So my doorbell rings while we’re watching a movie and I run down the stairs with ambivalence. It’s either someone with info about my lost cat or another newspaper salesman. I start mentally preparing my speech, which I’ve given a few times and always results in a quick end to the sales pitch. It’s simple and to the point:
“Newspapers are old technology. I read the news online, the day before it goes to print. It’s a waste of resources and it’s not as good as the free alternative.”
Although I’ve been tempted, I’ve never offered what I suspect would be a catchy and accurate new slogan for the printed press, “Yesterday’s News, Today!”
My goal is never to make enemies, just to make them go away.
Opening the door, I’m shocked to see a guy holding a black cat.
“Hey, I saw the posters up.”
“Is that…” I reach out for it, pulling the cat in for a closer look. “Oh, is that… it’s… wait…. it’s not him. He’s too small. A little young. But he looks so much like him…”
I set the cat on the ground and meet my neighbor, who’s name I instantly place wrong in my memory, later calling him Jake instead of Dave.
I thank him for bringing the cat anyway, “I wonder who’s he is, anyway…” I watch the cat as it sniffs around my porch.
After closing the door and running back upstairs, I tell Lena about the encounter.
“Are you sure it wasn’t him? Maybe he just lost a lot of weight.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t him, he was too young and different. It looked a lot like him though… Like Thor 3 or 4 years ago. I’ll go back and get him so you can see.”
I run back outside and see the cat across the street, sniffing at a tree. I pick him up and bring him inside. “You aren’t Thor. You’re too small and young. You smell different, too.”
I show Lena and she almost convinces me that it might be Thor, traumatized and different, lighter and more spry from the shock and activity of stray life for four days.
Cassiopeia hisses and the new cat is way too playful to be Thor. He smells around the house and doesn’t understand the cat door leading into the garage without my help, holding it open for him. He eats and plays, very friendly and looking comfortable but unfamiliar the whole while. It’s not him. But what do we do? He doesn’t have a collar. He might be a stray. He might be someone’s lost cat, just like our Thor. Maybe the people who lost him took our cat in by mistake. They look remarkable alike. We could take him to the shelter and tell them if nobody claims him to call us… then we could figure out what to do with him… damn, it’s Sunday and the shelter is closed. Why do they make it so difficult?
“Maybe I can take it outside and follow it around back to it’s house…”
“OK”, Lena is too tired with an ear infection.
I take the cat out and for a while he doesn’t do anything but circle a car parked in front of our house, weaving in and out of the tires and occasionally coming back to our porch to sniff around some more. Eventually, I urge him to follow me away from the car. He strolls over noncommittally to the fence across the way, exploring all the while, battering rocks and sticks, chewing on twigs and doing Parkour around the fence and telephone polls. Several times he leaps onto a phone poll, straddling it with his forepaws outstretched and jumps to get higher in little bursts of bear hug furry. He’s certainly wild. He knows how to work the outside. Darting in and out of a hole in the fence, he shows me around the area. I lose him for a while as he travels the other side of it so I run around the block. Maybe he lives in that house. I could ask them. When I get to the house, there is a man coming home.
“Do you have a black cat?” I ask.
“No, there are some posters though.”
“Yeah, that ones mine, but I saw another one that’s too small and doesn’t have a collar. I just want to make sure he has a home. Oh, there he is.” The little cat runs from the back yard of the neighboring house up to me.
“Where?” the man looks around, not seeing the cat.
“Right there.” I point to it as he runs up into my arms.
The man still doesn’t see the cat around but congratulates me on finding it and says “good luck” finding my other cat.
I thank him and take the cat back. Every few houses, he makes a curious sound and I set him down to walk alongside me. He doesn’t run away, just along. We get back to my house and he comes inside when I open the door. He plays with yarn and we wonder how we can manage taking him to the shelter since they close at 6pm. After a while, I decide to take him out again.
It’s darker so I bring a flashlight and a laser pointer.
This time, the cat heads over in the other direction. I follow him to the back parking area of the townhouses behind us. He makes a daring jump onto a high fence and I follow him with the flashlight as he goes to0 far for me to follow. After losing track of him, I get a little worried and run around the block to the other side of the fence. There’s a lot of space back there and I circle the houses around that area until I’m sure he must have gone back to where we started. Again, I run around the block, this time exhausted as I approach my house.
Out of the corner of my eye, behind a fire hydrant, next to the hole in the fence, I see him.
“puuRreow”, I call but he begins to retreat into the hole as I approach. “Hey, come on, where you goin’?”
I get closer and I notice he looks a little tense and scared. He’s different. He looks bigger, bigger eyes, different meow. I reach down and pick him up and I’m fully certain. This is Thor. The other cat is nowhere in sight and I take my cat home.

I spent the night looking for my cat. At one point, after I fell asleep, I found him hanging out on the street, cleaning himself, with a blue collar and a new name tag. He had been catnapped by a neighbor and given away as a gift. We found the people who took him through some clues left behind at the scene. We took it home and pieced together who they were and why they did it.
Half-way through the night, I woke up disappointed, realizing it didn’t really happen.
Later, I dreamed that I found him across the street, in a dark cave-like crevasse. I could see his green eyes light up inside it and when I meowed at him, he came running out. I woke again, several times, disappointed that the place I found him in my dream doesn’t really exist. I dreamed and awoke not realizing that I was still asleep in each waking. After dream frustration, I got up and ran out to find the area that I had dreamed about. It was just across the street from the house. I found the small cave underneath a pond and surely he was there. I woke up Lena with him in my arms and she was amazed to see him. She wanted to know where I found him so we went out to the spot, Thor still held tight.
As Lena was examining the area, the wind started blowing extremely hard.
“Is this where you found him?” Lena shouted over the wind.
“Come over here, we need to head back.” I screamed.
We were only a couple blocks away from the house and I hit the crosswalk button with my foot, clutching Thor with my hands.
“The wind is picking up, we need to get out of this hurricane! I don’t want to lose him again!” This last part felt strange, like a sappy movie quote.
The cars and trucks driving past us started to drive much faster. A massive truck went by, floating several feet off the ground. A Metro bus passed us with only one wheel remaining, floating in the middle of the undercarriage. It had lost all the others from skidding over the sidewalks at magnificent speeds and smashing it’s parts into the sides of the concrete. Pieces of vehicles started to glide by us and drift off the cars and trucks as they came by.
I pushed against the wind, holding myself on the ground with the weight of my guilt for losing Thor.
A car went by sideways, parts flying and riping off it. Lena exclaimed, “yes, you are dangerous,” to the driver, as if he was spinning out for fun–and he may have been.
Time slowed and we used it to our advantage, navigating between parts of the flying wreckage, like a giant 3D Frogger but instead of cars and logs, it was massive pieces of automotive shrapnel.
We eventually made it inside the house but then I realized I must still be asleep. Thor was home and the world outside was in windy chaos. The streets were coming up off the road and telephone polls where I had stuck the “Missing Cat” posters were being eaten by the Nothing.
I woke up for the last time, “I’m working from home today–so I can look for Thor…” I told Lena.
We’ll find him.

Everyone was speaking acitaciously in my dream last night:

a·ci·ta·cious [ah-si-tey-shuhs]
–adjective

1. characterized by supplying the suffix -acity on words that may not need it.
2. a type of suffixiousness, using -acity as the main instrument of verbal bludgeoning.

Example:

Person A: “My cleveracity is too great for you.”
Person B: “Your meageracious, acitacious suffixiousness is too weakacious for awesomeaciousness.”

acitatious words:

cleveracity, urbanacity, awesomacity, doggedacity, tenaciousacity, etc…

I woke up this morning with a new word floating around from my dreams. After searching google and the Urban Dictionary, I have verified that nobody has defined or used this word yet on the interweb.

Once it’s approved on Urban Dictionary, it will be there. For now, it’s here:

suffixiousness
–noun

1. excessive suffixes
2. the practice of using extra suffixes on words
words that have suffixiousness:

* awesomeacious
* fantasticaliciousness
* anonymousnessity

1. “The fatasticaliciousness nature of this situation is awesomacious”

2. “Your suffixiousness is killing me”
Source: Adam Eivy, Seattle

When I switched to Clearwire last summer, I canceled my Comcast broadband. When i called, they were amicable.
“Can we do anything to keep you? We can cut your monthly bill in half…”
I said, “tempting, but I’m switching to Clearwire. The modem is already in the mail.”
I knew that I was going to take a performance hit by going to Clearwire, moving down fron 9Mb/3Mb to 1.5Mb/768Kb. That was a sacrifice I could make to be a part of the wireless broadband revolution.
I lowered my standards of broadband because Clearwire was a cool company and I was proud to tell people about it.
Several months went by and Clearwire worked fine. A few minor outages for a short period were the only setbacks–something I expected from a new, growing broadband provider.

Having just moved 3 miles closer to downtown Seattle, I was sad to find that my new house does not get Clearwire service. I was so disappointed. I wanted to keep my Clearwire modem. Sure it’s much slower than cable but they will have Wi-Max soon (One reason I wanted to joined in the first place). I didn’t want to leave but I had no choice. Clearwire can’t service me.

I called Support and explained my situation.
“You will have to have someone take over your contract to avoid paying the early termination fee of $195. I can give you the number of someone in your local market who has a list of people you could transfer it to.”
I get transferred. I talk to Sean. Sean has no idea what the support rep in Florida is talking about. He says he’ll get back to me after he researches it. Several days later I get a voice mail that he doesn’t know what she’s talking about and if he can be of any other assistance to let him know–meanwhile explaining that his department didn’t handle that kind of thing and I would be better off talking to someone else.

Well, damn. I don’t have time to be a Clearwire salesman. I’ve already told my friends and family about Clearwire and I work at a Web startup company–all my friends and co-workers already have internet with higher speeds and better uptime (and after mentioning my predicament to my co-workers, I found that Clearwire didn’t have the good reputation I expected amongst my peers). So, I was stuck. I can’t find someone to take my contract–and I don’t want to shove it on someone else’s plate if they are going to get this kind of treatment. So I call back.

Many times, I talk to them and get thrown back and forth, called back, disconnected, etc…

Finally, after a long negotiation, someone says I can schedule a technician to come to my house and verify that I don’t have a signal. If the tech finds no signal, I won’t have to pay the fee. Ok, great, let’s do it.

I get the guy to come over on Friday evening. I leave work a half hour early to meet the guy. He doesn’t show up until half an hour past the appointment time. He wanders through the house, up and down all three floors and finally concludes that, indeed, I have no service. Great, I did that myself on day 1. Thanks.

Monday, I call Clearwire again. This time, they say that it doesn’t matter. I still have to pay the fee because I’m under contract at my old address. I tell them to have someone call me back who can influence this policy. This is, I say, the one reason I will not go back to Clearwire in the future. I’m on a 2 year moving plan. I expect to sometimes not get service and I will have to change over–but I’m not going back to Clearwire if this is what I can expect from them. It’s not worth my time or energy.

Today, I get a call back from Matt at Level 2 support.

Since I wasted (and was charged for) a month with no service, trying to get my plan canceled at a reasonable cost, Matt from Level 2 was able to refund this last month of service fees. yay. It’s great that they don’t charge customers for a month of service they didn’t give, but I still wasted many hours on the phone with Clearwire and left work early to meet a guy at my house. In the end, they still want me to pay the early termination fee to kill my contract that extends until July of 2009.

So, I’ve already wasted $200 worth of my time and I’m paying another $195 to get the Clearwire monkey off my back. Needless to say, however excited about Wi-Max I may be, I’m not going back to Clearwire anytime soon–and although I recommended Clearwire to friends and family before, I am now on a mission to rant to everyone about how bad this customer service situation was for me. Maybe Clearwire will be better in the future but they are going to have to extend more than a welcome handshake and a bill for service if they want me to join them again.

I ran across some ‘interesting’ code today. As I do many days while debugging this outsourced website I’m working on, I found some tidbits that should go in the coding blunders hall of fame.

The quick version is this:

The site failed on something called IsDefaultProfileExists. Looking into the code, I find that it takes two variables (IsDefaultProfileExistsParamProfileOwnerNick, ownerNickName).

um…. need I say more…

UPDATE: After getting an email from a non-developer, it appears I do need to say more.

To explain:

Code should be written so people can understand what is happening. The most important thing to know about a function is what it eats and what it excretes.
In the case of this function, which has a silly name “is default profile exists” (understandable but excessively worded in bad grammar), it’s not apparent what it eats. It’s plainly obvious that “ownerNickName” is the ‘username’ or ‘nickname’ of the profile ‘owner’ (although, it would suffice to call this variable “NickName”, which would be lighter code and make just as much sense in the context of the function.
The first variable though is

1. Ridiculously long
2. Confusing
3. Possibly the same value as the second variable?

You shouldn’t have to be a programmer to look at a function and be able to tell what it’s eating. Programmers should never need 45 characters to make a variable understandable–it makes the codebase horribly large and it generally causes more confusion than clarity. Variables definitely need to be clear but there is a limit.

Ok, I just spent the last hour kicking some ass on Wii Boxing. I love that game. I actually bought a Wii just for the Boxing.
But I really wish Nintendo would one up the boxing game with a full game dedicated to boxing. They could spend more time on it to make it more realistic and sell actual gloves with it (not like the wii-mote cozy style gloves currently on the market but gloves with real wii sensors). I would buy that in a heartbeat.