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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First ten things to come to mind to blog as I surf the websites I check regluarly (see left column):
* I’m in the New York area for business, and this time I am not sick! Woo! One of my co-workers is sick though, so I guess it all balances out. Matt from my previous job now joins me at my current job. He is a great addition. Today was his first day. We started him right out at a client. It went very well. It is now snowing hard. Tomorrow morning’s meetings might be messy. (OK, that one wasn’t from my usual sites, it was from what it going on, just throwing it in.)
* My mom reprints an article by my dad on drops in donations to Africa after the tsunami. No real thoughts here by me, just a note, and a link to complete the three way family article linkage.
* Brandy is posting again. Apperantly she has found and unpacked the tarot.
* A thread on the TivoCommunity site links to a site with pictures of all sorts of incidents with planes. I immediatley thought Ivan would like this.
* Rumors of Apple Buying Tivo: This has been going around for awhile, but seems to have gotten more attention in the last few days. I wouldn’t lay odds on it happening, but I would be quite happy if it did. Tivo was great, but has been struggling lately to stay in the game and keep ahead of the rapidly approaching competition. An infusion of Apple influence and money might be one of the only ways to get it back in shape to stay the best. And Apple has a long track record of knowing how to survive as a premium product with low market share for those who care more about the total quality of the product than the cost.
* Earlier this week I finally got a Florida Driver’s licence. Woo! Go me! (Also not from a site, but hey!)
* A little while ago the GPS Info noted that Garmin posted the manual to the new Street Pilot c330. Unfortunately it looks like they DID dumb down the interface, removing some of the geek features that I like. So my object of GPS lust remains for now the Street Pilot 2620.
* The bulb on my InFocus X1 reached the end of its life span and popped a few days ago. At the moment we are watching TV on a rtegular old fashioned TV. It makes me very sad. There are other priorities in the budget though, so it will be awhile until we get a new bulb for the thing.
* Speaking of Tivo, the kinds of applications that are being developed now that Tivo has released their developmetn kit are really cool. I honestly thought this would mostly be lame, but some of these are actually interesting and useful. It will be interesting to see how they capitalize on this sort of thing going forward. (Found through PVRBlog.)
* I am in a hotel, away from home. There will be a meeting with a client in the morning if the weather allows, then lunch, then it will be time to be home. Looking forward to it. Home is nice. I like being home. A nice weekend relaxing and doing things around the house. Sounds fun. :-)
One year ago today I sent this email to some of my friends and family. Because it was at a sensitive time and the new job was not yet final, I did not post it. One year later, I feel free to relate this story publically. Originally emailed 2005 Feb 20 17:35:18 UTC.
This is another non-web SPF. Please consider confidential until I give information more widely.
This morning the guy from Accent in Florida called. Got my voice mail at first. Wanted to finalize what we needed to to move forward. Brandy was on the bed still recovering from her back problem. Zuri was flying around the room. I considered going to another room where it would be more quiet, but I ended up staying there and I called back half an hour later. Got his voice mail. A few seconds later, he called back. Just as the phone was ringing, I saw some icing from Brandy’s birthday cake on the bed. So I scooped it up on one finger. Then I answered the Phone and said “Hello Pete” just as I licked the chocolate icing off my finger.
Then I got a sinking feeling. Brandy’s cake had not had chocolate icing. I quickly said, “Can you hold on a second Pete” and put him on hold. Brandy asked “What’s wrong????”. I said “That wasn’t chocolate!!!”. Yes, indeed, I’d scooped up a finger full of Zuri’s poop and shoved it in my mouth. Yum!
I spent a minute or so spitting out as much as I could and swigging some drinks to get the horrible taste out of my mouth. Then I got back to Pete… while both Brandy and I were still working to stifle our laughter. “That’s not chocolate!”
Anyway, long and short of it, I think we now have an agreement on how they will do relocation expenses. That’s on top of the verbal agreement on salary and other things we came to last week.
So, next steps are us finalizing the verbal agreements in writing. I’m writing up a summary of all our agreements this afternoon, which hopefully they will take and put into the formal offer and FedEx to me next week.
This is getting close to being a done deal. After everything is formally signed and legal and official, we’ll start the process of putting this house on the market and finding one down there. I’m looking at a potential start date of March 15th if the deal gets signed next week, but the first couple months I’d split my time down there and up here.
I’m hoping everything will be official by the end of next week.
Crossing my fingers!
I’ll of course send out a full announcement to the world, post on my blog, and all that sort of thing once things are fully official and legal.
Yesterday while Amy was with me at work after school, she told the story to a couple of people at work, so I figure the cat is out of the bag. Yes Pete, I accidentally ate bird poop while on the phone with you negotiating for the position down here. Oops. :-)
I should have posted right after I got the phone call from Chris a day and a half or so ago, but I didn’t. I think I went to sleep instead. I also should have asked insightful freindly questions about how it went and how everybody felt and if he was cute and all that. But I didn’t. I was just kinda like “Uh, OK, Congratulations.” But that didn’t mean I wasn’t excited, it just meant I was toungetied and unsure of the right thing to say at that moment. I felt like such a dork. I *am* such a dork! After I got off the phone I was all excited and thought of things to say.
So, Erica added a comment to the last post on Rebecca’s Blog on Wednesday evening that officially said it, so I’ll quote here:
Yep, Yep, Yep
Gideon Hart Morrow was born at 5:35 p.m. 8.2 lbs and 21.5 inches. Reb, baby, and Chris are all doing fine!
Congratulations Rebecca and Chris. Welcome to parenthood. I know nothing about the baby years, but I know what having a 9 year old is like. So, enjoy! :-) Can’t wait to see all of you again and meet Gideon in person. Don’t know when it will be possible, but hopefully before too long!
(Note: The date scale on the chart is wrong. Damn bugs in Quicken. It actually shows 17 Feb 2000 to 16 Feb 2005 for AAPL.)
Yup, my investing skills rock!! I am awesome!
To my credit though, I had no intention of selling. It wasn’t because I didn’t think Apple would come back. I was sure it would actually. My plan had actually been to never sell any stock I ever bought, just keep it for decades and decades and see what happened. Well, at least to never sell it because of how it was doing, but rather only if I needed the cash for something. I *wanted* to keep it. But in early 2004 what with being unemployed and all at the time, I did indeed need a jolt of cash. So while I kept some mutual funds, I sold all but one share each of each of the stocks I had at the time. I kept those single shares just for sentiments sake, and also just to make me keep watching “what if” I had kept the rest.
*EVERYTHING* I sold at that point (with the exception of Tivo) has gone up. Some quite nicely. But Apple… OUCH! My timing was just about perfect on that one. I bought it mere weeks before it crashed through the floor. Then I sold it mere weeks before it skyrocketed through the ceiling. Go me!!
Oh well! I’m sure I’ll get to the point where I am all set to be buying again, load up on some Apple again, just in time for it to crash again. :-) [To be fair to myself, I’ve had some good timing too, I did very nicely on GRMN, more than doubling my money in a relatively short time… although I would have made even more keeping it longer.] But on Apple… once more, OUCH!
But hey, on the flip side, last night coming home on the plane they upgraded me to first class for no apperant reason, so that was cool.
Oh yeah, and while I won’t post anything here before she posts herself, I hear the Jackal will have some news before that much longer. :-)
In about 20 minutes I am leaving for the airport. Two day business trip to Manhattan. At the moment I have a fever that is bouncing around a little, but is averaging 102. I should probnably make a graph. It started suddenly a few hours ago. I think it is once related to kidney stones… according to the ultrasounds last month I still have 2 or 3 floating around up there causing trouble. Based on other symptoms that started at the exact same time, I think that is the most likely explaination, but it could be something else. Dunno. But it seems like the last several times I’ve headed to NYC, I’ve always had SOMETHING wrong. It sucks.
I have taken appropriate medications. Hopefully that will break the fever in the next few hours and I won’t be walking dead when I get to the client tomorrow morning. But I certainly am now. Even driving to the airport and getting on my plane will be a chore. I plan to be unconcious as soon as I am seated and the plane takes off.
It has been awhile, so time for another new graph! Only a couple more new ones in the works before I start updating the old ones again.
Abulsme.com Steps Chart
As I was packing or unpacking or doing something to boxes in October 2004, I found a pedometer I’d boght years before. I started noting the results daily. A few days later I lost it. I found it again at some point in December and started up again. But I kept reseting the pedometer by mistake. So for Christmas Brandy got me a new one with a cover. This was much better, and seemed to give more accurate results. I wore it all the time. But it kept falling off my belt and I had to tape shut the cover. Eventually I lost it. So Brandy’s mother gave me a new one. In any case, the graph of how many steps I take per day continues…
So, given that, perhaps I’ll go walk some more…
Further update… Brandy’s mom came out of her procedure a little earlier this evening and was chatting and joking with Brandy before falling asleep in the recovery room for the night. All went very well. She is scheduled to be released from the hospital tomorrow. She’ll then come home and stay with us until her doctors declare her strong enough to travel. Which may be as soon as the end of this week, but most likely will be a bit longer than that.
In any case, looks like the worst is past, and she will be back here soon, and in fact will stay for a considerably longer visit than originally planned! Which is nice, although this isn’t quite the way one might have wished for a longer visit!
Just an update on Brandy’s mom for those who are interested. She is being transfered to a bigger hospital this morning and is scheduled for heart surgery this afternoon. The bypass she had 10 years ago has degraded. They are putting in a shunt or stint or some similar device to reopen the problem area. The surgery is not as involved as an actual bypass, but any surgery involving the heart and the areas around it is still very serious. If all goes well, she should be out of the hospital and ready to travel home to PA within a week, maybe two. The Doctors say there is about a 1% chance though that things will get unexpectedly more complicated though. We’re obviously hoping for the 99%.
So, this week Brandy’s mom has been visiting.
And nearly every day while I have been sitting at meetings at work and answering work emails and other such activities, my girlfriend with a bad back and my girlfriend’s mother with a history of heart issues have been packing boxes and moivng heavy things at the old house. In retrospect, that sounds really bad.
Yesterday they rented a truck and started loading boxes into the truck. We were going to try to finish moving all of our stuff out of the house we are renting from Ivan’s family today, and then clean it all up by the end of the month when we are officially supposed to be out of there.
But… right after they started loading boxes, Brandy’s mom started having chest pains. And since she had a history, there was no chancing anything. Off to the emergency room. I left work early to go meet them. After not too long a wait they were monitoring her in the ER. A couple hours later they admitted her for overnight observation.
It is now over 24 hours later. As of the last update I had from Brandy her mom is still in the hospital. They observed her overnight and she is going to have some more tests soon. If she passes, she can be released, if not, she’ll be there longer.
She is in good spirits, because appearantly she thinks her Doctor is hot. But still… the intention was her to visit and have fun… and she was insisting on helping us move… but spending a day or two in the hospital was NOT on the agenda.
But here we are.
I’m hoping I get a call from Brandy at any moment saying her mom is ready to come home. But it hasn’t happened yet.
OK. During the day yesterday all my stuff finished transferring to Virginia, and last night Chris got abulsme.com back up and running on his servers. So the site is back up although I’ll still have to work out some details of some things.
THANK YOU CHRIS!!!
The old server still can’t boot itself, although I think I can remedy that as soon as I find some system disks. I won’t be able to boot off the clone drive I made though because of the firewire issue. I tried cracking it open and seeing if I could just pop the drive into the internal slot, but the drive types don’t match. Oh well.
I’ll have to work on what to do as a long term solution, but this will do short term.
I miss having the server right in my office though. There are not too many practical reasons why that is needed, but I just LIKE it. :-)
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