I didn't mention it before because it's none of your damn business, but Ilene and I took Monday and Tuesday off and made a five-day weekend out of Remembrance Day, some of which we spent at a wilderness resort. It was a great vacation, and I'll tell you why. It included the one thing missing from our Las Vegas trip: a cat.

I've often said that any hotel charging more than $100 a night needs to have cats available for guests who request them. Because, obviously, cats are awesome. But also, because you can't take your own cat with you. Because cats love their house more than they love you. Obviously, the cat needs to be settled into the resort before you arrive, or it won't be relaxed enough to absorb any scritching.

Our loaner cat, a calico who we found out later was imaginatively named Cally, showed up the first night on the porch of our cabin and yowled to be let in. We didn't even have to sign her out. For the rest of the stay, we had a cat. She'd go off somewhere to eat at the same time we did, and came back in a few hours later. She slept on the bed both nights and absorbed near Mr Andersonian levels of scritching during the day. She also drooled a little, but nobody's perfect and that's why they give you complimentary towels.

It was pretty great, but realistically this could be the only vacation I ever get a live-in cat on (thus making it the high-water mark for my entire vacationing life, which is a depressing thought). There ought to be resorts that advertise the availability of cats. Like, right in the brochure listing the various features and it amenities, it should say that Cabin 8 contains a six year old orange tabby who likes to go out at night, and Cabin 9 contains a 12 year old siamese lap cat who likes to talk.

There are lots of people who like cats because, as I mentioned earlier, cats are awesome. Surely there should be resorts where cats are a feature. There are resorts for cats, which is a stupid idea since as I also mentioned earlier, cats love their house. Dogs may like to go places and see new things, but a vacation for a cat would be you taking a week off work and staying home the whole time to dote on them.

Reader mail!

A while ago I posted some spam as reader mail because, frankly, I was bored. And it was kind of ambiguous whether the spam was autogenerated or semi-personalized. But mostly because I was bored and needed filler. Like today.

Subject: tshirtinsanity.com
From: removed
Date: Sat, November 12, 2005 9:33 pm
To: deacon@uacomic.com


I saw your sorta-bloggish entry about the tshirtinsanity email; thought I'd pass along something that may or may not be illuminating. I've gotten four or five emails from them about my site (www.instantattitudes.com) recently, not one of which has been sent to the email address that's human-readable on the site. Every single one of the emails has been to a spamtrap address that I've got hidden in the HTML; the only way it's visible is if somebody is either using a spammer's tool to webcrawl and extract the addresses, or if they directly examined the HTML code...and given that the addresses all start with the word "spamtrap", they'd have to be pretty dense not to catch a clue that sending email to such an address is, at best, a Bad Move. Had an actual human been looking at the site, they'd have found the real contact address displayed with some parentheses and such included which do a pretty good job of confusing the spambots, but which Real Humans generally can figure out how to deal with. Given that they sent the mails to the spamtraps, though, I've pretty much concluded that they're running an automated trolling setup which just harvests the first address it finds on a site and then spams it...and if that doesn't get a response, after a while it comes back, looks for another address, and spams that one instead.

Needless to say, since they'd be a competitor for me in any event, I'm not bloody likely to link to them or sign up as an "affiliate". I'll sell my own shirts, thank you.

We'd sell our own shirts too, if Penguinx would give us something to put on them. Incidentally, although none of the shirts jumped up and said "buy me", they were at least somewhat clever in a first-year engineering sort of way. I'd even wear the Latin one if I actually knew Latin.

I haven't played Civ in a while, partly because of the aforementioned vacationing but mostly because of the incessant crashing. Apparently it's fairly common for the game to crash post-1950, and to subsequently crash on any attempt to load an autosave of that game. I was just about to switch from killing people with Cossacks to killing them with helicopter gunships and tanks, and now it all turns to ashes. Or doesn't, depending on your perspective.

However, there is hope on the horizon. The patch, which has been due "sometime next week" since the game was released, is reportedly going through the final QA. Who knows what that actually means, since they did such a bang-up job uncovering such subtleties as "map appears completely black" the first time around. I guess they can verify that it loads up on Sid's Special Box.

Incidentally, I thought that loading up the DVD image in Alcohol and then running SafeDisk 4 Hider was a crappy workaround while the cracker groups got, as it were, cracking. But now, that inelegant kludge of a solution has shown up on GameCopyWorld. So I guess it's official. I don't profess to know the intricacies of copy-protection-protection, but I was under the impression that there was some level of ego involved, wherein the various groups would race to defeat the scheme and release a patch first. Now, I guess they've all gotten fat and lazy, or moved on to ripping pre-release DVDs, because all you get is the image itself and instructions on how to crack it your own damn self. How weak is that?