mykrocosm

My ride to work couldn’t make it today and my throat was feeling a bit crap anyway so I set up office on the bare dining table, nothing else around, no distractions, just one window open with a nice view across the Seacliff hillside. I’m pretty chuffed with my day’s work, nailed a few things that have been bugging me for a while. Wrapping my head around some of the new code has been frustrating but I feel like I’m getting somewhere now. Apart from one awful MS Access application the VPN works great, it’s just like being in the office! With people connecting to our intranet in Adelaide from Queensland, England and China, it really is a shrinking world.

What a nice lazy afternoon, hours spent curled up on the sofa and beanbag reading our books, light streaming in the windows.

I got to finish the book I mentioned earlier; Mao’s Last Dancer. It’s a captivating autobiography of a Chinese peasant boy who, through equal parts of luck and determination, made the journey to the top of world ballet.

You don’t have to know anything about ballet to enjoy this book - the involving story is woven through a China undergoing great change in the 60s and 70s, the lofty tussles of political power playing out far above one tiny village enduring abject poverty and suffering.

Beautiful, Simple, Inspirational. Definitely recommended.

Author’s Site , Amazon link

My right wrist hurts. It’s a nasty, insidious pain that comes and goes throughout the day, spreading up from the wrist into the back of my hand. It didn’t seem to be getting any better, so this morning I whiled away a quiet hour reading my book at the Marion Domain Medical Centre before I got called in for my 2 minute consult.

I was told it was a “ganglion”. He suggested that I could try anti-inflammatories but didn’t seem too confident. He finally recommended that I just rub Ibuprofen gel into it three times a day, and come back in a month if there was no improvement.

Did a little googling, this seems the best link :

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g2601/is_0005/ai_2601000572

Bits and pieces from that page :

A ganglion … also called a synovial hernia or synovial cyst, is a non-cancerous cyst filled with a thick, jelly-like fluid … a small, usually hard bump above a tendon or in the capsule that encloses a joint… mild sprains or other repeated injuries can irritate and tear the thin membrane covering a tendon, causing fluid to leak into a sec that swells… flexing or bending the affected area, or continuing to perform the activity can cause discomfort… general soreness or a dull, aching sensation… sometimes disappears without treatment… Over the counter analgesics such as acetaminophen (Tylenol) can control mild pain… surgery is the only guaranteed treatment…

The other weekend this pimply kid came to our door trying to flog us an EnergyAustralia electricity contract. We gave him 10 minutes with his spiel. He enthusiastically kept saying we’d “save money”, but he couldn\’t tell us how much. We asked him to leave a brochure with us so we could read over it, and he said “I can’t give you the information unless you sign up with us”. Is he kidding or what? We had to send him packing.

Edit: weird, Wordpress put all these backslashes in my saved draft post. Thinking they were escape formatting I left them in, but they got literally included in the published post! I had to remove them by hand. Grr.

Supermarket error in your favour, collect $38.

Bloatware is a fact of life. Any good system is doomed, through its own popularity, to become a bloated, ponderous mess. It’s not just in software but everywhere you look.

Take our curry run. When it started two years ago it was just five mates in the office who every Thursday would nominate a different driver to go and grab some curry lunches from the city. As we’d sit there happily chowing down on our Thai Green or Chilli Chicken people would poke their head in to smell the fumes. Of course they wanted to join in.

Our curry run now caters to 12-13 people week in, week out. Along the way we had to evolve a wiki-page based roster and ordering system that was fast, simple and actually worked. Then some people wanted to use a different restaurant. Then there were the people who found Thursday terribly inconvenient, and would we mind doing it on a Tuesday instead? Then there’s the forgetfuls who put an order in and haven’t yet paid, and those who want change for a large banknote every week. All these little things add up to make curry day a weekly four hour saga starting from 9am and going right through to the very last belch.

Then there’s my pet peeve… all those curries when stacked four high in a cardboard box tend to pile drive down and if yours is the unfortunate container on the bottom it’s no fun to extricate your oily squished mess, with most of the juice floating around in the plastic bag. And their combined weight is not insignificant, I’d love to weigh a full box one of these days. You’ve now got to think about how you’re carrying them and how far. Say someone parked a block too far one day and hurt their back, well I don’t think there’s anything in the occupational health and safety policy about that.

You can bet on the same thing happening to anything that works well for a small group of people. We’ve started experimenting with carpooling at work, beginning small with just two of us and its been working quite well, indeed its fun to share the long drive with someone. Now we’ve got interest from a third party, so the amount of communication and organisation has tripled. Instead of A-B we now have A-B, B-C and A-C. We’ve had to draw up a participation sheet, just for the three of us. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.. the whole point of carpooling is to stack up the numbers. I just hope we can find a way to keep things simple and low fuss… that’d be nice. Or it could be the curry run all over again. Fingers crossed!

Gee, even that paragon of simplicity, Google, isn’t immune to bloat. Each of their individual offerings works great, but now they’re wrestling with the big question; how do they combine them all into a single simple GUI? They haven’t progressed any further than that small link panel they stuck in the corner of the Calendar page. By and large you still need to use separate, distinct URLs to access their many sites. The integrated Google OS is still a long, long way off.

End rant…

We had the family over for dinner tonight, our first entertaining night in the new place. It’s been a busy week for my parents, clocking up over 1500km in the car between different states to visit their kids and for dental and medical appointments. I worry when they drive so far, but they’re happy where they live. Having just put a new kitchen in I don’t think they’re moving anytime soon.

Had my first corked wine experience. I had noticed when extracting the cork that there were unusual purplish stains all along the side of it to the top. Which made sense once we started tasting it, though to be honest I probably would have kept drinking it anyway! It was a really nice 2002 Jacobs Creek shiraz that Dave had brought along, which was really unfortunate. I felt bad for him but we really did appreciate the thought.

I’m beginning to hate the sight of cardboard boxes. They’re everywhere. They flock together, from one corner of the house to the other, stacking themselves staunchly in front of the one you need. They don’t have the grace to disappear when their job is done but loiter around in misshapen piles, their stubby wings flicking out to catch your legs as you walk past. Every now and then I round on them, gathering them up roughly and sweeping them out the back door in a torrent. They lounge around out there mocking me, knowing that soon I’ll be out there amongst them again, forced to pick from their motley lot one, two or a few to return to the house, to return to service.

They don’t know it, but most of them have been marked. Marked with the owner they came from. The owner they’ll go back to. Soon. Soon.

Three days in a row after work we’ve been cleaning the old place from top to bottom - its amazing the amount of accumulated crap and dust that manages to hide between, amongst, under and inside all your possessions which you never notice during normal cleaning. Guess that’s the whole point of “spring cleaning”, where you take all your things outside and beat, shake, and bash them. There could be something in that.

Cardboard for dinner again tonight; I think we’ve reached our quota of junk food for the year. I made the mistake of ordering the double quarter pounder with cheese. I remember being rather impressed with the name of that burger when I was a kid, but I’d completely forgotten that it was just a giant cheeseburger, with no salads in it whatsoever. Yuck. It was not very enjoyable. I should have gotten the aussie burger, at least there’s some variety in that to chow through.

Yesterday was a whirlwind. Four weeks of carefully laid designs got swept up in the chaos of nine helping pairs of hands. While I was painstakingly positioning the washing machine according to plan in the covered trailer, three other pieces of furniture got squeezed in next to me and seven boxes went sailing by to the smaller trailer. Probably a good thing too, the control freak in me would have gone nuts seeing that teetering tower of worldly possessions. By the time I noticed it I was resigned to the flow, and I didn’t even care how countless other bits and pieces had been packed into half a dozen cars. Even the rain pouring down during our second trip didn’t dent the momentum of our willing friends and we were all done in time for a big pizza lunch and then a nice relaxing coffee out the back with a bit of Ow’s the serenity.

Taking stock, my vibrating alarm clock seems to have lost its buzz, but miraculously, everything else survived. In bed, our first night in the new house, we whispered to each other, “Good night, co-homeowner”. And then… zzzzzzzZZZZZ