Nov 29
Milenka got me a new ring for our anniversary (which was only a week and a half ago….I’m right on top of things here) to replace my old wedding ring which I have been having problems with lately. I’ve been wearing it since our anniversary and so far I’ve had no trouble. The new [...] [...more]
Posted: under Personal.
Milenka got me a new ring for our anniversary (which was only a week and a half ago….I’m right on top of things here) to replace my old wedding ring which I have been having problems with lately. I’ve been wearing it since our anniversary and so far I’ve had no trouble. 
The new ring is silver rather than the gold of the old one. With the old one, after 4 or 5 days a rash would be really obvious and it would itch. I’ve worn the new one for twice as long with no trouble at all now. It looks like it’s safe to say that I’ll have no trouble with this one in the near future.
Usability aside, I really like the new ring. I had a hard time getting a decent picture, but it has two dragons facing each other with a [[triquetra]] in the middle. Although the triquetra has no particular meaning for me, I’ve always enjoyed it’s artistic symmetry. The dragon’s wings go further back to become some other interesting shape that then gives rise to 4 lines that go around to the other side of the ring. I like it a lot.
Nov 27
The last of my four days off is coming to a close. Overall, it’s been a good weekend. It hasn’t been exactly optimal, however.
Thanksgiving itself went well. We had (and still have) lots of food. If I made a list of everything we had, it would probably top 30 items…Milenka tried to do so and [...] [...more]
Posted: under Movies, Personal.
The last of my four days off is coming to a close. Overall, it’s been a good weekend. It hasn’t been exactly optimal, however.
Thanksgiving itself went well. We had (and still have) lots of food. If I made a list of everything we had, it would probably top 30 items…Milenka tried to do so and ended up with more than a page of stuff. The funny thing is that everything was for 3 people…we always do that though. The Lions really, really got killed. I didn’t actually figure they’d win….they suck as always, despite having some nice talent. They’ve generally stayed alive pretty well in most of the games they’ve lost though. There’ve been a couple that they lost in the last minutes of the game. This one was pretty much over by halftime. Not that any game ever is ever really over that early, but without a change for the better, there’s no way to come back from being 17 behind. That was their worst game all year.
We watched a few movies, though nothing particularly notable. I will say that Polar Express was better than I thought it would be. Of course, I thought it would be absolutely horrible. In reality, it was only slightly horrible. The whole thing is CGI and looks just awesome. The quality reminds of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. That’s about where the good parts of the movie end though. Beyond that it’s mostly boring. It kind of has a nice happy Christmas moral or whatnot, but, bah! If the movie had been done with real people I probably wouldn’t have watched the whole thing. It’s also kind of silly because Tom Hanks does like half of the voices, which probably wouldn’t be a big deal if he had talent as a voice actor, but he doesn’t. So all we get is different variations in pitch of the same voice….lame.
We got our monitor back. It’s still broken. What a surprise. It’s actually rather difficult to see what’s wrong with it….a single column of pixels is really very, very small. We’ll have to try again some other time I guess… It was a big shock and a bit annoying to have all of the text be so small again once I got it hooked back up. I quickly got used to it though and it’s absolutely incredible how much more can be crammed onto one screen. I feel like I can actually see web pages again and not just half here and half there.
I also did some misc. cleaning and painting and other rearranging of furniture. It’s always nice how just moving stuff around a room so it looks different can breath new life into things.
As for the dying….that’s mostly Milenka. She likes to go around saying “I’m dying” when she’s feeling really sick. She’s felt not so great the past couple of days. She was nauseous for about 14 hours the other day and she finally felt better when she threw up a piece of turkey that seemed as though it was stuck somewheres. She was feeling good last night and this morning and then early this afternoon she was back to feeling terrible again. We’re not real sure what’s going on there.
And then there’s me. I was trying to cut a loaf of bread. I was holding the loaf of bread as I was cutting it and I was going off the theory that the bread knife wasn’t all that sharp. I knew I was about through and I really wasn’t giving it much but I cut into my fingers rather badly. It’s one hell of a bread knife I guess….I could probably shave with the thing. I would have rather stayed at home, but it was a bit too deep (and it a bit too bad of a location to keep relatively immobile) for that. I ended up with 7 stitches. At least I can still type… 
It just compliments the time I cut the back side of those two fingers when I was like 12. Oddly enough, I did it the first time using my swiss army knife. Just earlier that day I had put that knife in my pocket after finding it. It had been floating around the house somewhere and I had been looking for it for some time.
It’s kind of odd as well. The last time, I was supposed to keep it covered pretty much all of the time. This time, I’ve been told to keep it bandaged for 24 hours and then just leave it unbandaged all of the time unless I’m “digging through the mud” (the nurse’s exact words… ). The primary difference being a well that they gave me a prescription for keflex as opposed to last time when I had nothing but Neosporin for infections. It just makes me think of tattoo aftercare… (which is basically just care for a wound). Some camps say to keep it covered nearly all of the time and only let it air our for a little bit each day, whereas others say to keep it open all of the time. It’s a bit different with a tattoo of course as the primary goal is to keep the ink from bleeding out, but then this generally corresponds with healing it as quickly as possible. Anyways, it just makes me wonder more about the whole bandaged vs. unbandaged thing. Is one a newer trend, or do some people just do it one way and others do it the other (while others do everything in between, of course) with no particular rhyme or reason when taken as a whole?
The picture is really for my own records….and for the relatively odd others out there. For the record as well, my index finger has some dried blood on it so it looks slightly worse than it really is…
Nov 23
I was curious how much an xbox 360 would go for on ebay (link will be dead after a couple of days) and I looked last night. There were many auctions that were just ending that must have been 24 hour auctions that people had put up when they got home the night before after [...] [...more]
Posted: under Hardware, Technology.
I was curious how much an xbox 360 would go for on ebay (link will be dead after a couple of days) and I looked last night. There were many auctions that were just ending that must have been 24 hour auctions that people had put up when they got home the night before after it came out. The first one I clicked on went for $905….it sold in the store for $299 + $60 for the game that was also in the auction…nice profit. MS has said that they purposefully are restricting supplies so that it sells out everywhere…
(The auction didn’t mention a HD, so I’m assuming it was the cheaper $299 system and not the $399 one….either way though…)
Nov 22
As I mentioned before, my numbers, as far as visitors are concerned, stay rather high even when I don’t write anything. I just think that it’s interesting that the trend has continued over the past couple of weeks.
But then, that has little to do with my writing, or rather lack there of, as of [...] [...more]
Posted: under General, Personal.
As I mentioned before, my numbers, as far as visitors are concerned, stay rather high even when I don’t write anything. I just think that it’s interesting that the trend has continued over the past couple of weeks.
But then, that has little to do with my writing, or rather lack there of, as of late. I’ve been busy, sure, as I always seem to be, but I just haven’t been in the mood. The idea hasn’t had a great deal of appeal to me. That is, until I sat down and started typing the last paragraph…
Various things have been going on. Saturday was our six year wedding anniversary. I didn’t work and we spent the day together and it was a good day on the all and all. More about that later though. I just mentioned that I didn’t work. That was actually the first day I’ve had off since September 25….that makes 54 working days in a row. I’d basically become numb to the whole thing, but once I’d had a day off, all bets were off and I had even less desire than normal to be there on Sunday. I’m pretty sure that we’re getting all 4 days off this weekend, however, which will be exceptionally nice. I’m also quite sure that in doing so, we’ll be guaranteed to start off next week far enough behind that there will be no doubt about us working Saturday and Sunday for at least the next week or two (we have been lately, as I mentioned, but orders are slackening enough that we could probably manage to get a Sunday off now and then). But long weekend…yay. That makes today Thursday essentially and not Tuesday like the calendar says.
We finally sent our monitor in for repair (or more likely, replacement). We have 21″ LCD monitor. It has column of dead pixels and some other dead areas as well. None of them are terribly noticeable when there are 1600 such columns, but it’s still under warranty so we’re getting it taken care of. When we first got it, I thought it was overkill. The 19″ CRT we’d been using seemed plenty good enough. Now that we’re back to using the CRT it’s just ….. eww. The CRT just looks wrong. Though it will run at 1280×1024, everything seems blurry unless we run at 1024×768. This is because the monitor isn’t the greatest, but I think that in part it’s the difference between the CRT and the LCD. Also, this thing does NOT have a flat screen, so everything is especially odd looking. And 1024×768….how do most people do it? It’s just nasty looking. The only thing the CRT can do better is play movies/display things in more than once resolution clearly. Unless what you’re doing is in 1600×1200, the LCD just comes out blurry, unfortunately. Still, I’d rather deal with that on occasion than this CRT… I even want to go so far as to say that the LCD seems brighter, even though that doesn’t seem to make whole lot of sense..
Now I actually have to go to work….bah. Two more days to go. I’ll have to make a point of posting again sooner than a week from now..
Nov 10
I was thoroughly disturbed when I first heard about the insurance company Weyco firing employees with any nicotine in their bloodstream. Basically, the president of the company, in an effort to spread his beliefs, informed everyone two years ago that they’d be fired if they didn’t quit smoking (altogether mind you, not just on their [...] [...more]
Posted: under General.
I was thoroughly disturbed when I first heard about the insurance company Weyco firing employees with any nicotine in their bloodstream. Basically, the president of the company, in an effort to spread his beliefs, informed everyone two years ago that they’d be fired if they didn’t quit smoking (altogether mind you, not just on their property) by the start of this year. (Weyco is actually the insurance company that my employer chooses to use, and I remember way back when, when their representative made his annual visit to talk about benefit changes for the coming year, hearing about this plan.)The article specifically mentions two employees, at least one of which tried to quit and couldn’t, who were fired/forced into resignation over all of this.
I mentioned that the president was just trying to spread his beliefs….I wasn’t just spouting out what sounded good. It’s easy to say (or assume even) that it’s all about cost. Statistics have shown time and time again that smoking is linked to a variety of health problems and there’s no denying that, taken as a whole, medical costs are higher for smokers than for non-smokers. But if it were just about money, wouldn’t it make more sense just to tack on a higher premium to smokers’ insurance? That would be a fair way to appropriately cover costs. That isn’t what this guy decided to do though. He decided to tell his employees that they weren’t allowed to smoke, period. Furthermore, he’s quoted in the article as saying that he never even bothered to look at whether these particular employees were costing more money than anyone else. He said it didn’t matter and that he didn’t care.
The article goes on to describe other cases were people have been fired for dumb things outside of work. For instance, it mentions one guy who worked at a Budweiser distributor who was out one night and ordered a Bud. When the waitress messed up the order and brought a Coors, the guy told her not to worry about it. His boss’s son-in-law was there and offered to buy him a Bud, but the guy declined. The next day, the guy was fired because he was drinking the Coors…
Seeing as though I don’t smoke and never have as I’ve always thought it was a rather dumb idea, I don’t care too much about smoker’s rights. This isn’t really about smoking though. It’s about people having freedom to do as they please with their own time. It’s quite wrong for an employer to tell people what they can and can’t do in their free time. My first thought was, of course, that this can’t be legal. These two should sue. But it is legal. That’s the worst thing. Nearly all of the states have no laws that protect employees from being fired for any old reason. An employer can pretty much fire you at any time for any reason. And here I thought unions no longer served a purpose..
