When my hair fell out

I recently found out that I have pancreatic cancer and as a result have started chemotherapy. My first session went fine with no real problems. I was sick as a dog but it wasn't the chemo causing me problems, it was the pain killers I was on. The second chemo session also came and went without much fuss until a few days later and I noticed a few hairs floating around after rubbing my head. No problem. A little while later I realize that a slight tug on my hair results in a handful of hair. No problem. I decide to take a shower and as soon as I start to shampoo I am deluged by my own hair. I'm not sure how, my hair is not very long but I have hair everywhere, in my face, my mouth and eyes. I'm hollering for my wife to come help. "I can't see!" I spit hairs and sputter trying to wipe the hair from my tongue and eyes. I finally get to the point that I can see and breath. I clean a small dog worth of hair from the drain cover and get dried off. That's when I decided that I have to cut to the chase and head off the remaining hair by clipping it all off and shaving it bald. Fortunately I don't have a very odd shaped head, have no tattoos, scars or markings that I have to spend hours explaining. I just have to have a hat because it's cold. No problem.

Setting up the new phone

Nothing to see here. Just setting up the new phone. Oh, here is a pic of the new kitty, Boo.

Local Drive Q

I was puzzled to find a mysterious local drive Q on my laptop and immediately jumped to all the worst conclusions; virus, root kit, daughter loaded some rouge peer to peer. It turns out it was just Microsoft again. I recently tried out the Office 2010 beta and it uses "click to run" which apparently uses their virtualization. See the details here . But the telling sentence is "Click-to-Run users may notice that they have a virtual Q: drive on their PCs, this is the virtual file system used by Office". Well, that's well and good but it doesn't look like a virtual drive although I'm not exactly sure what one would look like. I do know that I have less space on my "C" drive than I had before I noticed it but it says it has zero space allocated. I'll have to look more at it later just to know more about it but for now just know that it's not malicious.

CNCInformation.com

Recently I was looking through the wanted ads looking for local jobs in the IT industry and kept seeing a need for CNC programmers. I thought I had heard of about every programming language known but had no idea what CNC was. It turns out to be Computer Numerical Control and is a language used to control things like lathes, mills, routers and such. Being an old wood worker and hobby nut you can imagine how cool I thought I thought this site was. If you are interested in such, CNCInformation has all sorts of information, tips and community to help you get started in using CNC as a hobby.

IE8 Blues update

I was able to get around the problem of IE8 hanging. I went to add/remove programs and looked for anything that looked like a plug-in and removed it. The one that seemed to do the trick was removing IE7PRO which is a pretty nice plug-in for IE7 that apparently gives IE8 congestion. I guess I'll live without it or wait for an update that is IE8 compatible.

IE8 Blues

Well, I'm having to write this post from the Opera browser.  I could have used Chrome or Firefox or just about any other browser.  Since I let the "upgrade" of IE8 go in, I am unable to access ANYTHING using IE.  The problem first reared it's head when IMDB said I had to load flash 8 or later.  I knew I had flash 10 on already so I knew something was up.  When I tried to reload flash it said it was already installed and sure enough I could find it and it said enabled.  After some poking around I found that if IE8 has trouble with ANY ONE of the add-in it put IE in a "special" no add-ins enabled mode.  You have to figure out what it is having issues with and disable them, restart IE and hope you don't run into any more.  At the moment, I am locked into a mode where IE won't even come up enough for me to manage the add-ons.  I'm quite sure I won't be able to uninstall or go back to IE7 and many other posts I've read seem to back that up.  Google around before you load IE8 and see if the problems have answers before you leap.  I wish I'd have.

More on the virtual wasteland

I am starting to warm up to twitter a little more. I still can't get the direct messages to work, my dropdown box does not list any of my peeps in it and I can't just type into the textbox. The reason I am warming up to it is that I am finding some useful places to follow. One is my daughter's school. They have a twitter account and send out school announcements. I like that.

I'm enjoying the heck out of FaceBook. I joined to keep tabs on my daughter and soon old friends started finding me. It's a great place to hit for just a little while and catch up. It could be a huge time sink if you let it though. I just have to get in and get out. I've found that using the web browser "flock" is helpful when using the social networking sites.

I've been toying with the Microsoft Office Live site as well but the real benefit is for collaberating with others and I'm having a hard time getting the "others" to move past email. I forget that everyone isn't a tech loving geek like myself. I have plenty of tech loving geek friends I just don't have a need to collaborate spreadsheets and powerpoints with them. We just get silly on FaceBook.

How can 90% tax make me happy?

When it happens to fat cats who mismanage huge amounts of money and cry to the government to bail them out, then grant themselves huge bonuses.  That's when.

Exploring the Virtual Wasteland

I've been spending some time lately exploring what the web has to offer. There are so many nooks and crannies to poke around in. I don't claim to be breaking any new ground as most of the stuff I'm checking out has been around a while and old news for a lot if not most people. I joined Face Book mostly to keep tabs on my daughter and not really intending to really participate in the community but before long old friends began to find me and next thing you know I have a fair amount of friends there. I still am not really comfortable with the interface on facebook though. It is very busy and not really that easy to use but I get by.

I have had a Shutterfly account for a very long time but haven't been posting too many pictures to it but I went to add some recently and found that they have added a nice share page that you can post pictures to as well as ad calendar, events, disussions and more. It is pretty nice.

I just jumped on Twitter today so I don't really know if I'm going to like it or not. I'll let you know more later.

I have to run for now but will update soon.

Snow in Alabama

It is pretty rare to get a decent snow here in Alabama. We got out earlier today to walk in it and take a few pictures. It has continued to snow so it is even prettier now. I'm a little too comfy next to fire now or I'd go out and take some more pictures. Maybe later.

Happy New Year

I hope all my friends and family had a great 2008 and will have an even better 2009.

I don't really have anything much more than that to say. It has been nice to have a little downtime as work has gotten to be hectic. They let a LOT of people go where I work and those of us who are left have had to pick up a lot of work with no extra pay. I'm not grousing too bad though because, as I said, a LOT of people lost their jobs just before the holidays and had to spend that time looking for new work.

I hope they all find something better and a little more secure.

Kirk out!

Spam from worldswidedomainnames got you down?

I was a little dumbstruck at how dumb some spammers can be but this guy is the dumbest I have seen in quite some time.

For some people who explain it better than I could and to not re-create the wheel and steal someones nice work; I point you to DYNAMOO and SKILLETT.
These guys do a nice job of telling the story.

I thank them for clearing it up because I was starting to get a little miffed wondering what the heck was going on.

Blogger Buddy Post

I'm just checking out the little Blogger Buddy gadget on my toolbar. I already have my MS Live Writer that I love so I don't know if this guy will be worth taking space up on my bar or not. I guess if I made lots of quick and dirty posts this will be useful. I just don't know how much the world is interested in my random thoughts.

As long as I'm here though, I've started administering my neighborhood web page and it uses Joomla! It took me a few days to get the hang of it but it is a pretty nice way to run a web community web page. I've been checking out all of the cool addons and ways to modify it using PHP. It was relatively easy to set up an WAMP server on my pc and then load Joomla! on the pc to have a test environment to tear apart without fear of screwing up your live site. I reccomend using the PHPAdmin for you MySQL administration. It is a fairly easy to use graphical database/table manager.
My only problem at the moment is I want to upgradet the site from 1.0 to 1.5 and there are several 3rd party components that dont' get moved over in the migration script that I'm trying to figure out how to replace/replicate in the 1.5 environment. I also have to update the template so that it is 1.5 compatable. Until then, 1.0 is fine.

New Laptop

I broke down and let go of a dime. I didn't spring for the MAC I have lusting over for so very long but settled for a very nice Dell Studio. I really didn't think I was going to like Vista since all I have read about it made me think I was going to uninstall it promptly but as it turns out it is pretty nice. Admittedly it is a little more cumbersome to do some tasks as you have to go through an extra layer of security but it isn't all that bad really.

We'll see how it is after I try to get everything I want to load on it up and going. So far I've only had trouble trying to install ActivePerl. Komodo went in without a hitch and most of my Art related software works great.

Another Mother's Day Cartoon

Results of the Crawfish boil

As it turned out the weather was beautiful by the time of the crawfish boil and remained so for the duration.  We made the mistake of showing up on time.  The tickets said the gate would open at 2:30PM and they did have us start making a line a 2:25 however; they didn't open the gates until 3:00.  They never said why the delay but they entertained us driving various lifts in among us and then deciding that it needed to be driven back out an another one driven in to the middle of our line.  Yes it was dangerous and annoying but not nearly as annoying as the rednecks hollering "hey, let us in it's two thirty already!" over an over for the next half hour.

Here we see my daughter and her friend next to the second of two lifts that they drove into the crowd, parked it and left as a nice obstacle.  Prior to this I had a nice shady spot that I was enjoying while waiting for the gates to open.

I wish they had waited until they were ready before asking us to line up.  Once inside the gates it was pretty nice.  They were at a new location this year but as this is my first year to go I can't comment on if it is better or worse than other years.  We made a bee line for the VIP area to get in line for the crawfish.  They had a decent enough setup.  You get in line for a plate of crawfish, boiled corn and new potatoes and go sit under a tent or in an open area and eat.  Not too bad but it would have been better if they had broken up the extremely long and close table rows into two columns instead of one large one.   Some of the people had somehow acquired live crawfish and were letting them walk around on the tables.  It was cool watching the kids admire them. 

This is one that I saw just walking around later in the day.  Wouldn't it be wild if some got off in the sewers of Birmingham and in a few years we could have crawfish taking over the sewers?

The music was pretty good later on in the day.  The first two or three bands were ho hum and didn't crank my tractor but it picked up with Cory Smith and got better as the night went on.  Flo-Rida wasn't bad on the one song I like of his but it was monotonous otherwise. Cory Smith was new to me and I liked his show except for the language.  There were too many kids there to be flinging cussing around so.  Gavin DeGraw had a nice polished show and played a lot of familiar tunes.  The real surprise for me was Fergie who I had no real interest in seeing.  She had the usual rappy crappy stuff that I expected but she also covered some rock hits such a barracuda and did them very nicely.

Overall it was a nice day out but I learned that you need cash at these things.  Not one place was set up for credit cards and that is about the only way I travel any more so I was seriously on the low side of cash as everything was WAY overpriced.  I should have done like my daughter and her friend and bought a juice drink.  They got free refills on them so that was a pretty good deal.  I don't mind walking around with a stupid looking drink glass if I'm going to get a free refill!  It looks like it would have been pretty good tasting too.  I may go back someday but will definitely bring more cash and get there later.  Eating crawfish is nice but you don't need a whole day to do it justice.

Mother's Day is soon!

The Crawfish boil

Today we are going to the Schaeffer Crawfish Boil and it is raining cats and dogs at the moment.  I'm hoping that by this afternoon when it kicks off that the rain will be past.  They won't allow cameras at the place so I won't be able to share any pictures from the event.  I mainly want to eat a lot of crawfish and hope that some of the bands are worth hearing.  All the good bands were last night but since I worked Thursday night I don't think I could have stayed up for it plus my wife wants to see Fergie who is on tonight.  I don't know any of the other acts but maybe I'll find some I like.

JUST STOP RAINING!!

Finally!

So, I finally decided to do a little more than the plain old banner. Of course, I'm not happy with it but I never am. boo hoo. I imagine I'll get better at it as I go along. I haven't decided if I want to tweak the art to fit the CSS or tweak the CSS to fit the art. Right now I've tweaked the art to fit the CSS. I don't have time to mess with it right now so it will just have to do warts and all.

Kirk out!

A new blog is born!

My wife is a wonderful cook who has wanted to attend culinary school for some time now. She starts tomorrow and I suggested that a blog would be a nice way to capture the events so that she can share with friends and family. I can't wait. Like I said, she already is a great cook so I expect her to ramp it up. I made her a cute little characature of her to go on her site.

Check it out often as I intend to help her keep it updated regularly.



Kirk out!