Archive for the 'Personal' Category

Just got off the phone with AT&T. The reason I can’t get DSL here is that they’ve already got customers using all the bandwidth they have at our CO. Epic fail.

As soon as Sarah gets off her currently ongoing phone call, I’m going to call AT&T and see if I can get DSL service here. Their web site tells me that I can’t, but I have neighbors that have it, so I’m hoping that it’s just a glitch in their system.

Charter has gone offline four times in the past week, for as long as 15 hours. I’m fed up with it.

I sure hope AT&T can hook us up. I’m getting tired of having to deal with outages when I’m trying to get work done.

July 11th. I have to wait until July 11th to get my new iPhone. Oh, the humanity!

I want one.

I’m nigh-on giddy with anticipation at the impending WWDC keynote. Less than 12 hours to go now. I expect this is a sure sign of my immense nerdiness, but I don’t care.

I sure hope the rumor that it will be available later this week is true. I’m all set to go!

Working on getting myself packed and ready to head to Toronto. My flight leaves late in the afternoon tomorrow, so I have plenty of time. I’m just one of those people that likes to be ready well in advance.

I’ve got the files I need (I think), expense reports I need to hand in, and most of my personal effects all piled up and ready to load into a bag. I’m really close to having a small enough amount of stuff that I could just put it all in my new laptop backpack — but not quite. Going to need to scrounge up a small enough second bag.

My biggest worry is my limited diet right now, and being sure I can find appropriate foods and enough fluids. With my requiring as much as a gallon of fluids a day just to avoid getting dizzy, I pretty much have to drink nonstop. And there’s a lot of stuff I can’t have.

I’m bringing along some instant tea mix, so as long as I can find water, I should be okay. Although I hope to find other options. Drinking so much of the same thing all day gets really old, especially when it’s not something you really enjoy.

More worrisome is finding appropriate foods. I’m sure I’ll be able to, but I’m not sure how easily it will happen. Traveling with a restricted diet is always a hassle. I’m particularly concerned about travel days. What will I eat tomorrow night? I arrive in Toronto right about the time I should be eating my final meal of the day; what will my options be by the time I get to the hotel, assuming I can’t find something to eat at the airport, which I’ll try to do?

Now, this trip will be easier than my next one — a vacation trip to California to visit my parents — coming up at the very end of June. That’s a very long trip by comparison, and will be a lot more complicated logistically.

Life will get subtly easier for the following trip, in late July. On July 22, many of my dietary restrictions get lifted, which will make finding appropriate meals easier. I’ll still have to find ways to get a lot of fluids in despite being on the run though.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the Evangelism team in Toronto on Tuesday. Should be a fun and productive visit. It would have been extra exciting if we’d made our original June 3rd target date for the MindTouch Deki based MDC launch, but there’s still lots to do, so it will be a good trip.

As those of us in the United States settle into our extended weekend this Memorial Day, I think it’s important not to forget that it’s not just a day off from work.  It’s a time to remember those who’ve paid the ultimate sacrifice in service to their country.

Thank you to everyone who’s served, from the Revolution to Operation Iraqi Freedom.  You have my deepest respect and appreciation.

And a quick note to my colleagues at Mozilla (whether employees or contributors): have a good weekend, but be careful out there!

On the fluid intake front, today I kept careful records of how much I’ve been drinking.  I didn’t make any concerted effort to drink more than usual, and don’t believe that I did.

As of this moment, out of the 96 ounces a day I’m supposed to drink, I’ve had… (doing the math)… 130 ounces.

I don’t know what exactly that means, but I’m more convinced than ever that I’m following doctor’s orders to the letter, which leaves me puzzled as to how I’m winding up dehydrated.

Pah!

Today (that is to say, Wednesday) didn’t go the way I planned.  Right about the time I was planning to go run the errands that I needed to get done, I was overcome by weakness all over and wound up headed to the emergency room for the second time in as many weeks.

It was an interesting experience.  I was so shaky and weak when I got there that they rushed me back to a room almost immediately, and got me hooked up to monitors.  When they were reasonably sure that I wasn’t about to keel over, things slowed down a lot.  Took over two and a half hours for a doctor to see me, and he spent about two minutes with me.

He ordered up some tests — which took over 45 minutes to get started.  Then we waited around two more hours for the results, which came up that I was totally fine — which, by then, I was.

The diagnosis: I still need to work on my fluid intake.

Unfortunately, after spending almost six hours at the hospital, it was no longer really feasible to get my errands done — which means they’ll have to be done tomorrow.  I expect to do them in the morning, so I may get a late start working tomorrow (er, today, I guess, technically).

The Deki Transition

We now have a very rough MDC up and running on DekiWiki.  The majority of the rough edges are my fault.  I made a PDF of the guide MindTouch wrote for how to set things up on our server and sent that to IT… and failed to check to see if it changed (which it did).  So our current setup isn’t quite right.

I’ve filed a ticket with IT to upgrade things and fix the stuff they didn’t know needed to be done, so hopefully they’ll find time for that today.

There’s also one relatively minor skin issue that’s causing some interesting problems, but that ought not to take long to fix, so hopefully we’ll get that today or tomorrow.

Then finally the testing can get underway.  There are probably going to be a few other things that will need twiddling, but until these other issues are resolved, they’ll be hard to spot.

Places

In more directly documentation related news, I’ve been finally actually moving stuff around for the Places documentation.  Among other things, this involves renaming a number of pages, and cleaning them up a bit.  We have reference document pages for each of the Places interfaces, so the Places API pages that Dietrich created are being phased into being how-to articles, since they include lots of great samples.

Things will continue to be a little dusty in the Places docs for at least a few more days.

Other Stuff

I’ll be out for a couple-three hours this afternoon.  My parents are coming to visit, arriving Friday night or Saturday morning, and my dad always appreciates it when we have a project for him.  So we’re going to go out and buy mattresses so that while Dad’s here, he can help us put together Sophie’s new big-girl bed.  She’s been sleeping in a toddler bed for about a year and a half now, and she’s ready to move into a full size bed.

I’m also going to take Friday off, so I can help my wife finish getting the house whipped into shape.

I’m tentatively planning not to take off any time while my parents are in town — they’re really here to see their granddaughter, and I’d just get in the way.  But I may work unusual hours for the first few days next week.

Figured I’d mention how I’m doing after my emergency room trip late last week.

Doing okay.  It’s surprisingly hard to increase by 50% the amount of fluids you drink.  It’s a pretty substantial change to the pattern of your life.

Now, the odd thing is that I’ve always been big on pretty much always having something to drink handy.  Problem is that it was almost always Diet Coke or something along those lines, which after my surgery in January, I’m no longer allowed to drink.  So now I have to drink different things, stuff I always thought of as “once in a while” beverages, such as juice or water.  Or milk.

I like milk (a lot), but it’s not something I sit around drinking while I work, either.

It makes it somewhat more difficult to drink a lot when the things you like the best are off the table.  In fact, of all the things I can’t eat or drink these days, diet soda is easily the one I miss the most.  And, of course, it’s one of the few things I can never have again.  That hurts a little bit more than I expected.

Anyway, I’m still having the dizzy spells, so clearly I’m not back up to snuff yet.  But they’re not as bad as they were, so hopefully I’ll have this behind me soon.