I often complain about being busy, no doubt because I have a talent for com­pli­cat­ing my life. Things were relatively quiet for a while, but that’s not true anymore.

At work, we’re close to releasing the first version of our product. Happily, crunch time at Atlas isn’t nearly as bad as it was at Microsoft. Instead of working eight-ish hours a day, it’s more like nine or maybe ten. The pressure level has risen, of course, but it’s far from in­tol­er­a­ble.

The real busyness is in my ex­tracur­ric­u­lar life. I’m the president of BiNet Seattle, a bisexual community group, and have been for the last three years. I also do a …continue.

I was born 41 years ago today. (Tech­ni­cal­ly, yesterday, as it’s now the early hours of March 16th.) I was to have been called Vincent after my father, but my mother’s father, George Victor Clery, had died just 12 days before. I was baptised George Vincent Reilly on March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day.

Beware the Ides of March, I tell people: You might have to buy George a present. Better a birthday present than the reception that Julius Caesar received on March 15th, 44BC.

I’ve never liked the name George all that much, but I’ve never disliked it enough to do anything about it. (Emma legally changed her entire name about ten years ago.) "George" …continue.

WashTech has a piece on frus­tra­tions with Microsoft’s com­pen­sa­tion system. Sounds about right to me. I don’t miss the horseshit of Microsoft’s stack ranking one little bit.

I just saw Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte at the Seattle Opera. I had a great time. Lots of fun. Well acted. Great music. And a modern dress production that works.

The plot, in case you’re unfamiliar, involves fiancée swapping. Two officers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, accept a bet from Don Alfonso that their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, are fickle and will easily betray them. They pretend to go off to war, then disguise themselves and each woos the other’s fiancée under false pretences. Don Alfonso, along with Despina, the sisters’ personal assistant (maid) sows mischief. Dorabella, the flirt, wears down quickly. Fiordiligi is tougher, but eventually yields. Ostensibly a comedy, by the end, everyone has …continue.

Awww! Ain’t he cute!

Via Emma, from Cu­teOver­load.com, a cornucopia of terminally cute animal photos.

A couple of months ago, the Science Times section of the New York Times had an article on the Cute Factor.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, harm­less­ness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest …continue.

A very in­ter­est­ing piece in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine: A Talib at Yale. Sayed Rah­mat­ul­lah Hashemi is the former "roving ambassador" for the Taliban, now studying at Yale. An in­ter­est­ing and improbable life story.

The right-wing bl­o­gos­phere is furious about it. I say it’s better to co-opt moderate former Talibs than to freeze them out.

Besides, his B-grades at Yale are better than George Bush’s "Gentleman’s-C".

I needed to add some de­clar­a­tive error checking to some XSLT templates recently. Specif­i­cal­ly, I wanted to throw an error if my selects yielded an empty string, indicating that the input XML was wrong.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, there seems to be no easy way of doing this in XSLT, nor in XslTrans­form. The approved way is to validate against an XSD schema, but for various reasons, I didn’t want to go to the hassle of creating one.

I found a partial solution using xsl:message with the terminate="yes" attribute. Under XslTrans­form.Transform() the following code throws an exception if the XPath expression is empty.

<xsl:if test="not(/some/xpath/expression)">
    <xsl:message terminate="yes">Missing expression</xsl:message>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:value-of select="/some/xpath/expression" />

It doesn’t do …continue.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have no use for organized sports. Watching baseball or basketball bores me. I seem to be con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly incapable of being a sports fan. I’m too much of a watchful outsider to want to throw myself into rooting for a team.

I actively despise American football. It reminds me far too much of the rugby of my youth. I spent 11 years at an Irish rugger-bugger school, so I come by it honestly. The ugly jock culture that permeates football repels me. The veneration of football in small-town America annoys me. The fans are obnoxious; the players, thugs.

I exaggerate, of course. There are plenty …continue.

A friend sent me a Word document with a parody of the Department of Homeland Security’s Ready.Gov website. I googled and found an HTML copy of the parody here.

Seriously, there is some useful in­for­ma­tion on Ready.Gov. Which reminds me that Emma and I are long overdue in putting together some disaster planning.

Here are some links that I put together a while back:

• AlphaGeek’s 5-part series on disaster pre­pared­ness at DailyKos
• 3 days, 3 ways
• City of Seattle Emergency Resources
• Scott Hanselman’s 2006 resolution
• ICE (In Case of Emergency) entries in your cellphone address book

If there’s any lesson that should be learned from Katrina, it’s that you need to have your own disaster plan in place.

Via Dependable Renegade, it’s Cheney playing Folsom Prison. (Not work-safe.)