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March 29, 2005

Broken...

So I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole.

And Sunday, while rushing around on a wet floor and wearing dress shoes, Kim fell and broke her leg. Okay, everyone is calling it her ankle. But while it is true that the break occurred in the vicinity of her ankle, it is her fibula that is broken (at the very bottom tip), and the fibula is one of the two bones that make up the lower leg. So there, she broke her leg.

She’s in a walking cast/boot/Robocop Foot and on crutches now, having been to the orthopedic surgeon yesterday. The good news is that she won’t need surgery. The bad news is that she woke up with an intense pain in her upper gastric region this morning.

I was on the phone with EMS when the pain went away, so now we’re going to see our family doctor who will order lots of tests to check for ulcers and blood clots and other fun things.

So Kim still hasn’t gone back to work and I haven’t been to work this week, either. I’m starting to feel bad about not being there, but I also know what’s important in this life. So, wish us luck today if you have any to spare.

Posted by john at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2005

Crap, Fundies, and Weirdos...

So there are four things I need to say.

First thing is about Terry Shaivo. Let's get it straight-- the x-rays show that large portions of her brain have suffered "massive deterioration", according to ABC News. We euthanize a horse if they break a leg. We euthanize a dog if they're in great pain or can't move around any more. Can we not get all the fundamentalists involved in this woman's last days, please? Her husband and her parents have been through enough, but despite what some people say, she's not going through any of it any longer. Her soul is long since gone. Let the shell go.

What kicks me in the ass about this? Check out this quote from Yahoo:

Gov. Jeb Bush said the judge's decision "breaks my heart" and noted that it often takes two decades for a death row inmate's appeals to go through the system.

"There's this rush to starve her to death," Bush said.

This says it all, doesn't it? Death row inmates aren't entitled to live even though they're still fully functional and aware of what's going on, but this woman who's brain is so much cellular jello should be kept alive indefinitely.

Secondly, I need to discuss President Shrub. It looks like he's finally going to get his big wish and drill in the Arctic National Wilderness. It's a National Park, but let's parcel it out to Exxon and BP because it's going to lower gas prices here by about 2 cents a gallon. Yeah, that's right. 2 cents a gallon, at most. Yay for our pocketbooks.

Thirdly, it's President Shrub and Paul Wolfowitz. He's nominated Pauly boy to head the World Bank. Pauly was the guy who architected the invasion of Iraq, who claimed they had all the chemical bombs and bad shit. Okay, so maybe that's a mixed bag, but he also ignored all the advice that he solicited about rebuilding the country once we kicked the shit out of everyone over there. So let's put him in charge of a hugely influential organization that deals with third world countries and helping them pull themselves out of poverty, okay? Sounds like a killer fucking idea.

Four, it's President Shrub one more time. He's nominated Kevin Martin to head the FCC. This is the same Kevin Martin who wants to clean up satellite radio and cable tv. That's right, boys and girls, you pay for something but the FCC is going to control that content in the name of PUBLIC DECENCY. Sounds like censorship to me— because my wholesome entertainment might just be naked breasts and cum shots. or it might involve Howard Stern cussing and talking about his hairy ass on satellite radio. But someone in Arkansas think's that's immoral and complains, and old Mr. Martin will say that's just indecent and I can't see it or listen to it anymore.

God, this country is becoming more Facist every frigging week.

Posted by john at 10:24 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2005

Grrr...

Darian was very fussy last night.

[THIS PARAGRAPH REMOVED BY THE INTERNET CENSORS. I HAD A BAD DAY AT WORK. THAT IS ALL.]

I forgot to bring my leftover chicken mahkani for lunch.

It's got to get better. Really.

Posted by john at 08:27 AM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2005

Dullville

Not a whole lot happened today, in terms of anything that anyone outside this particular household might be interested in. Hence the title.

[THIS SENTENCE REMOVED BY THE INTERNET CENSORS. NO ONE CONTACTED ME ABOUT A TROUBLESOME ISSUE. THAT IS ALL] I bought three bottles of rubbing alcohol for use in cleaning my keyboard, but found that it wasn't enough to submerge the entire keyboard. Kim went to choir for the first time in months last night. William was almost continuously under foot, so much so that I put him to bed at 9 PM. I played my guitar for a few minutes here and a few minutes there. Susan and I got Indian food, which was rocking as usual, and I have leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

So, today in a nutshell. There you have it.

Posted by john at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2005

Days of Blunder...

I’ve been bad, in that there have been no updates for the last two days. It’s not that I haven’t been doing stuff— I have been. Rather, I blame it on equipment failure. Well, that and a little bit of laziness. But mostly equipment failure.

Sunday was okay, a beautiful day that could have lasted forever but didn’t. We had taken William and Darian to the park Friday evening, so we didn’t do anything all that special with them, but I feel like I spent most of my time tending to one or the other. I did go and sort of apply for a job at Willis Music, but that was non-committal at best. They’ve got signs up everywhere that they’re looking for people, but there aren’t actually in need of anyone right now.

The big event on Sunday was the cause of the equipment failure. It was a toxic spill, you see. Diet Big K cola all over my desk and down my keyboard tray, over top of my keyboard and then down to the floor. It was touch and go for awhile, and even though my wife wanted to call in Federal assistance, I managed to deal with the worst of it. Or so I thought.

Yesterday was kind of a rough day at work. Well, even before work, since there was a tractor trailer overturned and blocking both lanes of I-64 East. It took me about two hours to get to work yesterday morning, and of course it would be the day that we had an application going live. Except that I wasn’t there to do that until after 9 AM. I usually hit work at 7:30 and I left in plenty of time yesterday, but Fate (and perhaps the local 89th Teamsters) were against me.


I finally did get the cutover done and [THIS CLAUSE HAS BEEN REMOVED BY THE INTERNET CENSORS. I RECEIVED TROUBLESOME INFORMATION. THAT IS ALL.] In the afternoon I was finally able to get back to the project I was supposed to get started on back on February 23rd.

When I got home, I horked around with my Mac for a while, trying to get it connected to the Internet again. It didn’t work. I was hampered in this activity by my now sticky keyboard…. Hells, I couldn’t even log in and check my Yahoo! Mail account due to keys not working, or spitting out two characters instead of one.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to soak the keyboard in alcohol and clear it up. Especially since it is a Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard. And I don’t think they make those things anymore. I have two of them and they are like as unto gold to me.

But for now, I am off to Jeffersonville, Indiana to pick up my guitar. I have been assured that the action and intonation have been set up, the neck has been adjusted, the nut has been reattached, and that new strings are now stretched over the fretboard. Here’s hoping they’re correct, cuz I wanna play already!!

Posted by john at 02:50 PM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2005

She Called Again...

The nutcase called again, and as usual, Susan was not home to take the call. Today’s missive was very quick, and just covered the following topics:

  1. Someone has complained about one of those families that live over at LakeLand, and Susan should probably know about that.
  2. There are a bunch of people over at the apartments, and they’re having a meeting about shock.
  3. They looking at the nutcase for thyroid cancer, and something in her left eye.
So now you know.

Posted by john at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)

March 04, 2005

3 Weeks

Darian is three weeks old today!!

She's already grown half an inch, and is back up to and probably now over her birth weight. She seems to be doing wonderfully-- she's spending more time awake now, and she looks around quite a bit.

Posted by john at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

Job Opening

From Zeldman.com:

Good job!

The Daily Report’s longtime pal Tim Murtaugh — he of Cloud King and Pirated Sites fame — informs us that his company is looking to hire standards-aware front end web experts:

IconNicholson, a Manhattan-based web shop, has openings for full-time client-side developers with strong, standards-driven HTML and CSS skills. Experience with JavaScript and server-side languages (ASP, PHP, etc) a plus, but not required. Must have an eye for both design and clean code. Send your resume to Tim Murtaugh [tmurtaugh AT iconnicholson.com] for more information.

IconNicholson has a strong design sensibility, to which Tim and his hires have added a respect for the user’s time and needs. As if that weren’t enough, the agency is housed on the eighth floor of the famous Puck Building, where Soho meets Nolita. Which means you will never lack for a good place to have lunch or a funky bar or gym in which to decompress after work.

Dude, that's me!

Posted by john at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2005

William the Gamer

William, just now, has completed an entire level of Super Mario World (yes, on the dear old Super Nintendo) all by himself.

Daddy is almost in tears. What a good kid :-)

This important historical event brought to you by the letter D, and the number 16.

Posted by john at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)

Threats, implied and otherwise...

So the situation with that other department has grown so bad today that I overhead my boss's boss say the following in reference to a particular member of that department:

"I'm just gonna kill that son of a bitch"

For my part, I merely suggested that should I encounter a member of this department in a dark alley, they wouldn't be walking out. There's an implication there, but a lot of possibilities... I mean, I could be carrying the person on my shoulders. I could challenge them to a race and they would then RUN out of the alley. I could tell them that a genie will appear and give them three wishes if they only wait long enough. I never actually said anything about killing someone.

Posted by john at 03:28 PM | Comments (0)

They think they are the smartest on the earth

A while back, I mentioned that certain folks at another department were driving me a little nutso. I even implied that I might cause bodily harm to them, which was of course a joke (You hear that? A joke. My website, my personal time, my freedom of speech. Just a joke).

That project has been on-going, and just when I think it's finished something else pops up or they request another change. I've likened it, at work at least, to trying to land an airplane on an aircraft carrier that is weaving from side to side and changing speed almost continuously. Assuming, of course, that an aircraft carrier was as responsive as, say, a black Ford Mustang. These nice folks have a deadline that we're trying to meet, and as they make changes, they still can't seem to grasp that their deadline is in two more workdays and we aren't going to make the changes until after the first release.

Oh well. They sent me another e-mail this morning requesting a change to the status reports that I'm generating from the application. They've requested this change twice already, and we've told them we'll do it after the deadline twice. But they've asked for it again, a third time.

Along with this repeated request, they've informed me that some of the data about [CENSORED] and so on is incorrect and that I'll need to change it. Now all of this data comes from our "Enterprise Database System", which provides this data to all of our applications and tools, so it's pretty funny for them to ask me to go in and just make changes to that because they said so, especially since I'm a web developer and not a DBA or some other database wonk. The other funny part about it is that I've been building this app on our development server, and running against development data.

Now we've got three separate environments set up for our apps. One is the production environment, which serves up all of our apps to the public at large. It’s stable and nothing short of an act of war should ever change that. We’ve also got a QA environment that we use exclusively for testing the apps before they go live. The testing, of course, is part of what ensures that production stays up and running. And then there’s development, or just dev for short.

Now we use dev for building all of our apps or any changes we make to them. That way, while we’re trying things out and the whole server crashes when we accidentally run some code that runs an infinite loop, all the customers aren’t affected, just the developers. Now the cool thing about dev is that we can do silly stuff there, as well, because no one ever sees it. A password like “blowme” or a street address like "19.99 Retail Lane" aren’t out of the question, nor are typical entries such as the following:

First Name: Julio
Last Name: Iglesias
E-mail: julio@iglesias.com
[CENSORED]: Cooper Institue for Wayward Spiders


Consequently, when the guy e-mails me to let me know that the status report I’m working on right now, which I kindly provided him a copy of, has incorrect data, I get a good laugh. When he provides me a list of the actual data that we should be using, the stuff that’s going to be coming from the Enterprise Database, it gets even better. Let’s see, you mean there isn’t a [CENSORED] named “John’s school for indigent penguins”? When did they close?

I sent his e-mail to my project analyst and asked her if she’d like to handle it or if I should reply myself. She sent me back a one line response:

I’ll handle it, they think they are the smartest on the earth.

Posted by john at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2005

Free Ice Cream

Today marks the 10th anniversary of Yahoo!. In honor of their birthday, they're giving away free ice cream with the help of Baskin Robbins. No, this ain't el-cheapo Kroger brand ice milk, this is the real deal.

Be warned, however, that you will need to enter in some basic stuff and have a Yahoo account (free registration) to take part...


http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/yahoo_birthday/

Posted by john at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2005

Strange Caller

Susan will get the occasional phone call from a woman who is not in her right mind. Sometimes, when she's not home, I take them instead.

Susan's admirer called again tonight, and here’s a partial list of what she wanted me to tell Susan about:

This woman (we’ll call her Carly Jones) calls once or twice a month. She’s called her for years, and she used to be friends with Susan’s mom. She’s totally serious and I can only imagine what might actually be wrong with her, and I often wonder if she’s truly functioning from day to day. If so, how does she do it? Where does she live? Does she have a job? Is she like this all the time or is it some lapse in medication that spurs up these occasional phone calls?

I listen to her dutifully and answer all her questions (He’s running around with a samurai sword! Now isn’t that crazy?). I deliver her messages to Susan as best I can. Sometimes I even take notes, but she’s hard to keep up with. And every once in a while, even though I try to be compassionate to her, and even though I wish she was doing better and not so troubled, I catch myself wondering if she knows where we live and just how fixated on Susan she really is.

Posted by john at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)