This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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Just had a call on my cell. I didn’t recognize the number, so I let it go to voice mail. I have transcribed the full text of the message. The first word starts in the middle, so it is obvious the automated system had already said a sentence or two while my recorded “Please leave a message” thing was playing, so I missed the beginning.
From 877-778-2578 at 00:09 UTC on 2007 Sep 25:
… As you are on the DirecTV do not call list we are not able to contact you for these exciting offers. The reason I’m calling you today is to give you an opportunity to change your selections. If you allow us to remove you from the DirecTV do not call list please be assured that we will not share your information with anyone else. Please call 1-877-778-2578 to remove your account from the DirecTV do not call list. You will then be eligible to receive exciting offers in the future. If you prefer to remain on DirecTV’s do not call list we completely respect your decision and your privacy and no action is required. Thank you for being a loyal DirecTV customer.
Excuse me??? I’m on your do not call list, so you are calling me to ask me to please take you off your do not call list? So you can call me about crap I don’t want? Excuse me? EXCUSE ME? I already told you not to call me. Assholes.
We were already planning to switch away from DirecTV as soon as either of our two DirecTivos die since they are no longer manufactured and you can only get them on the secondary market for way over what was the market price when they were still being made… all since DirecTV decided they wanted to push their own second rate DVRs instead of real Tivos.
Anyway, this call just makes me not have any regrets on that planned move. It may even end up accelerating it. (Although I don’t see us switching until early next year unless our existing hardware does die.)
What a crock.
More Internet comments on unwanted calls from this phone number here including at least a couple comments suggesting that it might not really be DirecTV. Dunno. Very annoyed regardless.
I think I am going to rearrange the furniture in my home office. It has been the way it is for quite a few months. Time for a change. You might be able to see these efforts on the camera. But then again, it has a fairly tight field of view. I wish I had a fisheye lens for it, but I don’t. Also, and perhaps more importantly, I’ll probably have to shut off the computer at some point to move it, which of course will turn off the webcam.
And of course it will be incredibly boring. A few minutes of me moving furniture. If I even end up doing it right now. That dragging thing is still going on, so I may be just as likely to just lie down and not do anything.
All week long I have been seriously dragging. No definable being sick or anything. Just majorly dragging. No energy, off and on aches and pains, difficulty concentrating, strong desire to just lie down. I’m plodded my way through work, saving most of the energy for meetings, and otherwise falling a bit behind at the stuff I need to just do at my desk as I am going slower than I should. Then each day when I’ve gotten home I’ve essentially immediately collapsed into bed rather than doing any of the stuff I usually try to get done each evening at home. Then waking up in the morning feeling a bit better, but still with low energy levels I know will peter out by early afternoon.
Don’t know what this is, but I want it to go away now. I am glad it is Friday. I suspect I will sleep all day Saturday.
I’d been holding pretty steady for the last year or so, but I spiked a bit last night and this morning I hit an all time lifetime high for a single daily weight reading (although the moving average may or may not end up being a record, I haven’t calculated it yet and I do a centered weighted average rather than the more traditional method, so I’ll actually need to take a few more readings before I have the final value for that).
Oops. 86273 grams. Bad Sam. I really need to once again occasionally do something other than sitting at a desk or lying in a bed. Something involving vigorous movement every once in awhile perhaps. Hmmm….
(And yes, not all of those five digits are significant, the inherent error on the scale is probably about 100 grams, plus my daily variability is on the order of 1000 grams or more… which is why what really matters is the moving average, not a spot reading… but still… a new record… and yes, I could probably stand to lose 5% to 10% of the total mass to get to where I theoretically “should” be.)
We thought Skittles was doing much better. After Cheese died he hadn’t seemed to be doing well at first. But in the last few weeks he had perked up. He was looking very healthy. He seemed to be doing great. On this week’s podcast you can hear him chirping in the background. And he would chirp along if music was being played. He was eating well. Last night he seemed fine. This morning we noticed nothing. He seemed like a happy little blue budgie again.
But this afternoon he suddenly started acting sick and started to deteriorate fast. Brandy noticed him puffed up and on the floor of his cage. At the first sign of trouble Brandy made a vet appointment for first thing in the morning. (The vet had already left for the day.) I came home about an hour early to help. But by the time I got home he was in very bad shape. There were bursts of activity, but he was not doing well.
About 25 minutes ago, with Brandy and I there, Skittles cheeped for the last time, turned to look at me for a minute or two, then closed his eyes. A few minutes later he took his last breath. He had seemed absolutely fine and healthy less than 12 hours earlier. Poor sweet little guy.
We’ll take him to the vet to see if anything more can be determined as to cause for him or Cheese. The vet had warned that Skittles might have the same problem as Cheese, but we had thought we were just about over the hump and he was going to be OK. But that was not to be.
The vet also still has Cheese, who he was keeping in case more tests could have helped Skittles. When the vet is done with both of them we will bury the two of them together. They were best friends their whole lives. It is only fitting.
Goodbye Skittles. We’ll miss you.
As I type it is seven hours and a couple of minutes until the exact time I’ll be exactly 36 years old. It will happen at 14:13:38 UTC today. That’s 7:13:38 AM Pacific, 10:13:38 AM Eastern. Wow, I sure am old. I’ll probably be asleep when the exact moment hits. At least that is the plan.
So early today when I was ready to leave work, I headed down to the car and it wouldn’t start. Brandy had to come and give my poor Saturn a jump start. I hadn’t left the headlights on, which would be my usual excuse. This time I’d left the dome light on. I don’t actually remember turning it on ever, so who knows how long it had been on. But in any case, it killed the battery.
Brandy came and rescued me, then we went out to dinner. Then we went home. I watched one TV show, and then immediately fell asleep for the night.
My productivity last night was obviously limitless.
The book above is not available at all your normal book outlets. (At least not for the vast majority of the readers of this blog.) These are the memoirs of Valeriano Ferrão, who was Mozambique‘s ambassador to the United States from the mid 1980’s to the mid 1990’s. It was just published in Mozambique. He is the one on the right of the cover. In the center is Samora Machel the first president of independent Mozambique. And who is that on the left? Oh yeah, that’s me. :-)
According to my dad, who just received an actual copy of the book:
The caption on the photo in the inside of the book reads:
O autor com President Samora Machel e Samuel Minter, filho de Ruth e Bill Minter, professores na escola de Bagamoyo
Translation: “The author with President Samora Machel and Samuel Minter, son of Ruth and Bill Minter, teachers in the Bagamoyo school.”
I of course do not remember being there when this picture was taken. I do remember meeting Ambassador Ferrão a number of times when I was a teenager living near Washington DC. And I remember meeting President Machel once during those same years when I got to attend a reception for him while he was on a state visit to Washington. I remember him quite clearly saying something along the lines of “This is little Sam? He looks so much like his father. I remember you when you were THIS tall…” and showing his hand at a level about at my height in this picture. Not too long thereafter he was killed in a plane crash the cause of which is still controversial today.
In any case, I have now made my way to the cover of a book. Although I don’t imagine I feature in the narrative itself at all. :-)
It is somewhat strange to me that at that age I was in the middle of some very interesting and historic events, but because of my age I have no memories of it beyond snippets of stories from my parents. (For instance, I know I was passed overhead from person to person to get me out of a stadium where there was a major rally celebrating independence to keep me from being trampled by the crowds… but of course I don’t remember a thing.) I think I am now at an age where I could appreciate those memories and learn from them. But they are not there. I was a little too young to retain anything.
And even when I visited Mozambique again for a few weeks while I was in college, I was still a little too young and not quite ready to get a lot of value out of it. The culture shock was a little too big and the time too short. Perhaps someday I’ll visit again. But probably not any time soon.
A little over 4 hours ago once Amy was back home from her class trip, she actually was able to use her computer for real for the first time. I had finished all the mucking with it I was going to do and moved it to the location it will live last night. So far she’s been watching her Tivo via her Slingbox and then watching a DVD while IMing me and Brandy occasionally. She seems quite happy. Cool.
Yout know, I’ve been thrown all off by the Pandora thing. I’ve still been messing with minor things on it each evening, adding a few more bits of software, cleaning out Amy’s spam (not just deleting it all, but looking through it for false positives) etc. So I haven’t been answering email and I didn’t make a blog post last night. I was going to say something about the new iPods. But I didn’t. So here is a random post about not much.
In the mean time, Amy is on the one day overnight class field trip that her school always does the first week of each school year as a way for the kids to spin back up (and meet the new people). So tonight I’ll finish up everything I want to do. Anything I don’t get done, I just don’t worry about right now. I want her to have the machine and have me done with fiddling and such when she gets back from her trip tomorrow.
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