| craving HDL |
[Jun. 18th, 2009|09:31 am] |
I had a physical yesterday, and like last time my HDL is still low. (it's 28...somethings and normal is 40...somethings) The good news is that my triglycerides and LDL were normal this time. Oh, and I need to lose some weight, which I already knew.
I got my results on a nice little sheet with the normal values and what I could do (non-medicationwise) to improve the values. On literally every measure, the first two items were "Lose weight" and "Exercise more". Um, great.
Also, I moved at work today! Exciting. |
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| post-birthday blues |
[Apr. 21st, 2009|01:01 pm] |
Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes! I had a nice dinner and post-dinner Rock Band session (we're Rock Immortals now!) and caught up a bit with my family. And we're making really good progress on wedding stuff, so that's gotten a lot less stressful. Also, now I'm 27, which is 33, and next year I'll be 28 which is a perfect number! (after that, it's all downhill, I'm sure)
That notwithstanding, things kinda suck right now. Let me run down why, because I'm sure you're all dying to know!
Torture - So when Ex-President Bush said "We don't torture", apparently what he meant was "We don't torture, except when we do". This is not terribly surprising, but it is a little depressing. (we waterboarded one guy 183 times in a month even after he had given up intelligence) I haven't had the heart to read the memos, but I applaud Obama for releasing them.
Work - The last week of work has been the worst week in at least a year. (I wish I had some sort of device where I recorded how work went that day, then I could track the data over time and say definitively how bad last week was!) This week is shaping up to be somewhat better, but it looks like I'm going to be generally stressed for at least another month and a half.
Teeth - As I mentioned, my filled tooth still hurts, and my mom and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) djedi convinced me to see the dentist again. And they took an X-ray and it looks like I need yet another root canal, to the tune of $1200 out of pocket. I'm going to get a second opinion, which means more work and stress and time away from work, which means more work stress. Argh. |
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| benchmark analyzer! |
[Feb. 24th, 2009|10:20 am] |
So I wrote this benchmark analyzer to analyze benchmarks that have many parameters and try to figure out what the important ones are. To that end, it creates a decision tree in R, and also generates lots of boxplots to visualize the different parameters. Here's a sample report (with boring data). It also (somewhat cleverly) saves the original .csv file with the web page it generates, so you can save the page and send it to a colleague who can play with the options and rerun the analysis.
It occurred to me as I was prettying this up that most benchmarks don't involve lots of parameters, and so the probability that anyone else is going to find this useful is pretty low. I'm OK with that because
- it's useful to me right this very moment for work stuff
- I had fun writing it and learned some more about R
- pretty graphs!
- it was good to work on something other than whereslunch.org for a while |
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| psychology is weird |
[Feb. 9th, 2009|03:34 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | work | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  chipper | ] |
It's weird that I started the day in a meh mood, got very frustrated this morning, and now that the source of the frustration doesn't apply anymore I'm happy. Mood is not a conservative force! |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 23rd, 2008|10:14 am] |
Rehearsals are going pretty well, albeit a bit tiring. We're about to get into "oh crap the shows is really really soon and we all suck" mode (it's an annual occurrence), but once we buckle down I think all will be well.
After rehearsal last night, I arrived home to find a few "dude, did you steal all the stuff in the guild bank?" IMs. Not a good sign. Tried to log in to WoW and couldn't, so I reset the password online and discovered that I had, indeed, done so. The weird thing is that the thief took basically all 5000 of my gold, but didn't sell any of my soulbound gear, and cleared out most of my bank but not all of it. And didn't find the 8 Primal Mights and 450 gold on my auction house mule.
Anyway, I filed a petition to get my crap back, which I think they usually do, and presumably they'll restore the guild bank as well. Yet another way WoW is better than the real world :-)
This week I've been superproductive at work...let's see if that continues today.
This article about purity balls is kinda creepy. |
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| a short list of things that anger me |
[Jul. 7th, 2008|02:44 pm] |
- Visual Basic 6
- bugs that don't happen when you set a breakpoint but do otherwise
- bugs that make you think you're losing your mind
- Visual Basic 6 |
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| ah, Heisenbugs |
[Jul. 2nd, 2008|09:40 am] |
Yesterday I was going to say that, when debugging a problem, I had caused another problem by popping up debugging MessageBoxes. (tip: VB6 does not like coercing non-string-like objects to strings implicitly) But after I fixed that, it turns out that popping up MessageBoxes actually seems to fix the real problem. Arrrrgh.
Happy 4th! Here are 21 hilariously hyperbolic pro-America songs. I recommend "America, Fuck Yeah" (number 21). |
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| this has been a long week |
[Apr. 18th, 2008|10:59 am] |
mostly because I've been horribly unproductive at work. Luckily, the Productivity Fairy has waved his magic wand and yesterday and today have been much better.
Rolled out the new version of the Frost mage DPS calculator (hopefully soon to be arcane and fire as well) - here's the old version for comparsion. I think it looks a lot nicer now.
This story about a non-doctor having a breakthrough in curing cancer makes him sound like a crank, until you get to the part where his method is being tested in hospitals now, including M. D. Anderson. The late Dr. Smalley (that felt weird to type) helped out by providing some nanoparticles.
I'm hesitant to link this story about elevators because it discusses a guy who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. Make sure you're in a strong mental state before watching the sped up security camera footage of the ordeal. The piano music makes it even more tragic.
Last night's Zul'Aman run went well - we downed the Bear and Eagle bosses with 9 minutes (plenty of time!) before the sacrifice and killed Hex Lord Malacrass for the first time. Did a decent job on Zul'Jin - almost got through phase 3 before we called it a night. Unfortunately wowjutsu hasn't picked up our new loot yet because it's slow and unreliable. (I'll admit to being bitter I didn't think of the wowjutsu idea first...genius, I tell you!) |
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| not as deep as it sounds |
[Apr. 1st, 2008|02:42 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | work | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  content | ] |
From one perspective, being notified of a problem as you get to work and later fixing that problem means you haven't made any progress - from your point of view things worked as well as they did before you came to work.
From another perspective, there was a horrendous bug that you didn't know about and now that it's gone peace can reign over the codebase. I find it very satisfying! |
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| a day of unnecessary stress |
[Feb. 19th, 2008|10:01 am] |
First I was stressed about a recruiting meeting, which ended fine and without my being asked any questions. Then I was stressed about playing bridge with onefishclappin and the gang - it went fine, I had a lot of fun and I think I played at least well enough not to embarrass myself (or onefishclappin). Duplicate is a really nice format, and the bidding boxes are very elegant. 24 hands in 3 hours is a lot, though - my brain was fried by the end!
I was also stressed by a horrendously tricky bug at work, but that's worth stressing over, at least during work hours.
Carpet costs more than we thought it would (anyone surprised?) but it'll be fine. I just want to get the damn thing installed, really.
Now I'm stressed about taking my MacBook in today to see if they can fix my "Control" and "v" keys. That would make me a happy person.
Django question: (sorry yerfdogyrag, meant to ask you last night but see earlier bit about brain-frying) On my main page, I want a drop-down box that selects which person to see gifts for, and then some way to do that. Two options I've come up with:
- Use a <form> with a <select>, and GET the results to a different page. The problem with this is that the URLs get kinda ugly, which I'm not thrilled with. Should I do a redirect to the nicer-looking URL?
- Do some javascript stuff in the <select> element that changes the target of a link to the nicer-looking URL. But, I'm currently using the newforms library to generate the form - is there a good way to insert javascript in the onChange handler? |
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| *twitch* |
[Feb. 6th, 2008|01:49 pm] |
My right eye has been doing this weird twitching for the past 5 days or so. It doesn't happen all the time, and it doesn't hurt, but sometimes it'll just start twitching like the eyelid is stuck open or caught on something. And the eye does feel a little dry. Anyone have any clue whether this is serious or not? It's a little irritating, but I can live with it if it's not the sign of some larger problem (eye falling out, for example - that would be bad).
Work meeting #1 today, big work meeting #2 tomorrow. |
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| MacBook Pro: October 17, 2007 - ? |
[Jan. 31st, 2008|07:59 am] |
While kicking butt in Arathi Basin last night, I knocked a big ol' glass of tea right onto my $3000 laptop. A good chunk of it went in the keyboard (which made the laptop turn off which is probably a good thing given the alternatives), so djedi hurriedly mopped as much as we could off, disconnected it and moved it to higher ground. (it's currently sitting upside-down on our dining room table in the hopes that it will drain or something) I didn't have the heart to try to turn it on this morning - guess I'll see about that tonight. I did buy the AppleCare for it, although I don't know if that covers spills or not.
The weird thing was that I wasn't super panicked or angry or whatever. I was upset at myself, but I know that I'm prone to clumsiness when I'm tired. (like when I burned my thumb on the oven last week!) And if the laptop is unrecoverable, well, that would suck, but I could get by for iPod syncing and WoW playing and whatnot. It would be nice if it worked though.
Ironically, I was just yesterday reading about jwz's backup strategy and thinking it sounded like a good idea. Not that I had anything particularly interesting on the laptop data-wise (I always back up my iTunes database), but still...
Other than that, work has been going really really well this week. My mom visits next Wednesday, Friday we close on our house (!), and that weekend djedi's parents are coming to hopefully buy carpet for us and stuff, which will be quite helpful.
I'm going to miss campaigning in Florida, specifically hearing about Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani saying that English should be the national language, and then advertising in Spanish. That's some good hypocrisy, there. Via dailykos, an article in Rolling Stone about how Republican's immigrant-bashing is not going to help them, especially in the Southwest.
Finally, on the way home I heard this kinda-brutal story on NPR about how Giuliani should have taken his advice from his leadership book, complete with excerpts from the audiobook itself. (it's the story on top, not the longer story on the bottom) |
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| puzzle pictures |
[Jan. 23rd, 2008|02:55 pm] |
I took pictures of the latest puzzles we've completed, whereby "we" I mean "David, Miriam, and sometimes me". The last two were taken with my new phone, which is why the color is pretty messed up. (I tried to fix it in iPhoto but I may have just made things worse) So: having a camera with me at all times: pretty neat, but I'll stick to the real camera when it's available.
Speaking of the new phone, it's pretty neat! The screen is much nicer than my old one, and it's my first clamshell phone, which I think I like. It has pretty good web access, although my one big complaint is that it doesn't let apps access the network, which means that I have to use the kinda crappy web version of Google Maps instead of the super awesome one(*) that runs on the phone.
I got my car's oil changed today, which revealed that the rat that used to live(**) in our garage was gnawing on my air filter. Luckily it didn't gnaw all the way through; I don't know what implications that would have, but I can't imagine they're good.
Work is going really well today - between that and a new project at home(***), I am really peppy!
(*) - I've never seen or used said version so it may not be super awesome.
(**) - "used to" because we haven't seen any signs of it in a while, so it seems likely it's gone. We're moving out soon anyway. Whee!
(***) - which I will post of the results of hopefully tomorrow. Thanks to destroyerj for the idea...
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| role reversal, music recommendations |
[Jan. 17th, 2008|10:18 am] |
This week I've been in the odd position of being really excited about work and not so excited about non-work projects. Work has been going really well - a lot of the setup for my big project is done so I'm getting into the fun part. The non-work project of pulling down Netflix ratings and analyzing them is pretty similar to what I've done in the past, but has enough different parts that just aren't interesting to leave me totally unenthusiastic about working on it. But I've already done enough that I feel like I should finish. I'll put it on hiatus for a while.
We've been catching up on Simpsons episodes from the last few months with people, and as a result I've seen "Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind" twice in the last week or so. It's a pretty good episode, but the part that struck me both times was the montage-like scene where it shows lots of pictures of Homer throughout his life to some hauntingly beautiful piano music. Anyway, djedi found the song, which is called "Everyday" by Carly Comando and I bought it last night - yay for Amazon MP3! The scene itself is based on Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years which is pretty creepy in itself, although the music really amplifies that. Good stuff all around, and I feel bad I missed this all the way back in 2006.
Yesterday at lunch I was really happy because of a problem I had just solved, so I went out to Pars Deli, a greek place at 183 and Burnet. Unfortunately, the parking spots are deceptively thin, and so as I was pulling in I heard a noise and realized I hit the car parked next to me. After I parked and got out, the car looked like a mess, but I could brush off most of it. (dust from my bumper or something?) There was still a scratch that was very narrow but kind of long, and I wasn't quite sure what to do, and I was mad for having done it, so I just walked away to the deli. It didn't take long for my conscience to get the better of me and realize that that was a pretty stupid/selfish/horrible thing to do, so after I ordered I went back out there and left a short note with some paper I found in the car. Not my finest hour - "doing the right thing...eventually" isn't exactly high praise.
I have a few Best Buy gift cards and kinda prompted by that I'm looking for some new music. Definitely getting the new Radiohead album, other options include "Year Zero" by Nine Inch Nails, "Distortion" by The Magnetic Fields, maybe something by LCD Soundsystem ("Sound of Silver"?), maybe something by Arcade Fire. I am open to suggestions! (surprisingly hip suggestions stolen from the AV Club's best of 2007) |
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| big day |
[Jan. 9th, 2008|09:18 am] |
Big work meeting today after lunch.
We met with our mortgage guy yesterday and everything seems to be in order, so bully for that. After work we're gonna view the house again and then, in all likelihood, make an offer, which is exciting! This just in: the house was not used previously to manufacture methamphetamines (yes, this question is on the seller's disclosure).
Also, $32 per month is a ridiculous sum of money to pay to a homeowner's association, for use of a pool that we'll probably never use. |
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| -1 for working on New Year's Eve |
[Dec. 31st, 2007|01:06 pm] |
The worst part is that I'm actually getting work done. I plan to party even harder for the holiday in exchange for this. The second worst part is that there was a great elevator timing I could have taken on the way up (1->3->5->8) but I couldn't get my cell phone out of my pocket in time. Still taking data, though.
Managed to reschedule my meeting so as to not conflict with the wedding. Hooray for that! |
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| The next two weeks |
[Dec. 30th, 2007|10:00 am] |
Here's what has to happen in the next two weeks:
- New year's party (fun!)
- Shuffling money around in anticipation of making a down payment
- Picking a mortgage broker/company and finishing that paperwork
- Next weekend: Drive to Houston for djedi's brother's bachelor party.
- Next weekend: Probably with djedi's parents, looking at the house we're interested in again (and talking to neighbors about mosquitos?), as well as looking at a house we probably aren't interested in
- Figuring out whether a drainage ditch behind a house is bad or not
- Maaaaaybe, if all our ducks are lined up, making an offer on said drainage ditch house
- Holding the big proposal meeting for my big big feature at work (probably the most important meeting in my professional career thus far), attended by my former boss, boss, and boss's boss (and other people) which I stupidly scheduled for the day before...
- djedi's brother's wedding in Houston, for which I will have to drive down right after said meeting unless I can reschedule, which is unlikely given the number of people attending
After all that I'm gonna get me a new phone, the idea of which will hopefully get me through all of the above. I'm thinking either a Nokia 6133 or a Nokia 6263.
I'm declaring it's OK for myself to get very little else done as long as the bullet points above are hit. |
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| houses houses houses...I made you out of clay... |
[Dec. 21st, 2007|10:22 am] |
We went house-hunting again yesterday. The first house we looked at is now our current favorite (which is good, as we heard our previous favorite is already under contract. Stop buying houses, people!), with a nice big kitchen (with an island!) that opens up to a living room which is a little on the small side but could probably fit the TV and computers. Master bedroom is plenty big and the bathrooms are nice. Plus it was built in the 90s and is reasonably priced!
Downsides:
- a bit far from freeways, although the neighborhood it's in is nice (it's off of Duval)
- there's a deck in the backyard which would be nice were it not so rundown, presumably by the current owners' (don't yell at me, there's more than one owner so I'm assuming they both own the dogs) dogs.
- living room is a little small
We have another good possibility that we'll see after the holidays, hopefully.
Now for the important stuff: at work my building has 8 floors and elevators. I work on the 8th floor, so I get plenty of time in said elevators. (fun thing to do: walk in a circle as the elevator is moving and realize that you're tracing out a helix!) Often I have to wait for other people to get off on their stupid less important floors before I get to the top, so I was wondering: let's say it's a given that we have to make two floor stops from 1 to 8. Is it better to have the stops be consecutive or spread out? For the sake of concreteness, let's say one way we stop at floors 2 and 3, and the other way we stop at floors 3 and 6.
Poll #1109699 Elevator floor distribution - which is faster?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllStarting at floor 1 and going to floor 8, which set of stops will lead to a faster ride?
I have an idea but I'll cut it: ( no peeking! )
Anyway, I was going to start taking measurements when I get my new phone, but it looks like the RAZR V3 doesn't have a stopwatch. (can anyone confirm?) That makes me sad. I'll come up with something, though! |
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| getflix revamped again! |
[Dec. 19th, 2007|10:23 am] |
So I spent some time updating this script to pull your Netflix ratings and after redesigning the database tables a bit (which was fun since it isn't something I usually do) I think it's about done. Now I need to add in some analysis or something :-)
We had our release party for the new NI smart camera (get yours today!) yesterday at 300, a bowling place that feels clubby. (there were music videos playing on screens in front of lanes and such) It was fun. |
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stressed
annoyed
busy
nervous
anxious
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creative
7 (58.3%)