Mizblog

I seem to be writing less and less often. No time or energy to do more, I suppose.

We ended 2006 shortly after a day trip to Santa Barbara’s botanical gardens and Mission. It was the baby’s first trip out of Los Angeles. My feet didn’t hurt much as long as I walked slowly.

Now I’m back at work, trying to tackle 3 different projects at the same time. I’m too ambitious.

It’s Monday again. I haven’t written here much lately because I’ve been pretty distracted.

I’m developing a new program at work using Flash and PHP. This is surprising because I barely know how to do anything in both of these realms, and yet I’m planning to rebuild my application framework using these two technologies by the end of next month.

It’s been getting colder. Not compared with other parts of the world maybe, but sub-70F feels cold to me and I don’t like it. I prefer 90F or more, to be honest. More chaos.

Saranya is getting easier to manage and also cuter.

When I first registered to vote, I registered under the Natural Law Party. I did this because I saw all politicians as corrupt, and the most corrupt were drawn to the two most powerful parties.

As you can infer, I did not register thus because of my belief in Natural Law (whatever that was). But lately I’ve come to wonder what it was that I’d been signed up for all this time.

The first thing I found out is that the Natural Law Party has been subsumed by the US Peace Government. Soooo I’m now a registered “Independent”.

The second thing I found out is that Natural Law is mainly an assertion of the objectivity of moral norms. Now we’re getting somewhere interesting. I’ve got to study this Natural Law thing some more.

I’d just like to point out one of my personal heroes: John Brown. He was a white guy who tried to do the right thing about race relations in America. Of course they killed him for it and subsequently called him “crazy” but I really admire his stand for ‘the dignity of human nature’.

Yesterday I saw a tree fall on some girl. It happened right in front of me. I saw the tree start tipping and it just kept going. This girl was on her cellphone and walking away from the tree, when my coworker yelled “Look out!” so of course she stopped and turned around just in time to see the leafy top of the tree land right on here. Luckily for her the only solid things that hit her were the little top branches (which hit her leg) but maybe if it wasn’t for that warning shout she’d have escaped contact entirely.

We decided, my coworker and I, that it was probably a message from God. We failed to agree on its meaning, however. He asserted that it was a commentary on our previous conversation, while I argued that if it was a message, it was sent to the girl upon whom it landed and that in any case we couldn’t know its meaning.

It’s Tuesday again. Maintenance day. Yesterday Joel installed and configured phpBugTracker on our lab server. This involved hours and hours of puzzling over why Apache wasn’t responding to changes in its config file (answer: there were two versions of apache installed and guess which one wasn’t running), wondering why php pages were being served raw and unprocessed (answer: php wasn’t installed), struggling to get phpBugTracker to connect to the database (surprisingly, MySQL wasn’t installed either) and a long list of more trivial disconnections and missing dependencies. At the end of the day, it turned out that several hours of hacks and soft links and reinstalls could have been replaced by three config file adjustments. That’s computers for you.

It’s been getting colder. Seems like I write more blog entries during times like this. The dropping temperature seems to put me in a morose, contemplative mood. Watching the world begin to die.

My daughter is fussing in the next room. My wife just walked out of that room and went back in with a tool of some kind. My sense of self preservation is keeping me from inquiring further.

This morning was rough.

It started early with a trip to the pediatrician. With our regular pediatrician on vacation, there was some mixup as to who would see our girl, how we would pay for it, what her name was, how to spell her name (Sangeeta still can’t spell it), and what the name of the substitute doctor was. I almost screamed.

It turns out that Saranya shrank half an inch and gained 3 pounds since last time we visited. Needless to say, they aren’t too careful when they weigh and measure the babies. Oh yeah, and this time they didn’t make us strip her nekkid so she was wearing a diaper, onesie, sweater, and pants-with-built-in-socks to help with her ballast. In the end she got three shots and did a whole lot of crying. And she has wax in her ear.

Then I tried to get my foot X-rayed, but my doctor had failed to fill out the paperwork so the X-ray tech wouldn’t do the job.

Article adjectivy pluralnouns verbed adverbly preposition the noun. Pluralpronouns verbed adjectively.

Pronoun verb adverb interjection!

I’ve been diagnosed with plantar fascitis. It’s been disabling me for months and I had no idea what was going on, except that my foot kept hurting for no good reason. I suspect the blame for it can be laid upon my old worn-out shoes, which I replaced a month after symptoms occurred. That was back in March though, and it’s been half a year since then. So now I’m doing stretches and exercises in addition to taking ibuprofen in large doses.

It’s time to get back into writing a regular blog.

Saranya is getting bigger and better developed. This morning she rolled over onto her tummy (with a little help) and held her upper body off the ground by resting on her elbows! Before today she’d just lie on her face with her arms lying limp at her sides, and she’d kick her feet and arch her back to lift her head off the ground a bit. This was a big step for her.

Work is going pretty well. Today I finally converted my main coding project from VC6 to VC8 and got it to work! I’m finally using a modern compiler again.

We’re about to get a new contract with a major corporation. I’m not supposed to talk about the details, but it’s going to keep us quite busy for some time. Mainly me, since I’m doing all the programming. I’m going to need a new computer system soon though, since VC8 doesn’t run on my old work computer (Win2k). I’d better get shopping.