( Recent Shared Posts )

( Recent Shared Posts )

So, I haven't been doing the whole get-my-free-credit-report-every-four-months thing like I'd planned, since I don't use the task manager I'd been using to remind me of it anymore.

But, having been reminded by I don't remember what, I went to go get them.
TransUnion won't let me have it yet, because it hasn't been a year since the last one. Oh, that was August. Ok.
Experian says "For security reasons, we are unable to provide immediate access to your personal credit report.", and wants to send me a letter and I can't be bothered.
So, Equifax it is.
And, because I like numbers that don't mean anything to anybody who actually contributes to society, I paid them for my credit score as usual. 721. Down from August (836) but higher than last April (698).

And there's an account showing as open, with $0 balance, which should be closed.
Interestingly, the credit score says "You have a relatively high number of consumer finance company accounts being reported". It doesn't care that all but one of them are closed, nor that two of them were opened by mistake and never used (window company contacted loan company about financing the windows, and they wouldn't give us enough to pay for it, so we didn't use them. but they (the loan company) opened the accounts anyway, because they're apparently asshats). But, whatever.

Still need another kilobuck a month. Or five.

( Recent Tweets )

( Recent Shared Posts )

Red Mars was originally published in hardcover and trade paperback, simultaneously, in 1993. It was brought to my attention by an excerpt from Green that was publish in Asimov's or Analog, both of which I was subscribed to at the time. I'd never heard of KSR before that, but this excerpt was great, and so I picked up the trade paper of Red at one of the family's frequent trips to BookStar. I read it, I loved it. I bought Green and Blue in hardcover, and spent the next decade trying to find a first edition hardcover of Red, until loree finally found one at Powell's and bought it for my birthday.

But I've never re-read it since then. It's been 16 years, and it's still arguably one of the most influential books I've ever read, in terms of shaping my outlook and view of the universe.
The Mars trilogy was one of the first things I bought (again) when I get my Kindle.
I just haven't actually /read/ them since doing so. I just needed to own them, so I could.

Well, I started re-reading Red a couple weeks ago. I'm about halfway thru it.
It's stirring up intense feelings that can only be reasonably described as homesickness.
And it's made much, much worse by the near-certainty that I'll never see it.

It's really not enjoyable to know that the one thing you want more than anything else, at all, ever, is as close to Absolutely Impossible as makes no odds.

tithonium: Wanna go drive by the house?
loree: No.
tithonium: The car has air conditioning. Wanna go drive by the house?
loree: Stop stalking the house.
tithonium: No! I love the house, and the house loves me! I know it does! If it would just see that we could be happy together, forever!

I rarely dream about work.
Even rarer are dreams about code. I can think of /twice/ it's happened before.

Last night, I was having /nightmares/ about code. I kept waking up, heart racing, because this one div would render /completely/ differently depending whether I hard-coded it into the page or send it in an ajax request. Like, /entirely/ differently, and I Just Couldn't Get It To Work, and it was driving me completely insane.

Very clearly, I've been working too hard. This week has been spent rewriting a schedule grid from a series of divs inside tables inside divs inside tables, with columns all set flloat:left, to a series of divs inside divs inside divs, with the inner grid divs all absolutely positioned inside the outer relatively positioned divs, so I can have the entire thing scroll around inside its container while keeping the rest of the page stationary. That's been my entire week so far. I'm almost done with it. I still have a problem where the innermost container of the grid is scrolling internally and being cut off within the outer container that is supposed to be the one that scrolls. I think I've just got it setting its height somewhere it shouldn't, but will need to track it down.

And then this morning, I'm woken up WAYTF too early by loree yelling at the dog for puking on the bathroom rug. And I'm Awake, and there's no way I'm getting back to sleep. While I did go to bed around midnight, and would normally be able to function just fine with 7 hours sleep, it doesn't count if you're waking up every ten minutes.

So, today, everything and everyone can die in a fire.

( Recent Shared Posts )

( Recent Shared Posts )

[REDACTED]: you know what I just realized?
tithonium: hm?
[REDACTED]: there are all these people using the Internet to get laid.
[REDACTED]: And those people owe us. You and me, especially.
[REDACTED]: But do they thank us?
[REDACTED]: No they do not.
tithonium: they don't.
[REDACTED]: I think we should demand... what should we demand, Marty?
tithonium: hm
tithonium: enough money that women would throw themselves at us.
[REDACTED]: that's way better than my idea, which was just to demand that women throw themselves at us.
[REDACTED]: because that gives us flexibility.
tithonium: exactly.
[REDACTED]: okay. so I expect I'll see this demand on your LJ or twitter stream soon.
[REDACTED]: because I'm too much of a wuss to write it up myself.
tithonium: I'll see what I can do.


So, if you would, please send checks, cash, or paypal. Make checks payable to "Adam Smyth"; use my primary email address for paypal.

So, loree and I were out looking at open houses, as we are wont to do from time to time, and we found the absolutely *perfect* Nerdvana 3.0. It's got sound views, 400 amps total power service, a shop in the garage (including, frex, a single 50A240V circuit labeled 'welder'), and a separate apartment in the basement on the back. We'd have to rearrange the back yard a bit to put the hot tub in, but that shouldn't be a problem.

Now I just need to get a non-contract job, and we need to find somebody willing to pay $2k/mo $1k/mo rent for the apartment.
Or I could go win the lottery. That would work too.

So, I wrote a research slash opinion paper, at the end of what must have been college. This was at Wichita State, tho the campus didn't look anything like the real one, and nearly everybody I knew there was from my high school. But, I wrote this paper, which basically explained, in exacting and - importantly - /correct/ detail exactly why certain kids end up going on rampages in their schools. It was a little broader than that, examining longer-term badness that can result, etc, but that's the important gist.
I received significant acclaim for this. A movie was being made based on it.
I'm wandering around campus on the last day of classes, and at some point, while I'm in the library, someone I know - NOT based on someone real, I think; in fact she mostly looked like a young Reshma Shetty - handed me a notepad and pointed out some things she'd written. I couldn't read it in there, because it was too dark, so we went outside. By the time we get out to where I can read what she wrote, there are several other people I know hanging out with us. Basically, she's written snippets of what would likely end up as an op-ed talking about how spot-on brilliant my paper was (I simplify for brevity). We, the group we're now part of, talk, sometimes animatedly, about various things regarding the paper. Somehow, the school pool is relevant to the discussion, and I note that I've never actually been in it, and I'm going. So we all head down there, and stop off in the little library next to it to pick out books to read while we're swimming. I make some joke about the pool being smaller than I expected (the room is maybe 10' square, with bookshelves and a dozen people standing in it), and the reshma-like one made some entendre-and-a-half to which I peer at her and ask if she's coming on to me. At this point, I wake up.

( Recent Tweets )

( Recent Shared Posts )

Oh yeah, and another episode of young women opening up to me, as the lab tech was telling me about how she's thinking of leaving for Harborview, in between talking about Star Trek and Transformers.

My day so far:

Wake up and wonder why the alarm, which was supposed to wake me up at 845 so I could get up and get ready to go to the dr's office, hasn't gone off. Is it really that early? No, it's 9am, and the alarm isn't set to go off on thursdays, only tuesday and friday. oops. Get up. Take shot. Take shower. Put clothes on. Dog hides in bedroom. Have breakfast. Read email. Cage dog, drive to doctor's office. Get stuck in wrong lane at wrong time, loop around, get to office, get parked. Sign in, stamp parking ticket, pay copay, fill out new patient mini-form, since new doc. Wait, read. Get called in, 25 minutes after appointment. For an 11am appointment. Not as late as I was used to with Dr P and my 430pm appointments, but still kinda late. Vitals taken. Doc pokes head in 7 minutes later to say he'll be with me shortly. Is with me 5 minutes later. Am impressed. Doctor starts asking questions, going over some of the data that's in the system, like drugs, and some as if I were a new patient. Comes across very focused on filling out the form, not really paying attention to me. Gives me backwards robe and leaves. Disrobe, lie down, wait. Doc comes back in, apologizes for being so long, does physical exam. Asks about past experiences with doctors. Finishes exam, continues asking about historical experience. Decides that maybe I don't see my doctors enough and don't test my blood sugars because of bad previous experiences with doctors, such as being forced to get a flu shot when I was little (earliest specific doctor-visit memory I could think of). Makes suggestions for blood sugar testing less often than previously told, but better than not at all, and orders blood tests and says get them done whenever I'm comfortable with it. Explain, no, it's really just the part with the needle that bugs me, and I just look away and think happy thoughts. Well, whatever. Do what works, so I actually do what needs to be done. Come back in a month, and see Dr Enzmann soon too. Take paperwork, go to lab. Get EKG - all is well. Some blood work needs fasting, do later. Will put me into the computer, I walk in any time and we do it. Maybe tomorrow morning on the way to work. Leave. Get lunch. Get home. Whiny puppy. Eat lunch.

And that's the first 5 hours of my day. For a 1 hour doctor's appointment. Now I need to get some work done. Oy. And I think I'll make an appointment with the next doctor on the list. This one's fine, but maybe others are better.

( Recent Shared Posts )

From my Tumblog:
( 23 June 3:48pm )

Called M&J to make my appointments. Turns out, they'll only make one at a time. If you don't like the doc, you get to call and make a separate new appointment. Lame. BUT, it's okay, with the way the scheduling worked out:

* Bushyhead - first available is friday, and I'm working at Garr's friday. No good.
* Hodges - first available is 15 July, and he's consistently an hour late.
* Efird - Not available until 2 July
* Smyth - only takes two new patients a day, and first available would be "way out there".
* Leahy - not available until august
* Verrilli - Available thursday. I'm seeing him at 11.

Based entirely off their profile videos on the M&J website, Verrilli is my second choice from attitude and style, and would be first if I wasn't afraid he was gonna badger me about exercising more. Bushyhead is first choice, and will be my fallback if things don't work out with Verrilli. Smyth and Leahy are out, 'cause they're obviously too popular for me. When I want to see my doctor, I want to see them /yesterday/, not two months from now. Hodges would be my third choice, then Efird.

We'll see how well the profile video preshadows in person interaction.

( Recent Shared Posts )

Using niac and the internet's help, I've got Hylonome routing nerdvana's network. Haven't tested inbound port forwarding yet, and it doesn't seem to fall back to routing global traffic out thru the speakeasy connection when the comcast connection is down, like I /think/ the configuration should have it doing. But, it works for now. I can connect to the world via comcast, and I can connect to my servers without leaving the lan. All is good.

Now I just have to wait for the dhcp lease to expire so I can make sure the scripts to maintain the nat rules work.

edit: Oh, and Hladolet, the faithful netbsd-running Cobalt Qube 2, has been retired and relocated to the South Nerdvana Museum of Computational Antiquities.

Does anybody have any experience with any of these doctors? They're all associated with Minor and James, and all operate out of the first hill medical building. These are the ones I'm considering as replacements for Dr Pollock as my primary care physician, what with Dr P's retirement from internal medicine. I'm planning to call tomorrow and make appointments with several of them, but figured I'd see if anybody had an opinions about any of them. Feel free to send friends in to comment, if you know anybody who has, as well.

* James B. Bushyhead, MD
* John L. Verrilli, MD
* Wallace R. Hodges, MD
* Alex C. Efird, MD
* Cynthia M. Smyth, MD
* Jennifer M. Leahy, MD

( Recent Shared Posts )