No idea what the weather is like Wed. morning. It was hot and very humid when I got home though.
Late night and early morning means I’m not at my best today.
Getting the kids and wife out the door, more later.
n
Wed. Oct. 16, 2019 – home and busy, also tired
36 Comments and discussion on "Wed. Oct. 16, 2019 – home and busy, also tired"
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I think I’m gonna grab a little nap. I’m wiped out.
n
I have been out of the world for 3 weeks now but things may now be moving to a new normal. Three weeks ago tomorrow the wife got violently ill while we were out of state. We called 911 and they took her to a local triage clinic. The next day she suffered a heart attack and was sent to a real hospital in the capitol city where they inserted two new stents. For the first 24 hours she was mostly comatose, unable to stay awake more than a few moments and unable to answer simple questions. Her blood pressure dropped dramatically and stayed low for 3 days till they could get her stabilized. This incident, unknown to us, precipitated another serious problem. She began to have growing pain in her right hand that the hospital ignored as it was focused on getting her heart condition stabilized. They released us 8 days after admission and at that point her right hand was completely unusable and so painful it required narcotics to allow her to sleep. We surmised that the problem was loss of blood flow due to the fistula that had been installed 4 weeks earlier. She had reported some numbness and loss of feeling to the doctor in the surgery followup but he dismissed it as normal. So as soon as we were released I drove us to the Methodist University Hospital in Memphis where she had the fistula operation performed. We got into the ER Sunday evening and the examining physician looked appalled. He somehow got the vascular surgeon to come in. I had never seen a persons face literally blanch before but his face turned white when he examined her hand. He scheduled a surgery for the next morning to try and reverse the botched fistula he had installed that had shut down all blood flow below her elbow when her blood pressure dropped. His assistant warned me that “If we can get to these within 24 hours we can usually save all functions”, this was 5 days after the incident. The surgeon went in the next morning and “tied-off” the fistula graft, restoring normal blood flow to her hand. In the week since she has been wheelchair bound and on oxygen but has regained some function of her hand. The pain is still at times unbearable and she has no feeling in three of her fingers. We are going back to the surgeon tomorrow to see what we can expect going forward. I have been by her side the entire time, sleeping in hospital recliners and eating hospital food. We are finally at home but she is requiring constant care and I am taking time off from my remaining 2 months at work. I have already filed my retirement and can dare them to penalize me for dealing with these serious issues. I expect any employment court would find in my favor.
Now I am trying to catch up with the mess the world has become while I was not paying attention. You look away for a few days and it all goes to hell. Sigh.
Very sad reading the above.
Very sad indeed. I’ve been dealing with care and supervision of my mother for over two years now. That too was an instant change. Fortunately we’ve been able to keep her in her home.
I know this might not seem like the time to think about it but I would consider action against those that botched this. You may need help with her care.
Best thoughts for you both.
@hcombs, so so sorry. Words cannot express how deeply I feel for you and your Wife.
Never give up. Never give up.
Prayers and best wishes.
Peace and comfort.
Thanks all for the kind words and thoughts.
I thought we lost her a couple of times there and was trying to understand what life would be like without my love. We have been together for 48 years since she was 16 and I was 19. It wasn’t all roses of course, for many years we simply lived together. Then, a couple of years ago my wife wrote a book “Beginning to End”, loosely based on our relationship. She inserted many true episodes in our courtship and early years and her writing reminded why I loved her in the first place and re-awoken the feelings that had lain dormant for years. We have had a wonderful close relationship since and my goal is to make her difficult life as good as possible.
I have a highly recommended malpractice firm I will contact next week. I need to see what our next meeting with the surgeon goes. I feel we have a negligence case against him and his staff because they ignored our concerns and did not return our many calls asking for help when things got worse. I also think I may have a case against the out-of-state hospital for completely ignoring my wifes growing complaints of pain in her hand. Their only reaction was to prescribe Oxycodone for the pain.
My best wishes for you and your wife, Mr. hcombs.
More sad news to add to the above. My wife lost a brother on Monday. Only 64, but many complications from obesity, drug/alcohol abuse, and more. It was sad to see him wither away. He lost 90% of his small intestine. He was staying with us in Vegas for about three years. A Navy Vet, he was cared for at the VA hospital in Vegas. The surgeon surmised he developed a blood clot in an artery servicing his UI. Due to abuse, or one of many drugs for various diseases. Four surgeries later and the doc sewed what was left of his small intestine to the big one.
He return to San Antonio around March where his home is. He opted for in home hospice realizing he wasn’t going to make it. He died in his sleep on Monday. MrsAtoz flew out of Reno this am for the service tomorrow. I’m in Tahoe and on to Williams, CA, tomorrow to continue work. Wife will fly in late, late Thursday.
MrsAtoz has now lost three brothers in the span of a year to old age and diseases.
Don’t get old. Don’t get sick. Take care of your self.
@Nick: This one’s for you:
Is CAL FIRE Trying to Dismantle the Ham Radio System Amid Blackouts and Wildfires?
But be sure to read the editor’s note preceding the original article.
@mediumwave, as soon as I read this “with constantly changing technological advances, there is no longer the same benefit to State as previously provided. ” I knew there would be FirstNet involvement.
SO much fail. The ham system, and it’s extensive in Cali, is a linked network of repeaters with worldwide reach and is intended as BACKUP for when other systems fail. Like trunked radio. Like FirstNet. Like every other more “whiz bang” technology. It is actually very sophisticated, but still simple in execution, modality, and requirements. Freaking FirstNet requires poles about every city block to provide coverage. Only an idiot would think that could cover rural areas, rough terrain, or anywhere outside of the urban core.
Someone will get this mess straightened out.
n
@hcombs, I am so sorry that you are having the problems you have now. I sincerely hope that things improve from this point on.
And Mratoz, it seems like too many of us are beset with problems this Fall. I hope you and your wife can find comfort somewhere in the situation.
I think most of us here are of an age that we’ll be going to more funerals than weddings. Right now that hurts my heart. I hope I can find some peace with it using the example of the generation before mine, who I see facing the same issue at every funeral I attend.
n
Time to brush up on my smoke signaling. Oh, wait, smoke (and vape) is politically incorrect these days.
A thought for today as we prepare to enter a year plus of electoral chaos:
Benjamin Franklin (1706–90)
We’ve lost it.
Swan Eaters: And Wigglesworth is back !
https://www.gocomics.com/swan-eaters/2019/10/16
Every little girl should have a personal demon.
Freefall: astronaut puffy face
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3400/fc03344.htm
I’ll bet that this is minor affliction for astronauts in freefall compared to other effects of zero gravity.
Over The Hedge: the first use of any technology
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2019/10/16
is dirty ??? Say it isn’t so !
Well, everything I read about last nights Dumbocrat Kabuki, Plugs Biden is dead. He is also down to $8 million in his war chest. Warren is the front runner, but peeps like Booty-Judge since he attacks the others on how they will make their retarded programs work. It’s between Warren and Comrade Bernie (if he doesn’t croak). I don’t think either is palatable enough to beat tRump.
Been preoccupied just now seeing today’s posts.
Mr. hcombs, sorry to hear about your wife’s circumstances. May she recover fully an quickly.
Mr. Atoz, sorry to hear about your wife’s brother. At least his earthly suffering will be over soon.
So many here have expressed their condolences better. I often find it hard to express these things in words.
Brad, the preface to this article is disturbing, but the article itself is a great read. It reminded me of the USA before all the restrictions of the last 80 years. Care to comment?
“https://www.ssusa.org/articles/2019/10/9/a-swiss-schuetzenfest-the-world-s-largest-rifle-match/”
I think I picked up something on my trip. I feel like hammered shite, even after my 3 hour nap. Way worse than I should feel from just being tired. Figures, since I’m fully booked for the next 2 months.
Speaking of which, I need to get some stuff out the door.
n
I think I picked up something on my trip. I feel like hammered shite, even after my 3 hour nap. Way worse than I should feel from just being tired. Figures, since I’m fully booked for the next 2 months.
Any therapy animals on the flight to Houston?
I think I picked up something on my trip. I feel like hammered shite, even after my 3 hour nap. Way worse than I should feel from just being tired. Figures, since I’m fully booked for the next 2 months.
Welcome to getting old. I feel like that every morning now. By the end of the day I feel like my old self and then it is time to go to bed.
“Disney Over the Top: Bob Iger Bets the Company (and Hollywood’s Future) on Streaming”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/bob-iger-bets-company-hollywood-s-future-streaming-1247663
“Disney+ leads a wave of billion-dollar Netflix competitors that are transforming the entertainment industry and launching a new age of ambition (and anxiety) as Iger, Kevin Mayer and team explain their all-in strategy: “We’re locked and loaded.””
I gave daughter my Roku Ultra on Monday. She loves it as it works with Hulu and should work with Disney.
We are not going to have DirecTV at the new house. I am tired of their nonsense and continuous bugs. The stupid DirecTV Genie insists on recording the 4K version of the Astros baseball games. I do not have 4K DirecTV nor do I want it. I set up all of the Astros games to record manually. The stupid Genie switched all my manual forced records to the 4K channel. Argh !
The main side effect of puffy face is heavy nasal congestion. It cuts down on the sense of smell and taste.
“The Life and Times of a Backblaze Hard Drive”
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/life-and-times-of-a-backblaze-hard-drive/
“Backblaze likes to talk about hard drive failures — a lot. What we haven’t talked much about is how we deal with those failures: the daily dance of temp drives, replacement drives, and all the clones that it takes to keep over 100,000 drives healthy. Let’s go behind the scenes and take a look at that dance from the eyes of one Backblaze hard drive.”
“After sitting still for what seemed like forever, ZCH007BZ was on the move. ZCH007BZ, let’s call him Zach, is a Seagate 12 TB hard drive. For the last few weeks, Zach and over 6,000 friends were securely sealed inside their protective cases in the ready storage area of a Backblaze data center. Being a hard disk drive, Zach’s modest dream was to be installed in a system, spin merrily, and store data for many years to come. And now the wait was nearly over, or was it?”
Cool !
We are not going to have DirecTV at the new house. I am tired of their nonsense and continuous bugs. The stupid DirecTV Genie insists on recording the 4K version of the Astros baseball games. I do not have 4K DirecTV nor do I want it. I set up all of the Astros games to record manually. The stupid Genie switched all my manual forced records to the 4K channel. Argh !
Sounds like they’re still using my old code for parsing the national TV schedule XML into SQLite files. I wrote it very half-a**ed, intending it to never get used in production, but my version ran in three minutes on my MacBook where the overseas vendor’s best effort ran in eight hours on a beefy Windows server.
My lead, Mr. Two Patents (Three now?), handed the production guys my code, claiming it as his own, but Two Patents had nary a clue as to how to fix it. And you can forget the production guys in India fixing it.
HD was already a cluster since I wrote the code a decade ago when HD channels were rare. 4k is just making the situation worse.
Pretty vanilla Python, but the Python way is to use exceptions for branching since doing so doesn’t involve any additional expense and makes the code very concise. Apparently, it is a challenge for noob maintainers and holders of multiple Patents alike, however.
I honestly don’t even have a copy around anymore. I doubt Microsoft (national TV schedule vendor) altered the XML so I could re-create it quickly if I so desired.
I dumped DirecTv at $142/month and installed an antenna for the locals. The picture is better and I do like the sub-channels that I never knew about. Added a Roku so someone can Sling for college football and Nascar. That’s about $50/month.
The price of the Internet connection is irrelevant. I’m going to pay that bill with or without having a Roku.
Sure, I’m in the sticks and if the weather is foggy (or something) over Lake Travis channels vanish for a few hours. It’s ok.
And while I have no proof, not owning a Watt Meter thing, getting rid of DirecTv dropped my electric bill about $8 a month. Along with getting rid of the whiny hard drive DVR thing.
My sibling has three big Rhodesian ridgebacks. Two days there could have contaminated me, but it feels more like a cold. Not quite body aches yet, hint of headache. This morning I felt like my body wasn’t regulating it’s temperature very well. I feel “half a bubble off”…
n
@jimB, some people yearn for the collar and chains, some yearn to hold the whip. Too few yearn to be free until AFTER the collar is riveted on….
n
My sibling has three big Rhodesian ridgebacks. Two days there could have contaminated me, but it feels more like a cold. Not quite body aches yet, hint of headache. This morning I felt like my body wasn’t regulating it’s temperature very well. I feel “half a bubble off”….
Allergens or germs, airline cabin air doesn’t get turned over as often as it should. Doing the minimum saves fuel.
I dumped DirecTv at $142/month and installed an antenna for the locals. The picture is better and I do like the sub-channels that I never knew about. Added a Roku so someone can Sling for college football and Nascar. That’s about $50/month.
MeTV does a decent job with horror and sci fi on Saturday nights.
“Buck Rogers” is starting to wear out its welcome, however. They need to give the show a rest.
I’ve had DirecTV for years (decades, actually), with minimal problems. Got a few equipment refreshes as I moved over the years. And the occaisional rain-out problems, but not many.
I don’t have the latest 4K reciever, since I don’t have a 4K TV, just a 50″ Sony LCD HDTV.
All has worked fine for me. YMMV, of course.
Well today has been a freaking banner day. 28 crashes of our software logged on our web server over the last 24 hours. And the day is not over yet. I am not totally sure but that is probably an all time high. And it is not all since several of our customers use the firewall of death that allows no communication through their firewall without extreme permission.
I freaking hate software crashes. It is bad enough to give bad results but to crash is the ultimate insult to the user.
So much sad news.
hcombs – my best wishes for your wife and her recovery from the heart attack and the lack of blood to her hand.
Mr & especially Mrs Atoz – my deepest sympathy for your loss.
@JimB: The EU rules on guns are the smallest part of things. Generally, Switzerland is facing the problem of being geographically surrounded by the EU. Open markets and open borders are pretty important. For Switzerland, because the EU is our biggest export market. For the EU, because lots of transport travels on Swiss rails and roads.
The thing is: the EU is a bully. If we want open markets, then we have to agree to *automatically* adopt any law that the EU passes. Including gun legislation, but that’s just the smallest part of it. The thing is: we aren’t *in* the EU, quite deliberately, so being told that we have to adopt all of their laws is…irritating.
Swiss politicians are playing for time, knowing that agreeing to blanket adoption of everything EU will go down in flames. The EU is getting increasingly impatient, and threatening to close the borders (which will hurt them as well, but us more). I’m not quite sure how this is all going to play out.
On the topic of the Schützenfest itself – I’ve never managed to get involved in shooting in Switzerland, so I can’t say a lot about it. There are a lot of clubs – it’s a common hobby – but somehow I’ve not found the time. So I can’t really say a lot about it. But it is certainly true that a lot of Swiss have a rifle at home, not even counting all the military weapons. Of course, there are also a lot of people who think guns are evil. But politics here are less rabid; people will agree to disagree and go on with their lives.
@brad, thanks. It is too bad that remaining out of the EU doesn’t allow sovereignty. I would go further than the term bully, and compare the situation to a business that refuses to join organized crime, but still has to play along and surrender to some of their rules. Maybe I am just not very sophisticated.
One hope is that Switzerland can simply outlast the EU. Betting against a country that has prospered for so many centuries seems unwise.
Well, we will get through somehow. We have solid trade agreements with lots of countries outside the EU. Plus – if they suddenly had to re-route all the trucking traffic currently on Swiss highways – well, I think Italy might have a problem. So we have some bargaining power.
Mostly, I think the Swiss strategy is to wait for Brexit to be over, one way or the other. The EU politicians are scared, because if Brexit finally does happen, there are a number of countries that might just follow. So they’re being incredibly stubborn about making Brexit possible. And the issues (for a post-Brexit UK) are exactly the same ones that Switzerland is discussing.
As you say: “Nice little country you have there. Be a shame if anything…happened…to it.”
I freaking hate software crashes. It is bad enough to give bad results but to crash is the ultimate insult to the user.
Windows crashes are really bad to track down with data from the field. My guess is that Microsoft sends you the data.
We embedded Python in our application at the Death Star, and if the user’s computer experienced a crash in a program with embedded Python, even if it wasn’t ours, I would get the data dump from Redmond.
Most of the game companies do a poor job of embedding Python and then they compound the problem interfacing with the scripts via ctypes. I’m not saying our developers didn’t cheat with ctypes too, but I made sure that the MSVCRT versions stayed consistent in all binaries — the step the game developers miss — and we got away with it most of the time.
Linux has core dumps, but the big downside of that is getting the cores back. Plus, proper diagnosis can mean sending a customer an unstripped binary, and, from what I understand, you have some Eastern European customers who are quite capable of reverse engineering.