Snap Shots, those popup windows that give a preview of the target page of a link, are to my thinking highly annoying. You can turn the feature off by visiting their FAQ and finding the link that leaves a cookie on your machine to disable the feature on any pages you visit. Unfortunately, if you clear your cookies, you get the blasted preview windows again.
I can never remember where the FAQ link is at, so I am putting it here on my site for future reference.
For the past three days Sibylle has had the good fortune to attend a piano master class at a nearby university. The presenter, head of the Yale Piano department, spent an hour with each student, listening to their piece and then helping them to mold it, or improve it in some way. Some of the suggestions are subtle, mere nuances in the sound. Others are more profound reinterpretations of the music. With three students each afternoon, anyone who attended got to partake in nine hours of world class piano theory, practice, and technique.
What is interesting to me is the utter lack of a parallel to the music master class in the programming world. It wouldn’t be hard to accomplish; rent a room with a large screen, bring a laptop or three loaded with virtualization software, and one at a time have participants load up their development environment and walk the group through their project. The moderator would then ask questions about the choices, obvious or hidden, in the code base. The group could chime in with thoughts and ideas of their own. Not a code review as conducted by some shops, but a code sharing among interested parties.
A code review, in my mind, while a valuable exercises that all programming shops should employ, is at best a group check that the code nearing completion isn’t egregiously out of line with the local standards and expectations. The feedback is internal to the shop, and may have folded into it politics, business constraints, or other artificial factors. A code master class would have some theme (optimization, or refactoring, or human factors, et cetera) and the presenters would be asked to bring examples that fit the theme. The feedback from the master presenter wouldn’t be limited to the needs of an individual shop or group. Without the constraints of the local shop arbitrarily limiting the discussion, I think a master class setting would help all participants to increase their knowledge in a more collegial manner.
Unfortunately there is an air of ego that swirls around programming; it is hard to offer up your code for critique by another, much less in front of a group. However, watching Professor Berman coax, coach, and enlighten already accomplished, indeed virtuoso, pianists to find new layers in their music has me convinced that all of us in the technical realm could benefit from the same kind of master class approach to learning.
Having grown up listening to The Beatles I am hugely pleased by the “McCartney reported inks deal with Apple” headline over at Ars Technica. No time frame yet of when the catalog will appear on iTunes, but I would suspect this will make a great “one more thing” bit at this years WWDC.
Last evening Sibylle and I attended a piano recital at Park University in Parkville, Missouri. The recital was part of a three-day piano festival that the university’s International School of Music is hosting this week. Sibylle had spent the afternoon attending a piano master class, and after dinner out, we returned to the campus for the recital.
Four incredibly talented students perform works by Liszt, Chopin, Haydn, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Grieg, Debussy, Rachmaninov and Brahms. Even to my relatively untrained ears the pieces performed were incredibly difficult; seeing them performed by virtuosos was outstanding.
Since I arrived in time for the tail end of the afternoon master class, I was aware that the piano being used was brand new; it had been delivered just that day for the music school to demo before completing its purchase. In a flight of fancy during one of the pieces I had this chain of thoughts:
Imagine the piano factory late at night, the cluster of completed pianos nervously talking amongst themselves about where they will end up. “What if they never tune me?” laments one. “Will I only be used to prop up family pictures and be used to (badly) play Christmas songs?” wonders another. The third says, “I’ve been sold already. I’m going to a chapel in Missouri. Nothing but hymns in my future.”
Imagine that piano’s delight when instead of Christmas carols or hymns being played, that Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody is played, or Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre is coaxed from its strings and keys.
Yesterday Nekko had a visit to the vet to get one of her annual vaccinations and to have a blood glucose curve test completed to measure the effectiveness of her current insulin treatments.
Her blood glucose curve was very good. I gave her a shot of insulin at 8 am, just before we took her to the vet’s office. Her initial blood glucose (BG) was 125. Over the course of the day it went up to 140 and stayed there, which is exactly what it should do. A reading of 100-120 is normal. Anything below 100 is dangerous. In the case of an 11-year old cat, anything under 200 is good, so she is doing very well.
We have noticed an increased amount of urine output and increase water intake. Since her BG is normal the doctor felt that the increase drinking and urination could be a sign of kidney disease or failure. At our prompting they did a quick blood test and urine analysis. All of her blood values are normal except for the amount of glucose, which was 215. Given that we were 9 or 10 hours into the insulin cycle he wasn’t concerned with that value. He also observed an increased amount of glucose in her urine. The doctor explained that if she hadn’t urinated in a while that the concentration of glucose would be higher.
There is slight evidence of infection (raised amounts of protein and something else in her urine), possibly in her bladder, which the doctor said is common with diabetic cats. The test is subjective (matching colors on a test strip to a graph) and he didn’t seem overly concerned by the infection.
We had three options: wait a week and test again, liquid antibiotic, or tablet antibiotic. Nekko is not a pick-up-and-hold-me kind of cat. Trying to give her an oral medication would be trying for all involved; worse it would make subsequent injections harder to complete as she would start avoiding contact at all.
When we explained to the doctor her reluctance to be handled he offered that he could provide the antibiotic in an injectable form - subcutaneous - just like the insulin. We opted to wait a week, watch Nekko for increased signs of lethargy. We’ll do another quick blood test then and if the infection indications are still present we’ll go the injectable antibiotic route.
We asked him about her occasional inability to complete a short jump up onto the bed. He said that neuropathy (disease or dysfunction of one or more peripheral nerves, typically causing numbness or weakness) is common in diabetes. This might also explain an episode earlier where she chewed or licked off most of the fur on her forelegs.
The firmness of her belly is not unusual or anything to be concerned with he said. Cats store fat in that area and it can often feel quite hard. Her weight was 14.6 pounds, up from 11 fifteen months ago, and a low of 10 when she was first diagnosed in September 2006.
All in all she is in very good shape for a cat who is about to be 12 in May, who has diabetes.
Sibylle and I have joined a local gym. The mother of one of her students remarked about how much she enjoyed her fitness club, which got Sibylle to looking at our options. We went and visited the Prairie Life Center nearest us one Friday evening about a month ago, and had a tour.
The facility was nicely spacious and very low key. The manager who walked us around was also very low key, no hard sell at all. We were given three guest passes and used them over the next week to come in and try things out on our own.
We were able to sample a yoga class, use the weight machines, the treadmills, elliptical walkers, rowing machines, and the walking/running track. We also tried out the whirlpool and sauna in the locker rooms. At the end of the third visit we were both sold, and so at the start of our fourth visit we signed up for the monthly membership.
Since then we have gone at least once or twice every week. Our routine is starting to be established and it feels good. We start with some laps on the track - to warm up. A run through the weight machines is typically next, followed by some treadmill work for Sibylle and a little rowing machine action for me. I try to complete the stretching exercises required for my lower back in the stretching area, on those days we are there, and then we might walk another few laps to warm down. Last, but certainly not least, is a sauna or whirlpool and a shower.
Our workouts are unstructured in terms of when we go, or how long we stay. If there is a group class in pilates or yoga when we are there we may or may not join in. We’ve both talked about trying one of the water based exercise classes but so far haven’t committed to that yet. By letting ourselves approach our workouts in an unstructured manner we both have a positive feeling about them. Going and working out is time shared, and something we look forward to, rather than a chore that must be accomplished in order to feel good.
The last time I belonged to a club I obsessively tracked the repetitions and sets I completed, and the total weight lifted for each workout. In order to not take time from the rest of my day I was getting up at 5:30 and working out before going to work. While that gym experience ended when I hurt my leg in kendo (which eventually contributed to my lower back issues), I think the regimen wouldn’t have lasted; simply because I was making it about work and not about play.
The uncomplicated manner in which Sibylle and I are approaching the gym now, feels much freer and more rewarding than a rigid schedule with objectives and goals. Perhaps we might see more benefits sooner from a more structured approach to our gym time, but I think we will gain in the long run with our unstructured, but fun, approach. As long as it is fun we are more apt to stick to it.
I’ve made some updates to my resume, it now looks like the paper one (more or less). Go have a look, and feel free to pass on any comments or suggestions.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “barackobama.png” }} followers. Still, I’d like to think that he was involved in the process somewhere, if only to give verbal approval that the message be sent.
Even so, it’s pretty cool to get a growl notification of a new tweet and have it be one from a Presidential candidate.
Today, Sibylle and I traveled to Manhattan KS to participate in and watch the 2008 Manhattan Area Music Teachers Association Concerto Competition. Students competed in four age categories by performing concertos accompanied on a second piano by their teacher, who played the piano reduction of the orchestral accompaniment for the various pieces.
The adjudicator has four award choices for each category: no award, Honorable Mention, Second Place, or First Place. She or he may also award a tie or, and this is the interesting part, they may choose not to reward any performance.
In America most contests or competitions are geared towards finding the winner. In today’s competition the students weren’t competing against each other, they were offering up their performance for evaluation against criteria such as: ensemble, note accuracy, rhythm, tempo, technique, style interpretation, poise, and choice of literature. Each performance is evaluated individually against these criteria, and not against the other performances. Therefore it is quite possible for a category to produce only Honorable Mentions and no placing at all.
Today there was a category that produced only Honorable Mentions, no First or Second place awarded. With so much focus in America culture on winning, or being the best, I think we some times lose sight critiquing against a standard and not just determining who was better. Was one of the performances in the category in question “better” than the other? Perhaps, but neither was up to the standard of a First or even a Second place performance.
In my experience I think the only place where I have been regularly critiqued against a standard and not against my peers is in job evaluations. With just a single source, then, of individual performance based evaluations, I am not as comfortable with this form of learning as I could be. And I suspect that my managers who, although they perform this activity for their direct reports on a regular basis, aren’t as comfortable with it either.
When I was competing in martial arts we had a saying, the gist of which was, “just because you won today doesn’t mean you would have won yesterday, or will win tomorrow.” In other words, winning, being first, is a temporal event. The winner was the winner on that day, under those conditions. It may or may not be a repeatable event. (The recent Superbowl loss of the New England Patriots comes to mind.) However, an objective evaluation of your performance against a standard gives you excellent chance to grow, particularly if the adjudicator is capable of writing lucid comments and suggestions for areas of improvement.
We need more standards based evaluations and less winner/loser evaluations, I think, in order to mature as a society. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with keeping score and deciding a winner, however I think we would all benefit from more emphasis on standards based critiques. As today’s performances demonstrated, just because one performance is “better” than the other doesn’t mean it was good enough to be first.
After a week of wearing trifocals I have come to some conclusions.
They are better than progressive lenses for me. The blurred, fun-house-mirror effect the progressive lenses had is not present at all with trifocals. This isn’t to say that there isn’t some adjustment required. When I got my first set of bifocals in May 2003, I experienced some adjustment. At that time I remarked,
The worst part, so far, is finding a new head position for things. It seems like the line between short and far is always getting in the way…. I would agree with that earlier incarnation of me, and add that having two lines in one’s field of view is even more distracting. That my posting from five years ago echos some of my thoughts today, comforts me. Especially in light of my memory of bifocals. I remembered them fondly (if one can think of glasses fondly). With some time and patience I think the lines on these lenses will disappear too.
Having three focal ranges is nice, extra lines notwithstanding. I can read the syringe markings for Nekko insulin clearly and easily for the first time. Reading in bed is enjoyable once more. I can print documents at work two-to-a-page, and read the result. The intermediate range works fairly well for my desktop workstation at work. I can see the text clearly again. The height of the intermediate range isn’t quite tall enough to see the entire screen without tilting my head a bit. This makes me aware of the lines above and below that portion of the lens. Hopefully my conscious awareness of those lines will fade over time. There is even some added sharpness at distance, although it is slight enough that I can get by without my glasses for activities like driving.
Several years ago I tried a pair of lenses that had anti-glare coating on both sides. At the time I cleaned my glasses rather haphazardly, usually with the pad of my finger to brush away the large bits of debris on the lens. This fingertip cleaning method caused huge smears and smudges on the glare coating. I took the glasses back and had the coating removed. I was offered glare coating again with these glasses and turned them down, remember my earlier experience.
Now that I’ve had the glasses for a week I wonder if the glare coating will help to minimize my awareness of the lines between the different focal areas. I have only touched the lenses once or twice so far, in an attempt to learn to use the little micro-fiber cloth instead. If I can learn this habit I will opt for the anti-glare coating on my next lenses.
To sum up my experience so far, if you can’t abide the blurry effects of progressive lenses, go for the trifocals. I think you like them.