Redoing RSS feed
I’m updating my RSS feed to be http://www.ericri.com/blog/getRSS.aspx.
Dr. Cherri M. Pancake’s web site is here: http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~pancake/ (and http://www.nacse.org/top/about/team/pancake.html, too). Dr. Pancake was my major professor at Auburn and moved out to the Northwest the same time I was joining Intel Supercomputer Systems Division in 1992. Mark Newsome came out, too, to get his PhD with Dr. Pancake.
Cooper the pet goat has been getting stuck every day. Stuck everyday with a shot of antibiotics. Over a week ago, we called in the vet for a farm visit because Cooper (a Nubian goat) just wasn’t doing well at all (while Chongo the Toggenberg was running around and showing off). Anyway, Cooper stopped eating and dropped a lot of weight, resulting in all sorts of bones sticking out of his skin. So he (and Chongo) got de-wormed and I was given six shots of antibiotics to give Coop, one a day. Sub dermal. Meaning that each morning Elisa holds Cooper’s collar while I pinch his skin and *poke* him with the needle and press down on the plunger. The antibiotic must have a molasses base because it’s pretty slow, meanwhile you have an antsy-goat none too happy to have a needle under his skin.
He’s still skinny, but he has started eating some again (grain and orchard grass hay) and his nose isn’t produce the vile gunk it had been. I hope he pulls through. This past year has just been too much to go through wrt animals on the farm.
What happens when your Subaru's alternator dies?
What happens when your alternator decides to give up the ghost?
This morning on the way into work I fueled up my 96 Subaru Outback and noticed, clearing some mist on the windows, that my windshield wipers were really slow. No matter what setting I put them on, they were slow (could be a real safety problem out here in the Northwest). So as I drove on I started thinking about how to schedule a trip to get the wipers checked before all of this lovely sunny weather turns to rain again.
About 30 minutes later, zooming down Highway 18, my speedometer and tachometer needles starting bouncing up and down, up and down, and then to zero. It was like a dying gasp. At this point, the ABS light clicked on. Followed by the Check Engine light.
Hmm, I thought, the car still seems to be running just fine… maybe I can keep going and when I turn it off it will be like a reset and all will be well (works for Windows…). Well, I thought the better of this and decided to pull over off of the Maple Valley exit and check the car out. The engine was running rough, and when I restarted it the engine was hesitant to start. Well, better get it to a dealer.
Luckily, I had two things in my favor: (1) Elisa working at home, who looked up nearby Subaru dealers, and (2) a McDonald’s manager that owned a Subaru and really recommended Auburn Subaru Volkswagen. So onto the cell phone I got and arranged a tow. Elisa picked me up and I checked in later to find it was the alternator that was bad (much better than the car’s computer).
Bad News for Beau
Oh,
we got some bad news for Beau
last week. I brought him in for his shots and to have a growth on his rear leg
checked out. The rear leg growth was no big deal, but his front leg had some
swelling that was a very big deal: bone cancer.
My
great vet took some x-rays to confirm it. The cancer has not metastasized yet.
If Beau’s rear wasn’t so weak and giving out on him we would
consider amputating the leg before the cancer spread. Chemo’s no good
for his weakened state, either. So the vet prescribed piroxicam, which should
help for any pain, perhaps reduce the swelling, and maybe even have some
anti-cancer benefit.
Beau
did quite a bit of dancing around this weekend so he’s dealing well as of
today. Everything is fine upstairs, so to say, it’s just that his legs
are slowly going out from under him.
Brom’s online website, in case you didn’t know, is http://www.bromart.com/ .
Quantum Physics and Yelm? There’s a nice full-color ad in the paper as of Friday for a new film coming to the little independent Yelm, WA cinemas. What caught my attention is that it’s a film about quantum physics. The website is http://www.whatthebleep.com/home/ . My first reaction: odd, why would a little town like Yelm get such a cool movie about quantum physics? My second reaction: oooooh, that’s right. Ramtha.
Ol JZ Knight has taken up home in Yelm. What the heck does a channeling mystic have to do with quantum physics? I guess it helps to explain how channeling happens. I had no idea about the physics-Ramtha connection until I went Christmas shopping in Yelm back in 2002. I went into a gift store, RIE or something like that, and in the midst of all this wonder Christmas décor and clothes and such, I stumbled into their book section and discovered a book I was currently reading, The Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. How odd. Someone in the gift store must have screwed up ordering that.
But then I discovered another quantum book I had, and more physics books. And then a book I had always wanted but never could find. It was like a dream come true. Mesmerized, I wandered over to their full shelves and no doubt became slack-jawed as I saw all the best-of-the-best physics and quantum theory books neatly nestled together, shelf after shelf.
Heaven. But then my WTF meter went off and I looked around and saw right after the books was the sermon tape section and Linda Evans pictures and Ramtha-this-that-and-the-other-thing. Ooooooh. Two plus two.
So I’d like to see this movie one day. Maybe I’ll wait for it to come out on IFC or such. Unless I find myself in Yelm, taking in the quantum scenery.
RSS via Feedster
I’m trying to set an RSS feed up as well via Feedster.com – it might be a bit funky as I adjust my template. Final URL should be: http://subscribe.feedster.com/EricRi – let me try turning on my URL for publishing… hmm, had to try adding <span class=”rss:permalink”><a href=”<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>” title=”permanent link”<>/span> … and now I’ll give it some time.
Hello. This is a test of the Microsoft speech recognition. I’m very impressed at how well it does on recognizing my speech. And this comes free with Microsoft office. To tell you the truth I don’t know if I’ll use this versus typing all that much. I guess I should find some fun ambiguous text to read and see how well it does, or perhaps some really big sat words. I haven’t taken the time to learn how to do the commands as well as just the speech recognition. In the meantime I’m just having fun learning.
Eric.
So because of this Wired Magazine article (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/india.html ) I finally borrowed Who Moved My Cheese? from Elisa Sunday night and gave it a read. Not too bad – I had read mostly negative things about it deeming it too simplistic.
It does have just a few central points, though, and does it nicely. Given that my profession is beginning to move offshore more and more, it serves as a nice reality check to stop and look around and realizing what I’m doing might very well be done less and less on U.S. soil in the years to come… my cheese is indeed changing.
(At a meeting today, I joked how the future versions of our product might have to be localized for English.)