I hate to be the one to complain about bad neighbors, but two doors down from my cul de sac my neighbors have left a car on the road for months. With all the snowfall, it’s completely buried. Normally it’s not a problem, but we’ve had so much snow that the plow isn’t coming through our turnabout because it might hit the car. I just called the police department to complain about it. The garbage trucks aren’t coming through, and even the mail is not being delivered. Enough is enough, time to let the Police deal with it.
I think I’m just going to install a revolving door on my office to accommodate all the traffic it’s been getting today. And stuff all my work—nothing’s getting done when this many people keep coming to me. Seriously, it’s every three to five minutes I’m getting interrupted, sometimes way less.
Lorien left for Houston this morning. She’ll be down there until Monday night. She was going to hit some RenFair down there, but apparently that’s canceled now. I was hoping she’d get to go (so was she—it was one of the main reasons she wanted to go in the first place), I wanted her to get me a picture of a wench on a cell phone to go with my ninja on a cell phone and pirate on a cell phone pictures.
Anachronism. Ha!
My jaw has been numb since 9am. Yesterday I had my semi-annual dental checkup and cleaning. I had lost the top of a filling last week or so, and it had to be repaired. I have a new dentist, since my old one retired. I’m now older than my dentist.
That aside, my new dentist is a nice guy. He uses a new anesthetic to which I found I’m as equally resistant as the old stuff. Unfortunately, the way to find that out is to get a shot of it, then have the dentist start drilling. He instantly hit a live nerve. So he gave me a second shot and a few minutes for that to take effect. Then hit the nerve again. I got a full third injection after that and about ten minutes later was completely numb. I am just now starting to get some feeling back on the right side of my face.
The sad part is he had to drill for literally five seconds, just enough to clean up the edge of where the partial filling fell out. The whole thing cost me $20 after my insurance cut in. It really was almost no work! Such a high price to pay in numbness though.
I missed out on a nice free lunch too because I didn’t want to bite my tongue off or take a chunk out of my cheek.
Two days ago, I wouldn’t have believed I could have a more difficult day at work. Somehow I managed to experience one…the very next day! I had a terrible day right after a really bad day, which doesn’t make me very happy.
We had a bunch of people over last night, too. When I got home, I stomped around for a while, then went to my bedroom, turned off the light, and just laid there in the gloomy silence. I felt a lot better after about an hour or so.
When people started arriving, I no longer felt like caving their heads in with the nearest blunt instrument.
Today was terribly busy. It all started when I was asked to test internal network mail relaying as soon as I walked in the door. I accidentally overwrote the file I was “borrowing” the code from, using Notepad.
In case you didn’t know, there is no way to recover a file if you’ved edited it and saved it in Notepad. It only has one level of undo, and it’s certainly not the one you need. Take it from my mistake, use a real editor even for a small job, and make sure your files are backed up.
From there, the day got worse, with steady a traffic of problems into my office. Everybody thinks they’re the only ones with problems and I should be able to take care of it right away. Some I can, when they’re easy, and I don’t mind it. But some people come to me even when they know I have nothing to do with whatever their problem is and still expect me to figure it out for them.
The file I overwrote this morning wasn’t a total loss—I was able to rewrite it much better, and the bulk of the difficult part was a SQL query that I had stored so I access it as a View, so I just had to rewrite some logic.
The worst part about the day was I was so busy I never even had time to stop for lunch. I hate days like this.
I got suckered in to coming to downtown Coeur d’Alene today to fix my in-laws’ wireless router. As you can see, there’s nothing wrong with it, as I’m connected to it right now. Today is Car d’Lane, the big classic car show. Therefore, there isn’t a parking spot to be had anywhere downtown—including my in-laws’ business lot for “guests only.” I wish.
The temperature finally crested 70°F today, it seems like forever since we’ve had a warm day like this. Except for one odd heat wave real early this year, it’s been quite cool. We’ve had rain for the last two weeks almost. I even had to turn the furnace back on!
This morning a neighbor’s dog woke me up with its incessant barking at about 7:30am. Now, I’m usually up by this time, but it is a Saturday, and it would have been nice to sleep in. But since I was up, I decided I should go out and mow the lawn. I spent the earliest part (I didn’t start until about 8:45) by the fence nearest that neighbor, just in case they were able to sleep in with their damn dog barking every two seconds for the entire morning.
It took about two hours to mow everything, and now I feel like I’m going to die from all the pollen I’ve been exposed to. It’s been the curse of my life to have bad hay fever.
But at least the lawn’s done. Until next week, anyway.
Remember how I hurt my toe? Here’s day two’s picture.
Today has been one of those days—my phone has been ringing off the hook, people come into my office all day long, or hunt me down in other parts of the building when I’m fixing some other problem. I need a clone of myself.
Today I received a couple of 750 Gb hard drives for the office. Upon opening one of the drives, several surface-mount components proceeded to fall out of the bag. I examined the board on the off chance that they would have been “spares” that fell in the bag at the factory (yeah, it was real wishful thinking). Sure enough, the thing is toast. Fortunately, I have two, so I’m not set back too much.
Last night I spent the night at the hospital’s sleep testing center. I don’t sleep well most of the time. I wake up sometimes every 1.5-2 hours. My brain doesn’t slow down sometimes, and it can take hours to fall asleep. Or if I wake up in the middle of the night, it will keep me from going back to sleep. It’s not fun. I’m usually tired in the morning, but can’t get back to sleep right away, so I get up.
Unlike some people, though, I’m not likely to fall asleep during the day, or when I sit down at my desk, or even relax on a couch. I don’t feel tired once I’m up and moving around again. The problem is I know I’m just not getting enough recuperative sleep. My wife says I stop breathing from time to time, which fits with the sleep apnea profile.
Anyway, last night was awful. I was really tired, but couldn’t fall asleep. The wires didn’t bother me too much, but the finger monitor and the nose-hoses that detect your breathing were difficult to get used to. I think it took me 2.5 hours to fall asleep (I went to bed at 11pm). I woke up several times, and was up permanently a little before 6am. I really hope I don’t have to go back, my insurance bill will kill me even at the 80/20 coverage.
On the good side, last night was a typical “worst-night” experience for me, so they got the whole range of my problem. They sure got what they asked for. Unfortunately, it’s going to take two weeks before I get results back, though.
Apparently Gary Gygax (co-creator of D&D) passed away yesterday.
In his honor, here are 16 Gary Gygax jokes you shouldn’t make (copied from w00t):
1. “Quick! Someone cast Raise Dead!”
2. “Don’t worry – he’s just playtesting the Astral Plane for the next edition.”
3. “He’s gone the way of Star Frontiers.”
4. “Analysts warn of a free-fall in Mountain Dew futures.”
5. “In the next town, you meet a stranger named Barry Bygax.”
6. “Now who will lead our young people to Satan?”
7. “With his last breath, he cursed the name of Marlon Wayans.”
8. “I wonder how they’ll divide up his XP.”
9. “Pallbearers, make a Bend Bars/Lift Gates roll.”
10. “At least he didn’t live to see Disney’s Greyhawk On Ice.”
11. “Lorraine Williams is behind this somehow, I just know it.”
12. “The worlds of adventure gaming, fantasy fandom, and van painting will never be the same.”
13. “When I heard, I cried 2d10 tears.”
14. “Is there anything in the will about electrum?”
15. “Heart condition? Wow, I always thought it’d be owlbears that got him.”
16. “Suddenly, nobody in Heaven wants to hang out with Marilyn Monroe on Friday night.”
I made an appointment to see my doctor today so I could get a jump start on allergy season. With the excessively long, cold winter we’ve had I expect spring will go into overdrive as soon as it can, and that means pollen, and lots of it. While there, I had the doctor freeze off a wart from the back of my left knee. It was a very difficult spot to treat, since I could never see it without a mirror. The liquid nitrogen is always fun to watch, but the freezing and unfreezing of my skin is not a pleasant experience. Neither has been sitting at a desk all day today with a bulging cold-burn on the back of my knee. It has been an unpleasantly uncomfortable day.
Let me tell you a story about what makes good customer service by opposite example. If you read this blog regularly, you know that I mentioned twice before that my Dish Network service has been out for about the last week. When I finished checking my connections and pretending to know what I’m looking at while poking at the satellite dish, I finally broke down and called technical support. After about 15 minutes of automated menus that walked me through very simple to moderately complex operations, I finally got to speak to a real person. This person repeated several of the steps I had just gone through.
After realizing that my problem was more serious, and not a simple case of something being unplugged—it didn’t matter that I told him that’s what I checked before I bothered to call—he said he’d dispatch a technician to come and take a look at it, but the earliest time was next Monday (today). I said okay, because what else could I say? Then I had to ask twice about not being charged for the satellite service while it was down. When he professed to not understand what I was asking I had tell him that I was not willing to pay for satellite service that I would not be receiving. He then said I’d get prorated credit for the time I was down.
What upset me about this whole process was the fact that I had to protest before I got credit for service that I wouldn’t be receiving. A good company would have done that without asking, and just told me that I would be getting credit for time down.
The technician came today and after some troubleshooting, replaced my receiver (just as I had believed was the problem all along). So everything is back to normal, I just have a little less faith in Dish Network. At least the replacement unit didn’t cost me anything.