Butters the Engineer sometimes gets too lazy even to get her whole body onto a bed that's twice her size:
Two more days of wrangling two dogs with opposite understandings of how to behave on a leash.
I'm a little delayed getting today's Morning Butters Report out for a couple of reasons. First, Butters and Cassie tag-teamed me starting just before 6:30 am. First Cassie poked me, then Butters poked me when Cassie kicked her off the dog bed in my room. Then Cassie came back when Butters used her engineering skills to ensure Cassie couldn't pull that crap again:
Last night, though, Butters showed me how much she cares about me—or how much she wanted another Greenie, it's unclear:
Meanwhile, all the major cloud providers are suffering a massive DNS outage right now, which fortunately hasn't spread to Inner Drive Technology. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and tons of other services have gone down. Updates as conditions warrant.
I have mentioned how odd Butters can be. Part of her oddness seems to come from her being a little princess who craves comfort to the exclusion of propriety.
Exhibit the first, this morning, less than a minute after I stripped my bed:
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I had to pick her up to get her to move.
Exhibit the second, yesterday afternoon, rearranging the dog bed in my office for...reasons:
Exhibit the third, last night, getting quite annoyed that Cassie has trouble respecting her personal space:
The poor dear suffers so.
I took the dramatic beagle and Cassie to Spiteful* yesterday afternoon. Butters got more pats than Cassie did. Perhaps it's this face?
This afternoon we took a half-hour walk through the local park because the weather is absolutely perfect. Whenever I stopped to try to photograph the two dogs, they immediately went in separate directions, so this is the best I could do:
The girls are now sunning themselves on my front porch, I'm up in my office coding away, and I've got chicken soup going in the slow cooker. It's definitely autumn.
* I really ought to update that Brews & Choos review...
I just got back from a 45-minute walk with Cassie, in which we covered 4.95 km (just over 3 miles) at a pace that Butters could never in a dog's age keep up for that long. According to my doorbell camera, Butters raised four objections to this at roughly 10-minute intervals, fortunately none of which lasted longer than 40 seconds. And she appeared to forgive me when we got back.
We're now heading to Spiteful for a little while. All of us will go. It can take 20 minutes to get there if Butters so desires.
I would apologize to my immediate neighbors, except the one to the north moved out recently, and the one to the south has a 4-year-old boy. Let's compare Butters bellowing for 4 minutes against the little boy refusing to eat for an hour, shall we?
I also made some progress this morning on the replacement for this blog software. Some of the fiddly bits are behind me, but some, including how to handle images, are ahead of me. But I hope to have the minimum viable product in a public test environment before the end of the year. Here's hoping.
Butters has stayed at Château Punzun many times. And yet, I swear she's getting stranger, starting with this burrowing behavior:
And her engineering:
Why the dog bed needs folding over and rearranging, I have no idea. I keep flattening it after Butters leaves, and she keeps doing this.
Of course, Cassie has opinions about me giving Butters attention:
And Butters is definitely not a morning dog. After showering and getting dressed, with Cassie checking on my progress several times, it took two hands and a gentle nudge with my foot to get Butters off the bed today:
I do appreciate how comfortable Butters seems to be at my house. The first time she stayed over, a few years ago now, she let everyone in the ZIP Code know how upset the turn of events had made her. If you have never encountered an irate beagle, enjoy your good fortune.
Updates as conditions warrant.
We've got a houseguest again. She started off as dramatic as usual, clearly put out that her humans had left her with me:
And yet, as soon as I put Cassie's harness on, Butters decided it's not so bad hanging out at Inner Drive Technology WHQ:
Of course, having met this beagle before, I've rolled up a rug and closed a couple of doors. She has decided that my office is a good place to be, which works for me because I can see her.
Regular doom posting will resume soon.
I thoroughly enjoyed our performance yesterday. After the No Kings demonstration, between the dress rehearsal and the concert, and well before the rain hit, Millennium Park looked pretty nice:
After the concert, I did not enjoy the rainstorm that greeted us when we walked over to the place where we had our post-concert drinks and snacks. I got home well after midnight, which fortunately Cassie didn't mind because she was at sleepaway camp.
Cassie, now home, seems to be recovering from the trauma pretty well:
I also finished Cory Doctorow's Enshittification a few minutes ago. At the very end he pointed to an essay by Cat Valente, "Stop Talking to Each Other and Buy Things," which I now recommend to you.
I will now debug some unit tests and watch vaguely-interesting videos because my body battery has dropped to 7.
I spent about 6 hours today making dozens of performance and stability updates to the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture and the Inner Drive Gazetteer (which provides geographical services for Weather Now).
Cassie spent about that much time outside, including Riding In The Car!, which she also loves.
Tomorrow I should have some more interesting things to say about how I did about 40 separate refactorings in just a few hours. Hint: Chat GPT 5 and 5-mini. Sometimes they were laughably wrong, but about 90% of the time, they saved hours of work.