In which I present the case for my cats being the best of cats

Soon I'm going to have to stop using "I moved long-distance" as an excuse, but that time has not yet arrived, so apologies for missing July, but I was moving! Moooooviiiiiiing, which sucks. Anyway. I'm joined today by Yasmine Evjen, one of the fabulous co-hosts of the Material Podcast, which covers the Googleverse over on Relay. Yasmine and I are basically the same person when it comes to interpersonal relations, so you know she has some good stories!

Stuff (and people, oooh gossip) we talked about:

• Material Podcast
• Russell Ivanovic
• Google IO Material Design session and awards video
• Chris Lacy
• Jason Howell
• All About Android
• Action Launcher
• Deutche Bank, AKA douche bank
• Wink Murder, an annoying party game
• Nerf guns! Here are Popular Mechanics’ To 10 Nerf Guns of All Time

My friend Bob joins me to tell some of his crazy stories. Bob is an old-school IT guy, and not entirely free of Bastard Operator from Hell tendencies. Bob's appetite for mayhem makes mine look positively tame, so enjoy some of his "yes I really did do that" stories!

Stuff we talked about:

• That Dilbert strip
• UC Riverside
• Mr. Taco
• Those jerks who wanted to shut down UCR and UC Merced

Have we reached peak introvert? Quite possibly! Your intrepid host tells you about her adventures abusing Amazon Prime and Prime Now and the introvert-optimized Panera app. Plus ordering burritos from the toilet with the Chipotle app!

Friends Joe Macirowski and his awesome wife Lia join me for an episode all about creepy crawlies, both real and imaginary.

Discussed in this show:

• Ruffled Feathers, a podcast about things that ruffle our feathers
• Everyone knows you die instantly
•  One of my favorite hats
• The boardwalks of New Jersey
• Very few spiders are actually harmful to humans
• Cane spiders
• A beginner's guide to tarantula care
• Big ol' Hawaii cockroaches
• Lemon-scented Raid and lemon-scented Pledge: not interchangeable
• Centipedes of Hawaii

So this happened.

Thomas Brand, Joe Macirowski, and I take a trip down memory lane, right through the heart of One Infinite Loop. We talk about our favorite old Macs and some of our not-so-favorite Mac memories.

Stuff we talk about:

• The crazy expensive indigo iBook
• Key lime iBook
• Relatively reasonably priced Key Lime iBook
• G4 Cube
• Those horrible CRTs
• The LCD studio display alternative
• Quicksilver G4
• Mirrored Drive Doors
• G5, the "good one"
• Blue-And-White G3
• iMac G4 "lamp"
• Take-apart guide for a G4 iMac
• Take-apart guide for a clamshell iBook
• Tear-down of a beige Power Mac 8600
• %^# CricketGraph
• GraphSketcher, formerly OmniGraphSketcher, now open-sourced by The Omni Group, which some people used to replace CricketGraph
• The mighty Mac IIfx
• Mac SE FDHD
• OS/2 was a thing
• Win 3.11 for workgroups!
• The New Macbook (one USB port)
• All of the PowerBook G3s
• The first Titanium Powerbook
• Ontrack data recovery
• Drive Savers
• Drobo
• Target disk mode
• Macdrive for Windows
• Those horrible TiBook hinges
• The Black Tax
• Colorware
• Flowered Dalmatian iMacs
• Plain ol Flower Power iMac, unfairly maligned

And finally:

• Follow us on twitter! @jessicadennis, @joemmac, and @eggfreckles
• or on App.net: @jessicadennis, @joemmac, and @thomasbrand
• And also check out eggfreckles.com

Moisés (Our Dear Leader) thinks it's awesome that my two older cats are named after literary/historical figures, so here's the epic (not) tale of how that came to be.

Links:

• Eloisa to Abelard, by Alexander Pope
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind*
• The Penguin Joke

*Yep, that's an Amazon affiliate link!

Some stuff I talk about:

• Prosopagnosia, aka face blindness
• DragonCon
• James Marsters
• And you have stupid hair
• Cary Elwes
• As You Wish (you bet that’s an affiliate link!)

Video: recording myself taking the Jeopardy online test

Audio: go buy I Lost on Jeopardy on iTunes or on Amazon or by some other means (though if you click that Amazon link I get a trivial amount of money!)

This episode dedicated to Georgia Dow, whose epic Ice Bucket Challenge inspired this episode. Georgia is one of the four hosts of the Isometric podcast, which I can’t recommend enough for people who like video games or podcasts or Canadians (which Georgia is).

Sooooo yeah. Head injuries: do not recommend!

I tried really hard* to record a podcast about institutional racism, but it turns out that my usual style of recording really isn’t adequate to serious topics. So here’s this instead: the story of the department that kept hiring creeper contractors.

*ish, in that I recorded two takes and they both sucked really bad

It’s PG, I promise.

Bonus inappropriate impulse: The time I offered to pet a bobcat

Games I actually like:

Revolution 60 for iOS: go buy it. It’s free to try with a single $5.99 in-app purchase to unlock the whole game and it’s legitimately super fun.

I forgot to mention this, but Rogue Vertex is another game I actually really enjoy. For awhile I was the third-ranked player in Campaign Mode but others have now stolen my crown, so I have to devote another few hours to the game to regain it!

That game I couldn’t think of:

No Man’s Sky is the game with the procedurally-generated worlds of dinosaurs and also the shooty spaceships.

Games that make me feel bad:

Shadow of the Colossus which you should still play if you haven’t because it’s lovely and different but you’ll have to live with being possibly kind of a bad person

Limbo is adorable and frustrating and fun anyway. I really should finish it one of these days.

Reuben volunteered to join my dumb podcast again to tell some more crazy dumb stories about the time we worked at a theme park not to be named.

Bonus: The Worst Picture Ever

Highlights:

• Why I can't tell you where it actually was
• Possums
• The Day Without Bread
• The Day Without Milkshake Mix
• Five Gallons of Ketchup
• I Really Don't Care
• Never Again

And other stuff! Including bonus meowing because Dale is a very bad cat.

The story of the time I had to bully a tech support guy into replacing a failing hard drive. Which, like this podcast, was Totally Uncool.

I swear this is all literally true and happened.

An epic tale of cats, toothpaste, and an ill-timed jump into the sink. Plus two bonus cat stories!

The second episode of the I Fail at Things series, in which I fail at podcasting on my very first attempt: an episode of the Discover ADN podcast. Check that out when you're done with this nonsense!

The first in the I Fail at Things series. I can call it a series because I know for a fact there will be at least one more. So minimally a series of two.

In the inaugural episode of the Totally Uncool podcast, host Jessica Dennis (that's me) regales you with the epic story of how Reuben beat his wiimote to death one day.