Rhonabwy

Amazing profiling and tracing tool... Shark

Its been a while, but I still remember scanning the output of strace (and later ktrace) from unix machines, looking for that hint of what went "boom" or was causing significant unhappiness with the machines. So when I read the recent article from Apple Optimizing your Application with System Trace in Shark 4, I was like "What? They do that in Shark too?!"

Yep.

If you're a unix hacker, MacOS is the system to get. The development tools are good, but frankly the most amazing development benefits are in the CHUD tools - there's stuff that is thousands of dollars worth of software in there, and they're just handing it to you. I'd even bet that if you developed for Linux, you'd find Shark a hell of a benefit to you.

Most of what I knew about Shark I really picked up at the 2004 WWDC, where they had neverending repeats of the "how to use Shark" session scattered about in other sessions. I mean, shoot - you could even profile and use Shark to optimize your Java code! Let alone the wonderful assembly language reference that seemed to be tucked away under the covers in there (yeah, I thought that was cool - so shoot me).

I know a lot of people say that Shark is the best kept secret of the Apple development tools world. Boy, I think that's going to change. (at least I'm doing my part...)

Rum

Back over Thanksgiving (?? was it that far back), Nathan brought over some extra-fine rum for sipping before/while we made dinner and chatted. I've had it happily lurking on the side table since then - it's a neat looking bottle, plus you never know when you might like a little...

So tonight I popped the cork and poured a couple of fingers. Man, that is good stuff. This is NOT the rum for wildly mixing with coke. I have that rum under the sink - dark and raw carribean stuff. This one is smooth and with a lovely aftertaste (well, if you like rum) - as well as fire running down into the belly.

mmmmm.

cleaning the basement

This whole water thing is at least netting us something - a very clean basement floor. The rainstorms that ran through here over the past few days just added to the seepage and wetness in the basement. In fact, I spent about 30 minutes sweeping the puddles towards the floor drain to help the place out. Good lord, what a pain. In the meantime though, I suppose it is only reasonable to admire the nice clean floor that we have...

And while I'm moaning about sweeping some puddled in the basement, Byron is about to engage on a whole new freakish aspect of outsourcing. I'm not so sure I'd be as welcoming about this process as he is - there's a lot of institutional bagage that you carry along with a whole new load of bizarre stress. But then I'm often not good at defining a hard limit for something like that. For those that can - it can be a sweet way to move around.

Of course you know Byron - I'll help you find a gig in (wet) Seattle any time... Just to keep the options open. :-)

a couple of stouts

Tonight? Tonight was a good night.

We had a decent turnout at the XCoders meeting (16 folks) for an overview of Perl. And that was one very thorough overview of perl! There is stuff he covered in that preview that I hadn't known... dating back to Perl 4!

But probably more important to me was the beer afterward. A couple of stouts at Tangletown (an Elysian brewery outpost at 55th in Greenlake) and a whole ton of bullshitting and general tech talk among folks with a common interest. It was a really good night.

Selenium

Well darn.

I took a stab at developing some internal tests using Selenium to see if that might be a reasonable fit going forward. I was impressed with the cross browser functionality and focus, which would make a number of things a LOT easier.

Unfortunately what I learned is that if your web application takes over the window (i.e. reaches into the DOM and makes SURE that it's the dominant window and not running inside a frame), the selenium isn't a good choice. At least in FIT mode. I haven't yet tried to run it in driven mode - that might resolve the issue, but I'm not counting on it.

We've been doing a fair bit of using PHP to drive IE (similiar to Pamie or Watir), and that's been working pretty darn well. The only problem is that its specific to IE on the windows environment. And it would be really nice to get Firefox testing in there too...

Most interesting with Pamie is that there's a 2.0 beta release which came out just a little while ago (two weeks as of this writing). Its a pretty big change to the whole pamie setup (so a lot of scripts written with 1.0 will need to be slightly modified), but it is a LOT cleaner. There's still an assumption that you'll know what to do with the callable COM objects if you're fiddling around in the interactive mode, or if you want to invoke something odd and strange inside the DOM (clicking on images, etc). Still, its a great improvement - and it runs very smoothly.

racing in a 30' sailboat

A few years ago I spent quite a bit of time racing as part of the crew of a 30' sailboat. Lately thoughts of that time have been popping back up, and I'm finding it a pretty apt analogy to a lot of things that happen in software development.

The most concrete of these thoughts is that crewing on that sailboat was the single most intensive team coordination experience that I've ever had. You didn't need to be the fastest sailboat out there to compete effectively - but you bloody well better have a smoothly functioning team. Anything less and you weren't competitive.

Of course, all of this follows in that I tend to be a very team oriented person when it comes to working and getting things done. I can work solo (I can sail solo too), but my most fulfilling moments come from working as part of a team.

Don't know why this is all popping up, except that I have insomnia tonight and that's racing through my head.

the kid with the ball

When I was coming home yesterday, I saw a kid sort of poke his head out from underneath a large truck, a red playground ball in his hand. He was popping out and then he ducked back in quickly, and it gave me a hell of a start. I immediately pumped the brakes thinking I was going to smack the fellow.

Well, he ducked back so I accelerated on - just wanted to get past him and the potential for something really bad. And then I felt the bump and heard it - "BAM!"

Oh shit - my heart dropped down for a second while my reflexes slammed the brakes into complete stop. I hit the kid. Wait, no I didn't - that felt like... that little shit!

I pulled the emergency brake, threw the car into park, and hopped out. Sure enough, there was the dead body of a red playground ball just under my back tire. And it really ripped it up - it was just burst down the seams. I walked back, picked it up, and turned to the sidewalk.

Just beyond the truck, the boy was waiting. Looking, half expectant, half defiant. While I looked and walked over, he went up the steps towards the schools playground.

"What the hell were you thinking!?" I hollered at him, handing him the ball carcas. He took it, didn't say anything.

"Well?!"

In my head, the dark side of my childhold raised up. 'Duh, you know exactly what he was thinking! How big would the 'bang' be and would the ball actually pop under the tires...' The kid said the exact thing that confused me: "Why are you cursing at me?"

What? I didn't say shit or fuck or anything! Oh... hell. Hmm. That's interesting.

"What exactly did you think would happen when you through that ball out there?" I asked, volume still up a bit. The boy hoofed it up into the playground. I walked along the chain link fence, following him slightly. He dropped the ball carcas absent-mindedly. "Stop following me!" he said.

I walked into the playground, "Is one of your parents here?"

"I'm not telling!", at which point he starts sprinting towards a lady on the far side of the playground that's waving at him. Hmmm.

I walked pointedly over to the lady, trying to get her attention verbally "Mam... Mam...", nothing. I tapped her on the shoulder, and she looked like I was some crazed monster about to eat her. I told her that her son had just pitched a ball under my car.

"Did you see him do it?"

"Yes"

"Did you seem him throw the ball?"

Come on lady, how hard is this to believe? A 9-10 year old boy with a ball - it's damn near a given. "Yes, I did".

"I'll talk to him", and she turned - I had been thorough dismissed.

I watched them walk away, turned around and walked back to my car (blocking traffic in the street) and drove it the rest of the way home (all the way around the school).

I wonder if she ever talked to him...

I would have pitched that ball out there too. It was an impressive "BANG".

PF Changs at Westlake

I met Karen at PF Changs at the Westlake Center tonight for dinner. Man, I have to got to say they have incredible service. They were incredibly diligent about dealing with a food restriction when we asked late about it (we forgot - our bad) and remade all the dishes effected when we didn't even need them too.

While I wouldn't say its terribly authentic chinese food in any sense, it is tasty. And you simply can not beat the service there. Karen and I will definitely go back, and if you're around that area in the evening, I'd recommend it for a dinner.

Disney is reinvesting in creativity

I'm hugely pleased to hear that the rumors have been confirmed about Disney purchasing Pixar Studios. Eisner, is my opinion, destroyed the creative staffing in Disney and I'm thrilled to see the company making dramatic efforts to bring creativity back to the company. The quotes near the end of the article are the stuff to read between the lines:

Yeah. Good work Disney!

grand house reorganization thoughts

Today has been reading and grand house reorganization thoughts. One of those "strategic thinking" days really - walking around the house, trying to visualize and think of the house in a slightly different format and use.

We have, long ago actually, run out of space for our books and my gadget electronics and software storage. They are spilling out onto the floor, stacked on tables sideways - basically all over the house. We manage to make forays into the dining room to clear off the table periodically, but that really means that stacks of books get made higher elsewhere.

And that cool treadmill I have? Well, it seems that Karen isn't too keen on the idea of it remaining in the dining room indefinitely. I expect I can get away with another year or two on sheer inertia, but that would be a might subversive way of not dealing with it.

Finally, we're making more and more noises about a new TV and maybe actually getting a sound system for the house. At least where-ever the TV is. A little 5.1 surround would be really nice. Shoot - just having a clear two channels and a subwoofer would be a major improvement.

Our current thoughts are revolving around finding/making more book storage throughout the house. There's a bumped-out section of our dining room that would be perfect for some built-in storage. Doing the finish carpentry work there would give us a lot of horizontal book storage as well as enhancing the general craftsman feel of the room. There is some minor woodwork detailing on a couple of hallwall/doorway trim areas that I really want to put together to finish pulling that detail into alignment with the rest of the house.

We have an 8x10 room that was once a piano room (currently my computer area and bookshelves) that looks like it would work well for a little excercise room - my treadmill and whatever additional stuff (tv or computer or something).

And finally, there's the living room - which we have two different views into. It basically amounts to moving the couch or not, and then what wall would be our "entertainment" area. The new plasma TV's would allow us to hang the TV on the wall, which really opens up the possibilities. Some decent sound and a new TV - that'd be really nice. The TV would be for movies and games. We don't have cable (or satellite), and we continue to not want it.

Whatever we do there, we want to choose effectively for ourselves, since we expect it will be an investment for 7-10 years. So far we've boiled it down to at least a 42" plasma (or LCD) with 720 or 1080i resolution, an ATSC tuner, and cable card ready (we *might* change our minds after all). The Xbox is a reasonable DVD player, but not awesome - so we might do some central tuner/DVD/CD player thingy (we saw a neat Denon system at Magnolia Hi-Fi last night that I was sort of enthralled with). The sound would be with small speakers around the top of the room - maybe Bose or something ala carte - and a good central channel that has some base (or a subwoofer) to it.

We're having a hard time prioritizing between TV or sound first, so it may just be a whole-hog purchase at some point. That wouldn't be cheap, but it would be an awesome upgrade.

Finally, I think most of my electronics would go into shelving or other closed storage and I'd just admit to myself that I'm fully laptop oriented for compute these days. Stick my G4 desktop into a closet or tucked away somewhere with other electronics and use it as a server. Shoot - at this point I could probably get one of those iMacs for that job - even leave it in a built-in somewhere. Okay - so I just like the look of the darn things. An upgrade from my 800MHz G3 iBook is due sometime this year. One of the things that I keep thinking about is how to transmit A/V from the computer onto that awesome new TV we'll be getting. I already have all my music on my macs, so I don't really want to re-rip the whole set of CD's into some other system (like Bose' lifestyle arrangement). And then there's the inevitable video that I'd like to play from the computer. In some senses, I could easily make that iMac the center system for playing DVDs or CDs. Heh - maybe I should.

Bran Ferren, from Applied Minds

I have been catching back up on my backlog of IT Conversations and listened to Bran Ferren - the Chief Creative Officer for Applied Minds talk from the Web 2.0 conference. This is one guy that I'd love to meet! Or at least hear speak publically... The presentation was funny, dynamic, and really really interesting. (worth a listen! - it's only a 20 minute long MP3). The talk is really about the idea that some new interface is yet pending a great breakthrough for human computer interaction.

But really, I mean Applied Minds itself is just a cool, goofy idea.

MS Project

I've been working with MS Project lately, trying to find the most effective ways of using it. And you know what? The Microsoft site on Project is just freakin' useless. They talk all about how you can plug in VBA applications and connect things to a dozen other Microsoft servers that I haven't a clue what actual value they provide. What they DON'T have is some real information on how to apply MS project to real-world problems. Like how to deal with the reality of resource constraints when people are doing two things at once. Or that a review of a project takes everyone for 1 hour - but putting that review into project seems to absorb either 0 or 1 days. Not that I really even want to keep track of people's time down to the hour.

It would be really nice to have a "this is how we're using it" series of articles that I could read and get up to speed. Otherwise it's calling in all sorts of contacts and favors to get a sense of what tribal knowledge can be gleamed.

mmm. that UI look

Now I'm going to have to pull down the whole webkit codebase to see how they put together the UI for the web inspector.

This is an important message...

If it's such a damned important message, then have a HUMAN talking to me, not some recording turned up way to high so that my cats can hear the message while they're in the basement.

Oh - and it was important that I hang up on you too!

after the holidays

While I did well over Thanksgiving, my weight is up a skosh after the Christmas and New Year's holidays. So I'm back to my routine and working to walk it off. The treadmill is working really well for me, although I'm beginning to think I'll need to move it around in the house before too long.

I've mostly been watching movies - the latest being the series I, Claudius that aired on PBS nearly 30 years ago. Watching movies while walking has been fantastic, and keeps me at least mentally occupied, which is proof against the bane of going to a gym - I get bored to death. I do wish I had the space for a weight machine though.

Mmmmm... Blood Oranges

I do love this time of year

craftsman builtins

Karen and I have been talking about a new TV and stereo recently, which sort of cascades down to a lot of things happening inside the house - but most specifically converting the area where our TV is currently located into a built-ins area. The interior of the house is craftsman styling (wood painted white, not the wonderful dark wood that some of our friends have), so the idea is to mimic that style and make it accent out interior of the house even further, while allowing room for a 42" plasma TV.

It just so happens that I saw a woodworking store across the street from Fusion Beads over on Stone Way today, so I headed over to check it out (bead stores are sort of boring for me). While I was there, I saw a copy of The Furniture of Gustav Stickley, and ended up picking it up for the woodworking projects and general lines. I like the styling quite a bit, and plan to use it for ideas. None of our furniture is craftsman, just the interior walls and woodwork. Along the same lines, Karen pulled out all the copies we could find of Old House Journal - and they even had an issue with a bunch of details on making craftsman style built-ins.

Now I have no idea when we'll actually attack this project, but some movement is happening!

my very strange cat

Most cats, at least by reputation, don't like water. Not mine. He's a freak. Of course, I like that about him. Even still, this one astounded me.

We've got this little water problem you see. Nearing the record rainfall in Seattle, the groundwater is thoroughly saturated, and we're seeing an upwelling through a french drain set outside our basement steps (and 3 1/2' below grade). It periodically causes a small stream through our basement to the floor drain, where it happily goes away. But not without leaving the periodic puddle.

And there's where this story comes in. While Karen was downstairs today putting in some laundry, this bizarre cat of mine sits down in one of the puddles. Maybe only 1/8" deep, but he just sits right down. Looks around, his ears all forward and interested. Then I think he saw the reflections in the water, because it became playtime and he started batting at the water. This, of course, made everything move. And that is just so much more interesting, that (as a cat) you simply have to bat at it some more.

After a good 15 minutes of this, I guess he got tired. So he just laid down. Yep, in that puddle. He was soaked. Karen brought him upstairs in a towel another 30 minutes later, just so he wouldn't track water all over the place.

Is that a weird cat or what?

just a little water

I like water. Really. Just not in my basement. Not seeping in from the odd corners that I don't expect and rolling up and in from a french drain near the back yard. 27 straight days of rain - real rain, not the usual seattle style rain and the groundwater is just amazing. Everything is saturated, mudslides all over the place. I'll shoot the driver of a car that goes over my verge right now!

Lordy - so tomorrow is dealing with water in the basement. Our floor drain is working, but it still sucks - because the floor isn't canted perfectly and you can really see the low spots after the flow has stopped and it's dried up a bit.

Mac fans at MacWorld != Sports fans?

I watched the MacWorld keynote video this evening, and as I was watching it I noticed that the whole announcement about the iPod and sports didn't really bring much applause. Especially when compared to the announcement about getting Saturday Night Live clips. So I am taking from that Mac fans who attend MacWorld aren't generally sports fans.

Just one of those things I guess.

MacBook or not?

Now it gets hard!

Do I get a new MacBook or not... That's a nice lookin' laptop. I wonder what the heat and battery life is like?

blur of a day

Its just been a blur of a day... Running around, catching errands, remembering the eat the periodic meal. Wow.

Looks like I'm wrapping up the technical work for the evening though, so it's off to the bus and maybe a little more science fiction before I pick up Karen from her classes.

SkyScout

Not really related to programming, but it's geeky.

Check out the SkyScout. That's an incredible idea! Take it out to tiger mountain or the western side of the olympic penninsula sometime in summer and have an incredible time with it!

that insidious beast

Water, that fine insidious beast, is coming back. Well, we've been walking under it pretty steadily since we came be to Seattle actually. But now it's making inroads again into our basement. This time, however, it's not coming from the back drain area. In fact, I'm not sure WHERE all it's coming from - there looks to be multiple locations all generally upwelling from just plain ole oversaturation of groundwater.

I think we're going to have to consider some constructive and innovative landscape ideas to make this all work out. Not really sure what we're going to do, but it'll probably involve way more manual effort of grading soil than I'd like. Heh. At least I've done it before, even if it is a terribly tedious and annoying job.

smothered in cats

Since Karen and I have been home, we've been smothered by cats. They are VERY happy to see us, and sitting anywhere in the house - or even standing still for a few minutes in one place - is enough to invite them. At least one, and more often both of them, jump up, claw up, or head-butt around trying to get some attention. My poor sweatshirt is covered in cat hair, but I'm happy - they are warm and aside from the oversharp claws (I've GOT to trim those) pretty friendly guys to hang with.

My left arm is tired of holding Pooka while I write this though.

Dave Hayden will be crewing on a Brig!

I found Dave Hayden's blog (one of the Panic guys), and was reading through it when I saw an entry saying that he would be crewing the Lady Washington this may!

The Lady Washington is a lovely brigantine that I had the pleasure of watching sail around Lake Union a few years back at the tall ships festival (along with the Hawaiian Chieftain). If I read the schedule correctly, Dave will be crewing while it is at Coos Bay, Oregon (makes sense, that's pretty close to Oregon). Both Karen and I had thought about getting involved, and even applied to crew, but we never heard anything back.

In fact, you've probably seen her if you've watched Pirates of the Carribean - she was one of the vessels - the HMS Interceptor.

Have a great time Dave, that's so cool!

the ACM

Back to my promised geekery!

I'm a member of the ACM, and periodically as a member, you get the "Time to renew!" emails and letters. Well, it's that time again. Coincidentally, the latest Communications of ACM is a really interesting issue. It is focused on personal information management (an interest of mine), and has some updated articles on some of the more interesting (and slightly - but only slightly - out there) concepts.

And on that note, I'm off to bury myself in a science fiction novel...

home again

Home again, home again, lickety split.

We've made it back to Seattle. A trip south from Burlington, IA to St. Louis, MO - then back north to Chicago, and across the plains and mountains to Seattle. Sort of amazing how fast you can move around compared to even a hundred years ago.

Lela's doing pretty well, although she had another bout of blackout due to low blood pressure. When we called this evening, she's already talked to the nurses and her doctor, and they've reduced the medication some more to try and level her out.

It's really nice to be home again. Time to get back into the sort of normal sequence of things and settle down a bit. We have a pile of mail (only a few bills) and the usual set of phone messages to work through.

Thank you to all for your wishes during this trip. I didn't know what to expect, and frankly expected the worst. It's clear that getting ourselves and meeting my brother there for New Years was the best possible medicine. I'm probably lay off the daily updates on my grandmother ... since I won't have daily updates so much now. That's the thing - blog for instant family updates of happenings. Heh. Time to get back to my geekery...

the buck

Clinton (probably best described as my cousin) shot a nice buck this year. With a bow:

14 points - he was pretty pleased. I was planning on showing he and Tom (his father) where "the farm" is located, but I suspect I'll have to wrangle some email mechanism to get them there. I have some GPS points at home in a notebook, so I bet I can come up with something with Google Maps...

The one day we (Ben and I) had planned to take him up there, it had thunderstormed the night before, and neither Ben nor I had any clothes that were really suitable for tromping around in muddy fields.

The funny story with this buck that was getting passed around was that Clinton was in the stand, trying to wait until it died so he didn't scare it off and have to track it for miles. So he was on his cell phone calling everyone. The most amusing was the taxidermist (he's having the head mounted) who said "when are you going to bring it in?", to which Clinton replied "When it's dead."

Maybe that's just really midwest humor, but I keep snickering at that one.

thinking about heading back

Karen and I work on returning to Seattle tomorrow - flights down to St. Louis and then from there to Seattle. So today has been a blur of getting everything set for when we leave. Our flight leaves out of Burlington around 11:30am, and it'll be a full day of travel to get back.

The reduced medicine has improved the blood pressure levels to where Lela isn't passing out when she stands up, but it's still pretty darn low during the day. I expect it'll take another week or so to get that all levelled out to a reasonable dose. In the meantime, Louise will be staying here after we leave through the weekend, and then we have some professional services folks who'll come in for the next week and be here to assist around the clock.

All that being said, Lela was up moving around much better today. She came back into the office to see what havoc Karen and I had made of her room and to clear out the backlog of mail. I went shopping and bought a little more food. I've found that I am WAY out of the habit of "stocking up" that I used to do when I lived in the midwest. You just get really spoiled when the grocery store is all of four blocks from your house.

So now I just have to remove the plethora of software that I installed on her PC so that I could work remotely. I've been using the Netscreen VPN client extensively this week, and aside from the damn thing wanting to reconnect constantly after you manually disconnect it, it's been a gem. Pretty darn quick, low impact - a little bizarre to set up, but not really bad when you consider the alternatives. I think I'll quietly leave Firefox installed here though - just because I can't quiet leave anyone with just IE. Seems sort of criminal.

reduced meds, keyboard drivers

And those two topics have nothing related except that they're both related to my grandmother. She's on reduced medication for the blood pressure stuff - which we'll be tracking like a fiend tomorrow.

And while everything else was running, I tried to install a driver for the HP 5183-9980 multimedia keyboard to her (newish) computer. The various special function keys weren't doing anything. When I checked Windows, it was just using the standard microsoft driver. Let me tell you - that was better. I spent three hours screwing around attempting to uninstall the damn thing that I dropped in place, as it was causing blue screens and terrible slowdowns. I thought I had that licked, but no such luck. That was annoying, and I just wanted to sit down and work on it - but dinner needed some working on at the same time. I spent a lot of time running back and forth from the computer room to the kitchen.

We made a passable meatloaf in the end. We planned for a roast, but the roast sized lump of beef was inconviently ground beef - so we "roasted" it as meatloaf. Turned out pretty darn OK, even if Ben wasn't here to cook it.

keeping all the balls in the air

You know what, there are a balls to keep in the air all at once when you're looking after someone and trying to work remotely. Wow - I mean, really - this ain't easy!

One of the things that's been really annoying is this restriction for DHCP addresses on the cable modem. Part of that is how I work - I have multiple computers here, but I can't easily hook them all up at once - at least not without going out and getting more hardware to work around the 1 address restriction that's being imposed by the cable modem people.

I'll have to think about how I can work this in the future - I suspect something as simple as a WRT54g wireless router might do the trick and make life a lot easier. You don't realize how much you take the wireless freedom for granted until you don't have it.

Lela's blood pressure is still low, and we have a call in to the nurse and doctor to see what we can do about it. The intial guess is that the drug dosage is just too high. The nurse and cardiologist are both keen on keeping it with the beta channel blocker bits that are there. Dad and Louise are using a calcium channel blocker for similiar effects (blood pressure reduction), but coming from different intial circumstances, and Dad reported that the beta blockers were a bit too effective for him - it sounds somewhat similiar to what Lela is having with the blood pressure drops. We've passed that all along to the nurse (Deborah) and the doctor, and are waiting to hear back.

For the detail interested, the essential problem is an Aortic aneurysm, which seems to be pretty derived from atherosclerosis. Lela has the tear, and its down relatively low. Managing the blood pressure is the biggest thing to do, and just getting that right is proving to be damned troublesome.

low blood pressure

The medications the docs have given Lela are working - a bit too well as we're learning. They're dropping her blood pressure pretty agressively, which has led to another scare last night.

She got up about 1am to "use the facilities" and was doing fine for a minute or two, and then everything blacked out. She wasn't hurt, but I was sure scared. I heard her fall, leapt out to check, and she was on the ground - walker and all. I shouted for Karen, and we took some time getting everything back together before getting her back to bed. She didn't respond for the few minute or two after she'd fallen, and I about had a fit. Then she came back around, and even sitting up was a chore.

The end result of all this has been "experiment with Lela" this morning, where Karen's been taking blood pressure readings constantly. It's been very very low - and when she even sits up, it crashes down. We got her all the way to standing again, but then she started to go again - so we got her sitting down quickly.

Karen and I are just pretty damn sure the medication is too heavily weighted to keep it low - doing it's job too well.

So the end result was two falls yesterday, but she's a pretty tough lady and didn't take any damage other than a bruise. Not that I want to press our luck there. Louise and Ed are back from shopping, so it's lunch time...

a little bit of a spill today

Lela's been doing better and better, but she took a spill today. She was in her bedroom this morning, walking with a cane, and the world just turned sideways on her. She's not hurt, but darned annoyed. The nurse came today too (not related) and we boiled it down to low blood pressure being the most probably cause. She's not yet eating what she used to, nor being as active. She is still making terrific progress, just not the miracle progress that I think we are all wanting to see.

We talked about options to look after her past this Thursday when Karen and I return to Seattle. Some sort of visiting care seems like the best option to me, and the nurse who's coming by this week and next indicated her agency provides those services. We'll be figuring something out over the next few days, because I don't think she'll be up to everything she'd been doing just prior to getting sick by the time we're leaving. Still - the progress has been terrific.

The only downside is that Ben left back for Denver - I just dropped him at the airport. There goes the really good cooking! Ben is an amazing chef who helps make the magic happen at Red Walrus in Denver. Ben has his own little spot on the site if you're interested in a recipe...

cable modems are a pain

My grandmother's cable modem is being a pain. I've been trying to connect the laptop I brought with me to it, and it's not providing a DHCP response. What an annoyance. I know it's so that the customer only has "one PC at a time", but it is still damned annoying. I think I'll need to leave things powered off for a while to get the bloody thing reset...

Quiet new years day

Today's been a pretty quiet New Years day. Everyone was sort of worn out from the flood of family and food yesterday, so we were all slow in moving today, including Lela. I think the sheer volume of noise and people yesterday wore her out some. She also had trouble sleeping last night - the family curse of insomnia I guess.

I didn't know it, but last year she received a roomba for Christmas, so we let it loose into the living room for a while today. That was amusing, and they're pretty neat little things. I do wish it had a clue when it was running out of battery to get back to it's little nest. Even still, I'm really liking it.

While the roomba was wandering about the carpet and getting stuck behind chairs and under cords, we watched a bit of football. Having watched football on HDTV and again today on regular TV, the difference is truly amazing. Nature shows and sports are the definite realm of HDTV, being quickly followed up by some of the XBox 360 games (Call of Duty 2 to be specific), which I'm having to grudgingly admit have some just incredible gameplay viewing. It's a good thing there's a huge shortage of those things this year or Dan and I would have impulsively bought one over Christmas to spend all our time playing it. I rather expect that the new Morrowwind game will be similiarly beautiful.

Tomorrow we're getting up early and heading up to the farm. That's sort of a misnomer, because it's not a working farm anymore - but that's what we call it. 39.5 acres of lightly wooded mississippi bluffs. It'll be nice to get out there again and see the land a bit. We're talking Tom and Clinton up there, who are thinking about hunting on it, and showing them the area. They'd also keep an eye on it for us.