Football Day

Thanks to the med test I needed to be home most of the day, but before football started I made a run to Walgreen's for baby powder & multi-vitamins. Remembered many other things which are only sold there, ended up spending $80.

Watched the whole Packers/Bears game and was disappointed with the Green Bay receivers who I think dropped more passes than they caught. Most of those through no fault of the Bears defense. Packers defense more than made up for it. I just love seeing someone fatter than I am score a TD.

During halftime I sliced up three onions by hand, then remembered I had a new food processor which could have done that in seconds. Made two panfuls of caramelized onions with minced garlic, packed them into the freezer for the next time I defrost a steaklet.

Watched the first quarter of the Steelers/Jets game, then ducked out to have coffee with a friend.  Talked until it was time for my next test, just in time to miss the apparently cardiologist's delight which was the end of the game. Heard it in the car on the way home, though.

Made a salad and a frozen dinner, and popped 2001 into the blu-ray player. Blu-ray disc version. Looked very pretty. The only time I have seen the movie all the way through was when it first came out, a friend from school and I went downtown to the Cinerama theater. I did not remember it being so boring. Kubrick padded the scenes to match the length of the music, rather than the other way around. I do remember we started to walk out during the psychedelic sequence toward the end, because it hurt to watch. We waited for the glare to go away and watched the fetus scene from the back of the theater.

I seem to remember a scene before the Jupiter mission where they show how HAL was taught. It was not in this version.  Neither was "It's full of stars" which I think was only in the book & the sequel.

The DVD has lots of commentary & such, but since I own this disc I'll save that for another time.

In the background I've been adding some Thai pop CDs to iTunes. One singer uses the name Ann in English, and when Gracenote filled in the artist's name, it was in Thai and was too many characters to be Ann. Looking closely at the tiny print, it's Sirina. I wonder why she didn't use the prettier Thai name.

Plans for tomorrow:
Medical Center, P/U prescriptions, Drop test off at the lab, make an appt for the nutrition program
Work
BASFA (But I'm not staying for the Hugo session as I don't read that fast)

Silent (?) Letters

[Poll #1672053]

Sandwich Day

Work was sandwiched between two pharmacy wins.
First win: PAMF pharmacy had the rest of my insulin ready for pickup at 9 am. The pharmacist said she could help CVS correct the original order which the doctor's assistant had messed up. In order to get me the right stuff, she had to do an end-around with my Endo's office instead of my PCP's.
Second win: After work, went to CVS and explained it all to the pharmacist, showed her the actual boxes with their prescription labels, and she said she would call PAMF pharmacy to get help on making sure I get the right stuff when I need refills.

CVS is (a) close to home (b) open convenient hours and (c) has English-speaking pharmacists.  Only (a) applied to Costco. Baffling - when I was  a kid, it was the pharmacy which was open later than the surrounding stores, not the other way around.

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Work was a summer festival. My new team is in effect, and we were given a box I'd tried to work on a couple of weeks ago, but it would not connect to our local servers. It did fine on the real servers, but we can't run 70% of our tests on the production servers.

Same problem on the newly updated boxes. Our internal support had no idea what the problem was, and offered a very intrusive fix for our servers, which was only available for Windows. I have linux. The other two on the team have windows, but it didn't work. I took the windows version and made some changes which made it linux-able, and got it working. But by then it was 15 minutes until I had to leave.

Late afternoon we had a little birthday party for Boss and one of the engineers. Ice cream cake from Cold Stone. Yum.

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After CVS and a quick stop home to put the insulin in the fridge, it was off to BASFA. Very fun meeting. At 10 till, there were only a handful of people, but by 8:10 the room was full.

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On the patio delivery rack were two packages, Check Designer and a new Logitech remote. The one in the livingroom has a dead "play" button, and I was getting tired of FF - Pause - unpause - REW - pause -unpause as a work-around. Also, TiVo will stop at a scene change if you come out of FF or REW with the Play button, but not with pause. Installed the software and tested it. Then installed Quicken 2011 which did not work with the 2010 version of Check Designer, then tested the two together. All is well. Quicken 2011 is hellafaster than 2010.

Did the "replace remote" thing with Logitech's online software and had a working new remote in 10 minutes. Tested all the fuinctions, and they all work, including "play". Well, except it still doesn't know how to turn on a Wii, but that's because Wii doesn't use IR codes.

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Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Home
Start packing for Conflikt.