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Weekend

Saturday was the last day of our recuperation. Now Liz and I both
feel much more up-to-snuff. On Saturday morning we went to visit the
new Jordan’s in Reading. To say that Jordan’s is a furniture store is
like saying the USS John F Kennedy aircraft carrier is a boat.

Well, YES technically its a furniture store, but its also got a trapeze school in the lobby! There’s a Richardson’s Ice Cream shop
and a Liquid Fireworks water fountain display every 30 minutes. The
theme of this store is “Beantown”. This means everything is covered in
jelly beans. I think I read somewhere that there were six million jelly
beans. Wally the Green Monster is there — he’s captured a life-sized
Yankee baseball player in his mitt and his mechanical arm keeps feeding
the player to Wally’s mouth. In the Boston Public Garden is a wonderful
statue of George Washington on his horse. In Jordan’s there’s a statue
(made of jelly beans) depicting Elliott and Barry on the same horse.

Additionally Liz and I both like the furniture they sell. Its all of
a uniformally high quality and you can find almost anything you need.
Their prices aren’t low but they’re not unreasonable either.

We ate lunch at a great luncheonette in the store. They had a menu
that looked like it started off as a standard greasy-spoon menu, but
metamorphosed in to something influenced by Thai and California
cuisine. They have large booths and we enjoyed it thoroughly.

Today we’re trying to take it easy until tonight when we go trick or
treating. We also have to attend our friend Parris’ Halloween party.
We’re not sure how long we’ll stay but we’ll visit for a while.

This morning I got a good deal on a one-shot coffee maker. Its
Melita’s One:One and it makes decent coffee and tea. The deal was that
if we spent $45 on the giant coffee/tea sampler JCPenny would throw in
the coffee maker for free. They said it was normally $65. I thought it
was a pretty good deal so we got a red one.

Its red. How gorgeous is that? Anyway, I always feel lousy about
wasting so much coffee because I only drink a couple of cups out of a
pot. This will be better. Liz will also be able to offer guests coffee
or tea. She likes it too. She doesn’t normally drink coffee or tea but
she might enjoy the iced tea it can make.

More on Halloween later.

And I’ve tried Doom 3 — holy mackerel what a terrifying game!!

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As much lesbianism as lesbians want to create in the world

HAHA!

Rogers Cadenhead is a developer and author for much of his time, but
he also came across this very funny exchange on Scarborough Country
regarding “scurilous lesbians”. Check it out

http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/entry/2004/10/27.html#2364

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Still Sick.

Can you believe it? Me niether. I’m still sick. But at least now I’m sick at work! I’m hoping to soon be healthy and at work. I’m still very tired. My voice is shot and I have a terrible cough. My neighbors are thrilled about the cough. Actually I’m doing a good job of controlling the cough.

My throat gets irritated quickly if I speak, so I’m trying not to talk today. This makes negotiating with the painter tricky. And it makes my job tricky.

All that’s peanuts though! Liz took Grace to “dance” class today and I guess she must have been feeling lousy too. She’s normally thrilled to be skipping merrily around the room and she frequently breaks in to dance at home too. But today she just sat down with her hands over eyes and cried.

HOW SAD!

I can’t even imagine that! I was shocked to hear such an awful description of such a giddy little girl. Liz took her home of course. But when Liz got home there was a message from the school nurse saying that Ben was complaining of pain in his ear and the nurse thought he might have an ear infection!

Lo, another tradgedy! Liz hustled off and got him from the school nurse and his pediatrcian agreed to see him right away. He was able to confirm that Ben had infections in BOTH ears!

I know all this because while this was happening the painters returned to finish up their work but couldn’t get to their paint, which was locked up in the store room.

And Liz feels lousy, too.

When it rains it pours.

Thank god the sox are winning!

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Sportsbetting.com

Sportsbetting.com has the Red Sox as the underdogs tonight:

  • RedSox(Boston)Lowe +129

  • Cardinals(StLouis)Marquis -139

So, if I put down $100 on the Red Sox to win I’ll get $129 if they actually do it.

Alternatively if I put down $139 on St.Louis to win I’ll get $100 if they pull it off.

My trouble with these web sites is that I can’t ever get my credit card accepted there because the credit card companies have all stopped servicing web-based gambling.  I tried to find a site that they liked but I was unable to find such a place.

So if i want to place a bet I’ll have to call these people on the phone and load up my account from my credit card and somehow I don’t want to do that.

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Comparators, Potentiometers and Photocells, oh my!

You might not know it from my Blog but I am continuing to slowly work on my Robot.  I haven’t done much with it for the last few months and I’m sure Liz is figuring that the whole robot-thing was a passing phase.  She may be right, but I haven’t finished passing it yet!

I was at a point where I needed some more parts, so I finally ordered those from Jameco a couple of days ago.  They priority mailed me a grab-bag of potentiometers and five comparators!  I told Liz what had arrived and she looked at me like I had just said “Habbash giggleyfroop on the zabbarazzit!”

Anyway it looks like I can fire up my testing again.  I’m at the point in the book where they’re describing the circuit used to determine light vs. dark.  That is, there are two photo sensors on either side of the ‘bot.  As they sense more or less light they let more or less electricity through to the motor on that side of the ‘bot.  The idea is that you put down light tape on the dark floor and the robot will follow the light tape.  Alternatively you can reverse the wiring and have the robot follow a dark line on a light background.  Whichever.

So, now that I have the photocells, the comparator and the potentiometers I can construct the circuit that’s used on my breadboard!  HAH!

I probably won’t do that because I still feel lousy and its (hopefully) the last night of the World Series when Boston sweeps the St. Louis Cardinals.  Have you seen those rediculous looking Cardinal-head hats?  They’re worse than those Cheese-head hats!

Maybe not.  They’re pretty bad.

(everything is out of whack due to my inability to publish.  I think this one is actually from Wednesday, 10/27)

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Curious

Rehearse the Curse. A melding of political and sports humor: World Series victories by the Boston Red Sox predict defeat for incumbents in presidential elections [New Urban Legends]

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A funny for you…

A magician worked on a cruise ship. The audience was different each week, so he did the same tricks over and over again.

One problem: The captain’s parrot saw the shows each week and began to understand how the magician did every trick.

Once he understood, he started shouting in the middle of the show:

“Look, it’s not the same hat!” “Look, he’s hiding the flowers under the table.” “Hey, why are all the cards the ace of spades?”

The magician was furious but couldn’t do anything about it.It was, after all the captain’s parrot.

Then the ship sank. The magician found himself floating on a piece of wood in the middle of the sea with, as fate would have it, the parrot. They stared at each other with hatred, but did not utter a word. This went on for a day and then another and then another.

Finally on the fourth day, the parrot could not hold back: “OK, I give up. Where’s the damn ship?”

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Still Illin’

I took the day off from work because I’m still sick.  Last night I had a fever and bad sore throat with swollen glands.  I’ve been thinking it was “strep” but Liz keeps insisting its just a cold.  I can’t believe she keeps disrespecting the virus and calling it just a cold.

In any case I’ve been resting this morning.  Liz went off to do some errands — I guess she’s doing better than I am.  While she was gone the groceries arrived, work called, Grace had to be fed.  Now that everyone’s fed and Grace is ostensibly napping its time for me to do something I promised work I would do.

Its a data load job.  Earlier this week I modified all the user master records to reflect what we had in the human resources (PeopleSoft) system.  So people’s names reflected their actual names.  Unfortunately, at some point in the past a programer throught it was a good idea to pull only a person’s first name and put it on a purchase order.  So for the last seven years people have been putting both their first name and their last name in the field marked “First Name”.  Its not like there isn’t an additional field called “Last Name” — its there.  The programmer just decided to only use First Name.

So now I have to go back and populate everyone’s first name with both their first and last name values.  It shouldn’t take long to modify the excel spreadsheet using the concatenate command, but I wish I didn’t have to do it.

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Bad news

Still sick.  The little woman and I both feel miserable.  My throat feels all swollen and I’m very tired.  I went to Dunkin Donuts earlier for a latte.  It was good.  I had been seeing these ads for them all morning and I finally couldn’t resist any more.  We’re both taking it easy and trying to rest.  The kids have been a little hard to take all day, though.  They’ve been good but they seem to expect us to entertain them and we don’t really feel up to it.  Tomorrow I’m going to have to kick them outside. 

Tonight we have some baseball to watch!  The world series begins at 8pm but I think I’m only going to stay up for the first couple of hours.  I’m so tired.  I think anything else would be irresponsible on my part.

I’ve been playing Far Cry.  Quite a game!  Loving it!

I’ve already pre-ordered Half Life 2.  I’m very excited about both of these games.  Well, I’d better tuck the kids in for bed.  Lets hope the Red Sox do well tonight!

 

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13mo.

I found a To Do list from 13 months ago.  The good news is that its nearly complete!