Multiplying Cats and Moving Companies

Feline Anomolies

The abandoned mother cat and two kittens previouly mentioned are not only still with us but a new twist has developed in the story. I noticed the other day that Sophie, the mother cat, seemed to be gaining a bit of weight and I kidded Susan about feeding her too much. A couple of days later we realized something was up and Susan took Sophie to the vet. It turns out there are more little kittens on the way. We had been planning on having Sophie fixed but because the two kittens we found her with were so young, we didn’t think she should be away from them for too long. It hadn’t occurred to us she could generate a new batch so soon. The vet said it was unusual but not unheard of it and, in all likelyhood, Sophie was already pregnant when we took her in. Yikes.

Office Plans

NCC will definitely be moving to new offices. We’ll be moving to a renovated loft area in the old Studebaker Building located in the historic Deep Ellum area of downtown Dallas. We’re going to be switching our upstream Internet provider at the same time, from Verio to The Planet. We’re planning two weeks of overlap to allow time to migrate all our servers. The next few weeks should be interesting.

Deep Ellum Arts Festival 2001

Last week was another busy week. Lots of Perl and a smaller amount of C programming. More progress on robots.net. The robomenu is now working. The robomenu is a database of robots with photos and descriptions. I’ve only managed to get about half the records into the database (they were originally static pages) but it is online and seems to be holding up okay so far. I’m using PostgreSQL as the database and a Perl DBI program to generate a set of static pages every night. I’m still working on the interface that will allow users to submit new robots but that should online within a week or so.

On Saturday Susan and I got to see Dmitry Sitkovetsky as guest conductor of the Dallas Symphony. He conducted the DSO in four pieces of Chamber music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. The Shostakovich piece was a transcription for Chamber Orchestra of the String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110 and was particularly good. We tried unsuccessfully to find a CD of the piece Sunday. We’ll probably have to order it on Amazon or catch a used one on eBay sometime.

We spent a while at the Deep Ellum Arts Festival on Sunday. Lots of live music including a group from Central America playing some sort of traditional folk music with lots of curious instruments. There were some Celtic bands, some Jazz groups, and quite a selection of local rock groups – like Baby Jane Hudson and Eden Automatic. The weather was great for a day outside and most of the people had brought their dogs. I think we saw at least one of every possible kind of dog while we were there. It was an Art festival so there was quite a bit to see in the Arts and Crafts department as well, though the weirdest aspect of the whole thing was a collection of Art Cars from all over. There was a Van covered in bright orange stucko, a car decked out to look like the yellow submarine, and several cars that I guess you’d call debris cars. One was covered with plastic toys like Godzillas, Boba Fetts, and Mr T dolls. Another was completely covered by sea shells with a variety of rubber octopi and other sea creatures attached. One had a back seat uplostered in one and five dollar bills and an outside covered with quarters, nickels, dimes, and an assortment of jewlery. Weird stuff.