April 2008
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Month April 2008

Entries 10 Total

Ugh continued

Apr 30, ’08 2:28 PM

A couple of hours ago I decided that I didn’t need narcotics, I just needed my mom. She is so great about making my aches and pains go away and soothing me when sick. But I am the mom in my household. I am back to wanting drugs. Please, please, gimme drugs. Anybody got the number for Dr Feelgood?
One thing is for sure- I am so thankful to be done having kids. Ugh, ugh, triple ugh.
I’ve tried to suck it up today and not let Brian’s care be affected (effected? whatever). It hasn’t really worked though, so I decided to cry ‘uncle’. I am commencing whiny, baby mode NOW. Waaaaaah.

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Ugh, pass the pepto.

Apr 30, ’08 4:03 AM

Three of the four of us are sick. I am quarantining the house until further notice.
In other news, Kevin is awesome and having him is better than being wooed by any fake billionaire. True story.
ETA- OMG, I am the worse sick person. I need some pot to combat the nausea and some Tylenol 3 for the pain. Boohoooo. Brian seems better though. He and I got sick at the exact same time, though I was feeling it hours earlier. I wonder if I can write a fancy algorithm predicting when I will feel better based on Brian’s stats. I sent Max to school since he was completely unaffected. Keep your fingers crossed that he stays that way.

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A Small Favor: Have You Read My Book?

Apr 29, ’08 10:25 AM

I sometimes check the Amazon page for Adapting to Web Standards to see if anyone’s rated it (and to see how it’s doing, of course). It’s been out for four months, and there are no ratings so far – good or bad.
So, I’m asking a small favor, if you’ve read the book, could you please go rate it? Good or bad, it doesn’t matter. If you’ve got any feedback on my chapter (#7, the one on AOL.com), I’d love to hear it. It’s the first thing I’ve written “professionally”, and I’d love to hear what people think of it, how it could be better and where it goes wrong.
Thank you, please continue about your day.

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Half the Photos from China

Apr 25, ’08 2:10 PM

man dancing in traditional Chinese dress while wearing a mask.

I’m not close to having them all up, and will hopefully be able to recover the ones on the
fried laptop’s hard drive, but I’ve started uploading photos from China. They’ll all end up at that URL eventually.
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The Many Misadventures of One Kevin P. Lawver

Apr 24, ’08 9:02 PM

I made it home. What a week. I posted before about what I did on the flight to China and that was the last you heard from me. Well, Saturday night, my laptop died. It suffered a complete hard drive failure. Even using Arun‘s system disk, it couldn’t find the hard drive controller. Hopefully, this means the drive itself is OK and I can get the first day of pictures and all the stuff I worked on on the flight there off.
But, that left me in a tough spot. I had no laptop, spotty access on my blackberry (which is OK for staying semi-connected and consuming small chunks of data, but doesn’t work very well as my primary connection to the “collective”), and I usually charge the blackberry with the laptop. Thankfully, I’d thrown a little USB power thing in my backpack just to see if it would work for charging the DS Lite.
So, I took notes in a W3C meeting longhand, on paper… yes, I stood out. Yes, my fellow nerds gave me a hard time about it (good-naturedly, of course). Yes, it sucked not to be able to upload photos, browse the web, read feeds and hack.
But, the worst part of the trip was my asthma. Beijing is extremely polluted, and I was affected by it. A couple times, I took a walk around the neighborhood (the hotel and conference center is right across the highway from most of the major olympic venues), and came back wheezing. The one free day I had, I took a “test” walk in the morning to see how I’d do, but had to cut my walk short and take multiple hits on my inhaler to stop the asthma attack that followed. So, I didn’t really go anywhere or see anything outside of a four or five block radius of the hotel. I didn’t want to get stuck somewhere having an asthma attack where I don’t speak the language and didn’t know where I was or how to get back to the hotel.
There was a great dinner, with entertainment provided by students from Baihong University, and I love hanging out with W3C folks. We even got a game of werewolf together. Doug Scheppers and I cleaned up the village as werewolves and won handily. It was only slightly unfair as Doug and I are both seasoned werewolves, and we “feasted” on a game full of first-time players.
Now, I’m home and it’s going to take me a few days to get back on schedule. A twelve hour time difference is crazy, and I don’t think I ever got quite adjusted to it, so maybe it’ll be easier coming back.
I’m off to bed, hopefully to sleep for many many hours. I’ll hopefully post pictures tomorrow once my laptop situation is taken care of.

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Tv

Apr 23, ’08 10:11 AM

Tell me you people are watching How I Met Your Mother. This week’s episode rocked! (Ha, literally.) Since I am a total spoiler-phobe, I was completely surprised at the many, many awesome surprises! Foshizzle, eh? Now I am off to check the Robin Sparkles videos that I have seen running amok on YouTube.
And if you aren’t watching How I Met Your Mother (CBS, Monday, 8:30), I weep for you.

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Another one bites the dust

Apr 22, ’08 6:25 PM

My wedding ring is falling apart. Again. I put away my original ring because the gold was wearing down, leaving little protection for the diamonds. I bought a similar ring, with much thicker gold, and the same thing happened again. I give up. I am just going to draw on a wedding ring with magic marker every morning. Or get a ring tattoo. (I think Pam Anderson did this once, which automatically makes the idea a winner, right?) Maybe I will blow our tax return on a new, non-channel set, diamond and platinum ring. I hear that stuff is tough. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Kevin would make sad face though. But not if I don’t tell him!

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WTH Tuesday? Why you be acting like a Monday?

Apr 22, ’08 6:30 AM

I am posting this at 6:32 am and this day has already been THE SUCK for three hours. Pouts.

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I am embracing my old ageness.

Apr 21, ’08 8:15 AM

I just bought shoes that were labeled “athleisure.”
Sigh.

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Losing Time, Gaining Time

Apr 19, ’08 8:41 PM

I spent fourteen hours on a plane yesterday, racing the dawn over the North Pole, getting from Dulles to Beijing. In my sleeplessness, I started thinking about how weird travel days are when you cross timezones. I lost almost a whole day, timewise, being in the air. A fourteen hour flight really took twenty-six hours off my calendar. I didn’t get to “live” that day, and on my personal calendar, it’s compressed to a tiny fraction of what it would have normally been. But, on the way home, I only “lose” an hour and forty-five minutes, so that day gets stretched out. It’s weird, and something only crazy people trapped in airplanes or pot smokers should think about.

But, since I was trapped on a plane for fourteen hours, I decided that I should keep a little diary of all the stuff I did on the plane. Here it is, minus bathroom trips and meals (they fed us twice):

  1. Read half of The Writing Life
  2. Watched Wizard People, Dear Reader version of Harry Potter
  3. Wrote a queue processor (it’s so freaking cool, I can’t believe I did it on a plane with no internet access and just my little Ruby pocket guide). This killed a good two or three hours.
  4. Listened to some CBC Radio 3 podcasts and Sunparlour Players
  5. Flew over the North Pole, but couldn’t see anything because there were clouds everywhere… total white out.
  6. Watched Ricky Gervais’ Politics stand-up special
  7. Watched The Amazing Screw-On Head (Mike Mignola series pilot about civil war robot secret agent. Yes, it’s awesome)
  8. Watched some Strongbad E-mails and Abigail’s Teen Diary
  9. Watched the first episode of The X-Files.
    • Love that they don’t wear seat belts, the smoking man really smokes in the office, and Scully has shoulder pads.
  10. Played with hbase. I got it running and created a table, but didn’t do much more than that.
  11. Worked on the blog’s admin interface.
    • Bummed that in Firefox I have to wrap HTML5 elements in order to style them. Bah, humbug.
  12. Stubbed out the blog main and entry page. Not how it’s going to stay.
  13. Played some Sudoku (*Brain Age 2* on my DS Lite). I’m trying to go back and redo games where I made mistakes and get all my times on the Basic and Intermediate ones under ten minutes. I have no idea if those are good times or not…
  14. Finished The Writing Life. I love Annie Dillard. The Writing Life is a short little book, only 111 pages, but just like Holy the Firm, it’s dense, packed with lots of great quotes, thoughts on writing and life and some of the most beautiful prose you’re likely to ever read. I’m so glad I stumbled on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek last year.

Beijing is big, noisy and “hazy”. Today, it’s big, noisy and drizzling, so I don’t think I’ll be going out. Plus, meetings start soon and well, why go out when I can stay in and nerd it up with a bunch of… nerds?

I’m seriously jet-lagged. I did all that stuff above while pretty much everyone around me slept. I don’t get how people can go to sleep at one in the afternoon and sleep pretty much straight for fourteen hours, but almost everyone around me did just that. I was there, trying to be quiet, either reading, watching something or typing. I got my upgrade to first class, which made things much more comfortable. I highly recommend it.

It’s 8:30AM on Sunday morning. My internal clock is somewhere on a train between home and here. If you see it, please tell it to hurry up. I’d like to feel human again.

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