You're a restaurant. You have a beautiful website. Your website says the holiday gift certificates are now available. Could you PLEASE include a way to buy a gift certificate online? Just because the recipient has to visit your restaurant in person doesn't mean that the gift giver is local! (If you could include the average cost of a meal for two? That would be a bonus, though I can figure it out from your menu.)

This last Friday, on the high holiest shopping day of the year in the United States, I actually bought something!

...a gallon of milk. We were out.

Um.

I spent a decidedly un-American Black Friday, cleaning out the basement and unacquiring things instead of acquiring. The house is now at least fifty pounds lighter.

After the debacle that was the Delicious.com transition, I have my website working again--on Pinboard.in. The Delicious "transition" broke everything.

I cleaned up a few things that needed cleaning up, and changed over to using cached data rather than retrieving from the Delicious Pinboard RSS feed each time. Unfortunately this means that 1) a refresh will have to be triggered rather than automatic with each page hit, and 2) I had to use the API, which requires user name and password, rather than the RSS feed which doesn't. If I offer a website to anyone else, they'll have to enter username and password each time they refresh the story listing.

I continue to learn more than I ever have before about XSLT. Including that an XSLT headache probably requires alcohol to treat, rather than just Tylenol.

The neighbor who owns (owned?) Miss Cleo is a hoarder (fortunately not of cats, she has a reasonable number of those). A social worker came over Friday to make sure her house was safe and habitable before she was released from the nursing home and...let's just say that the social worker concluded it was not. Or we can say that the social worker had heart failure when she saw the state of the house. Your choice. The social worker decreed--or is getting a judge to decree--that our neighbor can't be released for another 30 days, at which point the house will be reevaluated.

The neighbor's son is cleaning out and fixing up the house, or attempting to, and has been for the last month. So far he's cleaned out 56 bags of trash and taken two truck loads of metal to the scrap metal buyers. He's removed food products dating back to the '80s. He's also fixing the plumbing and electrical. He finally got the living room to the point where we could see and approach the piano that no one's played in the last fifteen years, so I called a guy from our church who knows pianos and was looking for one, and asked him to come over and evaluate it.

The guy, Kevin, came over this evening and looked it over, and even played it. It made an incredible amount of noise, some of which was even vaguely in tune. Unfortunately he said that the piano needed more than a simple retuning and was beyond his ability to deal with, but he called a different person at the church who is a piano technician. The person will be over tomorrow to look it over as well.

Meanwhile, Kevin found the maker's name, B. Shoninger, and the serial number. A little googling informed me that the piano dates to 1958, that it's a full-size upright with strings similar in length to a baby grand, and that the maker is considered quite respectable. It also informed me of the myriad very expensive things that can go wrong with a 53-year-old piano. It will be interesting to see what Tom, the piano technician, makes of it.

It's pretty much settled now that we have a new cat--a new old cat. A used cat?

Miss Cleo is, as far as she, I, and Rita are concerned, a permanent member of the household now. For those who need a refresher, she's our elderly neighbor's elderly cat--Cleo is 14, her owner is 77. Her owner went into a nursing home--possibly temporarily, possibly permanently--and even when she's home she can't handle Cleo's health problems on top of her own. We found a foster home for Cleo with someone from church, but Rachel found that she couldn't handle her either, so she came back to us.

Cleo has hyperthyroidism, which was not well controlled with medication, primarily (we suspect) because her owner wasn't able to give it to her regularly. Pilling a cat is hard; pilling a cat when you have severe arthritis is nigh impossible. We can give the medication to her much more easily, primarily because we cheat. I got a prescription for the medication from the vet instead of the pills, and took it to our friendly local pharmacy where they made it into a liquid, flavored with fish oil. (Seriously, look up a "compounding pharmacy" if you ever have to medicate a cat long-term.)

So Tuesday I took her back to the vet for a checkup, after a month and a half on full medication and an all-meat diet. She gained a pound!

When she came home she apparently decided she was through with being sick, thank you very much. She had been spending her days and nights eating and sleeping on a wide windowsill, barely moving, but suddenly she demanded to go outside. She spent a couple hours out, came in and ate a huge bowl of food, and then demanded to be let out again. She came in again at bedtime, ate another huge bowl of food, and then tried to crawl in bed with me to demand pets and cuddles. Since Miss Tessa has a prior claim to my bed, I picked her up and deposited her in Rita's room, on her bed. Cleo glommed onto her and decided that Rita is HER person. She's slept with Rita every night since.

Tessa seems to be settling down again now that Cleo is Rita's cat and no longer trying to make a claim on me.

My bathtub looks like I've been butchering smurfs.

In related news, I have 8 new silk scarves dyed and ready to steam tomorrow. *grin*

The Richtor scale really isn't that useful, because most of us don't really know what a 5.9 earthquake feels like anyway. I'd like to propose a new scale as a series of questions, from least magnitude to greatest.

1. "Did you feel that?" (Answered by "Feel what?" approximately 50% of the time.)
2. "What was that?"
3. "What the hell was that?"
4. "Was that an earthquake?"
5. "Have they said how strong the quake was?"
6. "Is my insurance gonna cover that?"
7. "What the hell happened to my house?"
8. "Can you believe this?"
9. "Where'd California go?"

Poor Miss Tess is deathly afraid of thunder. Guess what it's doing now?

She was shivering in my arms before I was ready for bed, so I asked Rita to hold her while I got ready. Then I put her under the covers with me. Much calmer now.

On the plus side for Tessa, Cleo went to her new foster home yesterday. No more monster in the basement!

Much has been said--quite eloquently and very true!--about Google+'s "real name" policy and why it's an incredibly bad idea for gays and lesbians, minorities, transgendered, liberals in conservative states, conservatives in liberal states, and anyone else with a potentially unpopular opinion. But can I also point out another post you don't want to make with your real name?

Hi, I'm going to be in New Orleans for Mardi Gras this year. Can anyone recommend a quiet hotel, outside of the party central zone?Thanks!

Nothing wrong with that, right? Nothing to offend your mother, your employer (assuming you asked for vacation time), or your minister.

Except...your real name, right? With a profile that says you live in X city, Y state. Which gives a nice quick lookup for your phone number and address. After you've just told the world that you'll be away from home on or around February 21, 2012. I wonder if you got anything good for Christmas--maybe I should go look.

Some sites--Slate.com, for instance--are requiring login from some higher authority in an effort to combat spam and trolling. GMail is one of their options, and if the real name jazz is perceived to work (whether it actually works is irrelevant) more will follow suit. So even if you don't post your vacation plans on G+ or restrict the entry when you do, you could easily wind up using your GMail/G+ identity on a travel website, asking for that aforementioned hotel recommendation. As a computer programmer, I estimate that it would take me two or three days to write a program to mine travel websites, find vacation dates, track them back to "real name, city, state" and get an address. Another day or two could refine that to only spit out addresses in rich neighborhoods more than 10 miles from me and less than 100.

Mind you, I'd make a lot more money selling the app to thieves than by stealing your low-resale-value stuff.

I have an ebook reader, a Kindle from Amazon. If I hear one more time about how evil and draconian Amazon was for removing "1984" from people's Kindles after Amazon sold unauthorized copies of the novel, I'm going to scream. Probably at someone, in their face. Because every time the word "ebook" is mentioned, someone hauls out this hairy old chestnut.

Folks, Amazon unwittingly sold stolen property. If you were one of the people who bought that ebook, you were guilty of receiving stolen property. Amazon retrieved the stolen property and refunded the purchaser's money. If it had been a stolen DVD player you bought, the police would have taken it from you and not refunded the money you spent buying it. If it had been a stolen laptop, they probably wouldn't even have given you an opportunity to backup your term paper/dissertation/great American novel before taking it away.