|
|
Seriously, this might be the brightest, most cheerful sock I've ever knit. The colors are awesome. I started it last night, and have knit most of the afternoon. The pattern, Sunday Swing is really easy, but I can tell I'm going to want to make the second sock the mirror image of the first, so I'll have to do some re-charting. The yarn is Trekking HandArt, colorway Brazil; I'm not sure what exactly about these vibrant greens and yellows evokes Brazil, though I can see some kind of Amazon parrot. As always, I'm modifying a pattern written for an overly loose 8 stitches/inch to have a firmer fabric that's far less likely to blow out the first time I wear the socks.
http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1184 Psyche! Schlocky T-day post is here. Had a good day with the family. Mona made the mashed potatoes, asparagus, and biscuits. Yatsze made the bird, and corn. I made the cranberries and gravy and washed the dishes. Sadie made a mess. Izzy ate turkey with ketchup. Fixed a problem I’ve had, where I thought I had managed [...]
http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1184 Psyche! Schlocky T-day post is here. Had a good day with the family. Mona made the mashed potatoes, asparagus, and biscuits. Yatsze made the bird, and corn. I made the cranberries and gravy and washed the dishes. Sadie made a mess. Izzy ate turkey with ketchup. Fixed a problem I’ve had, where I thought I had managed [...]
Last Friday, November 13th, I started the day getting home from work as normal, decided to go to the doctor to head off a nagging sore throat that had been bugging me for a few days, and ended up getting diagnosed with leukemia and being admitted to the hospital. It's a week and a half later now, and I'm only now getting up to speed on communications, but it seems like resurrecting the blog might be a good way to keep all the information flowing efficiently for all my different groups of friends and family. So for the next few days I'll be trying to play catch up as well as note some current stuff, and I hope it doesn't get too confusing. I think I am going to backdate some of the stuff that tells the story, so it's readable in some kind of order. Those of you who have seen my email reports will probably get some cut-and-paste repeat, too. You can just read my undying prose again. Just for orientation: Status report for right now, Tuesday November 24 at noon. I'm at MGH. I have fantastic doctors, nurses, and other staff working with me -- really, really incredible, day in, night out. I've been on chemo since last Wednesday, and the last bag will start tonight and run until tomorrow night. I'm looking forward to that being done. I'm still feeling relatively okay, though my energy is starting to fall more than it had been. Today I actually turned my thermostat up, which is freakish for me.
Update: They’re all gone now. Hope you all enjoy it.
I have some Google Wave invites if anybody wants one, comment here (only I see the email address you fill in the comment form, it isn’t published) or email me.
Originally posted at Rants and Revelations
I actually got a bunch of errands done before lunch. First, I had to take a package to the post office. And, therein hangs a tale. I had heard rumors about paying the postage on-line and printing out a mailing label, so I decided to try that. I went to the USPS web site, registered for an account, input the particulars for the package, and prepared to print my label. So far, so good. The instructions specify that you should print a sample label before printing your actual mailing label. The sample didn't print. The instructions specified that you need to have Acrobat Reader installed, so I downloaded Acrobat Reader (and, once I installed it, discovered that I already had it). But, Reader didn't pop up when it was supposed to. I had some vague recollection that Reader plays more nicely with Safari than with Firefox, so I tried again in Safari. (The account information was saved, but I had to enter the credit card info yet again.) Still, no dice. And, when I looked in the list of Safari plugins, there was no sign of Acrobat Reader. So I started googling for info about how to make it appear on the list. After about an hour of reading useless stuff, I finally hit paydirt. I'm running OS 10.6.2 on a relatively new Macbook Pro. OS 10.6.2 and other Apple-provided software, like Safari, runs by default in 64-bit mode (normally, quite desirable). However, the Adobe PDF plug-in for Safari is 32-bit only, and the trick to having it available is to force Safari to run in 32-bit mode. So, I did that (in the Get Info panel), and, to my surprise, I was able to print my label. And next time I have to send a package, it will be a piece of cake to print the label (and save a few cents on postage, and get free delivery confirmation). So the first errand was to drop the package off at the post office. Then, I decided to head for Milford, about 15 miles away. Normally, the Milford shopping run involves the LLBean Outlet and Trader Joes. (It used to include Costco, but I decided not to renew the membership this year. While there are products I really like, I just don't buy enough there for it to be worth the membership fee.) But today there was an addition. Whole Foods has come to south-central Connecticut. I've heard all the stories about high-quality organic food, not to mention all the complaints about prices. And, yeah, the quality did seem to be good, and I liked the way they highlighted local products throughout the store (even though their notion of "local" was a bit more expansive than mine would be). But, the prices... At some level, I suppose I really thought the complaints about the prices were based on a comparison with Walmart. I know that organic, grass-fed meat and wild-raised fish cost more than their factory-farmed counterparts. But, really, I can't justify blowing my entire weekly grocery budget on enough meat for 3 or 4 dinners. At least the wild salmon fillets were on special, and I could get a small one. And their base chicken (not the super-crunchy organic) pieces were OK. But I don't see putting Whole Foods on my regular shopping rounds. Except for one thing...they have a bin in the front of the store for recycling #5 plastics, which I can't put out for curb-side recycling. That's worth something to me. In the LLBean outlet, I found a new pair of heavy winter mittens that will serve me well when I have to shovel snow on really cold days. And in TJs, I stocked up on frozen food for my parents. Then on the way home, I stopped in at the farmstand for cabbage and a few other things. To my delight, they have kale, so I took some local sausage out of the freezer, and tomorrow will make sausage and kale soup. I picked up the sausage at a local farmers market—I'm not sure which one—and, while it was a little more expensive than supermarket sausage meat, even the local brand, it was still about half the price I would have paid at Whole Foods. And, now, I should be doing laundry, but instead I'm puttering around online.
I found out yesterday that Kodak has shut down the Digital Cinema group that I belonged to for over 6 years, a victim of a Kodak’s inability to keep up with an incredibly rapidly changing marketplace. Some years before that, I’d had the pleasure to work with many of the same people on a product called “Cineon”, a very high end post production and digital editing program for movies. Alas, technology marched on faster than we did and today people are doing on their Macintoshes and PCs what we were doing on 16 processor million dollar SGI Onyx computers.
But in both cases, I was working with the finest group of programmers, QA people, applications specialists and sysadmins it’s ever been my pleasure to work with (with the possible exception of GeoVision, which was also exceptional). And although I might be cutting my own throat because I’m still in the job market and many of them will be entering the job market very shortly, I sent out this message to the Peernet Rochester Yahoo Group.
I just found out that my old colleagues on the Digital Cinema team at Kodak all got their notices today. And while I’m probably going to be competing with them for some of the same jobs, I’d just like to put a shout out to any hiring managers here to let them know that if you see a software developer or tester with experience in the Kodak Theatre Management System on their resume, you could not do better than to hire them. They are positively the best group of people I’ve worked with in my 25 years of working all over the world.
Ok, if there was some way to put these things on a scale and see how it balances, I’d probably put the team at GeoVision (not the Albany group, the original ones) and the Cineon team as tied for first best, and the Digital Cinema group as a fairly close second, and a couple of the people at SunGard right up there.
Man, I hope we all end up employed again soon. And I hope we all end up working together some time.
Oh, and if you’re one of my former colleagues from Kodak, give me a shout off-line and I’ll hook you up with the Peernet group – it’s really been helpful.
Originally posted at Rants and Revelations
http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1182 Saw the last ten minutes or so of the Prisoner. Disgraceful, is all I can say. No. 2’s kid apparently committed suicide (that sentence never needed to be uttered: discuss), and there was some drippy crap and No. 6 was voted to be the head of the Village, or something. Honestly, I wasn’t paying a ton [...]
http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1182 Saw the last ten minutes or so of the Prisoner. Disgraceful, is all I can say. No. 2’s kid apparently committed suicide (that sentence never needed to be uttered: discuss), and there was some drippy crap and No. 6 was voted to be the head of the Village, or something. Honestly, I wasn’t paying a ton [...]
I’ve been suffering from a sort of mild stuffiness for several weeks now. I don’t know if it’s an allergy or what, but it’s really sapped my endurance. I haven’t been paddling much, and when I do I seem to conk out after five or six miles. Yesterday, Dan and I tried to push that a bit. Well, a lot really. We ended up going 11.47 miles. We kept it slow with our heart rates down in zone 2. Or at least Dan did – my heart rate monitor didn’t work – I think the battery is dead.
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direct
Along the way we did some technique video. My Thunderbolt isn’t as good a camera platform as the Looksha, for many of the same reasons why it’s a much better boat to paddle – it rocks more from side to side, and the cockpit is so long that the camera isn’t near me and I keep banging it with my paddle. But in spite of that, I think we both look pretty good, except for the tendency to drop our chins.
On the way back, I felt a bit cold, and the tape was coming of one of my paddle grips, which was uncomfortable. I put on one of my pogies to warm up a bit – I didn’t put on both of them because I’m too clumsy to get the second one on once one hand is covered in pogie. It did help a bit. But I wish I had a proper paddling jacket.
I did fade a bit, but by riding in Dans wake I managed to finish with a pretty steady 6mph for the last three miles. So all in all, a pretty good day out. Except it’s now 18 hours later and my muscles are still sore.
Originally posted at Rants and Revelations
http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1181 Tried to watch it tonight, but was driven away. It is just really bad television. Six – it’s not even “Number Six” anymore, just “Six”, for whatever stupid reason – is a bum, an idiot. He trusts people, he gets his widdle feewings hurt. By a smelly old girl. Does he represent you, or me, or [...]
http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1181 Tried to watch it tonight, but was driven away. It is just really bad television. Six – it’s not even “Number Six” anymore, just “Six”, for whatever stupid reason – is a bum, an idiot. He trusts people, he gets his widdle feewings hurt. By a smelly old girl. Does he represent you, or me, or [...]
"You know, if they bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York, he'll probably get government health care." -- Neal Boortz (paraphrase from memory) Um, I'm pretty sure the doctors at Gitmo are on the government payroll. "I've said for many years now that neutrality is not part of my being," -- Lou Dobbs And it only took 30-some years in journalism to figure that out?
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
willwheels's Friends Page![[i]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
productive
