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Hokay, so… Emylene rocks, and she got me lotsa cool stuff for my birthday. Specifically, she:
- baked me a batch of chocolate-chip cookies (my favorite, ya know), using (I think?) this recipe from Martha “Jailbird” Stewart
- got me a cool long-sleeved shirt and an all-weather log book from geocaching.com (I guess she’s been reading my blog entries)
- got me a really cool (okay, maybe that’s stretching the term “cool” a little) soups-and-stews cookbook, since she’s knows I’ve been hunting for a good 15-bean soup recipe (and my old crock-pot)
- took me out to dinner at Betelnut, where you can get Pan-Asian Cuisine, and check out all the hotties as they check each other out, et cetera
- went to the East Bay Vivarium and adopted our first pet (and my favorite birthday gift), a Madagascar hissing cockroach!!!

Some of you will remember that I was saddened a while back by the passing of Karl, the blue-eyed porcupine pufferfish (mascot of 826 Valencia). So, we decided to name our new pet Karl, partly in memoriam, and partly because “Karl the Cockroach” has a nice sound to it.

This weekend, we made a trip (my first) out the East Bay Vivarium to pick up some fancier goodies for Karl’s terrarium, and we moved it from a temporary spot (the kitchen table - oops, maybe Em thinks I shouldn’t have said that) to its new location in our office, right between our respective PCs. There’s now a lamp shining down through the (screened) top of the terrarium, the better to see Karl by, and a really cool half-of-a-small-hollow-log thing that he likes to climb on, and sleep under. We bought some dry cat food (recommended by the experts) for him to eat (it’s high in protein, which they tell me is good for him), but he doesn’t seem to care for it much. But I know from some hand-feeding experiments that he *loves* iceberg lettuce, and will do just about anything for a morsel of Western Hazelnut bread (good thing, because Em and I like it, too).
Here’s a little snapshot (click it for a full-sized image) I took of Karl munching some bread while perched on my palm. I’m very likely to fill these pages with cockroach-related links and facts, but I’ll start with the answers I’d ask for first:
- no, he doesn’t bite
- no, he doesn’t carry or spread disease
- no, he doesn’t smell
- yes, they (Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches) do really hiss, but we haven’t actually heard Karl hiss yet

I had a hamster once, very long ago, and a praying mantis (not as long ago), and most recently Em and I baby-sat (snake-sat?) a really beautiful snake for a friend who was moving. But this is our first pet together, and he’s a real cutie. If you live in the area, come by and say hi to him - he has no playmates in his terrarium, so I figure it’s good for him to have new humans to play with. [Actually, he's pretty shy - I only got him onto my palm by luring him there with the bread.]

If you aren’t in the area, you can (okay, I geeked out big-time, and stayed up late last night rigging this up) check in on him via the 24-hour KarlCam!! Yes, really.

He’s not that active, most of the time, so if you want to see cool video clips of his relatives in action, check out this QuickTime video clip, or this one.

Thanks, Emylene!!

Also, overdue birthday-related thanks go out today to:
- Michelle Parise and Norm Davis (they sent me a nice birthday card, and Michelle sent me a couple of nice e-mails, including one in which she claimed that she actually reads this blog!)
- Jay Gamez (he sent me some good info on IVR systems that I passed along to some colleagues of mine)
- Erika Seid (she sent me a really *pretty* birthday card - she doesn’t read this blog, but who does?)
- the Aspillas (especially Imelda) for sending me another nice birthday card
- the Rochmans (my brothers and parents, anyhow) for hunting me down on my cell phone so they could wish me a happy birthday (good thing incoming calls are free on my Nextel plan)

Final Note: Since we don’t know when Karl was actually hatched/born, and he was a birthday present for me, we’re going to celebrate his birthday on November 14th as well. Happy (belated) Birthday, Karl!

Not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES in the last two weeks, I’ve found (and deleted) *porn spam* in my *blog comments*. Yes, really. Spammers have gotten to the point where they’ve got bots scouring the net for blogs of any type that allow open comment posting (like this one does), and they then auto-post a URL to their porn site as a comment on your blog. Lovely. So, if you notice a particularly colorful “comment”, just try to ignore it. I get notified about all new blog comments, so it just means I haven’t gotten around to deleting it yet.

I won’t turn off the comments, if only on principle. But I might have to look into “hardening” them - that is, putting some (reasonable?) anti-spam measures into place. The problem is already widespread, and getting worse - enough that it’s the topic of the week over at MovableType.org. The ). The good news is that as a result, smart and creative people are already working on the problem - there’s already one good solution available that I’m planning on implementing as soon as possible.

Hrm, where was I? Oh, yes. When last I posted, Gentle Reader, it was pre-Halloween, the mighty Agent Dan was in da house, and we had no plans. Sure enough, that led to us going nowhere and doing nothing on Halloween night. Well that, and the fact that the weather was (by local standards) really nasty - cold and rainy and just yuck. We did get down to Monterey the next day, but on the other hand that meant missing the Day of the Dead festivities here in the mission, because we got back too late. So, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. At least Agent Dan had the best of times, overall, and we got to eat a bunch of the saltwater taffy that he bought at a cute shop in Sausalito.

[Trivia Break. Did you know that "saltwater taffy" does NOT contain (ocean) salt water? Some recipes call for a bit of salt, but apparently no one actually uses (ocean) saltwater, and a lot of it is made with no salt at all. Yes, I know that's perfectly idiotic. I did find a site (check the sidebar - "The Sweet History of a Treat") that purports to have the true story of why it's called saltwater taffy. Who knows? It might actually be true...]

Anyhow, here’s a big shout out to Agent Dan, now that he’s back up in the frozen North - our home and native land. Cheers, bro.

Dan left on Monday (November 3rd), and I left for Seattle later the same day, and spent most of last week there workworkworking. I didn’t go anywhere but the client’s office and the hotel, so there’s nothing much to report on. Oh, wait, there is. It has nothing to do with my trip, but it seems some folks have been eating sushi off of naked women in Seattle. Right or Wrong, that’s MUCH more interesting than what I was doing (installing Microsoft apps on a server and some desktops).

This week’s been dull-ish so far, but is picking up. Em and I are due over at Karie and Donovan’s in a couple of hours for “dinner and West Wing” (we don’t have cable, and they do, and in most of San Francisco you can’t get NBC without cable - yes, really). Then tomorrow night, we’re celebrating the long-awaited (by me, anyhow) grand re-opening of Cobb’s Comedy Club in their new, bigger-and-better-than-ever North Beach location. And so help me God, the headliner is none other than BOB SAGET. And despite how good he was at being the LEAST funny man on television, he is (I swear!) really, really funny live. Mark Pitta & Johnny Steele are also on the bill, and W. Kamau Bell will be hosting.

Unfortunately, I’ll be working this weekend, upgrading a client’s systems - they can’t afford the downtime that would cause during the work week. Yuck. But at least I’ll get a couple of comp days out of it to use later…

On the missions-accomplished front:

1) Agent Dan and I played the hell out of The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers (even finishing the Tower of Orthanc level), just in time for his departure, and for me having to take it back to Blockbuster. For the record, Blockbuster is The Great Satan of video rental, but they did send me a coupon (three, actually) that let me rent the game for the whole week for 99 cents. Can’t beat that deal with a stick.

2) Em and I watched our way through the rest of the Sports Night DVDs, so we’re DONE. We also saw The Matrix Revolutions (one-word-review: bleah), so we’re DONE with that as well. Now we just need to see The Return of the King, and all the loose (media) ends are tied up.

3) I installed iTunes on Em’s new PC, and it’s ripping our CD library into MP3s like a dream. I don’t know if it’s her CPU (currently the fastest in the house), or something about the MP3 compression algorithms in iTunes, or some mix of both, but it’s FAST. In fact, while typing this, I just ripped a 44-minute CD in just under six minutes, which is pretty sweet. In general, I prefer EAC for ripping CDs on Windows, but iTunes is really easy for Em to use (I’ve delegated some of the CD-ripping duties), and it’s optimized for playback-during-ripping, which most other apps won’t do. Anyhow, the good news is that we’ve now got around 200 CDs ripped. The bad news is that we’re maybe halfway to done, if that. How did we end up with this many CDs??

Now I just have to show Em how to make custom playlists, and burn them to CDs/CD-RWs, and fun stuff like that, and we’re groovin’. And no, the use of iTunes does NOT mean that we’re getting an iPod. My iPaq plays MP3s fine (and how much dork-gear can I carry?), I’ve got an MP3-CD player in the car, and Em’s got one to tote around with her on transit and such. Besides, we already have iPods - in our minds.

Speaking of great Onion articles (well, sort of), here’s hoping my mom never finds this blog.