Plague!

So the lovely lass was down with a nasty and persistent cold week before last. I managed to be in her presence the entire time without catching nary sniffle.

Last night however, at the aches and pains of 8 hours of cleaning the old house (I moved BTW) had faded into an ibuprofen supported stupor I realized a small little detail.

My throat hurt.

Within the hour it had developed into fever, joint ache, occasional nagging cough, BIG sore throat, and a headache ibuprofen wouldn't touch.


I had the plague!

So instead of doing our weekly gaming, which had been on hold for the duration of the move, I am awake far earlier the I would like and sitting here feeling my eyes dry out from the harsh light of the wicked day star.


Going back to bed now...

For Ook

For those of you who knew and loved Bill, which if you knew him generally you couldn't help but love him, it will come as no surprise that our last conversation was about ass-less chaps.

And Sushi.

But mostly the chaps. The details of why aren't important (it had to do with leather gadget covers you pervs) but the important thing is Bill's indomitable ability to amuse, entertain, and connect with you.

He was my confidant, my brother-in-heart, and most importantly my friend.

It's hard envisioning a day without his snark and his good humor.

Harder still to say goodbye.

I will sit here, with this fine bottle of spirits (which he would have loved: Rum + Horchata = Rumchata!!!) and focus on the things that made him such a brilliant part of our lives, and not the dark spot left behind by his loss.

So this one is for you, and when next we meet the Sushi is on me. (But only if you wear the chaps like you promised.)

A Clarification post.

The Girl mentioned in my blog post is *not* the same girl mentioned in posts say.. prior to last year.

They are in fact different in almost every respect.

This post was not published with the current girl standing over me with a cudgel...

:P

This space *not* Intentionally left blank.

It was my intention to write here more frequently, but I find myself more often then not staring at this white space waiting for inspiration.

It's not that my life is empty, there is a lot happening. I just wonder of how much of it worth putting down on paper.

For example, I still love my new job. But a lot of my day is spent digging into the innards of OpenPGP workings, user profile management, and redundant fallback procedures for fault tolerant servers. It hardly makes for heady reading.

He brandished the mighty scroll wheel, and rolled his cursor down to the next line. His breath caught. "Certificate services are denied in non-standard port settings! How can this be?" he cried in alarm.

*Ahem* I think we will spare you all that.

I suppose the one thing of note is I will be doing a sweep of the eastern 1/2 of the state next week with new equipment installs interspersed between 17.5 hours of driving in 4 days. Thoughts of this trip are mixture of excitement and dread. On the one hand, I will be seeing parts of Montana I have not visited and meeting new people, on the other hand... 17.5 hours of driving mixed with equipment installs.

If nothing goes wrong I will have ~ 2 hours to set up each site. Any longer and the time table goes out the window. Things always go wrong... so...

Weather has been... exciting, with 50 degree days followed by 6 inches of snow and 20 degree nights. I almost took my snow tires off for this trip. I'm glad I didn't. I may wait until July at this rate.

However, the early warmth has caused the Woolly Mamot.... err dog to start her shed a bit early. It's fair to say that there will be mountains of dog hair over the next few weeks. She is in otherwise good spirits, though the regular walks she goes on with the Girl have shown just how out of shape she is now that she doesn't have a 1 acre yard to cavort in every day.

I suppose the other thing of note is that I have officially hit the 1/2 point in 3rd Brown. I have learned 1/2 the techniques and 1 of the two kata. I suppose I should add a big "In theory" in the front of that. The first Kata (who's name I never remember) is at least as hard as the Green belt one (Chinese Hands) that kicked my butt.

Which reminds me... need to practice it more tonight... *sigh*

7 things...

So I didn't have the honor of being nominated as being super-stylish but I did try and come up with 7 things that you might not know, be of interest and don;t violate some of the basic privacy rules I follow for posting on the interwebs.

So without further ado...

7. I read a lot and fast too. Depending on the day and the book I will read 100 pages an hour. Though really that is with a subject I am familiar with, has me engrossed and barring distractions. My daily rate is usually much less, but it is not uncommon for me to read a 300 page book in less then 24 hours of doing other stuff too.

6. I am supertaster. I wish that meant that I was better in some way. What it actually means is certain compounds and food taste awful to me. Notably cilantro tastes like soap. Though recent research shows that I may hate cilantro for a completely different reason as the alkaloid compounds supertasters taste aren't even in there.

5. In spite of being a renaissance man in many areas (painting, metal smithing, computers, martial arts) I am complete failure as a musician. Whether it is just a lack of willingness to practice an instrument or a fundamental lack of... something on my part who knows. In any case I really don't play any instrument with any level of competency. Although I can pick out ode to joy an almost any instrument after few minutes.

4. I prefer crisp Fall days and barely warm Spring rains over Winter or Summer. really... if we could do entirely without Summer...

3. There has never really been a dog less then ~50 lbs in my life, and usually they are much much bigger. Something about yap...err lap dog's voices just sets my teeth on edge. The smallest dog I would ever consider ever having is a Scottish terrier. After all they are really medium sized dogs with small dog legs. They are like the Dwarves of the dog world (as a friend once described them.) Give them and axer and horned helmet and they are good to go.

2. I love crepes. Sourdough crepes may in fact be my favorite food ever. I am going to have crepes for lunch at the newly opened French cafe down the road. Assuming my lunch date ever shows.

1. I was born in a southern State where tabbacco is picked, but grew up in the wild north. Since the name of the blog gives it away, I feel confident that you know it is Alaska. I have never been back to said birth state... and really don't feel any particular pull to do so.

Dog + Snow.

Hullo Interwebs...

This is not quite how I envisioned my return to the endless sea of electrons, but here it is.

Some minor updates, as you can consider this a post to get the old brain pumping as I get back in the swing of things.

First, my nickname for the next couple of weeks is "Pinky" although there was some discussion of making it Lefty. I have managed to remove the tip of one of my fingers. Again. Some of you may have recalled this happened with frightening regularity previously because sleep deprivation + exacto blades are a poor mix.

The upshot of this is discovered my lovely lass handles herself in a crises when there is blood involved with aplomb and alacrity. I've never had a better assistant while self ministering.

Second, dog is fine and hasn't jumped out any windows or other heroically stupid acts. Still moderately gassy, though after year with out pig ear treats both volume and potency have decreased dramatically.

Third, I received my Green belt in Kenpo. This means I am technically qualified to teach everything up-to and including Green. 3rd brown is going fast, and most of the 2nd brown techniques I learned in the Green belt kata, so these next two belts should be over and done with soon. I also have 4 ladies who would like to start official Kenpo lessons, but I have to find a place. All the dance studios and gyms I have contacted rent out at either what my hourly rate would be, or more... so I would break even or lose money renting from them.

Fourth, school is on hold. At least until next fall. More on that later.

Fifth, I got a great computer job in the mean time, started about a month and a half ago. Good pay, great location, and a great group of people to work with. It's a six month contract, but may turn into a permanent position. One that may include the flexibility to continue with school, with a guaranteed paycheck.

That's all for now, all this typing is making my finger hurt.

A technological breakthrough...

I love books.

The poor saps dear friends who have helped me move my library can attest to this.

Much as I love books, I am perfectly happy with the idea of all my books being digitized, and readable on a device. If anyone want to buy my a iPad, Nook, or Kindle I will be more then happy to use them. I'm actually excited about the new android tablets on the horizon... and you'll soon read why...

I spent weeks converting books to .LIT format to read them on my old Dell PDA.

However, it died and there was much sadness.

Then came my iPod touch. I was excited. The app Stanza produced clear readable text, and I could store hundreds of books. All that I had to do was get them on.

Where I firmly got bitch-slapped by Apple. You see, Apple doesn't want you actually having access to the storage of the app*. So the only way to get my fairly massive e-book library on was to install Calibre on my desktop point it at the e-book library, share the folder holding the e-books without password protection on the network, connect the iPod touch to said network and instruct Stanza to go there and get them.

It never worked.

Months... nay years of me intermittently trying new things, new settings, new routers ended in failure. As someone who makes their living solving technological problems it was pretty disheartening. I was reduced to downloading books from a pirate Stanza server. This worked... but the site had a lot of things I carried nothing about and not enough of the books I wanted to read which I owned legitimate electronic copies of.

Then came the Droid.

Want to access the device? Not a problem, plug it in with a USB cable and you can copy to it to your hearts content. The Android OS is open. Access is allowed. It isn't a walled garden. This BTW also makes it stupidly easy to backup my photos and videos off the phone.

Sure Stanza isn't available on the Android OS (Amazon bought Stanza shortly after I discovered it...) and I don't like Aldiko as much... but you know what? I don't care.

I just converted (with Calibre) three books in the series I am reading to the format Aldiko wanted, and copied them over. In less then 20 minutes from when I thought... "I wonder if..."

It'd have taken even less time but I am a teensy bit OCD about proper meta-data so I cleaned up the files before conversion.

Is my phone the ideal platform? No. But if it was this easy to do... imagine what the crop of Android tablets coming out will be like...

The future it is a little brighter today.

*Yes I could Jailbreak my iTouch... and I tried... every time I tried it very nearly bricked... only hard rest to factory defaults and original firmware made it unbrick.

A day without rain...

Is apparently a day with snow.

Yes it snowed here this morning. Didn't stick... but still.

Nonetheless it had cleared up enough this afternoon that I snapped a pic of the front of the house.


I am also making progress, albeit slowly, with unpacking. I had planned on alphabetizing these as I put them up and realized is was better for my sanity to get the boxes out of my office and books on shelves then to have them organized...

Moving is no fun.

We (the roommates) opted not to rent a uhaul, and I think it was huge mistake.



Instead a day of crappy moving, it was stretched out over several days, with intermittant monsoons, with the order of things being determined by whose car it would fit in. (We had a small truck, my small suv and a Jetta.) The truck owning (now ex) roommate was ridiculously helpful. Like above and beyond the call of duty both in terms of availability and the amount of work he did. He was a roommate for 2 months and hauled more crap and cleaned more of the house then the rest of us.

*Edit* I forgot to mention that in this week, essentially doing noting but moving I put ~200 miles on my car. Which means I made about 20 trips back and forth, as it's 10 miles round trip.

But we are moved, the old house is immaculately clean, the new house looks like a furniture bomb went off in it and the garage is completely totally packed solid.

In other news, I have home inventory software on my Droid that uses a 3rd party barcode scanner software. Only after buying it did I discover that both of them didn't really work on the droid. Until this week. Both of them pushed out a patch and they are working wonderfully.

Which means I can inventory my books, and have that inventory with me... so I don't buy duplicates of books I already have. It's not a common occurrence, but irritating nonetheless.

And on that note I have been moving and cleaning for too long and I'm going to sleep now.