meet Samurai TechBlob

I've been having episodes of that, uh, thing where I wake up in the middle of the night, fall asleep again a couple of hours later, and sleep soundly until a relatively normal waking-up time. That nighttime waking interlude is where I get into serious trouble. I watch old movies or tv series and get overcome with nostalgia, a longing for times past, often for times way earlier than my birth. I decide that since noone else is up, I could clean out a file in peace, and then when papers are stacked in eight or nine little piles, I decide to go back to bed and finish the project later. Naturally, by sunlight, the reasons why something is in one pile and not another, or on the floor next to the table, are no longer as vividly apparent as they were at the witching hour.

And of course, I play with the computer. I'm getting good at making boxes on my Dots game, I've flushed every chart on the thing where you connect different-colored spots with pipes… well, this is embarrassing, enough about stupid games.

What I should do is re-sort travel photos. Since the Great Pome in the Sky "upgraded" iPhoto and upgraded operating systems, my photos are a mess. A snap of a favorite splurge resto in Paris, showing its lovely outdoor porch with tables, chairs and a random urn, has been identified as having been taken in Accra. Accra, Ghana, that is. Some of the pics of Cappadocia that I leaned out of a balloon to get have been tagged "Utah". I'll get to this, I will, I will.

But not until I check out updates on my bank and on the retail sites, since the middle of the night is a minute-by-minute rolling schedule of Neiman's, Nordstrom's, Bloomie's… and of course J.Crew. Bank first: my bank keeps trying to improve its web interface. Not a good idea. I have a credit card that's for emergencies only, I used it once, and generated a balance of $13.34. I instructed the bank to pay the charge. This didn't happen. I instructed the card to pay itself from the bank account. Not a chance. Now I am confronted with a survey asking me whether my situation will improve in the next 2 or 3 years, and if I would like to set up a payment plan. No. I want to pay the damn thing. That's today's personal project: to get rid of this. Interest is accumulating.

J.Crew is one of those stores that can't do its website right. While I'm shameless about taking advantage of glitches that work in my favor, last night I was asked to pay for a sale item in Hong Kong Dollars. Can there be a cookie on the computer that picks HK as my next logical destination after Ghana and Utah? No, the answer is simpler. With all the recent attention to non-functioning web site situations, someone I haven't been able to identify earlier has stepped forth.

a real photo of a Green Space Blob

Emerging from the shadows of space dust is a creature so odd, so slippery, so inarticulate, and yet so gallant in his attempts to adapt to a planet where most coders and QA techs work with their fingers, is --- Samurai TechBlob! With no limbs, STB glides, rolls, slithers, bounces, bravely bounces back, and types with his nose. Yes, he admits there are occasional problems with his work, and he has a reasonable explanation. Sometimes gravity overcomes him, and he is spread out all over his keyboard, with his heavier areas randomly exerting pressure on keys. Sometimes he is able to overcome gravity, and he can work in his favorite mode, bouncing from a height so that his nose taps the touchpad. Or a key. Or the space bar.


STB has confided that he had other plans when he arrived on Earth - well, didn't we all - and that as soon as his status is regularized and he can work on the books, he'll be heading for a better job. Maybe in DC.

Meanwhile, however, I think he's been moonlighting over at Citibank.