Thursday, 6 February 2014

By on February 6th, 2014 in Barbara, science kits

08:05 – They finally transferred Barbara’s mom from the emergency room to a regular room late yesterday. Sankie is doing, if not well, at least better than she had been. Frances stayed with her through the evening. Barbara is stopping on the way home from work to see Sankie. Frances stopped by Homestead Hills to put down a deposit to get Sankie in their queue, but we’re hoping that she’ll recover sufficiently that she’ll be able to return to her apartment at Creekside once she’s released from the hospital.

I boxed up another batch of biology kits yesterday. February and March are by far our slowest months, so for now we’re in good shape on finished-goods inventory of all kits. Not that we’ll rest on our laurels, because things will start ramping up again in April and by July we’ll be shipping kits faster than we can build them. That means we have to have a reasonable inventory built up by then, which means getting the labor-intensive stuff like labeling and filling bottles out of the way while things are slow.


10:19 – Last May, I commented that, other than the 15 year difference in ages, Michelle Burke (Little Men) and Leighton Meester (Gossip Girl) could be not just sisters, but identical twins. Well, with Minka Kelly (Friday Night Lights) that doppelgänger is now a dreifachgänger. They could be identical triplets. In fact, when I first saw Minka Kelley, I thought she *was* Leighton Meester. So much for eyewitness identifications.

14 Comments and discussion on "Thursday, 6 February 2014"

  1. bgrigg says:

    I used to work with my doppelganger. Same height, weight, eyes, facial features, stance, similar voice (his was slightly deeper), age and he even had a similar last name (Greig). We were confused for each other constantly, and people thought that at the very least we must have been brothers separated at birth.

    He was even born in the same Edmonton hospital as me, only two months later and almost to the day (I’m 10/7, he was 12/8). If my parents were still alive I would have had some hard questions for my father!

  2. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Yeah, right. Always blame it on the father. I’ll bet you never even considered that your mom might have given birth to you on 10/7 and to him a couple months later.

  3. Dave B. says:

    Yeah, right. Always blame it on the father. I’ll bet you never even considered that your mom might have given birth to you on 10/7 and to him a couple months later.

    The other guy could still be Bill’s twin.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/30/twins-born-87-days-apart-ireland-guiness-record_n_3186135.html

  4. Lynn McGuire says:

    I’ll bet you never even considered that your mom might have given birth to you on 10/7 and to him a couple months later.

    Ah, the old mythical man month. If a woman can give birth to one baby in nine months, then shouldn’t nine women be able to give birth to one baby in one month?

  5. Ray Thompson says:

    Ah, the old mythical man month.

    Ah, the old mythical woman month.

    Fixed it for you.

  6. Lynn McGuire says:

    “Gates Spends Entire First Day Back in Office Trying to Install Windows 8.1”
    http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2014/02/gates-spends-entire-first-day-back-in-office-trying-to-install-windows-81.html

    “REDMOND, WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Bill Gates’s first day at work in the newly created role of technology adviser got off to a rocky start yesterday as the Microsoft founder struggled for hours to install the Windows 8.1 upgrade.”

    “The installation hit a snag early on, sources said, when Mr. Gates repeatedly received an error message informing him that his PC ran into a problem that it could not handle and needed to restart.”

    “After failing to install the upgrade by lunchtime, Mr. Gates summoned the new Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella, who attempted to help him with the installation, but with no success.”

    “While the two men worked behind closed doors, one source described the situation as “tense.””

    ““Bill is usually a pretty calm guy, so it was weird to hear some of that language coming out of his mouth,” the source said.”

    “A Microsoft spokesman said only that Mr. Gates’s first day in his new job had been “a learning experience” and that, for the immediate future, he would go back to running Windows 7.”

    Wow. Sounds like a story from the Onion.

  7. Lynn McGuire says:

    Gates Spends Entire First Day Back in Office Trying to Install Windows 8.1

    This was comedy !

    I wish the writer would directly identify it as such.

  8. Bob Phillips says:

    Well, most buyers of Win8 are not laughing!!! This is serious:)

  9. ech says:

    Just finished jury duty. Had 1 day of selection and 3 days of trial. Convicted a man of aggravated assault of a family member with a deadly weapon. Sentencing was done by the judge. We were told after the case that he had two prior convictions – “unauthorized use of a motor vehicle” (auto theft?) & a federal conviction for conspiracy to distribute marijuana. Sentence was going to range from 25 to life if the state proved the two previous convictions to the judge. Saw on the court website that he got 60 years. He beat up his wife in front his two sons – one of whom provided key evidence, a 911 call – and was holding a knife to her throat when the Sheriff’s deputy arrived. They got there in about 7.5 minutes after the 911 call.

  10. OFD says:

    7.5 minutes; hell, both her and the sons coulda been goners by then. Sounds like a fairly bad hombre; he should end up doing at least 20 of the 60. The motor vehicle and pot conspiracy convictions are anybody’s guess as to how serious, exactly. Just something to hang out for the judge in regard to sentencing.

    Windows 8 and 8.1: had them both on two machines here; only trouble I ever had with either was when I prematurely tried out the 8.1 Beta and it screwed up a few things, including net connections. Since then, nary a problem. I don’t understand why folks have such trouble finding and using the start button or the desktop if they want those up and running.

    In the job nooz; I finally told the Feds to stuff it where the sun don’t shine; nine months of background checks and hassles and paperwork for a Windows IT drone gig in town. At a site where they had a bedbug infestation and where their machines are antiquated XP moving to 7 and Server 2008 and the usual nightmarish Exchange and Outlook. Let them find some other drone for that shit. Now up for another RHEL/CentOS gig but it will mean going back to the 30-mile commutes each way every day. We shall see.

    A high of 20 today, bright and sunny with blue skies and no wind, after we got about eight or nines of powder dumped on us yesterday; Mrs. OFD will be back this weekend from Orlando and we will be trying out our new snowshoes accordingly. If I was in any kind of decent shape and not so rickety, I’d love to get into the primitive biathlon they do up here every winter:

    http://primitivebiathlon.com/

  11. OFD says:

    Just watched the first episode of Season 3 of “Homeland,” and I stand by my original assertion that if I was in charge of the government, which I’m not right now but hey, I could be, eventually; stranger things have happened in this world; I’d rein in the Danes character and would have done so long ago and put her in behind a desk and a computer doing her bipolar genius savant analysis/strategy work. No business being any kind of case officer or field agent, period. The Patinkin character I would have fired and possibly jailed for his criminal negligence.

    Now just imagine what I would have done with the Agency and the Feebies over the last half-century; for one thing, the late James Jesus Angleton would have been made Director and we would have avoided a whole lotta shit. Hoover & Co. would be gone completely and I would have cleaned out most, if not all, of the Mormons who were running the place all these years.

    OK, back to my IT research; no more delusions of grandeur tonight.

  12. brad says:

    The US justice system is so over the top that y’all don’t even see it anymore.

    Domestic assault is a serious enough crime, but 60 years? Non-violent prior convictions? That’s just nuts. You want to teach him a lesson, not pay his room-and-board for the rest of his life. A few months in jail plus a couple years probation, would be a lot more reasonable.

  13. ech says:

    Auto theft can be violent, depends on how he took the car and if there was a chase. As for the conspiracy/distribution charge, that’s being part of a network that commits lots of violent crimes here. I’d guess that at least 20% of the murders here in Texas are related to drug distribution, based on media reports. Turf wars, robberies, falling out among the gang – all can end in dead bodies.

    As for teaching him a lesson, he may have had priors for misdemeanor domestic violence that were part of sentencing. I just heard about the felony convictions, for which he did time in the pen, and only because the judge told us about it after we delivered the verdict. I didn’t want to wait for the judge to do sentencing, as she had a few other items on the docket to deal with first, while the DA prepared his sentencing package. That said, 60 years is a long time.

  14. OFD says:

    What ech said; also, remember, he had a knife to the throat of his wife *after* beating her. This was a bad piece of work and he’ll probably only do a third of the sentence anyway, if that; also has a good chance of being shivved in there.

    In ye olden times of yore he may well have swung from a gallows.

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