Half-Life and Times

My Favorite Ad that DOES include Psycho T

Pretty sweet - you can catch a glimpse of J's church about halfway through.

I Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident...

...at least when I'm cutting grass on a hot Sunday afternoon.

Fescue's natural color *is* gray in July so I should stop worrying about it and rejoice over only having to cut it every three weeks or so until September.

"Shine On You Crazy Diamond" is the best Pink Floyd song. Evah.

My friends and relatives that are loudly wondering whether the country can take another 3 1/2 years of an Obama administration have every right to state their opinion and I won't even call them "traitors" despite the fact that we're still at war. Bless their hearts.

My mp3 player is currently way too heavily slanted towards alt.country and Americana - must shake things up a bit.

Propane really is better than charcoal.

I'm not blogging less because of Facebook - I'm blogging less because I'm spending more time doing than writing.

Labels: Stuff

Haiku Tweet

I do not Twitter
Each thought is a precious gem
I need more letters

Labels: Stuff

Mmmm, Crab Cakes!

There was a moment yesterday when the motorcade rounded the Willard Hotel onto 15th when it stopped a block north right next to my old office building. The new president got out and started walking towards the east sidewalk and I was convinced for a minute that he was going to run into Old Ebbitt Grill and come out with a couple of to-go orders of crab cakes. That would have been awesome! And tasty!

Labels: Food, Stuff

Raptors

I'm not sure what this means...

As I walked out to the Xterra yesterday morning, I startled a huge hawk that must have been just on the other side of the car - it flew right past me about chest height before landing in a tall pine across the street. I'm used to seeing hawks in the neighborhood but usually looking up a few dozen feet at them. It was nice to see one at eye level and only a dozen feet away for a change!

Then as I was driving back from the store after dark, a very large owl (I'm assuming a barred owl) flew across the street not 30 feet in front of me. If a black cat crossing your path is supposed to be bad luck, what does having two raptors cross your path the same day mean?

Labels: Stuff

CPAP - Follow-up

It's definitely gotten better. I'm waking up during the night and it's sometimes taking quite a while to fall back asleep, but it's definitely getting better. Since about the fourth night, I've either slept with the mask through the whole night or I've only taken it off a few minutes before the alarm was going to go off. Last night was the best so far - woke up 3-4 times but fell right back asleep and managed over 6 hours without much interruption. Getting there.

Labels: Stuff

Sleep - Trying to Remember What It's Like

Got my CPAP machine delivered Thursday and tried it for the first time that night. Unfortunately, the anxiety that woke me up during the test at the sleep clinic returned, and every time I'd start to fall asleep, I'd start to panic. It either felt like I wasn't getting any oxygen in or that I wasn't able to exhale properly. I suppose that's a form of claustrophobia - I wouldn't know as I've never had any problems like that before. I do know that if anyone even threatened me with waterboarding that I'd sing like a canary. I think it's safe to say that this has been the ONLY time I've ever had this kind of anxiety attack, at least that I remember. I finally gave up after an hour and decided rather than force it, I'd just go to sleep and try again the next night. It's not all bad - from reading some of the boards and some online med documents, it sounds like mine is a common enough reaction and there are certainly people that take two or three weeks to adjust. I'm more than willing to be patient given the upside I'm expecting.

[Update] Friday night was some better. I managed to keep the mask on for almost 4 hours, although I don't think I slept more than an hour and a half of that time. It wasn't so much anxiety last night as it was just thinking about the machine and paying too much attention to my breathing. Still... progress.

Labels: Stuff

Guinnessed Out

Just got back from a week in Dublin last night - mostly business. I'll catch up with you folks in a bit.

Labels: Stuff, Travel, Work

September

Man, I love living in a college town!

Labels: Stuff

Lately...

Working too hard...

Lots 2 and 3 of my comic book giveaway are still available...

X-Files movie is pretty good...

She and Him at the Cradle Monday night was absolutely fan-damn-tastic...

The opening band was anything but...

McCain is really reaching in his attempts to go after Obama, but it'll get worse...

Senator Stephens looks like he might finally get the smackdown...

How's it going with you guys?

Labels: Comic Books, Movies, Music, Politics, Stuff

Meh

Don't know what it means when you go to a sleep clinic and don't sleep. That's not entirely accurate - instead of falling asleep within 5 minutes of head -> pillow contact, I lay there in the dark for well over an hour (it felt like at least 5 hours, so I'm assuming it was an hour or so) before I eventually did fall asleep. Only to dream of being in a sleep clinic, but this one was in a rustic farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Oh, and of mistakenly driving down the wrong side of a divided highway.

The tech that conducted the study woke me up around 5:40 and removed the contacts (including a solvent to get the goop out of my hair, so I apparently had a better tech than K). I honestly have no idea if they got enough data or not and probably won't for another couple of weeks - I assume I'll do at least one more sleepover, either to gather more data or to see how I do on a CPAP.

Honestly it was not an unpleasant experience and I have no idea why I had so much trouble falling asleep, unless it was lack of beer (it's certainly possible that I've become somewhat dependent on having a couple of pale ales to get to sleep) or the fact that I was sacking out an hour and a half earlier than usual.

Getting to work an hour early didn't start my day off right either, but I did use the time to catch up a little bit.

Labels: Stuff

Sleepy

I'm not the world's best sleeper. Actually my whole family has had a history of poor sleep, including my sister's sleepwalking (which my nephew inherited) and Dad's snoring and apnea (which unfortunately *I* inherited). Between loud snoring, teeth grinding and apnea, I haven't gotten many good night's sleep in the last 30 years (and consequently JennySlash has had very few in the last 24). Things seem to have gotten worse for me over the last 3-4 years, to the point where I *never* wake up refreshed and it's affected my ability to concentrate for good chunks of the day. I figure that if I'm successful professionally now with as little good sleep as I get, I'll be taking over the world if I can actually get some rest.

Given the ever-increasing evidence that apnea can be a major contributor to high blood pressure, stroke and other life-shortening ailments, I finally decided to do something about it, starting with a visit to the Neurology Clinic at the UNC Hospitals. Took off mid-morning Thursday and let me tell you, if you don't spend a lot of time around the hospital down there on South Campus, it's a maze of construction tape, barrels, cranes, hard hats, construction vehicles and barricades. What's funny is that it's pretty much been like that as long as I can remember. It took quite awhile to find a parking space and I had barely starting filling out the ubiquitous form-on-the-clipboard when it was time to see the doctor. We spent a bit of time going over history and daily details and went ahead and made an appointment for a sleepover while waiting for the attending to be available. He was quite thorough with the physical part of the exam, keeping up a running commentary for the intern. He then used the paper on the examining bench to diagram out the likely physical causes of apnea and the possible treatments, the CPAP machine (or the Darth Vader mask as I usually call it) being the most likely. Of course you can't talk to a doctor without talking about lifestyle changes and it's no surprise that I'm going to have to resign myself to radically cutting back on how much beer I'm consuming. As I emailed Lex the other day, it wouldn't be so bad if beer sucked, but alas...

So Sunday I'll be off to the hospital to spend the evening watching TV and the night with them watching me. I'm not sure if I'll have internet access from the room, but I'll definitely have a laptop with me so I'll post updates if I can get on the 'nets.

Labels: Beer, Stuff

Too Much Information

So the News and Observer won and got access to the Eve Carson autopsy. Is that information that we really needed? While I won't argue the public's right to know, I do question in this case our need to know. Acknowledgement that she was shot by two different weapons as reported by a tipster is probably all that needed to be said. Yeah, I know I could have chosen not to read it but in this case I think the N&O should have chosen not to write it - or at least to write it differently. Whatever justification they come up with (and they'll undoubtedly feel the need to justify it since they're already coming under heat), the bottom line was in fact the bottom line - this was something that they felt (probably rightly) would sell papers. I'm sure it did. But I'd much rather have Page 3 girls if they want to appeal to prurient interests - much more pleasant than autopsy reports of murdered college girls or dead NASCAR heroes.

Labels: Stuff

Hot Blogging

Yeah, so I haven't been blogging much lately - not that I haven't had anything to say, but I just haven't felt like making the time to say it. Today I shouldn't have felt like doing much of anything, but instead we ended up running around all day. Got up before it got too hot just to take the motorcycle out for a spin since most of my riding has been start-and-stop commuting. Took the Old Greensboro road from University Lake out to 87 and then up to Saxapahaw before riding back. With the old mill there now turned into really nice looking apartments and shops, they've been doing a farmer's/craft market and live music on Saturday evenings - too hot today but worth a ride out some Saturday when it's a bit more temperate.

We then drove out to the North Carolina Museum of Art to check out the Far From Home exhibit - very nice and definitely worth a visit before it leaves next month. So now we're home and I'm sitting out back on the porch listening to Dave Brubeck and chatting with you guys while sweating my ass off.

I suspect that now that we're down to two candidates left for the presidency (apologies to Bob Barr fans) that I'll probably start blogging a bit more frequently. I just didn't feel like getting into the internecine warfare that seemed to be going on more on the blogs than between the actual candidates - now that I can cover up my Kerry/Edwards sticker with an Obama in '08 sticker, I'll be talking more about what a horrible disaster John McCain would be as president...

Labels: Blogging, Politics, Stuff

Steve Ballmer Owes Me Money

...or at least my Sunday back. For the most part we've avoided Vista but I did buy a Dell laptop for J last year that came with Vista Home Premium and it has certainly had more than its share of problems. Some of them are no doubt familiarity, which makes one ask why Microsoft thought it prudent to take a lot of the management controls and user controls that we've all become accustomed to with XP and essentially hide them. Much worse are the constant cases of the laptop locking up and other problems - the known issues with Vista make it difficult to tell what's a Vista problem and what is potentially a hardware problem.

Sunday was the topper though, as I tried to install SP1 on the laptop to see if it would alleviate some of these problems. While SP1 has been out for two months, it has not been presented to everyone yet via Windows Update, so I downloaded the almost half a gigabyte executable and, after backing up J's files, gave it a go. Halfway through it blew up with an error message so I rebooted to reset things and to start my debug. Then things got interesting. Well, if by interesting I mean frustrating as hell.

When the system started back up, I was presented with a message that the laptop could be running an unauthorized copy of Vista. My choices were to check it out or close. Knowing that this was clearly due to the failed SP1 installation, I hit "Close" which instead of letting me bypass the notice, shut the machine down. Wonderful.

So I started the laptop back up, got the message again, and hit the button to check it out, which opens a browser to the Microsoft "Genuine" page and, after the 8 Microsoft security messages I had to respond to for the ActiveX control from THEIR website to load, it told me that there was a problem with our installation of Vista and gave some suggestions for things to try, all of which required access to the "Start" button which at this point I did not have since Windows had never completed its initialization. So back to shutting down - laptop is currently unusable.

Next step was to bring the laptop up in Safe mode and try to do a System Restore. Took a few tries to figure out the right key to hit at startup to stop Windows initialization but finally got there and restored back to the earliest restore point, which had been 2pm Sunday. This took awhile but allowed me to boot the laptop all the way up into Vista and to find that the frickin System Restore hadn't considered the "Download" folder to contain personal files, so I lost the damn executable.

Downloaded the exe again, this time from MY laptop, and burned it to CD. I had also installed an outstanding patch before trying to load SP1 and thought maybe it had caused a problem, but now with the system restored it was no longer there, so I tried installing SP1 again. No luck. And once again I couldn't boot due to the Windows Genuine Advantage message. Reboot, Safe Mode, System Restore.

In the meantime, from some of the reading I'd done I thought there might be some previous optional patches that I had not installed that might be needed for SP1, so I went back in to Windows Update and decided to install all of the optional patches that were presented. Each of these steps is taking a considerable amount of time of course, so by this time it is well into the evening after I've taken a break to take J to evening services at her church and I've slammed down a couple of Bass ales at my "church" while watching LeBron James and Paul Pierce duke it out. I've been doing other things at the same time, but this is really getting annoying and I've gotten no closer to getting SP1 installed.

So, patches are on, I reboot and before I've even tried to reinstall SP1, I've got a Windows Genuine Advantage violation again. Unbelievable. Reboot, Safe Mode, System Restore. It's 1am and I'm no closer to having SP1 installed than I was at 2pm.

So now I'm exploring other options - blow Vista away and install XP, set up a dual-boot with Vista AND XP or even install a user-friendly Linux distro with OpenOffice since the primary uses of the laptop are web, email and document editing.

As far as Vista goes, I've bought three machines in the last 9 months that were preloaded with Vista. One was the Dell laptop - lots of problems. The second was a refurbed Gateway desktop for me - I immediately blew Vista away and started playing with various Linux distros but I've since reinstalled Vista to try to do some troubleshooting for JennySlash and for the third system I bought, a similarly-configured Gateway refurb that I gave to Mom for her birthday. She had no end of trouble with it and finally gave it back hoping I could get my money back for it. Not a good track record. As J said last night, what do people that DON'T have an IT professional in the family do?!

Labels: Stuff, Tech

Feeling the Burn

Rode down to Pinehurst last Thursday with my boss for a vendor-sponsored golf thingie that included dinner, overnight at the Pinehurst resort and golf on Friday at Pinehurst #5. Now, I've played maybe a dozen and a half rounds of golf in my life and hadn't played at all in about 8 years, so rusty is hardly an adequate description of my "game", if you can call it that. I did pick up some new clubs a couple of years ago after playing with an assortment of hand-me-downs from my father and grandfather and I did get out to the driving range a couple of times, but I was prepared to be embarassed and didn't disappoint. It was captain's choice of course and I did hit a couple of really nice chips onto the domed greens but for the most part it was as if I had never seen a golf club before AND had some sort of palsy. All of that said, I did have a lot of fun (not so much that I'm likely to want to start playing regularly).

Unfortunately, in the rush to get going Friday morning, I left my sunscreen in my overnight bag, so I played the round unprotected. That didn't seem too bad Saturday and even Sunday I was doing all right, but by Monday my arms and neck were covered with a really nasty-looking rash. Now I've gotten a lot of sunburns before and I've never had anything like this - the only thing I can think is that something I was taking (aspirin? Sudafeds?) or something I was eating made me very photosensitive. I still look like I've got some kind of horrible pox, but it's starting to get better (people aren't edging away from me in meetings quite as much as they were earlier this week). But yuck!

Labels: Stuff

Old Salem Weekend

Spent the weekend in Old Salem - Friday night was our 23rd wedding anniversary and Friday through Sunday was the NC Writers Network fall get-together which JennySlash attended for the first time. We had a great dinner at Old Salem Tavern for our anniversary celebration then I got to play with the camera on a couple of beautiful fall days. The color was actually about a week or two behind where it was when we were there three years ago - I love it like this when there's still a little green to go with the golds and reds.

We could first tell that things were turning a little later by the beautiful old ginkgo in God's Acre - when we were there for our anniversary a few years ago, the ground under it was a carpet of yellow. There were MANY more leaves still on the tree this year - that is the most amazing ginkgo I've ever seen.

Had a nice run this morning from the Hawthorne Inn over through Old Salem. Ran mostly in the street since the sidewalks are pretty much covered with leaves. Not much traffic on a Sunday morning.

We made our obligatory stop at Winkler's Bakery for sugarcake (saving for Thanksgiving) and a bag of oatmeal raisin cookies (which will so definitely NOT make it to Thanksgiving).

Beautiful weekend with my sweetie!

Labels: Stuff

Big Changes...

...coming to Casa Plutonium soon! Sorry to not be posting more but that was primarily due to getting ready for the Arts at the Meadows streetfair last weekend, which went very well! More soon...

Labels: Stuff

Messing with Us

The weather forecasters must be messing with our minds on purpose. The 10-day forecast keeps showing us getting back down into the 80's in a few days, but every day the 80's slip further into the future. We've now gone through 3 full weeks (at least) of highs between the mid-90s and mid-100s (I think there was 1 day with a high lower than 90) and other than an 87 high predicted for Monday, we're into the 90s again every day next week. We've got an Orange ozone alert today on a frickin' Saturday, for pete's sake! We've set another record high today (99 so far) and we've had at least 6 or 7 days over 100.

One of the biggest issues I've got right now is just getting laundry done. With the house getting into the high 70s or low 80s every day, I haven't wanted to run the dryer. If this keeps up much longer, I'll be heading to the coin-op just so I've got something to wear to work.

Labels: Stuff

Sweet Relief

Today we could actually breathe. After 7 straight days of highs of at least 97 degrees and three days in a row of 100+ temps, today's 87 or so humid degrees was downright pleasant. I didn't have it so bad since I at least had a cool office to go into, but J was stuck at home and our system is incapable of cooling the house more than 20 degrees below the outside temperature. Sure enough, the last couple of days as the temperatute outside rose to 103, 104 degrees, the thermostats in the house were reading as high as 82 (and there were parts of the house that were definitely higher). J did a great job of trying to keep it regulated, covering any window that didn't have curtains, keeping lights off, etc. But when the overnight low is 78 or 79 degrees, it's tough.

In addition to my escape into the office every day, I had an unexpected night in a hotel in Northern Virginia after my flight home from DC Thursday was cancelled. This was supposed to be one of my day trips up and back to meet with my customer, but my 5:30 return was originally delayed until almost 7pm and then was cancelled. I managed to get through on the cellphone and get booked on a 7:30 for Friday morning, then stood in line at a couple of different airlines to try to get out that night. While standing in lines with the rest of the sheeple, I worked the cellphone, first trying to find a rental car so that I could drive home (gave up after 4 firms said they had nothing) and then trying to secure a hotel room so that I didn't end up sleeping in National. Luckily I was able to get something in the Marriott Crystal Gateway just one Metro stop north of the airport (and by luck my favorite hotel) and got there in time to drop off my briefcase and head up one more stop to Pentagon City to hit Macy's for something to wear on Friday. So I actually got a decent meal at the lobby bar and a cool night's sleep while J was sweltering at home.

Looks like after another upper 80's day tomorrow, we're back into upper 90's for the rest of the week. Guess we'd better get used to it, huh?

Labels: Stuff

Half-Life and Times

Friday, September 18, 2009

My Favorite Ad that DOES include Psycho T

Sunday, July 12, 2009

I Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident...

Friday, April 10, 2009

Haiku Tweet

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Mmmm, Crab Cakes!

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Raptors

Monday, October 06, 2008

CPAP - Follow-up

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Sleep - Trying to Remember What It's Like

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Guinnessed Out

Monday, September 01, 2008

September

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Lately...

Monday, July 14, 2008

Meh

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Sleepy

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Too Much Information

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Hot Blogging

Monday, May 19, 2008

Steve Ballmer Owes Me Money

Friday, April 18, 2008

Feeling the Burn

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Old Salem Weekend

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Big Changes...

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Messing with Us

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Sweet Relief

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