That's a very very light cake in the icon there.

Tonight, the "Batman: The Brave and the Bold" animated series is a musical.


The explanation could have been reasonable except that once they're out of the influence of the mind-controlling singing villain, they keep improvising a musical. Except Batman.


And, I want to know who the singers are because they're actually tolerable.


I expect jarodrussell was singing along with "Deathtrap".

Greetings, dear friends.

Thanks to the three-way clusterskcuff of Microsoft Data Centers, Danger-now-owned-by-Microsoft, and T-Mobile pushing a broken firmware update from Danger to all Sidekick phones, I am now the proud owner of an empty brick rather than a useful central device for coordinating my data.

The phone itself has a SIM card (which held an old copy of my contact list as it existed on my phone in 2005) and a big honking SD card I added (which contains music and PLENTY of room for photos, but I didn't have the small number of critical photos on the flash card, and you cannot back up other information to the SD card, because gosh golly their data center will handle all that for us, right?

So sometime last week, they discovered that something was BROKEN at the data center, except, as far as I could tell when I looked, my data was still there on the data center. T-Mobile sent out an urgent, nay, frantic note telling us all that we needed to leave our phones powered on and not under any circumstances to unplug the battery or let it drain all the way.

And, yesterday on my way home, I glanced at my phone and there was the little spinny icon that said the phone was going through its power-up cycle. Which I have only seen when I deliberately power it off (I did not) and when a firmware update PUSH has happened from the network.

Yes. T-Mobile, a week after announcing their collective disaster, was still pushing the broken update.
And my photos, memos, calendar, and contact list (150+, not backed up onto SIM card because it can only be done a single number at a time and I never bothered and it doesn't actually store full data there anyway) was completely gone. I was able to find 20 phone-number-only entries, the rest of it's unreliable or I know it to be obsolete.

So, it's very likely that I no longer have correct information for you.
If you are someone who wants me to have your information, please leave a comment with your name, address, phone numbers, emails, birthdays, favorite color, airspeed of a laden swallow, and any other relevant contact information, and I will put it back on my phone. Which may end up NOT being this lovely SK LX2009 phone since I see no indication that this data is coming back quickly, and I see very little reason to trust their server-centric, backup-inhibited bugware at this point.

Your comments will be screened so only you and I can see them.

Emotional pain index, 2 on the 1-10 scale, equivalent to "if I think about it."
This is below the 4 where I noticed that physical, palpable pain also accompanied the awareness.
It's about the same as the arthritis/gout sensation that I have most of the time.

Recently had a "dream visit" - very calm, very quiet, amazingly undramatic. This was on or around the beginning of October, synchronous to when we had learned that it was quite serious. When I noticed that there was a reality-disconnect, it was fine, I acknowledged that it was a dream and examined for anything significant, at which time actual message came through as words, "I'm still resting and recuperating, that last period was hard. I love you, and you need to take better care of yourself now, OK?"
At which point I woke up, feeling quite peaceful and even joyful.

And typing that out is actually harder than the realization that I was just dreaming.

Felicitations on the anniversary of your natality.

So, I've been put on a low-dose statin (yay, I wondered why that had not been done yet) and on a NIGHT-TIME medium-low dose of humalin-N, and on a morning-only low dose of a longer-acting metformin which should not have the emetic properties of the current high dose. They've also taken me OFF the Januvia.


On the other hand, Costco tried to give me Novolin instead of Humalin, and I had to point out that the pharmacists were QUITE EMPHATIC about Humalin, not Novolin. So I will actually start that tomorrow.

And now, I'm a bit late starting, but time to put on the watch-pat and do a sleep study. Yay.

Yes, according to some definitions of friendship.


There are two ways that I generally stop being friends: loss of contact for prolonged time when the other person is not bothering to attempt to keep contact, or an outright breach of politeness, on my part or theirs, which results in a cessation of engagement.

On the other hand, when someone who is an acquaintance who maintains a social/society friendship, I feel no qualms about reducing my estimation of that relationship to "association" all the way out to "I know this person" and possibly to "this is my dearest enemy, we see each other only to continue to confirm our mutual loathing."

Although thankfully nobody has quite gotten the latter.

A quick rather than a detailed post:

My neurologist insists that most of my confused-sleep issues are probably due to failing to go to sleep at a regular time, and has imposed a 1 AM in-bed curfew, which I blithely ignored over the weekend. He also gave me "nuvigil" as a replacement for the provigil - it's longer acting, at a lower dose, and seems to be keeping me at a tolerable baseline longer. As they're trying to force people onto it and away from provigil, Cephalon (the manufacturer) has not only offered it at 2/3 the price, but is offering a year's worth of coupons to greatly reduce the cost. They also raised the price of Provigil, which they have somehow bribed lied arranged to have the Generic date happen in 2013, rather later than it should have been.

Neurologist also says to resume the practice of 15 minute deliberate naps at the key down points when I start falling asleep, and to stop drinking caffeine in the afternoons, which I choose to interpret as "after 5pm" - and I need to drink more water anyway to help with blood sugars.

My general doctor agreed that if the metformin I take for diabetes is to the point of causing IBS then I want to go off it, but started down the path to some OTHER stuff, before I said "Why can I not simply take appropriate insulin?" ... what is with these guys going down a path based on the assumption that people won't be willing to accept a particular medication? My issues with insulin were addressed last year.
Anyway at that point he had the AHA! reaction, and agreed to it. I will be seeing an Insulin Training And Dosage group on Thursday, which should allow me to get and manage the stuff. I don't think I have any more needles though.
I should inform the folks at United Health that I'm changing both. Otherwise they will do bad things regarding PAYING for the stuff.

I wonder if I can reach them on the phone as it's MUCH easier to manage.

Today (Wednesday, not Thursday) was Penny's fifty-fourth anniversary-of-birth.

I had a very strange dream on waking which I don't clearly remember except that Penny was, for some reason, my doctor, and I had some sort of cardiac thing, and I ended up having all my internal organs removed, and had to wait a while with everything sort-of-not-working in some sort of limbo.

Of course it's all very obvious when I'm awake thinking about it later, but it was simultaneously hilarious and creepy in a black-comedy sort of way while I was stuck in the dream.

Still having major issues with sleep, fatigue, and concentration.
Started a post about all the comedy of medical errors but haven't finished it.

Hope to get it done sometime soon, but it reads a lot like whining, and I'm tired of that too.

"One of the only"


It's "one of the few" or "the only" or perhaps "one of only (quantifier)" ... it's up there just above pronouncing the "T" in "often" - it's silent, people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo

You should watch that.

Got a text message on my cell Saturday afternoon.

Quotha:

VISA@VISA.COM / VISA (Card Blocked Alert). For more information please call 1-877-543-7987. Thank you. /

So, I never signed up for auto-text-messaging of VISA access blocking. Curious, I called the number.

"Welcome to the First Technology Credit Fraud Hotline. Please enter your sixteen digit account number followed by a pound sign." This in the VERY familiar voice of the First Tech Customer Service Robot.

Wait. I called the number they gave me. Last time I had an issue I was given a number to call, and it told ME who I was. I smelled worms. Someone was phishing.

So this morning I called First Tech, got a customer service agent, and told her about it.

She checked my account, using my name, birthdate, and special sekrit password.
"That message did NOT come from us. Did you give them any numbers?"

I said "No, of course not. They're supposed to know who I am."

"You would be surprised how many people will give their number."

I would not be, because this thing had raised my paranoia.

SO. Once again, glad I knew better.

Happy birthday, snobahr!!

Yes, mostly. I love my Dad, but sometimes I don't think much of his opinions, which are sometimes a combination of credulously believing targeted propaganda, and having been raised in an era of casual racism. But he's always been a loving dad.

Mom, I am indeed friends with. There are parts of my life I don't discuss with her, but in general, we're closer than many of my friends are with their parents, and part of this was that she talked to me as a person when I was younger, and that she recognized that even if I was a kid, I had my own feelings and thoughts and that I wasn't stupid. She explained the details of her marriage and divorce from my stepfather without leaving out any unflattering details. She explained the circumstances of my conception and birth when she was still quite young, and frankly that's one reason I did NOT mess around as a teen-ager, and her failure to explain that to my younger brothers may explain some of their too-early fatherhood issues.

http://bakingbites.com/2007/09/car-baked-chocolate-chip-cookies-step-by-step/

Isn't this the sort of thing we're told never to do?


Now I want car cookies.

If I had a spare $250 and nothing to spend it on I might well go here just because the guy does COOL WORK.

After the morning and afternoon programming at ArgFest-O-Con 2009 we had the Fest Quest. This comprised a set of four or five teams of people given a set of instructions encoded in puzzles, leading to different places.

For my team I was the "local guy" who could confirm or deny stuff.

We walked our asses off in 88+ weather in downtown portland.
First to the Alder Hotel, then to the Elk statue, then the smallest park in the world, then to the mast of the Arizona, then to the Skidmore fountain, then to Backspace Coffee, and there we apparently found our kidnap victim and exchanged him COMPLETELY failed to get back to our victim before it was too late to exchange him for pictures of the lot of us acting like utter goofs at each site.

I have borderline heat-stroke and am drinking a strong, very bitter coffee of doom.

I greatly fear the walk back to the hotel. It's now 6:18. ITALIAN FOOD starts sometime after 7pm.

( And there was MORE! The 2009 Fest Quest )

So there'll be more to come later for reflections about this ARG thing. But it was really a different and tremendously intriguing concept, and I did get an evil moustache for asking the last evil question of the morning meetings.

you old whippersnappers!!

So. On my 13th birthday, I got what I considered to be the best possible birthday gift.
We went to the moon. For real. They launched July 16, 1969 at 13:32 UTC (9:32 a.m. local time) which was 7:32AM for me. I got up early for this.

So when I was four years old, my Dad got me a bicycle, a nifty little slightly-too-large-for-four-year-old bike from Firestone, I think it came with a set of tires. It was very cool. It had streamers on the handles, training wheels, I was able to ride it everywhere (that I was allowed to go).
Naturally given that my folks had split up and I spent half the year with one, half with the other, it vanished at some point. (Most of first grade was in Polson, but before the year was out, I was sent to live with my dad.)
The bicycle reappeared, at the new place, but was promptly "reassigned" to my stepbrother by my stepmother - she seemed to have a knack for knowing when I liked something so that it needed to be taken away and given to one of her kids, whether they wanted it or not. And then when we moved, it had pretty much vanished, reappeared for a while before 5th grade when I moved out to stay with my Mom for the summer, then vanished again when I was back with my dad, and no idea where it ended up. So, here it was, returned, but it had been converted to a Sting-Ray style, which was completely amazing and awesome. It was also a bit too small for me by the end of the summer, but, Sting-ray!! Complete with the dangerous and wonderful impale-o-matic stick shift!

That was a great birthday. I was a teenager, and we went to the moon.