I have a lot of work to do, and I’m not in a very bloggy mood today.
Category Archives: Administrative
Crunched
Probably light blogging. I’m on a schedule crunch for a deliverable.
Busy Weekend
Slow posting because I’m finishing up painting and starting a new project–reguttering the front where we removed the gutters over the garage, and putting them in on the rest of the front of the house where there was never any, but now we have new landscaping to protect from the rainy season which starts in a couple weeks.
The challenge is that it turns out that the roof fascia board slopes in the direction opposite the one that I want it to in order to put one of the down spouts at the end of the house. In fact, the whole house seems tilted slightly toward the east three inches or so end to end (probably settling toward the intracoastal, since it was built on fill). So it works fine for the east spout, but not so much for the west one. Which means an ugly angle on the westward side to force the water to run uphill, so to speak. Still not sure what to do about that one, but now I know why the old gutter never worked very well…
The other joyous part of the adventure is that the fascia isn’t vertical, as the hangars expect–it’s seventeen degrees off with a slight overhang. So I get to cut a bunch of wedges from two-by-four to make up the difference. Which is where our new Craftsman double-bevel mitre saw, that we got for crown and base molding installation (which I haven’t started yet) will come in handy.
I’ll also add that laser levelers are well worth having. It would have been a real PITA to figure this out with a standard bubble and tacked string.
House Painting
That’s why no posting this weekend. We tore out some shrubbery, and it was a good opportunity to paint the house, which we had never done since we bought it, four years ago. New landscaping, too, so drive-up value should be improved considerably.
Under Attack
Some @n@l orifice is sending out spam using my long-time email address as the return address. So I get all the bounces. Typically, it’s about a thousand emails, in addition to the usual spam, and this is the third time this week (which makes me wonder how many of them don’t bounce, and actually get through). And I can’t filter it, because I have to know if email bounces, in case someone I was actually trying to send email to bounced.
But when these attacks happen, I have to just delete it all, because life is too short to go through them on the off chance that one in a thousand will actually be a legitimate bounced email.
I know Clark’s law (no, not Clarke’s Laws). The one that says that any sufficiently advanced amount of cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice, but it’s hard for me to believe that this is not intentional. I don’t know if my having to deal with all of this extraneous unfilterable email is the intent, or it’s just a side effect of the desire to make me look like a purveyor of p3nis enlargement devices and drugs.
Anyway, if I seem unusually testy, you know why.
Fedora Upgrade Woes
OK, so I followed Pete’s advice, and tried an upgrade from Core 7 to Core 8 via yum (yes, I know that Core 9 will be out shortly, but I figure it would probably be a mistake to go directly from 7 to 9, based on previous experience). Everything went fine until the end, when it failed with this message:
–> Processing Conflict: glibc-common conflicts glibc < 2.7 Error: No Package Matching glibc.i686 So, now what? [Evening update] OK, I ended up having to completely blow away glibc. Unsurprisingly, it broke my installation, with no obvious way to fix it. But it allowed me (finally) to do an ftp upgrade via a rescue CD. I'm now running FC8.
Don’t Panic
C’mon, people, I appreciate the concern, really, but get a grip (or is that grippe?). It’s just the flu.
In most cases, you don’t need to see your doctor when you have a cold or the flu. However, if you have any of the symptoms below, seek medical advice.
- A cold that lasts for more than 10 days
- Earache or drainage from your ear
- Severe pain in your face or forehead
- Temperature above 102° F
- Shortness of breath
- Hoarseness, sore throat or a cough that won’t go away
Emphasis mine. The first five bullets never happened, the hoarseness lasted about three days last week, I never had much of a sore throat, and the cough is a lot better today (i.e., I didn’t do it much). I’ve got most of my energy back, and I think I’m mostly over it.
I think that there is a lot of wasted money in the health care system of people seeing doctors when there’s really not much that they can do. It also clogs up emergency rooms. It’s particularly bad when they bully them into prescribing antibiotics, which have no effect on a virus, and then they take half the course and quit, thus breeding more resistant bugs. I’m not the type to avoid a doctor if I need to see a doctor, but really folks, it’s just the flu.
Don’t Panic
C’mon, people, I appreciate the concern, really, but get a grip (or is that grippe?). It’s just the flu.
In most cases, you don’t need to see your doctor when you have a cold or the flu. However, if you have any of the symptoms below, seek medical advice.
- A cold that lasts for more than 10 days
- Earache or drainage from your ear
- Severe pain in your face or forehead
- Temperature above 102° F
- Shortness of breath
- Hoarseness, sore throat or a cough that won’t go away
Emphasis mine. The first five bullets never happened, the hoarseness lasted about three days last week, I never had much of a sore throat, and the cough is a lot better today (i.e., I didn’t do it much). I’ve got most of my energy back, and I think I’m mostly over it.
I think that there is a lot of wasted money in the health care system of people seeing doctors when there’s really not much that they can do. It also clogs up emergency rooms. It’s particularly bad when they bully them into prescribing antibiotics, which have no effect on a virus, and then they take half the course and quit, thus breeding more resistant bugs. I’m not the type to avoid a doctor if I need to see a doctor, but really folks, it’s just the flu.
Don’t Panic
C’mon, people, I appreciate the concern, really, but get a grip (or is that grippe?). It’s just the flu.
In most cases, you don’t need to see your doctor when you have a cold or the flu. However, if you have any of the symptoms below, seek medical advice.
- A cold that lasts for more than 10 days
- Earache or drainage from your ear
- Severe pain in your face or forehead
- Temperature above 102° F
- Shortness of breath
- Hoarseness, sore throat or a cough that won’t go away
Emphasis mine. The first five bullets never happened, the hoarseness lasted about three days last week, I never had much of a sore throat, and the cough is a lot better today (i.e., I didn’t do it much). I’ve got most of my energy back, and I think I’m mostly over it.
I think that there is a lot of wasted money in the health care system of people seeing doctors when there’s really not much that they can do. It also clogs up emergency rooms. It’s particularly bad when they bully them into prescribing antibiotics, which have no effect on a virus, and then they take half the course and quit, thus breeding more resistant bugs. I’m not the type to avoid a doctor if I need to see a doctor, but really folks, it’s just the flu.
Blogging Remains Scattered And Variable
I’m still not over this bug. I was pretty much done with the chills, sweats and fever a week ago, but it’s transmogrified into something more like a head cold. My nose has pretty much dried up now, and my voice no longer resembles that of a frog, so I can do business on the phone again, but it’s settled into my lungs now, and my energy level remains pretty low. Today is coughing-up-a-lung day (though sometimes it feels like I might reach down deep and hock up a kidney). I don’t think it’s turning into pneumonia, but I’ll keep an eye on it. All I know is that I don’t have much energy. The good news is that I’m catching up on my reading, including finally getting around to Jonah’s book