After a seven year hiatus I returned to the dentist’s office this morning to have my teeth evaluated and cleaned. Over the years I have had a fair amount of dentistry done in my mouth, some of it rather painful and traumatic. My mother always said that we were each born with a set amount of dental courage, and that once it was used up, it was gone. My dental courage is long gone.
The last dentist I saw wanted to do several things all at once in my mouth, enough so that I was looking into the concept of “sedation dentistry,” where they knock you out for the duration. She felt that one of my oldest fillings needed to be replaced and, since the surrounding tooth wouldn’t support a new filling, a crown would be necessary. She wanted to have the tooth evaluated by an oral surgeon prior to her removal of the filling to see about a potential root canal. All of this came to a screeching halt when I lost my job (and therefore dental benefits) in May of 2000.
Since that time I have been fearful of going to another dentist since it would mean the removal of that filling, a crown, and maybe a root canal. Imagine, then, my delight in hearing the dentist say this morning that my teeth were in good heath and that as long as the filling was holding he would prefer to leave it alone. No cavities, no need for anything more than a cleaning in six months time.
I nearly levitated off the chair in relief.
As a reward I treated myself to Peanut M&Ms and an orange soda after lunch.
Seven years ago this month I created a new domain, one for my professional self. At the time I was engaged in negotiations for a contract that would set me up as an independent consultant. I would be working for myself rather than a company. Being hugely enamored of the entire web experience I wanted to have a domain for my doing-business-as name; I actually developed the doing-business-as name as a result of which domain names were available. In the end, Partition Software was created. Using partition in the name was a play on words as the primary development platform I was working with at the time allowed distributed software to be created and partitioned across many servers with ease.
To be honest I never really did very much with the site. I changed the layout once or twice and added my resume to it, but I didn’t really need it for my business. It was primarily a vanity thing; it gave me an email address for professional matters. Domain based emails being a magnet for spam, I get for more junk mail there now than I ever got real mail.
The site registration expires later this month and I am strongly considering letting it go. I don’t need the domain any more; if I were to have a professional site I’d want to call it something different to begin with. Being a bit of a pack rat it is hard to let go of anything so I find myself looking for excuses to keep the site. The technology I was using in 2000 is now defunct, so the name partition software is no longer really meaningful either.
I suppose it’ll be like the house I moved out of in 2004, I’ll never go back to that site simply because I won’t want to see the “Buy This Domain” site that will appear there almost immediately after my registration expires. Being an independent consultant was a rite of passage (in more ways than one) for me, and the name Partition Software, will always be important to me. But I am not currently an independent consultant, and were I to be again in the future there is another name that I would choose.
Recently a friend sent me one of those joke emails containing a list of politically incorrect “laws” that govern a gender. In this case they were “man laws,” and one dealt with the men’s room. To whit:
Never talk to a man in a bathroom unless you are on equal footing (i.e., both urinating, both waiting in line, etc.). For all other situations, an almost imperceptible nod is all the conversation you need.
Just a few minutes ago, after washing my hands in the restroom, I and another man were both reaching for paper towels from the lone dispenser. After giving him a nod, and gesturing for him to go first I thought we following the aforementioned law. He, on the other hand, took my politeness as an excuse to talk. A lot.
My tactical mistake was to allow him to be between me and the door. Throughout my drying of my hands and then while I stood there waiting, he stood, holding the door half open, telling me all about some new hot-air hand dryer that will use “400 MPH air” to instantly dry your hands. When my lack of response didn’t cause him to stop I had to resort to crowding him and reaching for the door. Fortunately, there are two paths away from the men’s room. Pausing slightly I was able to let him choose one and then I picked the other, to effectively end his now rambling discussion of using the “same cyclonic wind tunnel technology some high-end vacuums have” to dry ones hands.
Normally I think the contents of gender specific humor emails are worthy only of being deleted, but for once I agreed with the author. I’m not trying to be anti-social, I just would rather not strike up lengthly conversations with strangers in the men’s room.
I was hoping to write today about finding a cure for my Yahoo Messenger ills. The latest and greatest instant messenger client from Y! refuses to stay connected for more than about 10 minutes. It drops connectivity in the middle of chats, file transfers, and when it is just idle. Repeated forays into the support forum world haven’t been helpful other than revealing others with the same issue. One posting (which I should have bookmarked) purported from Y! itself suggested that using a third-party client might solve the issue. It is pretty sad when a major software producer creates a standard or protocol and then their own software can’t utilize it without blowing up.
The “cure,” discovered last night in another round of Googling-for-Answers was to change the Ignore List settings in the client. By default it gives you the option to ignore people on a list you create. The alternative is to ignore everyone who isn’t on your buddy list. I guess the thinking is that there is some kind of client-server communication required with the specific ignore list, and that this communication is somehow responsible for the connectivity issues. Unfortunately changing this setting in my case did not solve the problem. I still get dropped every ten minutes or so.
It has been pointed out to me that “you get what you pay for” and that Yahoo Messenger is free. So is Pidgin and it never drops my connection. For my two cents I think software producers should spend more time making simple software that work flawlessly, and when it can’t work, errors gracefully. Instead they seem more interested in stuff all sorts of ancillary bits into the install package (NO, I don’t want the weather bug installed. Or your toolbar. Or anything else.).
As a professional who makes his living creating or designing software I understand how incredibly complex even the simplest tasks are, and how vastly difficult it is to create fluid, easy-to-use interfaces. So I understand that Y! and Microsoft, and others are doing their level best. But I would be interested in software that did one thing, did it extremely well and effortless far more than I am interested in software that wants to invade my computer and deliver ads and unwanted extras. Because even thought the Yahoo Messenger product is free, putting up with all the shortcomings of the software combined with diligently avoid all the invasion-ware extras definitely is not without cost.
The cubical I occupy at work is fairly nice as cubes go, it even comes with a small built-in whiteboard. The whiteboard is maybe 18 inches tall and 40 inches long. I had to request a set of dry erase markers and an eraser, but that was easily accomplished in a couple of days.
The wall that the whiteboard is embedded into is shared with the neighboring cubical. This wall is shorter than the others so that you can peer over it into the next cube. You can also poach dry erase markers and the eraser over it when you are too lazy to order your own set.
Now, I’m not opposed to sharing. Well, not very. But I really don’t like sharing when the item borrowed is returned in a lesser state than when it left. I’ve had these dry erase markers for, what, 45 days now? They are still new. The chisel points are still all chiselly. Well the green one isn’t. It looks like someone used it to pound nails into really hard wood. You can’t draw a nice clean line with it anymore as the point now resembles a mushroom.
So instead of residing on the nifty little tray at the base of the whiteboard the markers are now in my drawer.
I’m taking my marbles and going home. So there.
I had heard stories of washing a gunky keyboard in the dishwasher, and even read a posting or three by people who had purportedly used this method to restore a keyboard to like-new (or at least closer to new) status. But until today I was a bit skeptical of the whole idea. In my mind the delicate circuitry of the keyboard wouldn’t stand a chance against an environment harsh enough to get three day old dried chili of my bowls.
The fine folks over at Coudal Partners have done an experiment, and made a film of their results. Well worth a click through to watch.
Auto Flush Overnight, one night last week, all the toilets in the men’s rooms in the building where I work were converted from manual flush to automatic flush through the installation of some overly sensitive infrared sensors. I discovered both of these facts simultaneously when I shifted a bit while seated.
The flush mechanism makes a slight mechanical whirring sound as it winds up to flush the toilet. I immediately recognized the sound as the last place I worked had a similar mechanism. At the old building they were properly adjusted so that the flush never occurred until after you got up. These new ones are a bit twitchier and the slightest forward movement turns the toilet into a make-shift bidet. Hopefully they’ll get the sensitivity sorted out soon.
The best part about this development is that one will never again be surprised by the present the last occupant of the stall left behind. Why grown men can’t flush a toilet is beyond me.
Manual Flush The urinals are still all manual. I don’t know if there is another midnight plumbing exercise in the works or not. Grown men can’t seem to flush these either, but it’s less of an issue than with the toilets. One wonders if they bother to flush at home?
Over the weekend I added international calling to my phone. This seemingly simple goal was made overly complicated by the “customer service” paradigm employed by AT&T.
Online Ordering Repeated attempts to access my account in order to add the new service via AT&T web account manager failed. The error message displayed was ambiguous as to whether the problem was with their server or my account.
Eventually, on the second day of trying, I was able to access my account and add the new international calling plan. I got a printable confirmation page and later an email with the same information.
Verification Since the phone companies are all greedy and have in the past “slammed” customers by unilaterally changing their service, verifications are required before customer initiated changes go into effect. I suppose the protection is a good thing, but putting the onus of implementing the protection on the customer is rather insulting.
Calling the provided 800 number to verify and confirm my order request was fruitless. They were unable to find any information regarding my account when provided my phone number. I was told to call back in “a few days.”
Customer Service Further reading of the confirmation email revealed an AT&T customer service number that I called. The automated attendant very helpfully wanted to look up the account for my cell phone (as that was the phone I was using to make the call), and once I entered my home phone number, he offered to give me “new information regarding your recent long distance options changes.” Selecting that option was a dead end; I was given useless information about the number of minutes I had used (zero) and no way back to the initial menu.
After hanging up and calling back I managed to get into the queue for a human being. Ten minutes of cheesy elevator jazz music at an incredibly loud volume, punctuated by advertisements for the AT&T web site, followed. Eventually “Brian” came on the line and wasn’t able to find my order using my phone number. Eventually he discovered it and said that the “Internet orders are slow to process.” He was able to complete the process for me today (the plan will be in effect by 8:00 pm this evening) but along the way he persistently wanted to review my other telecommunications needs (“Did I want to switch to AT&T DSL and save?, et cetera…) By repeatedly saying no I didn’t want to change anything else, I was able to short circuit their process.
At the end of the call he wanted to know how his service was today. I said that his was fine, but that the entire process was demeaning and frustrating. Three days, several phone calls, and more than a dozen attempts to set the service up online do not make for a good customer experience.
For the last year or so my cellphone has been a Sony-Ericsson w600i. Overall I am very pleased with the phone, its features, and its performance. However, about two or three weeks ago it started responding slower and slower to inputs, either from the number pad or the multi-way joystick. It got so bad that I could barely answer the phone; pressing the “answer” button took so long to respond that the call would forward to the voice mail system before the phone answered the call.
Not good.
The solution was to take the battery out and boil the phone in a mixture of olive oil, thyme, orange juice, and salt free butter for ten minutes. Really. Actually just taking the battery out for 5 minutes and then restarting the phone seems to have returned me to normal performance. I’m not sure what caused the slow-down, but I am happy that it is working normally again.
Just over a year ago, on June 12th, I bought a bathroom scale and started tracking my weight. I weighted 250 pounds on any given day, and I wanted to weigh less. A lot less.
I had seen a blog entry about something loosely referred to as the “hacker’s diet.” Not really a diet but rather a system for altering the way you eat. In a sentence you track everything you eat, along with their calories, and use that information to eliminate the excess from your diet. And you add exercise. A simple, eat-less-do-more approach to living.
It was highly successful for me. I’ve lost, and more importantly kept off, 50 pounds of weight. That’s ten 5-pound sacks of potatoes. My weight has been stable between 199 and 204 for a few months now, demonstrating that I have modified my eating habits enough to maintain a weight.
I’d like to loss maybe another 20 pounds and so I need to start tracking what I am eating again, and increase the amount of exercise I get on a weekly basis. Whether I lose another 20 pounds or not, I am very pleased with myself for having the determination to a fifth of my body weight.