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feline vomit aversion
Monday, February 19 2018
When I was giving the cats their lumps of wet food this morning, they kept avoiding the lump I'd placed in the northmost bowl. What was wrong with it? I came back later and the lump was still there, now darkened by exposure to the atmosphere. I dumped the entire contents of the bowl outside in the grass and discovered the problem: some cat had puked into this bowl, something I'd missed as I'd added kibble this morning. Apparently the smell of that puke wafting up from beneath the fresh kibble had the same effect on the cats' appetites as it would've had on a human's. This is interesting, because for a dog, there would've been no such effect. Dogs routinely eat their own puke, the puke of other dogs, and most especially, cat puke.
I spent much of the day trying to get DOMPDF to embed additional esoteric fonts in the PDF documents it dynamically generates from HTML. This is supposed to be easy, but none of the documented techniques (and, for version 0.7, there are three) worked. In frustration, I eventually searched the DOMPDF codebase for "Helvetica," cloned all instances of code referring to it (there were two or three), replacing "Helvetica" with the font I wanted to add, and tried rendering a PDF. This time it actually worked, demonstrating yet again that if one knows how code works, there are no actual limitations. It reminded me of the old days of the early 1990s, when I used to search compiled 680X0 code segments of complex Macintosh programs for references to dialog boxes generated by copy-protection schemes and then patch conditional branches to permanently unlock the software (a technique I developed entirely on my own; this was before the World Wide Web).
As I worked, I mostly listened to music on YouTube. A nice discovery was a new song by Slowdive called "Star Roving," that had the shimmery optimistic promise of a warm day in early spring, which was congruent with the weather coming into the area. Another fun song was "I'm The Mountain," by stoner metal band called, well Stoned Jesus. Its subtly warbly vocals sounded as if they'd been fucked with in the time dimension.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180219 feedback
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