For some reason over the last couple of weeks I've been unable to get my Notes client to talk to my server at home from my office... I ran into some DNS issues and had to diddle with the zone file some. It's possible not all those changes have propagated, so here I am, posting from the web.
First off, no, I am not dead, though I was off Twitter for a while and the server was having the aforementioned DNS problems. Even email at home on the Domino server was a bit problematic, which drove Nora nuts just at a time when we need good communications.
Second, we had to change some of the wedding plans, so those of you who are attending, keep an eye on the "Wedding" database at http://www.weightlessdog.com/wedding.nsf. Nora's mother suffered a recurrence of a long-standing illness and her treatments leave her too worn-out to travel. She and Nora's father are in their late seventies and even though they have a remarkably-smooth Cadillac to cruise the country in, they felt they couldn't come out to the wedding on the 17th.
So... we decided we'd scale the wedding down a bit and do a civil ceremony (albeit in full-dress, sans wabbit) on Friday the 16th, followed by an elegant lunch for the attendees, and then a nice celebration at the house in the evening. This solves a few problems and creates a few others, but all in all, we realized that the wedding isn't the point of the whole adventure, it's the marriage that comes after.
Work has been an adventure. I really don't like situations where I'm forced into playing office politics, and lately that's what I've had to do. I don't like it, I make it clear that I don't like it, and I fight hard and well. Like I tell people, if you make me play those silly unproductive games, be prepared to feel my cleats, because all I want is to be left alone to do what I want to do and do it well. It's odd, because we're actually about to roll out some cool code soon, I'm trying to promote getting IdeaJam in here, we're expanding the things we offer to users, we're upgrading to Quickr 8, and spring is here! Why fuck it all up by playing dumb office games? Alas, it seems like some people I work with don't know what else to do with themselves. I sort of saw this coming.
The latest thing here? One of our contractors sent out a mass-mailing autogenerated from our Quickr server advising users of our impending upgrade. We had a long-agreed-to project plan (blah) saying, "notify users on this date." Well, the other day, apparently management decided that they only wanted to send this notification to Place Managers. However, did they
tell anybody they'd made this change? No. So, on schedule and as previously agreed, the notification went out to all of our thousands of users. I got it. Matter of fact, it was pretty helpful, in that I got one such notification for every Place of which I was a member. This helped me to know that in fact, there were Places in which I was a member and I didn't even know it! But no, management instead decides to get grumpy about it because "you did this without asking us." Ah, jeez. If we hadn't sent it out, then they'd bitch about how we missed the target date for sending notifications out! Same old crap: we expected you to read our minds, and then it's your fault that you can't.
At least this month I'm getting a scheduled raise. More money to spend on fuel to come to work and deal with this amusement.
It hasn't helped that up until now, my sleep patterns have been crazy and I used an enormous amount of leave and still ended up tired a lot. Nice thing is, with the help of nice medical people, I am finally getting a handle on that and have a lot of my old hyper-energy back (those of you who knew me from Lotuspheres past know that I used to be able to go from 7am to sometimes 4 or 5am every day of the Sphere and still have enough energy to drive 900 miles home afterward). Being able to document this all as a medical issue has helped a great deal, because they really don't wanna make trouble for people whose legit medical problems are affecting their work. They gots laws about that, y'know. Anyway, it looks like I'm finally coming out of it with the kind advice of experts in the field, and this time, without the disastrous side-effects of ill-prescribed medication. Yeah, I had some problems with sleep medications they've given me over the years, but no more of that. This is all environmentally-managed... change the diet, change the patterns of the day, work on meditative tricks that help me completely relax. Things will be good indeed.
As long as silly stuff in the interim doesn't rip my leg off.
Speaking of which, Sam is huge. We didn't get to go up to Cortland and take him to the Flemish Giant show, so he took his annoyance out on us by eating another 30 pounds of feed last month and getting gigantic. The only thing we asked anyone for as a wedding gift was an electronic scale, kindly given us by my stepmother Kathy, with capacity enough to weigh him (and the other organisms in the house). Keeping an eye on your pets' weight can be your best weapon in the fight to keep them healthy.
On that note, I have sad news. We lost Mary early Tuesday morning. At 3:40am, we heard her in distress under the bed, pulled her out, and realized she was leaving us. Her weight was less than a quarter of what it had been at her peak, her lips and nose were pale, her bones felt like they were just all coming unraveled. Leukeumia is an insidious sort of cancer, turning good cells against bad, cutting off growth and the transport of oxygen and nutrients. Mary fought it hard, holding on and remaining her cantankerous/loving self right up to the end. But at 3:40am, I could no longer hear her weakened heartbeat, and she was gone. She was nine.
We'll lose them all someday. I just thought Mary had a few more years left to be herself. She did, however, have a good life here, and it was long enough for her to be a presence and an influence on everyone. Everyone she bit, in particular, which was everybody. And so, a small box with her ashes in it will come back to us next week, to be placed in the cabinet next to Ben and Nora's late rabbit St. Francis.
Have you checked out Sam and the other wabbits on BunSpace.com yet? Go to weightlessdog.com (there's a convenient link to your upper right, there) and click the "Sam on BunSpace" link. It's sort of my MySpace... for wabbits.
This place needs to be rickrolled. I was listening to Mr. Astley's masterpiece on the stereo in the TDI on the way to work. That bass cabinet right behind the driver's seat can dissolve kidney stones when it's turned up, so I put "Never Gonna Give You Up" on the iPod and thumped away down I-70 in Eighties glory.
The title of this piece, by the way, is a reference to a Mojo Nixon song, "Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant (With My Two-Headed Love Child)." If you ain't got Mojo Nixon, then your store could use some fixin'.
Technorati: Miscellany (2)
Life can be pretty good even if it isn't spectacular05/11/2008 12:20 AM
All my life, I've been a fan of road atlases
and maps in general. I always did well on that part of the Iowa Tests
Of Basic Skills where they had you decipher maps, usually centered on Crater
Lake. I always had an atlas on vacation, figuring out where we were
going and when we'd get there. When we stopped for gas, I was the
guy going into the gas station office and getting whatever free folding
maps I didn't already have. Gulf had the best ones, with Esso close
after. I can still remember when stations stopped giving out free
maps. It was 1973. The date at which gas station attendants
stopped being able to give directions wasn't so specific.
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