We mostly had a good weekend. Mostly.

When I woke up Sunday morning, I discovered that Ginkgo, our black cat, had passed away during the night. There she was, in our bedroom, lying still at the base of my dresser. I'm sad to lose a furry member of the family.

We have no idea what happened. She was acting fine the day before, and as far as we recall she had a normal dinner. Yes, she was roughly 11 or 12 years old. And she was being treated for a hyperactive thyroid, which can cause the heart to work too hard and eventually fail. The natural conclusion then is that she suffered a fatal heart attack. Ultimately, I suppose this is better than a protracted illness ending in euthanasia.

Ginkgo was initially quite aloof and hostile when we adopted her. Everyone, including the staff at the shelter, were surprised to learn that she was in fact pregnant at the time, which probably explained her behaviour. Of course, we couldn't part with the single kitten she gave birth to, and so she is survived by her son Arlo.

In the years after she gave birth, her personality mellowed considerably. She became sweet and affectionate. She was also by far the best hunter of the household, able to swat bats out of the air (and, as far as we know, devour them whole). I know I'll miss that skill in a couple of months, when bat season starts up.

I regret that I wasn't with her at the end. I woke up in the middle of the night, hearing strange noises. I got out of bed and looked around the room and into the hall, but didn't see anything. Alas, it was too dark in the corner of the room for me to a black cat lying in a shadow. I was very close to turning on the lights, but decided it was nothing. It saddens me to think that perhaps she was trying to reach me but couldn't. I am left only with the hope that her death was quick and painless.

Rest in peace, Ginkgo.

Someone sent me a 100MB email this morning. There was a short plain text cover letter from the administrative assistant, a real letter from the sender in the form of a scanned JPG on letterhead, a paper in MSWORD format, and bunch of very large PDF figures. It's tedious to save out a large set of attachments in PINE. I would have forwarded the message to my gmail account, but I think it's too big. After extracting all the attachments and looking at them, I finally was able to ascertain that the message shouldn't have been sent to me in the first place (not spam, just someone who didn't read all the directions they should have read). Overall, it was a remarkably unhelpful message, bordering on denial-of-service.

I had originally intended to post this in my work blog. Then I realized that messages that whine about (admittedly distant) colleagues who don't know how to use email are probably best posted here. I guess I'm still learning.

Here on Thingo, I've made an effort to remain anonymous, or at least to avoid broadcasting my identity. The idea, of course, is that I would feel more free to say what I wanted without worrying about getting in trouble (you know: "my boss is an idiot", that kind of thing). And while I suspect that an enterprising snoop (or Homeland Security) could identify me with out too much trouble, I think I've done due diligence.

The downside is that I don't have a place to talk about matters that truly are work related. I can't record ideas for projects, pointers to interesting papers, discussion about my department, or deconstruction of melted_snowball's butch shirts without violating this site's practised anonymity. (Well, that last one could probably go any old place.)

And so, with no great fanfare (but feel free to imagine trumpets now), I've started a separate professional blog for shop talk. Here are some notes about the change:

• The most immediate breach of anonymity would be to give you the URL for my work blog here. So I won't. You can get there by taking the URL for my work home page and appending "/blog/index.cgi". Or, if you don't know my work home page and have good reason to read that blog, you can email me here. The blog is also syndicated at "/blog/index.cgi/index.rss".
• When I wrote the software for Thingo about seven years ago, LiveJournal and Blogger were just babies and I was in the mood to experiment. I always thought I may create a work blog, and that I would then use my software to do it. Of course, there are many great choices for blog software these days, and unlike Thingo some of them are even maintained. I'm using Blosxom for the work blog.
• The work blog is very simple looking, but I like it a lot. So much so that I may need to revise the layout of Thingo. Of course, Thingo's layout isn't very flexible, so I'm likely to break everything in trying to change it. Brace yourselves.
• It's interesting to speculate what will happen to this site now that I've got a work blog. You might not see any change. Or Thingo could fester and die. Conceivably, it could even experience a renaissance. Since the subject areas of the two blogs are more or less orthogonal, I'm hoping we can all just be friends.
• Currently, I haven't set up any sort of commenting feature. I'm scared to do so, because of the growing problem of comment spam. But it's always a possibility. Blosxom seems to have some sort of commenting system that filters spam.

We now return you to your regular, irregular Thingo service.

When it comes to cover songs, there are good ones and bad ones. And some are the musical equivalent of relieving onesself on the once-peaceful grave of the original artist (and, if they're not dead, killing them and reducing to a previously solved problem).

For the record, the recent cover of The Beatles' "My Life" by (wait for it) Sean Connery is in the latter category. Picture Sean, with a karaoke version of the song playing behind him, whispering the lyrics into the microphone. It was so awful that, well, I had to buy it. It now lurks in my iTunes playlist, just above the recently released Hockey Night in Canada theme. (Yes, it is your duty as a Canadian to own a recording of the Hockey Night in Canada theme. In fact, I have a much older recording of it on vinyl.) On the same album, there are a few celebrity Beatles covers that are surprisingly listenable, including "Come Together" by Robin Williams and Bobby McFerrin, and a manic "I Am the Walrus" by Jim Carrey.