Yesterday afternoon Kelly Bears Mendosa Menaguzzi Lebushka -- a mouthful of a name that only my father would invent -- passed away back in Toronto. We'd raised him since he was a kitten only a few weeks old and he died as an old cat with a full life behind him.

He liked chasing balls down stairs, defending snow forts in the backyard, running sideways up trees, being dried off with a big towel on rainy days, and meowing to get inside the house (only seconds after meowing to be let out). He knew his name and came when he was called, but was famous for his look that clearly meant "uhhh, do I know you from somewhere?"

Goodnight, Bears.

Insanecats was down yesterday from what looked like "hard drive kablamo" (that's the technical term).

I quickly leapt into action and wrote a Python script to scrape the Google cache for as much data as possible. Of course, Google only allows you to find 1000 results per search, so I used some minor cleverness to do date-based searches and managed to pull down nearly all of the pages and comments, which was a huge relief.

What I did lose was all of the images and flash videos. And very gradually I became at peace with this, my biggest loss being some of the fan art you've all generously made for me over the years.

And then this morning a miracle happened. The hard drive was magically restored! Oh frabjous day! Callou callay! Major thankses to Laosy for not giving up. :)

Happy Catsy.

I have a cold (plushie of the cold microbe pictured to the right) which has eaten most of my weekend and got me thinking about the nature of colds.

Can zombies catch colds? I read up on the rhinovirus and it says that the human body normally contains several strands of the rhinovirus but it only actually reveals itself as a common cold when the immune system is weakened for other reasons, for example stress.

I would imagine that the zombification process would probably be quite hard on the immune system, so I suspect that zombies would be quite likely to have colds.

"Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa--ACHOOOO-aaaaains."

Of course, temperature would be a problem. The rhinovirus seems to be happiest at around 33C and can't replicate at anything lower than 27C. Zombies don't create their own heat, so I guess that zombies in colder climates wouldn't have to worry about catching colds, but zombies in warmer climates -- ironically -- would be very susceptible to catching a cold.

This caused me to wonder a lot about other zombie diseases. Since the human body has so many helpful bacteria and viruses in it which prevents us from harm by external microbes, I wonder what would happen in zombies. Would other microbes form this symbiotic relationship with the zombies? Probably not, since it would take thousands of years of evolution and zombies don't procreate in any gene-sharing capacity. So would they have even weaker immunities?

And what about viruses that normally only affect cold blooded creatures? Could zombies catch it, now that their human temperature has been reduced to the temperature of their environment? Their immune system couldn't possibly handle the wide range of lizard viruses that it has never had to combat before.

As I sat here, sneezing and fighting off this cold, I was suddenly comforted that at least I won't be attacked by a mob of zombies who will destroy the world. The lizard flu will catch them first.

Remember how I said that down here in silicon valley there's a perfect blend of politics and geekery that makes me happy? It's very hard to come up with tangible examples of this, but I found one this morning. Tomorrow is the midterm elections and one of my teammates set his status message to:

'Vote %s on %d!' % ({83:'no', 84:'yes', 85:'no', 86:'yes', 87:'yes', 88:'no', 89:'yes', 90:'no'}[proposition], proposition)

Awesome.

Tomorrow's gonna be my first US election where I'm actually in the US, so it'll be interesting to see what it's like. I feel like my vote represents the votes of all the Canadians who live here who weren't fortunate enough to have dual citizenship. I'll do my best to represent you guys well. :)

Vote YES on preposition "WITH" and Help Get Out the Vote!

A vote against the preposition "with" is a vote against freedom, liberty and puppies. You don't hate puppies, do you?

"With" is a preposition that signifies accompaniment, characterization bys, and in regards tos, that have been the foundation of our country since its inception.

A vote YES for preposition "with" is a vote for allowing indirect objects to be used as an instrument towards performing a verb.

A vote YES for preposition "with" is a vote for allowing indirect objects to have an interaction, company, association, connection or conjunction wrt a direct object.

Don't take away these fundamental rights of indirect objects.

Vote YES on preposition "with".

If so, you should think about attending the upcoming Canadian University Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC) in Montreal, Jan 18 - 20th.

If you attend, you'll be able to...

• hear me present as a Corporate Speaker
• get one of my fancy new Google business cards
• listen to me complain about the cold Montreal winter
• learn a whole lot from some of the other speakers at the conference, make some great contacts (peer, academic and industry) and have a few days away from your normal crazy undergrad class-attending schedule

Here are some of the great endorsements which some of you could be saying:

"I am so glad that I listened to Catspaw and attended CUSEC." -- [Insert your name here], January 2007.

"Listening to Catspaw's presentation at CUSEC changed my life." -- [Insert your name here], April 2009.

"Vote Catspaw for President" -- [Insert your name here], November 2020.

"Kneel before Zod." -- [Insert your grandchild's name here], January 2070.

So don't miss out! Check out the CUSEC website and start making plans to attend.

Recently a group of UCLA cops asked a student to leave the library because he did not have identification on him. When he was headed towards the door, one of the cops grabbed his arm.

The student demanded to be released immediately, yelling "get off me" several times until one of the cops shot the student with a taser. As he writhed, handcuffed, on the floor, the cops demanded several times that he "stand up", and continued to shoot him with the taser when he did not.

The cops then threatened to taser any protesters who got to close, who were demanding their badge IDs.

The UCLA Chancellor Norman Abrams released a statement that says: "Routinely checking student identification after 11 p.m. at the campus library, which is open 24 hours, is a policy posted in the library that was enacted for the protection of our students. Compliance is critical for the safety and well-being of everyone".

I know that I certainly feel safer knowing that I could be tasered for forgetting to bring ID with me.

You can watch the whole event from the point of view of a camera-phone in the library:

It's something to behold.

By the way, here's the contact information for the Chancellor. Feel free to contact him and express your feeling about this.

Norman Abrams
Telephone: 310-825-2151
Fax: 310-206-6030
E-mail ( chancellor@conet.ucla.edu )

This video totally made me smile.

Today I finally purchased some DVD shelves. My movies have been sitting in boxes for the past 6 months. Slogs sorted them into some sort of reasonable order when she was visiting -- as reasonable as one can sort boxes of DVDs -- but that was a few months ago and they are once again a total mess.

So I decided to finally bite the bullet and buy some shelves for my living room. In my head, I've known what my living room would look like for a long time now. I can see the DVD shelves, and the future plants, and the future TV stand and the future non-busted TV.

But for some reason I still have this strange guilt-instinct whenever I drop a few hundred dollars on something like shelves.

"The boxes are working out fine", the nagging voice in my brain says. "You don't need to buy shelves. Nor did you need the coffee table you bought last month. Nor did you need the couches you bought the month before that."

I'm not sure where the voice comes from. Maybe it's from years of being a student and paying very close attention to where my money went. Maybe it's because this is my first high-paying job and I'm not used to the fact that the money is gonna keep flowing in every month. Or maybe it's something else entirely.

I volunteered to spend a day working at a local food bank in two weeks, and for some reason that makes me feel a bit better. But then of course, the fact that it makes me feel a bit better makes me feel more guilty -- "oh good, you're donating just a few short hours of work to help the hungry and suddenly you can feel free to throw your money on things like shelves. Yeah, that makes it aaaaaaaaall better."

I dunno where this nagging voice is coming from. But maybe it's a good thing; maybe it'll keep me honest. Or maybe it's just ruining the fun of buying pretty new things.

It's seven-something in the morning. I've just completed my daily mountain climb to get to the Google shuttle stop, and I waltz into my usual coffee place to grab a coffee and orange scone for the shuttle ride.

"Hey", the guy behind the counter says to me. "Can I ask you a question?"

It pays to always be friendly to the people who pour your coffee, so I nodded and smiled.

He asked, "Do you have a date for the Google Christmas Party?"

Talk about catching me off guard. "Uh..."

"It's coming up soon, right?", he asked. "I hear it's amazing. What's up with it?"

Okay, so he must've seen that I always wear Google gear and that's how he knew what company I worked for. But how the hell did he know about the holiday party that's coming up? "I only have one ticket, yes it's coming up soon, and I don't know what's up with it because I've never been to one before."

It turns out that the whole world knows about our upcoming holiday party. It's widely famed as being "extravagant, to say the least" and some people are willing to do almost anything to get a ticket.

I'll let you all know what the party is like once I've been there. We'll see if it's all that it's cracked up to be. Knowing Google, though, I doubt I'll be disappointed.