It’s always nice when the day you decide that your kid deserves a special reward for good behavior is the day that something you ordered from Amazon, (ostensibly for her…
It’s always nice when the day you decide that your kid deserves a special reward for good behavior is the day that something you ordered from Amazon, (ostensibly for her but because you really wanted it, too) arrives.
Yet another lengthy list of the Top 50 SF Shows of All Time. Not bad, but … Les is irked by ST:TOS making #1 on the list. As a ground-breaker,…
Yet another lengthy list of the Top 50 SF Shows of All Time. Not bad, but …
Okay, so it is kind of bad. But rantworthy, which is almost as good, and it’s an fun list to read through (if you ignore the order).
Yes, it’s time (once again) for the Jog for the Jugs, wherein our friend Marn does Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation Run for the Cure on 2 October. I’ve been remiss…
Yes, it’s time (once again) for the Jog for the Jugs, wherein our friend Marn does Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation Run for the Cure on 2 October. I’ve been remiss in posting about this (along with so much else), but don’t let that stop you from contributing. A good person and a good cause.
If you lose track of this post, I’ll have a fine little link up in the sidebar for this until after the run.
Don’t make that woman in the photo chase you down. She can, and it won’t be pretty.
Thanks.
Don Adams — best known to me as Agent 86 on Get Smart, or as the eponymous lead on Tennessee Tuxedo, but also known to later, less privileged generations, as…
Don Adams — best known to me as Agent 86 on Get Smart, or as the eponymous lead on Tennessee Tuxedo, but also known to later, less privileged generations, as the voice of Inspector Gadget, has died at age 82.
Sorry about that, chief.
The old “Type A” personality test has been pretty well discredited (at least as a predictor of cardiac problems), but the “Type D” test seems to have some statistics to…
The old “Type A” personality test has been pretty well discredited (at least as a predictor of cardiac problems), but the “Type D” test seems to have some statistics to back it up.
The test, which accompanies this article, defines overall distress in terms of two emotional states: “negative affectivity” (worry, irritability, gloom) and “social inhibition” (reticence and a lack of self-assurance). It may sound more like a parlor game than a medical instrument?but in the research to date, it has been a surprisingly powerful predictor of cardiovascular health. High distress scores are strongly associated with both hypertension and coronary heart disease. And among people who already have heart conditions, those with the highest distress scores?the so-called Type D personalities?are less responsive to treatment and have a poorer quality of life. They are also more likely to die prematurely.
Evidently I qualify. Swell. I’d complain about being doomed, but I feel nervous talking about it with other people …
… comes another hellaciously crazy week. Work stuff keeps coming fast and furious, with replanning of older projects that have slipped going alongside new projects hurtling toward us like orbital…
… comes another hellaciously crazy week.
Work stuff keeps coming fast and furious, with replanning of older projects that have slipped going alongside new projects hurtling toward us like orbital kinetic weaponry.
On the home front — I’m beginning to remember why I ended my theatrical career in college (or, perhaps, why my girlfriend insisted I do so), as the Cotton Patch Gospel takes up my non-working waking hours as if I had entered a monastery. Line running and rehearsals every night this week, culminating (praise Allah!) with the actual performances on Friday and Saturday night (7 p.m.), not to mention Sunday afternoon (3 p.m.). Y’all come now, hear?
(We did a demo of one of the songs at the announcements at church at two of the services, and it was extremely well received — which was gratifying, to be sure.)
I still have a tremendous amount of work to do memorizing stuff. Rrg.
Margie, btw, is being very supportive of both endeavors (work and “play”). Many kudos to her. She even understands my need to stay up late (but not too late) playing CoH when I get home at night.
The only weekend activity not otherwise documented was going computer shopping for Margie. Between the 512Mb limit, and some unhealthy fan sounds, and general slowness and congestion, her old Vaio is reaching the end of its useful life in our household.
Biggest annoyance here (aside from contemplating the eventual transfer of data and reinstallation of programs) is that the nice new graphics card we got for her PC will almost certainly not transfer over. That’s because it’s an AGP-slot card, and the industry is shifting to PCIe, and you can’t find new machines with AGP slots.
Rrg.
Poking around here and there, I think it most likely we’ll go for an eMachine and buy a PCIe nVidia card for her. At Jackie’s suggestion, we looked at Dell, but, frankly, the price comparison isn’t there. I don’t need any fancy bells and whistles, and the eMachine I was looking at will do the trick just fine. Total price should be around $800.
Plus, of course, actually figuring out the time to get the frelling thing installed.
And so it goes.
I hate being bothered. I have enough bother in my life, that someone going out of their way to bother me — or, worse, bothering me in a completely negligent…
I hate being bothered. I have enough bother in my life, that someone going out of their way to bother me — or, worse, bothering me in a completely negligent and in-passing fashion — is seriously irksome.
I have a wiki, and I have some wiki pages from my late, lamented spy RPG. I do not want to take them down, and refuse to do so in other than my own good time.
Wikis are easily editable, so occasionally some spammer will get a wiki page and throw crap up there. No problem. They are trivially easy to revert to previous form and to write protect. I should write-protect the whole site, but that’s another story …
So usually it’s a one-off kind of thing.
Not with Doron.
Doron put bad stuff on my wiki.
I took it off.
Doron kept trying.
Doron kept doing it as what was clearly some sort of bot which had been set up. Nothing personal to him/her. Very personal to me.
Even after the page was blocked from edit, Doron kept trying.
And the really irksome parts were (a) it was obviously automated, so Doron had no personal stake in the effort, and (b) even though the page was edit-protected, the wiki software would still register the (unsuccessful) attempt to write to the page. Which means that if I want to keep track of any edits to my wiki (yes) I need ot keep seeing mostly Doron’s failed attempts. Two or three or four notifications a day.
Rrg.
So I finally went to the trouble of investigating the IP address used, combing through the access logs.
Aha. And it’s consistent.
Blocked.
Aaaaand … within a few hours, same (futile) attempt, but from another address. And neither address resolves to the ISP, so there’s a good chance it’s being spoofed, too.
Irksome. Highly irksome.
So Katherine was invited to a birthday/pool party from a classmate for yesterday. Whilst I was slaving away over Cotton Patch Gospel rehearsals and a vestry planning meeting, she was…
So Katherine was invited to a birthday/pool party from a classmate for yesterday. Whilst I was slaving away over Cotton Patch Gospel rehearsals and a vestry planning meeting, she was evidently having a ball and a blast and an all-around good time.
So good, in fact, that she got invited to make it a sleep-over, to which Margie (who was manning the phone in-between having oodles of CoH fun) agreed.
Which meant that we were Kittenless for the evening. My first question, when Margie joined me at the vestry social gathering after the planning meeting was: “So are we going to have mad monkey-sex in the kitchen before or after we play City of Heroes tonight?”
Her retort was, “At least I can’t accuse you of having a one-track mind.”
As it was, Katherine had a great time, and so did we. ‘Nuff said.
While this week has been a stone bitch at the office (or, rather, at the home office), one good thing came out of it. Also sprach the new interim CIO:…
While this week has been a stone bitch at the office (or, rather, at the home office), one good thing came out of it.
Also sprach the new interim CIO:
I’ve been asked about the dress code for IT personnel. In general, we should follow the local office dress code. Friday’s are a business casual day (e.g., no ties, but no shorts either). The exception to the casual Friday rule is that our manager’s should wear business clothes whenever they are meeting with key customers. I also travel casually.
Boo-yah! (Even if the punctuation is a tad sketchy.)
(I find it amusing that, of the three paragraphs that the CIO wrote in his “Introducing myself” e-mail to the IT department, this was the one in the middle.)
Okay, that’s it. My alarm didn’t go off again this morning. Or, rather, it did, but it was set to music — and, from past experience, I had the music…
Okay, that’s it. My alarm didn’t go off again this morning. Or, rather, it did, but it was set to music — and, from past experience, I had the music turned way the heck down.
My current alarm clock, a fabulous RCA widget, is really keen, nice looking, laden with features, with a clever user interface.
Problem is two-fold: I don’t need a lot of features. I want a dual-alarm clock. I don’t want a radio. I don’t want the alarm to have four ways to turn it off, including off, snooze, “off but ring at the same time tomorrow,” etc. I don’t want a “play the radio until I go to sleep” function.
I want something that wakes me up in the morning. And I want something that makes it easy to set exceptional wake-up times (e.g., a Saturday morning activity, or getting up early for a business trip, or something) without forcing me to reset the alarm back for my normal daily wake-up.
The second problem is that, well, alarm clocks are designed to wake people up. Most people so awakened will not be at the top of their game immediately, will be turning off the alarm by touch, etc. Designing a clever user interface is nice, and probably wins awards, and makes the other kids in the design pool go oooh and aaah.
But “clever” and “user” are not words that describe most folk when their alarm goes off. “Fumbling” and “lackwit” are probably a lot more pertinent, and alarms should be designed to that particular target audience. At least as far as my own wake-up needs are concerned.
Indeed, the whole reason I have the music volume turned off is the number of times that, in fumbling with the clock, I instead turned it to REALLY LOUD MUSIC, REALLY LOUD, DAMN, WHERE IS THAT BUTTON, SORRY HONEY, DAMMIT!
Rrg.
So. Time for a trip this weekend in search of a new alarm clock. Alas.
Anyone want a really keen, nice looking, feature-lade alarm with a clever user interface? Let me know.
Life has just been frelling insane this week. Business trip Mon-Tue. Well, actually, Sunday evening to Tuesday pretty much all day. Good trip, but … A good dozen Major Projects…
Life has just been frelling insane this week.
Today and yesterday I worked from home because, basically, I didn’t have time to drive into the office …
On the bright side, I’ve been “rediscovering” the office upstairs — which has been, for about the last five years, pretty much just a storage room. I’ve turned my old desk into a workspace (esp. when I’m working while Katherine’s home), and have been getting our technology of about five-plus years ago (multi-user dial-up modems! yow!) packed away. Needs a lot more work, but have made a lot of progress during non-participatory phonecons.
As a result, not much getting done here at DDtB. My apologies.
On the other hand, I’m enjoying watching flocks of grackles visiting the back yard (and our bird feeder). They’ve consumed a couple of inches of seed this morning alone.
The trees don’t seem to be actively turning yet, except for a few trivial bunches of yellow on the cottonwoods. But, all of a sudden, we’re getting drifts of leaves…
The trees don’t seem to be actively turning yet, except for a few trivial bunches of yellow on the cottonwoods. But, all of a sudden, we’re getting drifts of leaves in the yard.
Oh, boy. Leaf raking time!
The advantage of somehow either sleeping through one’s alarm or having it mysteriously not work is that, well, you end up with some extra, obviously-needed sleep. The disadvantage is that…
The advantage of somehow either sleeping through one’s alarm or having it mysteriously not work is that, well, you end up with some extra, obviously-needed sleep.
The disadvantage is that either you miss stuff that you really ought to have been on, or find yourself without your early morning time buffer that you use to get yourself oriented first thing in the morning, and instead have to go from snoozy to leading an international phonecon.
Rrg.
That this happened the morning after I spent most of the day travelling and thus was already behind on the levee-breach of e-mail was only icing on the cake.
Hah!this post enabled by airblogging.com….
Since running MT 3.2, I haven’t seen too many differences, except … Well, MT-Blacklist is gone, which is (a) pointing out to me the tremendous amount of trackback spam I…
Since running MT 3.2, I haven’t seen too many differences, except …
Well, MT-Blacklist is gone, which is (a) pointing out to me the tremendous amount of trackback spam I get (since I can view those Junked listings easily), and (b) giving me a way to deal with it by tossing anything dubious into moderation. Since 3.2 has gone up, no Bad Trackbacks have gone up. Huzzah. Makes me feel better if I can’t get to the page for a few days.
The other thing I’ve noticed: the Multiple Categories process for a post is much easier. Rather than pulling up a separate window, it simply pulls up a (Java?) set of check boxes that are very easily updated with but a single “save” at the end for the entire post. That’s a huge quality of life improvement for when you do category shuffling (as I’ve been doing a bit of lately).
The actual upgrade was much cleaner and straightforward an installation process than previous iterations; it still requires knowing how to do FTP and granting permissions to files and stuff like that, but it’s a lot cleaner and more professional than before.
Overall — well worth the effort of the upgrade, just for the two items listed, aside from the interface improvements.
Yesterday was a full day of meetings. Last evening was going out to dinner and a (cough) full night of CoH. Not much more to report, except that it’s raining…
Yesterday was a full day of meetings. Last evening was going out to dinner and a (cough) full night of CoH. Not much more to report, except that it’s raining in Southern California and everyone is driving like an idiot.
The hotel WiFi connection last night was much more stable. I got a little laggy at times, but no disconnections despite severe provocation. The bed was as uncomfortably hard as usual, but I was pretty tired when I turned out the lights.
Arrived at the airport and checked in. Why do I have a First Class ticket? My company only books Steerage Class … Check my itinerary, and, yeah, it says First…
Arrived at the airport and checked in.
Why do I have a First Class ticket? My company only books Steerage Class … Check my itinerary, and, yeah, it says First Class. Must call the travel agency … in the morning. No use disturbing them now …
Oh, boy, this means I get to take the First Class Passengers Are Trusted Because They Spend Lots of Money Short Line through security.
Which turns out to actually be longer than the Steerage Class line. And it also turns out that Dave Hill, International Man of Mystery, gets patted anyway, just because the security folk need to be on a “continuous” pat-down cycle. Joy.
Get to the gate. Hang out. Board early with the other Privileged Folks.
Nice flight. Very good food — some sort of a yummy, spicy, chicken-cheese wrap thing. And they ply me with wine, which is always nice.
Arrive in LA. Get to the Hertz lot. Discover I … have a mongo Expedition rented. Huh? I have Intermediate in my profile, and that’s the standard kind of thing we get. But, for some reason, I’m being charged $123/day for a big SUV I didn’t want.
Definitely have to call the travel agent.
Call the person I was going to call and meet for dinner. No answer on their cell. Call their home. They’re “at dinner.” Hrm. Glad I got fed.
Get to the hotel. Check in. Unpack. Discover this room has a very flaky Wi-Fi connection. Possibly, it occurs to me, because I’m sitting right next to the elevator shafts, and so have big elevators running up and down past my signal at odd intervals. All I know is that my connection keeps dropping, which makes playing City of Heroes more than a bit problematic, which is seriously annoying (esp. since I’m paying $10/day for the connection). Disco once during a mission with Margie, then, soloing, I disco twice in fifteen minutes (once in conversation with other folks), and can’t reconnect without a reboot.
Rrg.
Like mother, like daughter.this post enabled by airblogging.com….
I’m upgrading to MT 3.2 this afternoon (for trackback moderation, if nothing else). If things seem wonky … that’s the reason….
I’m upgrading to MT 3.2 this afternoon (for trackback moderation, if nothing else). If things seem wonky … that’s the reason.
Another last-moment business trip has come up, so I’m on the road Sunday afternoon to Tuesday evening. Oh, boy. At least I’m racking up FF miles for an upgrade on…
Another last-moment business trip has come up, so I’m on the road Sunday afternoon to Tuesday evening. Oh, boy.
At least I’m racking up FF miles for an upgrade on the inevitable (business) trip back to the UK.
