast that I took that insulin for never made it into the blood steam. I grab some non-diet dr pepper and drink part of that. I call loree and whine and she comes home to take care of me. She comes home, we check my blood sugar, and it's a /little/ high, 200ish, which isn't surprising given I didn't exactly measure out the dr pepper. But, frankly, I'd rather have it running a little high while I'm attending regular services at the porcelain church, instead of too low. I spent the next several hours trying to find a place to lay down that didn't make me want to throw up more, or - more frequently - throwing up more. What we did NOT do - and I'm going to plead "distracted" for this - was keep checking my blood sugar. Despite the fact that I wasn't consuming anything with carbohydrates in it, the blood sugar kept going up - the liver stores sugars, you see, and will release them as needed.. except /it/ decides on 'needed', and, well, it's no brain. By 9pm, I was having difficulty breathing. It's really not clear how much of that was physical and how much a psychosomatic reaction to everything else, but either way, it was freaking me out a bit and thus making itself worse. We called my insurance's nurse line. She said "Test your blood sugar. And call 911. You're going to call 911 now, right? yes? call 911.". There was a bit of an "oh, right." moment, and we tested my blood sugar. 412. Ok, that's.. too high. Thank you, nurse lady, bye bye. Took a shot of fast acting insulin to start bringing that down, and drove to the hospital - I wasn't in bad enough shape yet that I needed an ambulance ride. Went to Swedish ER. They took me back pretty quick. The doc in charge quickly declared ketoacidosis. They put me on an IV drip with saline and insulin, and then had me moved up to the ICU so they could monitor my blood sugar and adjust the insulin rate as needed. Overnighting in the ICU was uneventful, but noisy.. always something beeping somewhere. And, since I'm a side sleeper, but had IVs in one arm and a blood pressure cuff on the other, I couldn't sleep. Might've caught about 30 minutes in 5 minute slots thru the night. The next morning, a new doctor said it hadn't quite developed into acidosis - we'd caught it early enough - and since I'd come back so well with the saline and insulin, they'd probably be discharging me that afternoon. loree and beaq came to visit, and the doctor said he'd discharge me, and I got out of there.
In all, about 18 hours in the hospital.

Went home, had a little bit to eat, and went to bed. Woke up a few times, but from about 330 wednesday until 8am thursday, I think I was awake for less than an hour.

I'm still sore /everywhere/, mostly from the whole-body convulsions of puking so much, but also from the lack of sleep in a bed I couldn't get particularly comfortable in. Tylenol is helping with that. My stomach is still /really/ touchy, probably a combination of muscular soreness and the trailing effects of the flu. I wasn't sure I'd be making it to Norwescon at all, but made it down here anyway. I expect I'll be spending a fair amount of time in the room, and probably won't be party hopping this year. Ah well.

Would anybody like a pair of black Vibram FiveFinger Flows, men's size 43?

They need some repair, which I can not be bothered to pursue. Suffice it to say they should not be put thru the washing machine on the sanitize cycle. If you want to reglue them or have them reglued, they're yours.

I have decided that the first words of the first human on Mars need to be "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker".

You have Object A and Object B. You need to call a method on A, passing B as a param, to return the relationship of B to A. You'll get back answers like :owner (if A==B, or A.creator == B, or A.owner == B, or something like that), :friend (if A considers B a friend, or A is a group and B is a member, etc), or :other (if neither of the others).

If we were calling the method on B and passing A, I'd say B.relationship_to(A). But what do I call it in the other direction? A.xxx(B)? I don't like .relationship_from, 'cause that sounds kinda stupid. I'm looking for better ideas.

edit:

May as well be more concrete.

The logged in user, the person doing the browsing, is represented by 'current_profile'.
Now, if you're looking at someone else's profile, they'll be @profile. Or if you're looking at a group, it's @group. Or an event, it'll be @calendarItem (Event was taken). I'm defining an API that all three of these things share, and want to be able to say things like @profile.xxx(current_profile), instead of current_profile.relationship_to(@profile). It's entirely an aesthetic thing, there's no strong reason for wanting it this way.

editedit:

Well, ok, that's not /strictly/ true. It's /mostly/ aesthetic. But there's also the question of the 'friend' state, which will be based on relationship objects from A, not from B. so, if I'm calling B.relationship_to(A), the function on B will end up searching thru A.friends for itself, which just Feels Weird. If the actual implementation of this function was going to be different for each of the classes, then it would /have/ to be this way, since we don't want a Profile to need to know how to find the 'friends' of an Event. But since I'm planning to implement it once, in a module they'll all include, that's not an issue.

One last chance.

Does anybody want this deep fryer, before I throw it away?

Followup: After we got home, I actually /played/ Fracture for about an hour.

Story summary: Global warming flooded the midwest, the eastern and western states polarized, with the east taking a tech-oriented stance and the west taking a geneng-oriented stance. Now the east has declared geneng illegal, so the west is seceding. We went to arrest the guy in charge in the west and - shocking - he fought back. So now I'm running around, not quite on my own, trying to recapture the guy or .. something.

So, there are your basic weapons: guns, missile launchers, plasma canons, grenades. Whatever.
There's also the Entrencher. You can make the ground expand upward, or contract downward. Useful for creating cover for yourself if you're being shot at, or for throwing a badguy off his shooting stance (and preferably into a wall). There's a lot of contrived "how do you get thru this area? there's a tunnel, but it's FULL OF DIRT.".

I need to adjust the look sensitivity, 'cause right now the game play is a little twitchy. I'll give it another shot, and see if it gets better. But, right now, yeah, it was definitely well-priced at $10, instead of the $40-50 most of the console games seem to go for these days.

At Fry's the other day, I picked up a random PS3 game, Fracture, for $10. I just tried to play it.

1) system software update. Ok, I haven't used the thing for a couple months, that's reasonable.

2) you have to re-sign in to psn.
Fine.
3) you have to reagree to the terms.
Agree.
4) you have to re-sign in to psn.
Idiots.

Start game.
5) there is a software update for this game.
Ugh.

Start game.
6) installing game files. Please wait. With a completion timer starting at 5 minutes.
5 minutes pass.

7) "Press Start"

Total elapsed time since I put the disc in, about 25-30 minutes.

And now it's time to leave for dinner.

loree has a review of the "Neti Stik" inhalers, which we've been using since she brought one home a few weeks ago.

My problem is that I'm used to the Vick's inhalers. Which are pretty weak, so I tend to snort at them pretty hard. DO NOT DO THAT with this product. Seriously, I've done it a couple times out of habit, and spent the next five minutes crying and whimpering. The stuff works /really really well/. It's unbelievably effective. "Inhale gently", as they say.

They've been quite useful, since we've both had something cold-like since late last week.

I received an invoice yesterday, from Airgas. For $156, for rental of two 10L dewars.
Seeing as how I haven't done business with them for at least two years, and last year asked them to close my account, I'm not exactly thrilled about this. They're going to "research" and see if they can figure out why they think I have two of their dewars.

I signed up with formspring. Partly 'cause I haven't been using my own AQ system for a while, but mostly because it worked around a problem with clicking on links from twitter on mobile safari. That said, feel free to ask stuff.

I used to consider myself quite good at web design. This was back in the days when TABLE was bringing forth a new wave of design possibilities, and FONT tags roamed the earth.

Then I started doing web development professionally.

Hm.

If anybody is still undecided as to what to get me for my birthday, a new garbage disposal would be good. We just found out where the under-sink leak was: a crack in the side of the disposal. ::P

Anybody want a hand-made solid wood very-nearly-king-size bed frame?

I built it myself (with loree's help) for the soft-side waterbed. Due to a minor error between design and construction, the platform area itself is a couple inches too short for a king mattress. It's worked well enough for the past five years, with the foot of the mattress hanging off the bottom of the bed. It's designed to put the top of the mattress just below hip height. It's got a three-tier headboard (only the first tier was installed when the pictures were taken). The platform is built in four pieces, two pieces for the legs, two pieces for the platform itself, all bolted together, each movable by a single person (or, at least, by me). The headboard bolts onto the platform, and each tier stacks on top and bolts on. Some of it is stained, some isn't.

Pictures from right after it was built:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/themartian/sets/72157619680560943/

We've got a new bed arriving tomorrow, and no longer need the platform. Want it? It's yours, come and get it.

If nobody takes it, I'll probably end up tearing it apart, and recycling what material I can into something else. But I'd rather not do that.

Confidential to rigel_p: I'm gonna need a smaller rover.

PS: Awesome. Thank you!