Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Spouses good for each other? Who knew?
From the department of the obvious:
Married women under extreme stress who reach out and hold their husbands’ hands feel immediate relief, neuroscientists have found, in what they say is the first study of how human touch affects the neural response to threats.
Let me tell you, when I had to have a Cesarean with Sadie the worst part was the time that Jay and I were separated while he was getting dressed and I was getting prepped. One of the few things I remember from that day was the physical sensation of calm that came over me and replaced the fear when they let him into the OR and he grabbed my hand. I couldn’t see him; hell, I couldn’t see anything but the drape. But the feeling of his hand in mine at that moment is a memory that has seared so deep I’ll never, never forget it. Just having him there was far, far better than any drug could possibly have been.
Off-Topic Book??
So I’m looking at a crossword puzzle and one of the clues is “OT book.” I read that and think “off-topic? overtime? HUH?” (Insert scrunched eyebrows and puzzled look here.)
A minute later, after looking at some other clues and openings, I exclaimed, “oh! Old Testament!” (Insert big sigh here.)
It was four letters starting with an E, if you’re curious and would not have ever been confuzzled by the shorthand expression “OT book” as we were.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Happy Birthday
To sometimes blogger and talented artist Samantha Smith, the Acid Daughter.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
A Fine Choice… But How Did DS9 Tie?
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You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and don’t enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you.
Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com |
As seen many places, most recently via crewmate Explicitly Ambiguous.
Pep Talk
I was just telling Valerie that if she insists on coming a little early, then February 6th would be good. That was inspired by my looking at what birthdays were coming up in February and seeing Reagan’s on the 6th.
We also have Joe on the 8th, Margi on the 10th, Eric on the 14th, Craig and Rob on the 16th, and that’s it for bloggers in February. There are also some others, including two of my nephews on the 20th, which would make that an especially funny choice for her grand entrance.
Speaking of Happy Birthday…
This is the fascinating story of the song “Happy Birthday to You,” originating with a tune written in 1893, which in a fit of legislative madness remains under copyright until at least 2030.
Happy Birthday
To blogger Megan McCardle, AKA Jane Galt.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
I Picked the Only Set of Bands I Recognized and Winged it from There
Guess I’m getting old and stodgy, recognizing almost no bands, never mind songs, from 2005…
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Your 2005 Song Is |
 Since You’ve Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson “But since you’ve been gone I can breathe for the first time I’m so moving on” In 2005, you moved on. |
Via Wayne
Dedicated to Clara Peller
Last night I was at the office, rearranging things and emptying the room we are giving up. To reduce my jellybean consumption, I decided a little real food was in order.
Hormel makes a bunch of different microwavable “meals” that are on the small side of “meal” and the medium to large side of “snack,” and that don’t need refrigeration at all. They’re great, assuming you don’t mind that they’re not like Best Food Ever. Into that great I incorporate cheap, of course. $1.94 Each at Wal-Mart. In my big stockup run several days ago, I bought several for the office. Otherwise my options if I need to eat while there are popcorn, candy from the vending machine, or takeout. It’s that last one I particularly prefer to minimize on account of cost.
Back to last night. One of the flavors I’d bought was teriyaki chicken with rice. I decided to try that one.
Heated it up, pulled off the cover, and after sufficient cooling time, dug in.
It was beef.
I swear. Beef.
The color was way darker than pictured. The meat had the color, flavor, texture and grain of beef, perhaps like what you’d find in the beef pot roast variety.
It was teriyaki flavored. It was quite tasty, if a bit unexpected because it wasn’t chicken. Weird.
So it was that I ended up at Hormel’s excellent site finding out whether there was a beef version that could have wrapped in the wrong outer package.
Nope. Which makes it one inexplicable mixup.
One cool thing I learned while I was there: Manny’s is a Hormel brand. That is our preferred brand of flour tortillas, except for Deb’s homemade ones, which blow the store bought ones away. Which seems strange, as they are just flour, salt water and shortening.
Friday, January 27, 2006
Friday Night
|
Who Should Paint You: Andy Warhol |
 You’ve got an interested edge that would be reflected in any portrait You don’t need any fancy paint techniques to stand out from the crowd! |
Passing On Resemblence
So I wandered over to Tennessee Williams’ Paul’s place and found out about this MyHeritage Face Recognition site under construction, in beta. I had to create an account to use it, but it was entertaining.
I used this picture taken by Deb’s father:
The top matches were:
Bruce Willis (woohoo!), 60%, David Beckham, 53%
Alec Baldwin, 52%, and Aleister Crowley, 48%.
Interesting toy.
Awww
Mozart
Strangely, this brought me to tears.
Some Whine With My Breakfast
From 12/8/05 to 1/11/06, 34 days:
Electric $140.08
Gas $234.64
It was cold in December. Glad it’s warmer now! But damn, do the washer and dryer really use that much electricity? Maybe the air purifiers do?
By comparison, the 27 days 10/11/05 to 11/7/05 were $80.72 gas and $70.52 electric. I can’t find the one that fell mostly in November, but the combined total for the two was $390.59, including any credits and adjustments not reflected in the base readings.
Hey, it’s almost a pattern! Each month has been about one and a half times the preceding month. How sad the warm January will ruin the pattern. Plus we’ve done some sealing of heat loss.
The disturbing thing is that these are low utility rates. In Stoughton the equivalent usage would have been more money.
And Here I Always Related to Batman the Most…
Your results:
You are Green Lantern
| Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.  |
Via Spidey, a better quiz than many.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Valerie By Popular Demand
Note that these already are enlarged versions, so there’s no click for a bigger one as there usually is for pictures.
Here’s a profile from December 8, in which you can see a hand looking as if she’s pointing, and perhaps see she has significant hair:
On January 5 we couldn’t get any good pictures but this “peace sign” one of her hand:
Finally, today, January 26, we got an excellent profile:
“Go forth and have a baby!”
That’s what the perinatologist told us this morning at our last big growth scan. He doesn’t need to see us again, as all is beyond well. The little one is measuring big, which means that my blood pressure has not caused a problem. She’s also still got plenty of fluid, is moving around well, and is practice breathing so vigorously that the tech remarked that she looked like she was ready to come out of there any time.
And speaking of her pending escape...y’all would have enjoyed the look on my face when the tech put that transducer low on my belly and I saw a face. The little shit flipped! As far as I can tell, she did this last night sometime. As a result, we got a really fantastic profile shot that Jay will have to scan and post. Way, way too cute.
Just a month left to go now...almost there!
Happy Birthday
To blogger Robert the Llama Butcher.
Happy Birthday
To blogger Blackfive.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Here’s one for y’all in Fresno:
Irrigation most likely to blame for Central California warming.
Interesting stuff:
The same irrigation that turned California’s Central Valley from desert into productive farmland is probably also to blame for summer nights there getting noticeably warmer.
Irrigation has turned much of the San Joaquin Valley’s dry, light-colored soil dark and damp, says Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). While the valley’s light, dry desert ground couldn’t absorb or hold much heat energy, the dark, damp irrigated fields “can absorb heat like a sponge in the day and then, at night, release that heat into the atmosphere.”
That means the region’s summer nighttime temperatures don’t get as cool as they did before irrigation came along.
A two-year study of San Joaquin Valley nights found that summer nighttime low temperatures in six counties of California’s Central Valley climbed about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit (approximately 3.0 C) between 1910 and 2003. The study’s results will be published in the “Journal of Climate.”
Via JunkScience.com.
I picked an appropriate place to live, then.
|
You Are Lightning |
 Beautiful yet dangerous People will stop and watch you when you appear Even though you’re capable of random violence You are best known for: your power Your dominant state: performing |
Tech Blogging
I’ve started trying to post over here again, after letting is go fallow for months. The idea was always to post tech or geek stuff there, versus here, and actually I wouldn’t mind making it available for other bloggers to contribute along those lines, if you normally focus on other things in your main blog venue. Some of my tech focus should be elsewhere soon, but I expect the tone and content to be divergent.
Ellis Family Band
Recently I noted the Ellis Family Band was coming out of retirement, after my father forwarded me an article about it. The band is cousins of ours; my second cousins to be exact, as we fall in the same generation.
Last night as I was driving home, I was thinking about them and the idea of them having a web site. Turns out I was being freaky again.
When I got home, there was an e-mail from my cousin Wally, linking to the Ellis Family Band site on MySpace. Okay, it’s on MySpace, and the text color goes poorly with the background, but it’s still cool that there is a site and you can hear some samples of their music there.
It’s very strange how I do that; like I “detected” what my cousin was looking at and thinking about, a while before he sent me the link.
Anyway, check it out: Ellis Family Band.
“Book” Burning
It may not be the entertainment industry disaster that is Disney swallowing Pixar (though perhaps a prominently placed Steve Jobs at Disney will be a Good Thing), but I’m sad that the quirkily funny Book of Daniel has been cancelled.
Now we won’t get to see what happens with all the little storylines. If they had a whole season in the can and released it on DVD for a reasonable price, I’d buy it. It may not quite be Wonderfalls, but the humor and quirkiness is Wonderfallsesque.
Damn.
I blame the religious freaks who were offended by a not all that offensive show before a single episode could air.
Yay for Saving Money!
Boo for having to move things!
Once upon a time, our big client had spare conference rooms in their building that were not contiguous to the rest of their space and were seldom used. We started working for them, had no office yet, and so ended up renting a large hunk of spacious hallway plus two conference rooms, one of them containing a large conference table they gave us. A third, smaller, “landlocked” room was within our space, still used for storage by the big client.
After several months, we had a more temporary client, Marine Optical, for whom we were doing a substantial software project. So my partner and the guy he was working with from the other company could have a quiet place to work, we added that third room, increasing our rent $200 a month to $1001.50 (a buck a foot).
A few months later, my partner got a day job, that room gradually morphed primarily into space where we stored old computer stuff belonging to the big client, Marine Optical refused to pay us the last $20,000-odd when the work was complete enough for their staff to tweak and deploy and then went bankrupt (one of those business lessons you learn; all the signs of it pending were there), and we’ve been paying the extra $200 a month ever since. It always irks me because it was largely for the benefit of the company that stiffed us and my now former partner, and subsequently benefitted the landlord (ignoring distinctions like realty trusts) who was being paid for our use of it as much as it did us. Of course, my blood pressure goes up every time I think about that 20 grand stiffing, since essentially I absorbed the brunt of it and neither I nor the business have ever recovered. It’s also made me leary of the accrual method as applied to revenues.
But I digress.
The big client has decided to remodel. They use the entire third floor and part of the second floor. The third floor is reception, conference rooms, offices and cubicles. The second floor is offices and storage space. They are turning the second floor, which is the floor we’re on, into reception and conference space, leaving some storage and a couple offices that make sense to stay there. The third floor will be all offices and cubicles, except for the largest conference room. I’m impressed with the plan, as it makes a load of sense.
Seeing this, I detected a golden opportunity to ask them again (I did once before, right after it turned out renting it was a mistake) if they’d like that third room back for storage, or maybe our conference room back as additional conference space. It’s the chance I’d been waiting for.
This was the answer to their storage prayers. They’re more aggressively outsourcing file storage now, but there are things they have to keep in-house, and quarters would have been extremely tight.
I just have to move everything out of that room, into what has become rather cluttered quarters, though it’ll all work when some planned purging is done and things are organized better. I figured I had until the first, but they’d love to start moving stuff in this weekend.
Thus what I will be doing the most of for a couple days, maybe into Saturday. But damn, it’s worth the $200 a month. Woohoo!
That can’t possibly be comfortable.
And yet it’s how daughter number 2 insists on sitting:
Silly baby.
She’s still got a month to turn around, but I have a feeling that I’m going to be glad I’ve been planning on a C-Section all along...because it looks like there’ll be an extra reason for one! I don’t know what it is with my babies that they inisist on coming that way, but they’re damned lucky they live in the 21st century where their reluctance to be traditional doesn’t make things risky for them. ROFL! I’d love to know how they know.
(Graphic ripped off from the WHO.)
Travling Clothes from Monday
This sweater/shirt is half of an outfit my awesome niece gave Sadie for Christmas. The pants will take a few months more to fit.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Sadie a Couple Days Ago
Up
Glad that didn’t take long. I pay for most of what I have with Hosting Matters by check, and I’ve always noticed they take a very long time from when the check has to have arrived in the mail to the time they credit the account. It appears they simply don’t empty the mailbox more often than every few days. When it’s just hosting, that’s fine. When they provide the domain registration, as with AV, the cutoff is absolute. Which is why I mailed it enough ahead to guarantee our domain wouldn’t be suspended this year, beyond any possibility. I even notified them last week that it was presumably already sitting there waiting to be credited, days before the cutoff.
I’m pleased they got their mail yesterday and took care of it, as we planned to hold out however long it took for them to recognize they were sitting on the payment, and taking any time past yesterday or maybe today would have been infuriating.
Hosting Matters is just amazing. Billing is their one weak point. We’ll try to mitigate that by moving the domain registration for AV away from them. I also still have some to move off of Network Solutions, so I’ll hardly notice one more.
At least yesterday was such an “interesting” day that we barely had a chance to notice and fret about the outage…
Monday, January 23, 2006
Down
As I write this, accidentalverbosity.com is down, though our hosting remains accessible via http://hecate.hmdnsgroup.com/~jaysolo.
I wrote a check to Hostin Matters on the 11th, mailed it within the next couple days, and it should have been on the desk of receivables by the 18th or 19th. At 8:00 AM today, the 23rd, the domain went into suspension, exactly as I was trying to avoid.
I love Hosting Matters, but they have always been slow to credit payments. I suspect maybe they don’t even clean out the mailbox regularly, and that’s the cause.
Sigh…