Today is like a little taste of fall - cool and breezy with a slightly overcast sky. I know that this is nothing but a cruel tease and that the rest of July is still to come, but I’m enjoying it anyway.

If you’ve been visiting with any kind of frequency this week (and I can’t imagine that many people have been, after what amounted to my six month vacation from posting), you’ve probably noticed a fair amount of fuckery with templates and URLs and DNS. I’ve been sprucing things up a bit, and will probably continue to do so for a while yet. Thanks to Chris’s willingness to dig through an outdated database dump, I think I’ll even have the old Caoine archives available again soon.

I’m sorry I abandoned the site for so long, but in the end I think it’s been a good thing. As I mentioned over on Vox, my desire for privacy and reluctance to say much of anything in public has more or less killed my urge to maintain a weblog over the past year or so. But now I find that urge returning, so I suppose we’ll see what happens.

• The New Marketing: OpenOffice.org does a drive-by on Microsoft
  The article is not nearly as awesome as you’d suppoes from the headline.
  (tags: news tech pp)
• CNET: Shopping PayPal or Google Checkout
  CNET compares payment systems.
  (tags: news tech google pp)
• CNET: Did Comcast really censor the “Sleepy Repairman” video from “Nightline”?
  Everyone loves a sleepy repairman.
  (tags: news funny tech pp)
• Consumerist: Comcast Censors Critical Nightline Story (Updated)
  More on the Comcast thing.
  (tags: news tech pp)
• arc90 lab: Link Thumbnail
  An interesting idea, but I can’t see myself actually using it on a site.
  (tags: interesting web howto geek)
• Consumerist: AOL Retention Manual Revealed
  Why AOL customer service reps are such bastards.
  (tags: funny tech pp)
• Advertising Age: Wal-Mart Tries to Be MySpace. Seriously
  Wal-Mart and MySpace? Now there’s a winning combination if ever there was one.
  (tags: funny news web pp)
• YouTube: Human Space Invaders
  Fantastic stop-motion video.
  (tags: awesome geek pp)
• Grupthink: Easily mispronounced domain names: What are your favorites?
  Therapistfinder.com is an excellent domain.
  (tags: funny awesome web pp)

Well, Space Cat has finally returned to his home planet, leaving us with an almost-normal and extremely cranky Tigger. Noticeable changes include his newly altered genitalia and the fact that he’s missing large chunks of fur where the vets shaved him before his surgery. This, of course, will grow back, but in the meantime it’s hilarious. His entire belly is bare except for a little fuzzy regrowth. And since he’s fat, and since it turns out that the skin under all that fur is a charming pale pink, he now looks more like a Franken-piglet than anything else.

He’s also missing most of the fur on his neck and two of his legs, which doesn’t add to the piglet effect but it does look bizarre. He doesn’t seem to care much, not even about the fact that the cone is gone (along with most of his penis) - he just gnaws lovingly on our hands and swats at our ankles as though nothing had ever happened. I will, however, make sure to get some photos before he’s back to his usual hair self.

The weather continues to be absolutely fucking disgusting, but the abundant and omnipresent Mister Softee trucks that have invaded the city - even my little Roosevelt Island - are doing their best to make it bearable. I will survive somehow, I’m sure.

What I could use more than anything is a vacation somewhere cold (or at least cooler), but I’ll have to settle for being happy that fall clothes are starting to show up in stores. It may still be about forty degrees too hot to actually wear them, but their existence is a hint that this wretched season will, eventually, end. And then I’ll happily dig out my hoodies and drink hot coffee once again.

I switched banks this week, after being an unsatisfied Chase customer for seven years. They have ATMs galore, yes, but provide only unmitigated fuckery in every other respect. My new bank is HSBC, which I selected mainly on the basis of a few favorable anecodotes and the proximity of a branch to my new building. But that HSBC Direct interest rate is hot stuff, I can’t deny it. And (unlike Chase) they don’t charge ten fucking dollars a month for the lofty privilege of using Quicken. Imagine that.

• Dr. Google Sends Pain Relief : Andy Beal’s MarketingPilgrim.com
  I wish more search companies would send me medication in the mail.
  (tags: funny google pp)
• Technologists object to U.S. RFID passports - Jul. 13, 2006
  What could possibly go wrong?
  (tags: news tech pp)
• cbs2chicago.com - Virtual School Provides Alternative To Home School
  Because what small children need is another reason not to leave the house.
  (tags: news tech pp)

This is the stretch of summer that really gets me. Every morning I wake up our comfortable air conditioned apartment, stumble out of the shower to my desk and check the weather. The long string of predicted highs is enough to make me crawl back into bed until October, but somehow I make it out of my building anyway.

The worst is waiting for the train. Waiting for the bus isn’t so bad because I’m outside and near the water, so there’s at least wind. But far underground the temperature is even higher and the atmosphere so stifling it seems impossible to breathe. It was this kind of weather that drove me to shave my head, once, and remembering the breeze on my scalp makes me want to do it again.

I know that July is supposed to be the worst of it, and the fact that we’re already halfway through July should be encouraging. But August isn’t a very encouraging prospect, either.

Space Cat’s doing fairly well, it seems. It’s been a little over a week since his surgery and we’re taking him to the vet tomorrow to get his incision checked out by the surgeons, but he’s back to his normal cantankerous self. We knew he was feeling better when he resumed his standard practice of waking us up around 3am by pushing the books and alarm clock off my night table. Good kitty.

And as for me, I’ve just switched jobs, and I started my new one yesterday. A new neighborhood and a new office to get used to, but so far I’m pretty pleased with both. If I could just skip the next couple months of hot weather and go straight into fall, I think all would be well with the world.

You may already be familiar with the fat orange beast with whom Chris and I share an apartment - perhaps from his brief but enthusiastic stint as a camwhore. If not: there’s a fat orange beast who lives with us. His name is Tigger, and he’s surly and mean but we love him anyway.

Unfortunately for Tigger, male cats are prone to a whole variety of interesting urinary problems, the most serious of which is an actual urethral blockage. This is an extremely serious situation in which they’re no longer able to pee at all, and if it isn’t caught in time, the resulting buildup of toxins will end in death. In the past two weeks, Tigger has had two of these blockages.

We noticed symptoms of the first last Monday, and rushed him to the local animal hospital where they confirmed he was indeed blocked, and whisked him away to be sedated and catheterized and all sorts of other fun things. They were able to unblock him, but kept him for about a day and a half just to be sure he’d be ok when we brought him home, which we did last Wednesday night. He was groggy and unhappy, and within a day he was (lucky him) blocked once again. We repeated the entire process and dragged him back to the hospital on Friday. This time, however, instead of just sending him home a couple of days later, his vet recommended a surgical procedure to prevent future blockages, which we went ahead with over the weekend.

All that’s well and good - Tigger seems to be recovering well, and doesn’t seem all that upset by the fact that he’s now missing part of his penis (because, yes, that is in fact what the surgery involves). But in order to keep him from chewing at his stitches, he’s got to wear one of those plastic cone-shaped collars for a whopping two weeks. Because he looks as though he’s sporting some kind of alien headgear, Chris and I have dubbed him Space Cat.

Space Cat is remarkably cheerful and affectionate despite the fact that he can’t walk around a corner without hitting his cone on it, and often gets stuck in small spaces, and can’t lick his crotch or scratch at his ears with his hind feet. We like Space Cat well enough, but after a few days of cleaning up the food he flicks everywhere and feeling the cone poke at our feet during the night, we’ll be glad when he heads back to his home planet and our familiar surly Tigger is returned to us.