When she was first diagnosed with diabetes last September, Nekko started getting two units of insulin twice a day (every twelve hours). Attempts to get her blood glucose level checked failed twice so it wasn’t until late February that we finally got a measurement of her blood sugar (glucose) level.
At 335 it was high, but not extremely so for a cat. The doctor said he’d like to see it lower, but given her age, and the relative difficulty in controlling feline blood glucose levels through injections, he said 335 wasn’t bad. At that time he upped her dosage from two units to three.
It occurred to me as I was preparing the first syringe with three units that this was a 50% increase in insulin. Not, perhaps a lot in terms of volume, but a major increase in daily availability. Almost immediately we noticed an increased activity level in Nekko, and a decrease (perhaps) in urine output and water consumption.
Just a couple of weeks ago, while we were out of town again, Nekko had a second blood glucose test, this time in the 280 range. Still high, but headed in the right direction. Again I was asked to increase her dosage a unit, up to four given twice daily at twelve hour intervals. While it has only been a few days since the dosage was increased we are again seeing an improvement in her activity level, and it seems to me that her drinking is back to normal, and consequently her urine output is more normal as well.
I am pleased that the insulin injections are working, and more pleased that I have learned how to coax my timid cat into accepting them twice daily. It has been supremely frustrating at time, and has impacted our daily lives, but it has been ultimately rewarding. Nekko is happy and healthy again; playful and alive once more.
One of the networking sites I participate in works on the six degrees of separation concept. You contact people you know and add them to your network; they in turn contact their acquaintances, who in turn contact their. The number of people you know plus their contacts, and the third generation of contacts is a surprisingly big number. With only 37 contacts on my list I have a total network size of 1.3 million people.
While I haven’t fully leveraged the site or the potential of all those contacts, I do keep my profile there up-to-date. The old adage about it not always being what you know, but who you know is firmly in mind here. The site provides for introductions between you and your contact’s contacts as well as a job search feature allowing you to locate potential employment opportunities at the companies where these friends of friends work.
Recently I have gotten a couple of “cold call” emails from people I’ve never heard of at my work email address. Both are recruiters who are looking to work with me, and both were found on the fringes of my 3rd generation network. What is obvious to me is that they are trolling the network from their end and guessing at email addresses. I say guessing since my work email address hasn’t been given to anyone, least of all the networking site.
On the surface it should be okay to get emails from people you don’t know but who have something (potentially) of interest to you. However, I find that I am put off by their method. What is the point of the introduction system on the site (the introduction being conducted by someone you know, through someone they know) if over-eager achievers are going to do an end run around the process? The orderly, programmer in me wants to retaliate via the network’s customer support service, and an email to their employing agency. The pragmatic, you get more bees with honey than vinegar part of me says to politely respond asking that they use the established mechanism for an introduction.
I’ll probably just ignore them, Few of these cold call initiated recruiting relationships ever bear fruit anyway.
I used to eat these things as a way around waiting for a “grill order” when I wanted a quarter pounder without all the usual toppings.
Excuse me while I McHurl.
Recently I talked about the shift in direction at my current engagement from a major redesign effort utilizing Java and Eclipse plug-ins with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to refactoring and enhancing the existing COBOL applications. I have nothing against COBOL and JCL - I used them for nearly a decade when I first started out as a programmer. When people ask me what I do for a living my first reaction is to say, “I’m a programmer.”
So I’m not putting down COBOL or the people who make their living developing in that environment. For all their flash and appeal, the Java/Ruby/C#/HTML development environments so popular today can’t quite match the mystique of JES spools, IEFBR14, and IDCAMS. It’s just not what I want to do in my career any more. I’ve always been driven by learning something new, exploring what a new platform or tool will do for me. I’m happiest when I have new software to play with and incorporate into my daily working life.
Still, I have enjoyed the nostalgia trip the past couple of weeks, trying to remember various tidbits from my roots as a programmer. That I immediately remembered, upon opening a program listing in ISPF, that F8 would scroll down and F7 up, pleased me. They may be old and rusty, but the skills that once served me well are still in my toolbox.
With all of that in mind, I went to my storage locker first thing this morning (big, empty, creepy in a 6 am rainstorm) and dug out several dusty texts to bring to work. Such classics as System 370/390 JCL and The Programmer’s ANSI COBOL Reference Manual.
Now all I need is a radio station playing rock-n-roll from the 1980s and I’ll be right at home. Oh. Wait. Rock-n-roll from the 1980s is all classic rock stations play. Bitchin'.
While out and about on Sunday afternoon I managed to run over a can of spray paint laying in the road. The paint is in the red family of colors. I know this as my car has a surprising amount of paint on it now.
From looking at the car I can tell that the passenger-side rear tire went over the can - it has the most paint. The quarter panel behind the rear tire on that side has some paint down low, where the body panel curves under the car. The rear of the car has the most paint, surprisingly enough. Once I hit the can (I swerved, but not enough it seems) it exploded and started spinning while spewing paint. The view in the rear view mirror was of the can spinning and spraying paint.
Immediately after hitting the can I went to a car wash and washed the car. By this time is was dusk and against the black paint of the car the dark red flecks of spray paint weren’t really visible. In the sunlight yesterday I could finally see the coverage, especially on the rear of the car. Running my fingers over the painted areas I can feel the texture of the spray paint, so I am hoping that it is just on the clear coat and could be buffed off. Of course, if the buffing causes the spray paint to scratch the underlying body color the entire car could end up needing new paint.
Between taxes and some other planned expenses this year I really don’t have enough money to afford repainting the entire car. And I am not looking forward to spending time on the phone and schlepping around town to get estimates and advice on repairing the finish from the Lexus dealer and body shops.
As for the asshat who tossed a can of spray paint out on the road, well…. Let’s just say that I hope that what goes around comes around in this case.
In the winter of 1979 I talked my way into a community college course on COBOL. At the time I was a senior in high school and, having had the Basic programming course the high school offered I was hungry for more. The father of one of my friends was teaching a course in COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) and when I learned of it I was ready to go.
After four years of college I started work as a programmer working in COBOL. From 1983 until 1992 I was a COBOL programmer. I worked on IMS and CICS applications. I developed new programs and maintained a mountain of legacy code. With the appearance of 4th generation languages (4GL) such as Powerbuilder I saw that the IT industry was going to shift away from mainframe based solutions and incorporate the PC platform. I made the paradigm shift to Powerbuilder, and transitioned away from COBOL.
Later in the decade I shifted from Powerbuilder to Forte, an object oriented distributed application platform. This second paradigm shift was critical to my career’s continued success. Object oriented development, especially in the Java realm, was taking the IT world by storm. When Sun Microsystems purchased Forte the hand-writing was on the wall - time for another paradigm shift. In the past few years I have re-tooled myself with Java and all its associated baggage.
Each of these shifts was deliberate and calculated. There are many trajectories a career in information technology can take; I wanted mine to move towards architecture (what used to be called analysis) and the best architecture positions seem to follow the prevailing development technology. For the past ten years the dominate development language has been Java.
I have been pleased with my ability to keep up with the ever changing technology landscape. Determination, some skill, and a lot of hard work has kept me moving forward, adding new valuable skills to my resume. Recently I switched jobs as I had found a position that I felt would continue my path towards enterprise architecture. Imagine then, my upset at having the project I joined halted, canceled, so that aging COBOL based applications and systems could be documented and patched. Fifteen years after making the conscious, deliberate decision to leave COBOL and strike out with new, unknown technologies, I find myself mired in COBOL once again.
The trajectory of my career has at the least flattened out, and at worse taken a bit of a nose dive.
After reading about the Web 2.0 version of Sun’s Petstore application, I downloaded it to see for myself. At the end of the software license agreement was this line: You acknowledge that this software is not designed, licensed or intended for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility.
Okay. Not a problem.
Over the weekend we took a short hike in the Konza Prairie Biologic Station located just outside of Manhattan Kansas. This prairie restoration project is vast, and only a portion is open to the public. Hiking there gives one a new appreciation for the incredible distances contained within the American prairie. Our two and a half mile hike was just a fraction of the distances covered by American settlers headed west in the late 1800s.