Salivating at the thought...

So my co-worker at the next desk over wasn't in the office yesterday. We (the other people in our cube aisle) were actually fairly worried; we'd gotten a group-wide e-mail in the morning saying he was taking his wife to the doctor, but the e-mail at 11:30 saying he'd just work from home (it's a fairly long commute for him) only went to our manager, so from our point of view he went to the doctor's at like 8:45 and never came home. But it turned out everything was fine, just a communications hiccup. But I'm bringing it up, because the story's interesting.

Apparently, two nights ago, his wife was eating dinner, and her throat started swelling. Both sides, almost like swollen lymph nodes. They called the doctor's overnight emergency line, and he said it sounded like a mild allergic reaction. "Is she having trouble swallowing?" "Not really." "Is she having trouble breathing?" "No." "Then take a couple of Ibuprofen to take down the swelling, and go to the ER if she picks up any new symptoms or it gets worse. Schedule an allergy test for some time to look into it." So she takes a couple of ibuprofen, the swelling goes down, they go to bed, everything's fine.

Next morning, she's eating her cereal, and her neck starts swelling again. So they call the doctor, say "We're coming in now", he sends a quick e-mail to the group, and off they go. She gets looked at... And the doctor tells her to go out, buy some lemon drops, start sucking on them, and go home.

Apparently, what was wrong - and I've never heard of this before, though I suppose it makes some level of sense - was that the channels leading out of her salivary glands got blocked somehow. When she started eating, she started salivating, but the channels were blocked so the glands started swelling up - like a balloon being filled with water. And the doctor's advice was "Well, make yourself salivate more. Eventually it'll work itself out."

That's... Kinda freaky. :-P

Ahhh, well. Back to work and all that jazz.

Medical Bills

So I got the revised version of the hospital bill from my son's surgery, yesterday. I got it, that is; I have no idea how long it was sitting un-opened at my ex's house, but never mind that. It was the revised version, missing all the items that my health insurance negotiated out of existence based on obscure contract terms.

The single largest line item was 20 minutes of operating room time at $1,907. Really? It's not even that I object to the idea that an OR, with all the equipment amortized over some number of years, costs $6,000 per hour to use. It's a lot, but then an X-Ray machine for a couple million is a lot, too. But $5,721 per hour? Somehow that offends my delicate sensibilities. They couldn't have rounded up to $5,750 per hour?

The line item which actually seriously annoys me, though, is "Tissues - $0.83". Are you serious? Are you dead freaking serious? You can't include tissues in the recovery room hourly cost? You have to charge us like 20 cents per tissue for the patient?

Some days it's hard to dredge up faith in humanity out of the depths of illogic.

But in the Latin, super-user begins with an "I"!

It's always interesting to see how things are named technical areas. Back in undergrad, one of my friends who'd been given the responsibility for setting up (including naming) the new group of servers asked around the office and our circle of friends how he should name them, and from something like 20 people he literally got 30-something answers (two people kept on coming back to him with new ideas).

It's a widely varying and rather personal choice, with the added complexity administrative intervention. Servers here used to be named after astronomical objects; planets, moons, comets, stars, etcetera. As the number of servers increased, the names broadened to mythological figures (Greek and Roman gods, etcetera). And then a manager handed down "All servers will be named based on environment, OS, and function!" so now servers have boring names like "WSPROD01" and "FAQUAL04". Bah humbug. I guess it's easier when you're up to a couple hundred servers, but it's still immensely boring.

I've seen servers at places named after super-heroes ("Go grab those files off of Green Lanturn and copy them to Superman, will you?"); I've seen them named after countries and cities ("Uh oh, London's down and Rwanda's throwing exceptions because it can't reach its database!"); I've seen them named after presidents ("Make sure to expose Washington's port 80 outside the firewall, and close off FTP on Jefferson."); I've seen them named after wild animals ("We're going to re-configure Grizzly Bear, Fruit Bat, and White Tiger as a cluster."). It's always fun to see what they pick, given free reign.

The last time I had to name computers (or re-name, really), I had 7 machines I was naming. I obviously named them after the seven deadly sins. The only one of those 7 which is currently still alive is Sloth, my laptop; the rest have all been retired and gotten rid of. It's sad, really... I miss them. I do still have a second machine (my iMac!) but it doesn't have a name; it's just whatever the default is, which I honestly don't know for MacOS. I've only ever set up an iMac twice in my life, and one of the two times were long enough ago that I don't remember it clearly. Besides, my iMac doesn't get used terribly often.

This came up in my team meeting Monday morning, peripherally. At the end, my manager asked if anyone had any issues, and one of my co-workers mentioned that his super-user account didn't work. This transitioned to other super-users being set up in production, and then naming conventions. All "S" accounts are "sample" accounts (S-STPETERS); all "I" accounts are "internal" (I-BJONES). Someone asked how they'd picked "i", and the Indiana Jones joke came up.

This is the kind of thing that happens at work when you work with geeks. >.<

As a final note, I'll leave you with my favorite quote from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Indiana Jones: It's disgraceful, you're old enough to be her... her grandfather.
Professor Henry Jones: Well, I'm as human as the next man.
Indiana Jones: Dad, I *was* the next man.

Oh, the things we could do...

One of my oldest friends (an ex-girlfriend, funnily enough) contacted me over the weekend, Saturday. Said she wanted to send me a song. So she mailed me a demo file she'd made, and I listened to it, and damn did it amaze me. It was a really bright point in an otherwise difficult weekend. So thank you, Steph.

Oh, the things we could do with our hearts partially open...

Anyway. If you haven't (and I've mentioned her enough times in the past, but not recently, so it's obviously time for another plug...), check her out:

http://www.stephaniedelk.com/

She's good. Really good. Go listen, dammit. Hell, at least four of you following my buzz are from Texas (I think?), so you'd even be able to go listen to her perform. :) And yes, I know there's quite a hike between Houston and Austin, but it's a lot shorter drive than Albany to Austin.

Funnily enough, she's one of the very few ex-girlfriends I have that I still speak to, however bad both of us are at keeping in touch. Most of them - especially more recently - I don't talk to. Does that mean I've become a bad person in my old age? Or at least an ass hole? Probably. I was a very different person before under-grad. Then again, Steph and I broke up mostly because she was in Texas and I was in New York; most of my break-ups have been for simple incompatibility or severe disagreement. I'm sure that weighs into it.

Anyway. Post on the other blog later today.

A test... A test...

Okay. So I've had repeated problems, recently, with line breaks not translating properly when posting things on Blogger.

Copying-and-pasting seems to include no line breaks at all, while composition seems to convert a new line into a div break, which at least some browsers remove as white-space to a new-line with no spacing.

So I dug around, and found the formatting option for replacing line breaks with break tags.

I'm testing it. Don't mind me.

Almost, yet not quite...

I tried to write up a post for today, but it ended up not quite working out. And what I mean by that is that, I had things I wanted to write about, but I got so distracted by an argument with someone that I lost my ability to concentrate on it.


Ah, well. At least I can do it tomorrow instead, or something.

Possibly my favorite all-time comment from Slashdot:

Millennium. Two Ns. From Latin "mille", thousand, and "annus", year. A thousand years.
If you write it with only one N, it would be derived from mille and anus, which would be "a thousand assholes".

CPIP?

This must be one of the strangest things I've ever seen...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers



http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/