You Just Keep On Trying Till You Run Out Of Cake

Cat a Tonic

2009-12-01T07:30:11Z

Work was full of changes today, some good, some not appropriate to mention in a journal. Co-worker's 91-year-old father is doing well after heart surgery. May he live to be 120.

RadioCatLady Linda finally returned my call at about 6 pm, which is 9 pm her time (the San Mateo clinic's scheduling is done from Maryland. Go figure.) Very nice woman, explained what needed explaining, stopped explaining when I told her what I already knew. Bad news is the first opening they have is Jan. 5. The only other date is December 15, which would be perfect, but it's all booked. Maybe someone will cancel, what with the holidaze coming up and all. It's a major cashectomy, but less than what I've already spent on her, and with a 98% chance of total cure. Domino is "only" about 14, and other than the hyperthyroid ought to have a bunch more good years left.

purple, no haze

2009-11-30T20:45:29Z

Flora @ work

Ask Me Anything Meme

2009-11-30T19:36:29Z

A variation on the 5-question meme. Ask me anything, up to 5 questions. Questions will be screened to protect your privacy (I will gladly un-screen yours by request), answers will be public but won't say who the questions are from unless you have asked to be un-screened.

No question is taboo, or too stoopid, or too technical.

Long Weekend

2009-11-30T07:58:39Z

No cons for me - not into sorcery, don't like LA. But very happy to hear from all the good people who had a good time there. Also didn't do T-day, except by accident. I thought I might be going north, but couldn't get an affordable flight and also didn't want to panic. Turns out all three of my sisters are going to be there this week, as well as a cousin I have only seen once in the past 25 years. I'll go up during the year-end shutdown. The accident was finding that the only restaurants open in my area were 1 Chinese and 1 Indian. I chose the Indian, which actually had a buffet with turkey and stuffing.

Early this morning (like just after midnight) I found what I thought was a great deal on an HP netbook on amazon.com, and placed an order. At 6 am I woke up realizing it was older technology, and sent a message to the seller to cancel the order. Seller said it had already shipped. I know that was BS because the tracking info I received three hours later was just a note from UPS saying they received the pickup order. More research showed Best Buy had a deal on a netbook which had everything I wanted except 2GB or RAM (it has 1GB) and battery life is "only" 5 hours. $100 less than the amazon one. 2GB of RAM is about $60, and there may be a longer-life battery for about the same amount (though 5 hours is fine for what I need).

This morning after getting my nails done I went to BB and examined their netbook collection, but they did not have the Samsung on display. I found one boxed and ready to go, and bought it after the salescreature showed me their demo unit which was locked in a cage out of sight. Talk about hiding the sale items! $269 for a unit comparable to several others in the $350-$400 range.

Got it home and fired it up, and saw why they were hiding it. It took 2 hours for it to self-install the humongous amounts of bundled software, and another half hour to pretend to run a full backup, even after I had changed the partitioning to not create a backup partition. What idiot wastes 60GB of a 160GB drive as a backup partition? If the drive dies, you lose the backup too. Sheesh. After the faux backup was complete, I confirmed there was only one partition, and removed the backup software. Everything I'll be keeping on the netbook will be a copy of stuff on my main PC.

Once everything was installed, it ran fine. I plugged in my external optical drive and installed Office and the micro bluetooth adapter I'd used on the now-old ASUS Eee. Finally got frustrated with how slow the ASUS 0.9 GHz no-cache processor is, and only having 8GB of room on the C: drive. I expected the solid state drive to be faster than a mechanical one, but it isn't. Just waiting for a browser to launch could take 5 minutes.

I still have a couple of minor things to install on it, shouldn't take long. Windows 7 starter doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, which means it runs faster. I don't think I'll "upgrade".

Meanwhile, I'll send the HP mini back when it arrives, which will probably be next week coming from NJ by ground during the holiday season. Or I could sell it on eBay I suppose. It really is a good deal, I should be able to get what I paid for it, if not more.

While I was writing this I spent another $85 for an 8-hour battery and 2GB of RAM for the Samsung.

Watched some football - was impressed by the 49er win, it was very definitive. Not so impressed with the Ravens overtime win. Considering half the Steelers' stars were on the bench, the game was way too close. Baltimore's QB is one of the worst passers in the league. Looks like the Seahawks also won today.

Plans for tomorrow:
Call Radiocat and schedule Domino for treatment
Online work-from-home conference, then go to the office
Monday Night Football. So many choices for dinner. :-)

Ho hum

2009-11-29T04:14:53Z

Spent most of today with food. Yesterday I bought way too much of it, and as a part of being in denial about that set out a glass baking pan, dumped in most of a bottle of sherry and slid in the eight steaks to marinate overnight on the kitchen counter. This morning I peeked into the freezer and saw I was wasting a lot of space thanks to where I usually put the ice trays, and after some stunning feats of Pythagorean prestidigitation, aided by the intelligent application of zip-lock freezer bags, I was able to fit half the marinated steaks into the freezer.

One of the other steaks I pan fried for lunch, and the rest were cut up into bite-sized pieces and thrown into the crock pot along with coconut milk, straw mushrooms, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, baby corn and a tablespoon of Thai green curry paste. Some of that will be dinner when I am done writing this.

Watched some of the BC-Maryland football game, mostly because my nephew is an Terps alum and his parental units are fans. Unfortunately they snatched defeat from the very jaws of victory by running it up the middle on their final 4th down of the game. May as well just wave the white flag if you're going to do that against anyone except the Detroit Lions.

During the curry prep my electric can opener let out a painful-sounding shriek and refused to open any more cans, electric or otherwise. So I hopped into the car and went to BB&B for a replacement, but got sidetracked for about an hour at Best Buy next door. They had a bunch of netbooks on sale, all for around $350-400, all with more oomph than either my old Asus Eee PC or my laptop, both of which cost significantly more. There was a really sweet Nokia "Booklet" which AT&T was selling - it has 3G built in, and for a mere $299.999999 plus a 2-year contract for data service, it could have been mine. List price on this puppy is $600. The data plan is $60/month so by the end of the year the data plan alone would be $120 more than the value of the netbook., No thanks. They had a Gateway and an HP which were almost comparable (no 3G) for $350 each.

Finally left and bought the can opener next door, came home and did some research, found Verizon had a similar deal on an HP netbook, $199 instead of $299, but the same $60 data plan locked in for two years. After some searching I found the HP which I saw at Best Buy, but with a better wireless card and bigger hard drive for the same price, and ordered it.

In other news, Domino is not responding to the hyperthyroid meds, and for what a year's supply costs she can get "cured" by irradiated iodine therapy, so I got a reference from Dr. farmount for a clinic called Radiocat (love it!) which has a branch in San Mateo. They don't work weekends, so I left a message on their machine somewhere in EST land. Will try to remember to try then early Monday morning. The goal is to have her back home well before the Xmas break so I don't have to worry about her when I'm gone.

Now I'm hungry. Dinner calls.

Precious

2009-11-28T06:54:15Z

Went to see Precious at the one small theater in PA where it's playing. It is beyond excellent. It needs to be given full distribution. You need to see it.

Director Lee Daniels has put together an amazing cast. Who knew that Mo'Nique could give an Oscar-worthy performance as a psychotic abusive welfare momma? Who knew Mariah Carey could be so convincing as a cynical dowdy Brooklyn Jewish social worker? I walked out of the theater not believing it was her. Lenny Kravitz as a male nurse? A lot has been said on TV and in the press about the woman playing the title role, Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe. There is a lot of talent there, I hope we'll be seeing more of her in the future. Paula Patton as alternative school teacher Ms. Rains is a babe - she reminded me of Phylicia Rashad in The Cosby Show. Where has she been hiding?

There are a lot of small parts in this film, but no small actors. Everyone in the cast brought out as much of his/her character as there was to bring. That's the mark of a fine director. The film was shot on a budget, but the tech never gets in the way of the story. There are some minor editing mistakes, but they are on transitions which are just setting us up for the next scene. Makeup is so good it isn't even there. Costuming has its moments during the title character's fantasy sequences, and she gets to wear some great outfits. Queen Latifa would be proud.

The screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher is powerful, visual, articulate and real. Based on the novel Push by Sapphire.

Many of my friends will urge you to see the movie for nits powerful message, its overwhelming window into child abuse, incest, AIDS, the welfare culture, etc. I'll urge you to see it for wall to wall superb performances such as we have not seen on the screen for a long time.

Gold Friday

2009-11-28T06:13:56Z

Once the media latches onto a catch phrase, they never let it go no matter how stupid or inappropriate. We've just wrapped up the day in the USA when more people hit the malls and stores than any other day, when a lot of green passes hands, lots of plastic is used, and things start to become a little more golden for the retailers. So what's it being called? Black Friday.

The moniker is a combination of reverse racism and ignorance about basic bookkeeping.

The reverse racism part is simply that these days everyone seems to think that when color is mentioned, it's about race. Forget art, forget science, forget the fact that almost nobody on the planet has black (as in 000000 on the RGB color chart) skin, black = African-American. When I was growing up, one of the worst insults you give a person of that heritage was to call him/her "black". Particularly bad events in history have traditionally been called "black" days. But the black power movement changed all that, with the help of a slogan-mad media, so now black is a good thing to be. Fine, be proud to be black, but race has nothing to do with the day after Thanksgiving.

The bookkeeping ignorance is that the pundits who coined the phrase claim this is the day of the year when businesses start going into the black - start making a profit. But that's got to be wrong. It's only the first day of a month-long season of buying, and most people are only buying discounted items. Plus the businesses have hired more people to handle the crowds, they have invested more in the past few days on stock than up till this time, and so on.

So call it Green Friday. Or Plastic Friday. Or Gold Friday.

Calendar Photos: Thanks For Playing!

2009-11-26T04:48:18Z

Thanks to everyone who voted and several others who gave me feedback IRL. The final choices are at this link with thumbnails

Hangar-Airship

Half Dome

Reflections

Full Moon

Butterfly

Albino Gator

Loi Krathong Float

Thai Chili

Pelican Landing

Crayola Rocket

Links

Jellyfish

Crane

The jellyfish photo was far and away the most popular, Reflections, Half Dome, Butterfly, Krathong (the pink thing), Thai Chili and Pelican tied for 2nd. The rest were pretty even, so I chose my favorites: The Crayola rocket montage was built specifically for the calendar, so that's in, the Full Moon night shot is in there because my dentist loves it and it will make a great cover, and four people told me they liked the crane (bird) which was originally going to be in the poll but a brain fart got in the way.

Comments welcome, especially if you think a particular picture should be on a particular month.

Weird Daydream Channel

2009-11-26T03:12:40Z

I'm sitting in the recliner with Pumpkin splayed across the right arm purring up a storm, and I have a mini day dream. I'm in the cubicle of a big burly red-headed guy, 40-ish, the pumps iron type, he's wearing a white dress shirt and his hair is in a crew cut. He's explaining something to me on his whiteboard, and the last item on this erasable spread-sheet is the number 273. I point out to him how 273 doesn't look right to me, and suggest it should probably be 234 or maybe even 237. He's non-committal, smiles and nods me out of the cube. Two or three steps out of there I turn back and see the whiteboard has 273 x-ed out in red and 237 up above it in purple, with a question mark.

Last Day To Pick Photos for My Calendar

2009-11-25T04:17:32Z

If you haven't already (and thanks to those who have!) - vote for your favorites here

It started at 7 am

2009-11-25T04:13:48Z

but I didn't get online for the dog and pony show till after 8. Couldn't handle what would have been 8 hours of online conference calls with one 15-minute break and one half-hour break, especially since I had other work to do and am only supposed to work 8 hours a day.

Boss canceled one of the meetings, so there were two half-hour breaks.

After the meetings (ended at 2:00 or so) I picked up a prescription at Kaiser, then went to Fry's for a router and some network cables. Went to the office and did some work/play with the system, chatted a bit with a couple of co-workers.

Home, set up the router, I'll wait till tomorrow morning to test the VPN connection since everything else looks fine. TiVo found its wireless address immediately, which was a problem actually because I hadn't even changed the DHCP addressing scheme, so the address it was assigned had to be revoked twice before I was able to assign it the one I wanted. It's a D-Link N/gigabit router, white with pretty blue lights. Very pretty, which is what really matters, right?

Plans for tomorrow:
Dentist appointment
Work (have me a doc or two to read)
Stay out of grocery stores

Calendar poll closing on Wednesday!

2009-11-24T06:05:33Z

Vote for your favorite photos here

Wonder What It Was

2009-11-22T23:42:41Z

Last night I had a fever and headache and no appetite, felt like I was starting to catch something, so at about 8 I took some ibuprofen, which didn't help, so at 9 I took some acetaminophen, and curled up in bed with a book, which helped a lot. I also fired up the Eee PC, since I didn't feel like sitting in front of the big PC in the computer room.

Woke up this morning feeling fine.

Go figure.

Today I went for a massage, a woman who works in her home, a very nice apartment complex just of 101 and Lawrence. Looking online at the floor plans, it's only about $100 a month more than what I'm paying, and they have washer/fryer in the units, so I think I'm going to call them next week and ask what their cats policy is, and look into moving there early next year if the prices & policies are right. The massage was adequate - a mix of all the Asian forms - good enough for me, not good enough to recommend to a friend.

Tried to go to Pet Club in the Costco shopping plaza, but the entire population of north Santa Clara and south San Mateo counties decided to do their Thanksgiving shopping at Costco, and it was a total mess, so I wove my way to an exit and went home. I don't know who designs the Costco parking lots, but all the ones I've been in are engineered for maximum chaos and frustration, with no thought to how pedestrians with shopping carts will get safely to their cars.

The el cheapo camp chair which I bought on my way to Pinnacles this summer for $12 is starting to shred, so I went online and bought a hevy duty replacement, and since all the camping stuff is on sale now I also ordered a replacement for my moldy queen sized air mattress and two basic summer weight zip-together sleeping bags. Thanks to water damage and squirrels, I am down to one slightly nibbled bedroll. I suppose I should go to OSH and buy a garden trunk or something to store the camping stuff in out on the patio.

One of my favorite web sites has been hijacked. They have two DNS addresses, one is their full name and the other is an acronym which redirects to the first one. The acronym gives a "server not found" error and the full name gives a 404 for a bogus site name.

No plans for the rest of the day except my 9 pm phone call to the folks. Probably will watch some football. Definitely will have some lobster thermidor for dinner, and baggy/freeze the rest for later. Last night's is untouched and there are at least 4 servings.

Which reminds me: Fannie Farmer Cookbook total FAIL: Their lobster thermidor recipe starts by slicing 2 cups of mushrooms and sautéing them in 5 tbsp of butter. And that's the only time the mushrooms are mentioned. At the end of the recipe you're left with an oven pan filled with beautiful golden brown baked meal, and a side of cooked mushooms. I added them to the mix after pouring the thermidor into the pan.

Dumpster Diving

2009-11-21T22:47:17Z

It took three trips to the dumpster to get the stuff off the balcony which has been sitting there anywhere from 2 days ago to 3 years ago. That was after I took Clorox spray and wipes to the second of the now-retired clumping litter automatic litterboxes.

There are perfectly good (and fairly expensive) litterboxes, and I am wondering what to do with them.
LME9000

View Poll: Litterbuggery

It's been busy at work. Busy doesn't stress me, but having four almost equally important and almost mutually exclusive projects which each could easily require my full attention is making me feel mentally drawn and quartered. I am:

Helping build a video server lab
Becoming an expert at running our video server app
Proofreading documentation
Creating test plans and test cases

Got my first full paycheck direct-deposited last night. And with the horrible delayed pay scheme I've already earned the next one and half of the one after that. Two non-paid days this coming week, though, and no pay for the 7 work days between 12/24 and 1/1, which means the January 20 payday will be mighty meager.

Still Time To Vote for da Pretty Pictures

2009-11-21T01:52:29Z

Poll is here:
http://howeird.livejournal.com/956331.html

Calendar Photo Finalists - pick your faves

2009-11-20T08:24:01Z

I've narrowed it down to 18 images. I can only use 13, so vote for up to 13 photos, please. Click on each thumbnail to see a larger version in another window.

View Poll: Calendar Photos

Back Story - a Poll

2009-11-19T06:10:25Z

Please note we are not considering parallel parking in this poll. :-)

View Poll: #1487448

Help Me Choose, One More Time

2009-11-18T08:10:01Z

I'm putting together a 2010 calendar, and need help paring down my 88 finalists to 13. Check out this link and let me know which ones you would pick.
http://howeird.livejournal.com/955010.html

Bit by the Lion

2009-11-18T08:06:56Z

Last night was supposedly the peak of the Leonid meteor showers, so after work I went home, had a snack and took a nap, and then put on my very warm Seahawks stadium jacket and went out to the parking lot across from Shoreline Amphitheater, which has pretty much a 360° unobstructed view, pulled out my camp chair and started watching the sky. That was at about 1:40 am. After a few minutes my brain kicked in, I pulled out my phone and fired up the Google Sky app, and found the constellation Leo. Turns out I was facing right at it, but it was still low in the sky, in the glare from San Jose. After an hour and only seeing one major shooting star (and maybe three small blips) I drove to Safeway to pick up some stuff on my routine shopping list (and waste some time) and then went back to the parking lot. It was 3 am, and just as I was pulling the camp chair back out of the trunk a big shooting star flashed across the star right across Leo. I sat down expecting more. But for the next 15 minutes that was it, and it was getting cold (~ 40°) so I packed it in. Very disappointing.

Help Me Choose

2009-11-17T06:34:27Z

_DSC1127
Originally uploaded by how3ird.

I'm making a 2010 calendar out of some of my best photos from 2009. There are 88 images, and I need to pare it down to 13. That's too many to post them all here and do a poll, so if you would be so kind as to click on the photo, it will bring you to the page with the set on Flickr.com, and you can either leave a comment here with the numbers of the ones you like best, or comment on the Flickr page.

Thanks!

Graffiti-Free Wasco, CA

2009-11-16T17:29:25Z

_DSC2896
Originally uploaded by how3ird.

Photos of scenic Wasco (The Rose City), CA are now online. Enjoy!

Wasco Amtrak

2009-11-15T18:09:08Z

City of Roses

What new food should I try?

2009-11-15T06:37:44Z

A poll. Here are some foods I have never tried. which one do you think I should put first on my list?

View Poll: New Food

Stockton

2009-11-14T23:07:32Z

amtrak

Wasco Here I Come

2009-11-14T07:44:26Z

Booked Amtrak to scenic Wasco, CA. Never been there, have no idea what's there but I expect it will give me a decent view of the Leonid meteor shower, what there is of it 2 days before the peak. Why Wasco? It's the end of the line for Amtrak's Fresno-ish route.

Should be scenic.