Rants and Revelations

I went to the doctor about my wrist. They took off my cast, and let me wash my arm. All the skin on my palm was flaking off, but when I went to the sink to try to wash it off, the technician who’d taken off my cast called from the other room to say “you can’t get all the flakes off”. She says everybody goes back to the sink when they discover all the flakes. While waiting for the doctor, I made the mistake of trying to look at the back of my hand to see if it was flaking too. OUCH!

The doctor examined my wrist a bit and said that since it’s doing so well, instead of a cast she’d give me a brace. She said to treat it like a cast and don’t twist my wrist around too much, although of course I can take it off to wash. She said if it’s too painful I could come back and get a cast.

I can almost type normally with this brace on, but only if I raise my elbow at a high angle. And my elbow is very stiff and sore. But it’s nice to be mobile again.

Somebody on Usenet described those girls who hit my kayak as “financial paddlers” because they go from bank to bank and leave you broke.

I work at a company that employes thousands of people. Early this morning, Corporate IT send out a message to everybody at the company with a Lotus Notes (bleargh) account warning them that a couple of servers are going to be upgraded this weekend and Notes might not be available during the upgrade. That was immediately followed by a deluge of idiots using “Reply All With History” to ask why they were getting this mail, followed by a few dozen people saying “Stop using Reply All”, followed by more people saying “You’re doing it too, you idiot”, followed by the original few dozen saying “if I hadn’t done a Reply All, I’d only be talking to people who’d already done it”, followed by several petty flame wars, followed by still more people saying “take me off this list”. It’s the most traffic I’ve seen on Lotus Notes since I came to the company - as a matter of fact, it probably outnumbers all the Lotus Notes I’ve had in total since I came to the company.

Fortunately my Unix mail account is still working.

I’ve got the new keyboard and it’s nice. It takes a bit of getting used to, and strictly speaking I need more mobility in my left hand than the cast allows me. But when I get the arms of my chair set up right and the pillow under my cast exactly right, it’s just about full speed for normal text typing. Still very strange trying to find number keys, and very hit and miss to find the various modifier keys. The mirrors are more help with the number keys, especially since the modifiers aren’t labelled in an Apple manner, but also because they’re too far away from the mirrors to see them well.

One of the weirder aspects of this system is that is comes with a PS/2 to USB adaptor, and it’s got two connectors, one for a PS/2 mouse. I don’t have a PS/2 mouse, I have a USB mouse, but when I plug this adaptor in, then the Powerbook thinks it has a mouse plugged in, even if my USB mouse isn’t plugged in. This means that the trackpad doesn’t work (because I turned on that option when I’m typing one-handed because otherwise my hand drags on it and moves the cursor when I don’t want it). This causes problems when I have to unplug the mouse to, say, plug in the Compact Flash reader. I’ve either got to unplug this keyboard and go back to one handed typing, or reconfigure to allow the trackpad when a mouse is plugged in. What I really need is a small USB hub. I wonder if an unpowered one would work with this keyboard or if it draws to much?

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate typing with one hand, even with Sticky Keys turned on? I just spent way too fucking long on one of those stupid meme quizes. I wrote several paragraphs each on apple, linux, cross country skiing, flying, odd professors and the like, and was just finishing up 4 paragraphs on why usenet is better than blogging when I accidentally hit a key combination that closed the tab I was writing in - I think I was reaching for splat-x and hit splat-w. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

When you order a $314 keyboard specifically so you can do some work while your arm is in a cast to immobilize your wrist (and because you had a bit of rsi already and were already thinking about solutions) and you spend $45 extra for “next day air” shipping, and 24 hours after you ordered it, it still hasn’t shipped.

OI! I SPENT THE RIDICULOUS AMOUNT YOU CHARGE FOR HANDLING TO GET QUICK HANDLING!

It better ship by COB tomorrow or I’m going to be more than pissed.

Evidently the weekend’s activities weren’t as successful as originally thought. As well as this palm-to-armpit cast thanks to being rammed by a canoe full of idiot girl scouts, I also seem to have totally fucked up the light over the garage. As of yesterday, there is no power at all in the garage, not to the new light, nor to the inside light and plug socket. And the circuit breaker is not tripped. I even tried resetting it just to see if that would help. I swear there is a secret switch in the house for the power to the garage, and we’re switching it without realizing it.

I’ve spent the last couple of months doing an all-singing, all-dancing automatic upgrader for our customers sites. This process is designed to be totally hands-off - you stick the DVD in the drive and type “upgrade”, and at the end of the theatre day it will convert the main “cms” computer (one per site) and all the “cp” computers (one per projector) from Redhat 7.3 to CentOS 3.4, upgrade from version 3.3 to 3.6 of our software, and magically preserve all your settings and configuration. You should come in the next day to find everything ready for the day’s schedule.

For the very first one at a customer site, though, they sent out a technician to babysit it. Unfortunately they send a techician who’d never done or witnessed one of our many test upgrades in-house.

You probably guessed what happened - she saw the cms come up, didn’t realize that the cps start after the cms is done, and rebooted the cms at the worst possible time - right when all 18 cps were attempting PXE (network) boots and expecting the cms to be there to send them what they needed. And the cms doesn’t start dhcpd by default, so the cps have had nothing to talk to all night. And of course everybody is screaming for me when I got in!

I went to the doctor about my sore wrist. he sent me to a specialist who told me i’ve torn the sheath on one of the tendons in my wrist and it must be immobilized. so i’m in a cast up to my armpit for the next two weeks, and then a smaller cast with strict orders to keep it pronated for another four weeks. no flying, no kayaking, minimal driving, and typing is very difficult. this fucking sucks.

Read this: Open Letter to Canada - “There for Us Again Early and Eagerly”

Good, isn’t it?

Saturday, I woke up to an email saying that my waypoint generator had a bunch of Canadian airports with US-style identifiers (instead of CYRP, Carp was KYRP). I fixed that first. Then Vicki and I replaced the outside front floodlight which had a wonky socket. And we replaced the floodlights over the garage, which supposedly had a light sensor (although it was more of a randomness generator) with one that had a motion detector. Since we can’t find a switch for these lights, I like the idea that they won’t be on all night. This involved hacksawing off a bit of iron pipe conduit that was sticking out too far to put the box where I wanted it and some simple wiring. Or at least it would probably be simple wiring for somebody who isn’t scared of ladders and electricity (gee, my brother used to shock me with electricity and throw me off barn beams - see a connection?). But we got it done - I’m so domestic it hurts.

Sunday, I got up bright and early to be a safety pilot for Paul P. He’s been my safety pilot in the past, so it was only fair, even if it did mean getting up ungodly early. I took some pictures while he was buzzing around, but most of them sucked. Here are a few that didn’t suck too bad.

Back at the airport, there was an ancient Dornier flying boat re-engined with modern turboprop engines. Cool!

After that, I went kayaking again. This time I went a little slower, and went up all the way to Blossom Road. The river was still quite shallow, and fast. I lost track of the number of times I had to put down my paddle and push down and forward or backward on the bottom of the river because I was bottomed out. (Try that with a canoe!)

On the way back I took one of the other branches because this canoe full of girls can careering across the river and rammed me without making the slightest effort to slow down or avoid me - after they saw they were on a collision course, they all stopped paddling - and when I got to the fork there was another one of these canoes full of girls sideways in the river. But it worked out well - there was a Great Blue Heron on the bank of the river that I got a couple of shots of, and then some “ducks in a row”, and then a Green Heron, which I ‘ve seen very few of over the years.

The best pictures from today’s paddling.

Unfortunately on the way home I noticed that I had a really badly sprained wrist. Unfortunately it’s my left one (I’m left handed), but I suppose the right would have been worse since it would be hard to shift my car like that. It was literally a big pain trying to put my kayak away afterwards.

That this iPod came FedEx. And everything that I complained that you used to be able to do with UPS, FedEx does right. The door tag had the address of the local depot, their hours, and the information that you could come by the depot after 5:30pm to pick up the item, or if you didn’t come, they’d re-attempt the delivery the next day, and if I wanted I could sign the door tag in lieu of signing for the package. You could even give them information on a secure place on your premises for them to leave it, if you wanted them to put it behind the door or in your garage or something.

I got the same information when I phoned from work (before I saw the door tag). No muss, no fuss, no bother.

Currently “Copying 397 of 9733: Take Down the Union Jack”

Yay!

I just got a phone call from my boss. “So with everybody else I should multiply their estimates by four, but with yours I should divide them by four?”

How did this happen? He had called me a bit earlier and said that they’d changed their mind about postponing a “PCR” (probem report) that had been assigned to me, and wanted to know how long it would take to fix it. Since I hadn’t really had a good look at it before they’d postponed it, I said “Maybe four hours.” “Can you have it before you leave for the day?”, he asked. I said that I’d do my best. I looked, and found that 90% of what I needed had already been done elsewhere, so I needed to cut and paste some code, do a tiny bit of tweaking, and Bob’s your uncle. I did a very rudimentary test, and it worked, so I checked it in and marked the PCR as “Resolved” about an hour after I’d given him the four hour estimate.

As Scotty said, “how else would I keep my reputation as a Miracle Worker?”

I went kayaking this afternoon. It was quite a long trip because I had nobody with me to make sure I didn’t do something stupid. The Google Maps Pedometer (sometimes you have to fiddle with it to get it to show my course line) shows I went 5.7 miles.

	It wasn’t the most exciting trip I’ve ever taken, but the creek was sure different after the Katrina-spawned rain we got a few days ago. Not a lot higher, but way, way faster. Going up stream, there were places where I was paddling as hard as I could and barely making any progress at all. Lots of people on the river today because of the great weather and the Labour Day holiday. When I got into the bit upstream of Browncroft Boulevard, the bit I’ve never been to before, there were a lot of people in the park, most of them throwing sticks and balls into the river for their dogs to retrieve. Luckily none of them mistook me for a stick. One person did annoy me by throwing the ball right to the opposite side of the creek just as I got there, meaning that both I and the dog had to take evasive action to avoid hitting each other.
	On the way back, I stopped to take some pictures of a couple of swans that were preening and feeding. One of them did a big display, unfortunately I paniced a bit because I thought he was going to come after me, and didn’t get the picture.
	Later on, I met another couple of swans, one of whom had a neck tag. Man, those things must suck to carry around.