It has been one year since we lost Zuri. I still miss her so very much.
|
Sam and Ivan talk about:
Curmudgeon’s Corner was indeed recorded Sunday morning, but after that, I did my Leopard upgrade, and as is typical with my luck, it did not go as smoothly as for some others. First I did one final backup of everything which took several hours. Then the installer detected a disk error after chugging away for a long long time (a couple of hours) while it was making sure my disk was ready to receive the update. That was followed by many hours of letting the computer chug and do disk repairs several times over again until it was finally happy. Then the install itself (which once it finally started worked pretty well). Then me figuring out that I needed to recreate my crons and that the upgraded apache kepts its prefs in a new place and a different way so I had to fight with that for awhile to get everything running again. And of course me playing with all the new stuff and adjusting settings and such. And then installing the various optional bits. Etc. Anyway, it is now time for me to head to work, so getting the podcast out the door will have to wait until I get home from work. Sorry Ivan, and any others waiting for it. I’ll get it out tonight. The text on the ballot:
Of course I also read the explanatory and pro/con statements and the full text. On this one it seems the main effect is to allow for punitive damages and legal fees to be rewarded in cases where Insurance companies are being sued for denying claims. It would also somewhat expand the cases where such a suit was possible. The courts would of course retain the ability to decide on the merits of the cases and the exact penalties imposed, it just gives some wider latitude. The counter case is that this will lead to lots of frivolous lawsuits etc and it is actually all just about giving trial lawyers more opportunity to make money. I am OK with this balance. I’m going to vote “Approved” on this one. Just looking at my logs for Friday it looks like I have:
There were a few more too that looked like they might possibly be real people, but I think it was more likely they were robots, so I ignored them. But in any case, at least 13 people subscribed via RSS. Kinda cool. Of course subscribers ≠ readers. Just like the 80-90 website visitors I get on an average day are not mostly actually regular readers of this blog, but rather are mostly people who stumble on old archived things via random searches. But the RSS reader to subscriber ratio is probably a bit higher than the visits ratio I would imagine. In any case, kinda interesting. I thought I had registered too late for this election, but I got my absentee ballot in the mail a few days ago, so I guess I’m golden. This election is all state and local, so I pretty much know nothing about any of the issues or the people. So I need to educate myself. As I did for the last election I voted in (2004 in Melbourne, FL) I’ll post about each of the items as I decide how I am going to vote. The first item on the ballot is Initiative 960. The summary text on the ballot itself is:
But of course the summaries are not a good way to make a decision. I glanced over the pro/con statements in the voter info packet, but then went to the full text and spent 30 minutes or so reading it. I started out with a fairly positive feeling about it. All about disclosure and making sure all proposed tax laws have the potential effects analyzed and published, etc. Good stuff in general I guess. Something that one would expect to be part of a reasoned process anyway. And I’m all for the requiring a 2/3 majority for tax increases. And for tightening some loopholes that were used to avoid this in the past. I’m not so sure about the ability to sometimes submit the tax increase proposals directly to a popular vote. I’m not sure that is really how such things should be done. But I was still in favor at that point in general. The ability to refer a tax increase to referendum is already current law. Right now that is optional. But then they killed it by in cases where through one of several methods a tax increase happened WITHOUT a public vote an “advisory vote” would be required. That would be a vote to gauge the opinion of the people but which would be non-binding. If this requirement had been for a binding vote to determine if the increase stayed or went, I might have still been good. (Although I think I would still be on the edge.) But non-binding votes are stupid and should just not happen. There are better ways to gauge public opinion. It is called a poll. There are better ways to raise awareness as well, which I think is the only real purpose of this section. Things which are put up on a ballot in a public election should always be binding, otherwise they are a huge waste of time. I think this is also true of votes in legislatures. Every time they pass a “non-binding resolution” or “Sense of the Senate” or whatnot they are just showing their uselessness. Whatever though. Hmmm. There is still a balance here though. Yes, it adds the insanely stupid advisory votes… why not just make the referendums mandatory instead of optional if you really always want a vote… and make it binding… such that you need the 2/3 majority in both houses AND a majority referendum (or maybe even 2/3 there too) rather than just an “OR”. But on the other hand, it does add some additional transparency and close some loopholes that let tax increases happen without the 2/3 vote. Grrr. Unfortunately most legislation is like this (and ballot initiatives I guess). Bundling things that make sense with things that are crap. The trap is if you vote for the good, you get the bad too. I don’t think I am going to do that. Give me the same thing without the stupid advisory votes and I’ll consider it. In the mean time, I am voting “No”. When I started having issues with bloggspammers on this blog away back when, I started requiring registration to comment. Registration with email confirmation. That pretty much seemed to do the trick for a long time. But earlier this week there was a new registration, confirmed by email, and they started adding spam to a bunch of posts. I caught it within 15 minutes, deleted the account and deleted the spam comments. Then the same guy (or robot, or whatever) registered under a slightly different email a few minutes later and I just blocked the IP it was coming from. Since then nothing more. Annoying though. This was the first one that has bothered to register with the email confirm though. If I start getting more I’ll have to add a capcha or something. But I hate those things. So I hope it won’t become needed, but it probably will. Of course, if it wasn’t a robot but was actually a human, that won’t help. But hopefully the volume actual humans could do would be small enough I could handle it by hand. Oh, for anybody who was wondering, yesterday I did actually go to work, although a slightly shorter day than normal. I was still uncomfortable, but no longer in pain. Managed to get through what I needed to do. In the evening, still uncomfortable. Headed to bed early. Slept a bunch. But MUCH better than the previous day. This morning… about the same. I think I passed something though. Which is good. In any case, still not happy, but much better than the time right before I posted on Wednesday. Just continuing the TMI. Greg can thank me that once again I am not posting relevant pictures. Sunday night a lot of people were running their fireplaces, so my allergies were pretty bad and I got almost no sleep. I dragged myself into work anyway. The breathing stuff was pretty much better by noontime, but very soon after that a familiar discomfort started building in my abdomen. There is no way to tell for sure just on the symptoms… but the symptoms matched almost exactly what I have felt every time over the past few years when I have been about to pass a kidney stone. As the afternoon progressed Monday I was increasingly uncomfortable. I thought about leaving early a few times, but ended up putting in a whole day, although I must admit, as the discomfort increased, my productivity declined proportionately. In the evening at home, my discomfort stayed pretty constant for the rest of the night. Tuesday morning I did a conference call from home first, then headed in to work thinking things weren’t that bad. But during the drive to work it got worse and worse, and I knew as soon as I got there that I would need to turn around and go home. After a couple of quick meetings, I headed home. I managed to do some amount of work from home as long as I stayed in very close proximity to a bathroom at all times. At about 0 UTC today though, the discomfort spiked into pain… something I had been pretty much been expecting since the initial discomfort on Monday, but had been hoping would not happen. I took a Percocet clone I have around for exactly this reason, and almost immediately I started feeling better, and I did one last conference call with work that lasted about an hour. I had expected that the pill would knock me out and I would sleep the rest of the night. Instead, by the time I got off the call I was feeling no pain at all and was hyperactive. I ended up going downstairs and swaping out a bad head unit on our entertainment system and generally rearranging the room and such. That lasted until about 5 UTC, then I started feeling uncomfortable again, but I fell asleep. I woke up around 8 UTC. The discomfort slowly started morphing back into pain. About 8:45 UTC it was bad enough that I took another pill. But it just kept getting worse. 20 minutes later, I was about to wake up Brandy to consider the possibility of heading to the ER if the pain meds didn’t kick in soon. At this point it was pretty bad. I was in the curled up in a ball on the floor swearing at the world phase. I was just starting to feel like the pain killers might have been slightly working when all of a sudden I wasn’t able to keep the pill down. This worried me a lot, because I’ve only ever had to go to the ER for stones twice… once was the very first time, when I had no idea what was going on, and no pain killers to help deal with it… the second was when I couldn’t keep the pain killers down and had to go in so I could get pain killers in a shot instead of in a pill. At this point Brandy had woken up. I ended up waiting about 10 minutes, then taking another pill, hoping this time I could keep it down. Between whatever part of the first pill had actually stayed in my stomach and the second pill, 20 minutes later I was no longer doing the writhing and swearing thing. Now, as I write this, it is still pain, not down to just discomfort levels, and I’m not quite at the point where I can sleep. But I think (hope) it might be getting close. I suppose a third pain pill might be possible, but I’m not sure it would be wise. I prefer to take as few of these as possible. (And my supply isn’t all that large anyway.) This really sucks. I hope this one passes quickly. The last set of tests I had (over the summer) showed all the stones that were sitting in my kidneys ready to drop were still of the size where the indication was take pain killers and pass them rather than lithotripsy or surgery. But the biggest one was getting close to the limit. (I believe they said it was 8mm in diameter… which seems pretty freakin huge to me and would be about double the biggest one I’ve passed previously, but they hoped it would break up into smaller ones on its own.) So I imagine if this thing doesn’t pass on its own soon… and/or the pain killers stop being enough for me to get by… that a trip to the doctor and/or emergency room may be in my future. Of course, all this is assuming that because all the symptoms match the other times this has happened to me (which started out being once every couple of years, but is now a couple of times per year) that this is indeed another kidney stone. If it is something else… well, who knows. As for work tomorrow… I’m gunna try. We have a going away lunch for one of my employees who is leaving for a start up, and it would suck to miss that. Plus a couple of other meetings going on. But if I’m feeling like I do right now, even hopped up on Percocet, I’m thinking that might be unlikely. But I guess we’ll see how I feel in the morning… well, in about 4 or 5 hours when I should be waking up. No idea at this point if I’ll actually sleep between now and then. Well, there ya all go. TMI in the extreme I am sure. But at least this time I didn’t post any pictures… yet. :-) |
||
