We had to put one of our cats down the other day. Two-Face, the crazy one, is no more. She’d developed an infection (the name of which escapes me) that basically causes painful sores on the inside of the mouth. It’s not communicable, and veterinarians have no idea what the transmission vector is, but the only cure for it is to remove all a cat’s teeth. Given the expense and bodily trauma of anesthesia to older cats (to say nothing of new challenges in feeding her), that wasn’t really an option.

We tried a regimen of drugs including a desensitizing wash and anti-inflammatory steroid injections, but nothing really seemed to help. She’d yelp when eating soft food puréed with water, or even for no apparent reason at all. She put a pretty brave face on it, and was otherwise as normal as her mild psychoses would permit, but by Tuesday she was down to less than six and a half pounds and wasn’t even interested in food because it was causing so much pain.

So we made the unhappy decision Tuesday morning and took her on her last trip to the vet. The kids were remarkably sanguine about the whole affair, insulated, perhaps, by a youthful inability to comprehend mortal finality. I still feel crummy, though.

Goodbye, Two-Face.

Sure, the market is open today and they’ve since covered their tracks. But I saw the truth last night when the market closed. The world must know!

*adjusts foil hat*

Say what you will about the 1970s, but it cannot be denied that children’s programming (Sesame Street in particular, but also the Electric Company) laid down some serious funk from time to time.

Perhaps it’s just nostalgic thinking, but I often regard this much more highly than the hypersaccharine Elmo/Barney singsong pap that’s squeezed out these days.

A couple of houses in my neighborhood have already put up Christmas lights, and they were lit this morning as I began my commute at dawn. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems a bit gauche to do that before Thanksgiving.

Maybe they’re retailers.

When I was a systems administrator for the now-defunct Dantz Development Corporation, we migrated the company from an ancient Communigate installation and no org-wide calendaring solution to an AD/Exchange environment. Exchange worked exactly as planned. It was super make fun happy go time. Unless you used OS X, that is, in which case you were out of luck.

This was back in the day when a G3 “Pismo” PowerBook was an aging but still somewhat respectable machine, and OS 9 was not yet the quaint laughingstock it now seems. While OS 9 users were pretty well-served by Outlook 2001, Microsoft had no Exchange client for OS X. Finally, Microsoft released Office X, but the execrable Entourage was no replacement for Outlook. After leaving Dantz for Apple, I had no reason to continue using Entourage, so I didn’t think much about the release of Entourage 2004 when it came out. (As an aside, it still amazes me that for all Apple’s fantastic infrastructure and intranet resources, it still has no centralized, enterprise-class message and calendaring system a la Exchange.)

When Apple pulled the rug out from under me, I jumped over to UC Davis, landing in another Exchange environment. Perhaps, I thought, Entourage had finally arrived as a full-featured Exchange client in the interim. I was sadly disappointed; Entourage 2004’s Exchange functionality is really not much more than a glorified IMAP client, and its calendaring functionality, frankly, sucks balls. Disappointed again, I pinned my hopes on the next version of Entourage, 2008.

Surely Microsoft would have finally produced an Exchange client for OS X with all the features available in, say, Outlook 2003. Right?

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Sure, you’ve got tricks like a quick command/alt-tab trigger finger, Exposé/Spaces (on OS X), or even invested in hardware to hide your malfeasant sloth from the Overlord In the Corner Office. All well and good: you’ve covered your immediate tracks; the Boss didn’t catch you. Now how do you explain why you haven’t turned in those project files yet? The Boss still expects a reason, even if he doesn’t know all you did was surf porn all day.

That’s where Busy saves your ass. By drawing a simple little bogus progress dialog, you have instantly plausible deniability. Blame it on the computer! You’re waiting for the machine to do its thing. This handy little utility provides prima facie evidence of your earnest endeavors and could even possibly help back up your pathetic claim that you need a shiny new computer. Nifty.