Cat toes as an internet hazard

I had a wonderful distraction tonight. After spending the day working on the house and trying to catch up on sleep, I got some emails from someone on craigslist, a woman in Fairfax with whom I'd been talking about music and what's on our iPods. Turns out that she's separated, smart, and she owns two Saabs.

What's more, she asked if I was interested in meeting her for dinner, which of course I was. We met at a place near the Beltway and I found that she's not only smart, but pretty cute, fun to talk to and likes cats (just doesn't have any right now). I think she's way early in her separation to get into a relationship (only a few months, after 15 years) but she's a lot of fun to be with and I hope we see each other again.

I've needed those distractions lately and they've been rare.

The new phone arrived today. Or, rather, the second new phone. I might have mentioned that my Sony T610's keyboard flaked out a couple of months ago. After some major dorking around, the one I bought a month ago on eBay finally showed up, and I discovered that it was not in "great shape," nor was it a T-Mobile phone, though the guy simply never bothered answering that question. That meant that it was useful only as parts, and I could not do enough surgery on it to make the parts work with my T610, so I got on eBay again, did a Buy It Now on another phone, and that one showed up today.

I am much happier. It's clean, in nice shape, and the battery was even charged up when it arrived. I popped the SIM into it, and it was useful in minutes. And, I have two extra batteries for it. The seller immediately got positive feedback. As for the dimwit who sold me the first one, I sent him a note telling him all my gripes (he was kind of a jerk about the whole transaction) but pointedly said I did not intend to give him a negative feedback.

He sent some sort of reply; I ignored it. I have a source of parts, he has money, leave it at that.

I finally put a new podcast up. It's mostly words, not music. Sorry if you've tried downloading the podcast in the last day or so... thanks to a quirk in Windows 2000, if you put a text console (like what my server displays) into text-select/highlighting mode, the console output freezes, system messages back up, and eventually the server gets constipated and won't answer.

Alas, when the cats hop on the keyboard, they sometimes put the console in text-select mode. I only notice it when I can't get to the webserver, and then I have to manually get the console responsive again, after which it dumps tens of thousands of lines of textual diahrrea out onto the display. Then, it's fine.

My webserver can be taken offline by cat toes. Compare and contrast the guys in New Orleans who are keeping the Interdictor's weblog up and running (see yesterday's first entry).

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody pays me (or the cats) to do this. Otherwise cat toes would not be a threat.