pleased precariously

lunch with wings

Originally uploaded by toshok.

I made a smoothie earlier. Blueberries, bananas, and oranges. The smoothies I’ve made over the past few days have reinforced my belief that a smoothie just isn’t a smoothie without a kiwi in it. Also, I forgot to put soy milk in it this morning, so the portion was much smaller, and it was also much, much fruitier. That coupled with the huge helping of blueberries I put in meant that it was rather intensely sweet.

I wish bostonorganics.com would let you tailor individual orders the way planetorganics does. You can list foods that you *never* want to receive, but there’s no additional configuration beyond that. I mean, I could see myself occasionally wanting blueberries, or maybe wanting blueberries if there was nothing else available, but I would have rather had another orange or two, or maybe some apples.

Just got off the phone with my mom. I could hear the beeping machines in the background when she picked up.

She sounded in good spirits, and passed the phone to my cousin Jenny, whom I last spoke with when she was about 3 and the only word she would say was “shit” - she’d just run around the house saying “shit, shit, shit, shit”. She’s a doctor now, and went down the list explaining everything to me.

Heart attack after her knee operation, dramatically lowered her blood pressure for about 12 hours. They put her on medication to raise her blood pressure, which it has, but there was already some damage done for lack of profusion to some of her organs. Kidneys were most affected, but they’re also the most sensitive to things like that. The brain is the last to go in that situation, and in her case things seem fine: she seems alert enough when she’s not sleeping - responding to her guests, showing clear agitation with the breathing tube, able to move her limbs, etc.

They’ve been doing daily function tests of her liver and kidneys. The liver tests have been getting better each day, but the kidney tests have been getting worse, until today. Today, one got worse while the other stayed the same. So hopefully at least one will start getting better now.

They put a catheter into her heart last night and discovered she was very dehydrated. Loaded her up on fluids throughout the night. Turns out they gave her too much in the way of fluids, so now they’re going to transfuse her to alleviate the hemodilution. She’s definitely not dehydrated anymore, though.

I think that’s it.. My mom got back on the phone and talked to me about how they won’t resuscitate if things go bad. And about how long the road to recovery will likely be if she does pull through. My aunt has been through so much physical pain in this life, it’s unbelievable. *sigh*. Mom also said that she wouldn’t want to be resuscitated in that situation, after which I quickly changed the subject.

Finishing up my cup of “coffee subsitute” yogi tea. While calling it a coffee substitute is one of the bigger stretches I’ve heard, it’s not too bad. It’s definitely rich and warm, and on a morning like this, I can use all the help I can get just to get out the door and greet the gray day.

On October 6th, at 7:00pm, should you be looking for me, I’ll be here. You should be too.

I was reminded what it was like to get on the bike after a long stretch off it today. Finally picked up my helmet (and asked about cleat covers which they were out of - guess I won’t be wearing the shoes in the house.) Came home, and Rony asked if I would be up for a short ride. I was going to say no, since I was supposedly going houseware shopping with Sonic and Tricia. Hadn’t heard from them, though, and the day was nice and cool, so I said sure.

I love love love love love the new pedals and shoes. Yes, I spent way too much money on them, but yes, it was worth it.

The float on the pedals is pretty nutty, and will probably take a little getting used to. I can see already, though, that once I get used to it I’ll never want to go back. The only complaint (if you could call it that) I have about them is that it’s difficult to know when I’ve disengaged from them. I turn my foot out and can’t feel the shoe come off the pedal. Not that it’s a problem, but whenever it happens I think to myself “was the pedal even engaged before?” Of course it was, every time, it’s just a weird feeling.

The shoes are great. They’re so comfy, and the carbon fiber soles really do cut out a significant amount of vibration. The entire time I was out riding, I was there huffing and puffing, really out of breath, and then I’d notice that my feet felt great. Any time I thought about my feet I’d notice how comfortable they were, how little they felt the turmoil that was going on around them. Again, an interesting feeling that’ll take some getting used to. Also, the walking in the shoes.. not so much fun. But since I lack the cleat covers anyway, they’re off my feet pretty much the moment I’m off the bike. So not that big a deal.

Rony and I were talking during the home stretch about how out of shape and tired we were, and I was reminded of that first ride out to the beach and back with Seth - just how hard it was. But I also remembered just how quickly it got easier. Can’t wait.

I’ve been listening to a bluegrass cover of Modest Mouse’s “Trailer Trash” on repeat for what feels like hours now. Before that it was Rufus Wainwright’s “Barcelona”.

Added some more unit tests for mono’s atlas implementation, and fixed a few of them to actually work on mono.

I haven’t wrapped my head completely around all the atlas stuff yet. From the outside it looks like it’ll take a fair amount of koolaid to really believe in it as a platform, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be spouting the same uninformed negativity as seen in other blogs. True, there are legitimate instances of copying conventions and even a function name from prototype/script.aculo.us. Giving credit for inspiration would have been nice. but really, griping over copying a nice hack like $? If it were me, I’d think to myself “cool, they used $. that’s such a neat hack. I’m glad I thought of that.” Not “those bastards didn’t even ask if they could use $.” whatever.

anyway, their declarative client-side script stuff will be nice from a designer perspective. parsing a declarative spec for behavior/data binding is a lot easier than parsing code, clearly, especially when the spec can be either machine- or user-generated. But I still can’t shake the “jesus, that’s overengineered” feeling I get when I look at the stuff. I mean, having server side controls know how to render themselves in two different ways (HTML and xml-script), all the serialization stuff on the server side to transmit server types to JS and back, and having the javascript actually parsing the declarative stuff and hooking up events/databinding.. seems… well, overengineered. And several of their examples list xml-script along with javascript in the same example. Clearly there are problems that aren’t solvable with the xml-script. If programmers will have to write javascript anyway, why not just set out a series of conventions for writing behavior/databinding code in JS and skip the xml script stuff? it’s just another language people are forced to learn.

Also, the examples they’ve posted just don’t really feel easy to maintain. They feel very complicated and bulky and bloated. I’m not sure there’s anything they can do about that, given the design goals they obviously have. Atlas stuff might be more maintainable in the long term than either home-grown solutions or things like Rails, but at the moment the jury is out. About the only thing I can say is that it doesn’t look like it’ll be very fun to work with.

About the Modest Mouse covers:
(01:03:20) Nat: i want to be at a party where this is playing

me too.