Digital Choke Daynotes

"Daynotes" are popularized by a Internet Web site called the "Daynotes Gang" (http://www.daynotes.com or http://www.daynotes.com), a collection of the daily technical and personal observations from the famous and others. That group started on September 29, 1999, and has grown to an interesting collection of individuals. Readers are invited and encouraged to visit those sites for other interesting daily journals. You can send your comments to us by clicking on any mailbox icon.

You probably know by now that Sunday's around here are family days. This was no exception. After church this morning, we had lunch and then did a good job at the 'day of rest' thing. The grandkids came over in the afternoon, and we had lasagna and barbequed chicken. Yeah, I know that sounds like a different combination, but my wife likes to cook on Sundays. And it means that there are good leftovers for the rest of the week. Lasagna is almost better as a leftover than when fresh. And it saves a bit of money during the week when you bring a lunch, rather than eat out.

I made some changes to the pages around here (it was motivated by John Dominik), I think they all work OK.

So, to get to the current entry, just click on the "Bookmark!" link above to add an item (called "DigitalChoke Daynotes Current Entry") to your Favorites list. Then, just click on that new entry in your Favorites list to get here. Is that confusing enough?

Tomorrow is a holiday in California, in celebration of Cesar Chavez' birthday. I'm celebrating by mowing the lawns and starting on cleaning and boxing up the garage. That sounds like fun, doesn't it?

It started out OK, I think. I was going to do some lawn mowing ("Spring has sprung, the grass has riz...."), but needed to get some gas. Then my realtor called and said that we needed to get our septic tank pumped out and inspected. I did't have any idea where exactly it was, other than "over there somewhere", so I made a trip to the county Environmental Services office (where you get septic tank permits when you build in the country) to see what they had on file. Not much, as it turns out, other than an old inspection report that said the tank was 25' west of the master bedroom.

That pointed me in the general direction of the tank, so I got out the shovel and started digging. I lucked out and found a portion of the tank only about 16 inches deep, and the ground was still a bit soft so it wasn't; hard to dig. Now septic tanks are at least five feet wide and 9 feet long, and there are two manhole-like covers somewhere on the top. So I had to dig in one direction or the other to find the lids. I went about two feet 'one way', and didn't find a lid, so I went about three feet 'the other way', and found one of the lids.

Then it got worse. You regular readers (yes,both of you) might recall the entries from the first of March about my occasionally recurring problem of atrial fibrillation, or raid/irregular heartbeat. It is a condition that is kept under control (mostly) by medication (beta-blocker and Digoxin), but an 'incident' sometimes crops up at random times. And so it did, while I was digging into the ground. (Physical exertion is not always the cause of an incident, it has happened before while relaxing in front of the TV).

When it happens, I take a couple of extra Digoxin tablets (as recommended by my doctor), and sit around and relax for 4-8 hours until my heartbeat goes back to normal. It is slightly uncomfortable and a bit tiring until that conversion to normal heartbeat, but it usually happens. After about 6 hours, it was getting a bit better, but not entirely normal, and it was getting late, so I went to bed.

In the morning, the heartbeat wasn't entirely normal, so we decided to stop by the local emergency room at the hospital. (An irregular heartbeat, while not life-threatening, can be a problem if it occurs for a long period of time. Because blood is not flowing through the heart normally, there is a chance of blood clots forming in the heart chamber, and that can be a problem. So, when you check into the ER with an irregular heartbeat, you usually get right to the front of the line.)

So, now we are back in the ER room, hooked up to various machines and an IV drip. The doctor comes in and decides that their best bet is to try to shock the heart back into a normal rhythm. Yeah, paddles, yelling "Clear!", the whole thing. In this case, they give you a drug beforehand (don't recall the name right now) that puts you in a conscious unconscious state, so that you are awake but not aware of what is going on. (Sort of like when you are in a boring class, or listening to a boring presentation.) Sometimes that drug causes an allergic reaction, which I was lucky enough to experience. It is hard to recall and describe, since I wasn't really aware of all of this, but I understand that the doctors did get a bit excitable.

Anyhow, I also got the shock treatment (twice), which didn't really fix the heartbeat anyhow, so they went with a 'lowpressa' drug that slows down the heartbeat, and also lowers the blood pressure. So they have to watch that pretty closely. That seemed to do the trick (after about a half hour), so they watched me a bit longer in the ER room to make sure all was back to normal.

Now, the heartbeat was normal rhythm, but slow (55-65 per minute), and the blood pressure was low also. So, they decided to keep me overnight, and I waited for a room assignment and got wheeled over to the hospital room areas. Except the room wasn't ready, so I went back to the ER for a while until they found another room. I got wheeled back over there, and when I rolled into that area, a fire alarm was going off (a false alarm, I think). The alarm was pretty loud, but there was no panic in the staff. I managed to get a private room, though.

They hooked me up to a wireless EKG monitor that is centrally monitored in the nurse's area. I got an echocardiogram, which didn't show any abnormalities in the heart muscle or blood flow. The blood work was normal. And my heartbeat got to a more normal beat and pressure this afternoon so I could go home. There is an upcoming visit to the heart specialist, and an adjustment of my medications. That includes a daily aspirin, which has been shown to help keep the blood thin, which reduces blood clotting problems (studies have shown a daily aspirin regiment to be helpful to all sort of people, so you may also want to consider it).

So, now I am at home, catching up on things. I'm staying home from work tomorrow to rest up and catch up on the email, including some messages from a couple of readers of this stuff.

And that's how I spent my Tuesday and most of today (Wednesday)...no April Fool's here. How was your week so far?

Today was much less exciting than the past couple of days. Since the boss didn't want me to come in today (she said I should rest up from my ordeal), I didn't. That worked out well, because I missed a couple of boring meetings. No such luck tomorrow, there is an all-morning meeting regarding the class attendance tracking project that I have mentioned before. We get to sit through two two-hour presentations by the top two vendors. Both have good proposals, along with products that seem to meet most of their requirements.

So I spent most of today catching up on email, both home and work. I don't get as much at home as some of the other Daynoters, but I do get a lot at work. Although there is much less of it since we put our spam filtering software in production. I also did some more home searching of slightly used houses. Our current theory (which keeps changing, it seems) is that we should look at some similar homes that are under five years old in the same area. The new home will be very nice, but the base price doesn't include all the needed upgrades. Usually you want to upgrade the flooring (carpet and tiles), and kitchen cabinets and countertops. Those upgrades will add long-term value.

We and our agent found about three posibilities in the same area, near the price of the new house with a few upgrades. So Saturday's plan is to take a look at the used houses to see if one of them might be a better choice than a new one. And to go to the new home sales office to determine the cost of the upgrades, with an eye towards keeping the upgrade costs to a minimum. We'll see how that works out.

We had the vendor demo of the proposed product/application. Two vendors are in the final running. Both had some similar ideas, and both had some similar products that could be customized for the department. One product was pre-beta, the other was a bit more mature. One company was small/start-up size, the other was more established. One seemed to have a stronger project management process than the other. One had more depth in staffing (programmers and project managers). This project has a very aggressive implementation schedule, so that affected our rankings.

So we spent the morning with a 1 1/2 hour 'dog and pony show' with each vendor. Then a working lunch (without the vendors) to discuss our evaluations of each one. I think that either one can do the job, but the aggressive timeframe needs a more experienced and 'deep' company. So I gave them my recommendation, as did others in the evaluation group. We shall see who they choose.

That took until about 1:30pm, so I spent the rest of the day catching up on things and gathering together the information I will need for some things I want to work on this weekend.

The weather today turned a bit cold (well, cold for this area, not "Minnesota" or "Saskatoon" cold) today. A storm front moved in, and the high temperature never reached 60F. There's new snow up in the mountains, which will make the skiers happy, and will help with the year's water supply. Some cold rain in the valley, with a bit of thunder-boomers, which are sort of rare around here.

We had some nice pork chops for dinner, with red potatoes, and green beans. That is a pretty low-fat dinner, which is good for me. I even used a butter substitute (no fat, works quite well on moist foods), and only had a half glass of reduced fat milk. Then we fired up the pellet stove to get the family room nice and toasty.

I worked on these pages, fixing a couple more bad links in the last couple of week's posts, along with the index and current page. I'll be checking things out, as will my official editor (Brian C)...the apostrophe man.

Tommorow is house-hunting day. We have two 'used' houses to look at to see if they meet our needs. If not, it's off to the new house place to figure out what upgrades are needed. And we'll also take a look at some apartments in the neighborhood, since it looks like we may need to have an interim place to live.

A successful day today. Our Realtor found a 'used' house in the same general area as the new house we found last week. This one is about 3 years old in a very nice area. It was the former model home for that development, so there are many upgrades in the house, and the landscaping is really nice (front and back) with some good-sized trees. There is a large family room just off the kitchen with a full wall of bookcases along with a built-in desk, a natural gas fireplace, and a good place for the 'media center'. The kitchen and breakfast nook area has a terra cotta tile floor and Corian countertops with an island area in the center. There are plenty of cupboards, and a small desk area in there. The living room has a nice almost separate dining area. It's a two-story house, four bedrooms and two baths are upstairs,along with a laundry area. The master bathroom is nicely sized, with a separate shower and tub, and two walk-in closets.

It just came on the market, so we made a full-price offer which the owners accepted. They are moving to the east coast (I think) and it looks like they can get out of the house fairly quickly. Which is nice, because we have to be out of here on May 2nd. We're already approved for a loan, which saves that time. So we are hoping that all will work out so that we don't have to do an interim apartment move.

We spent the afternoon at my oldest daughter's house. They wanted to go to a movie, and we volunteered to babysit the one year old. He's a lot of fun, and quite easy to entertain. They were back by 730pm, so we left shortly afterwards and stopped by the grocery store on the way home to pick up supplies for Sunday dinner.

It's late now, but it doesn't seem like it. Perhaps my body clock has already done the 'spring forward' thing. Besides that, I just found "McKenna's Gold" on the Western Channel.

Don't forget to fix all the clocks in the house tomorrow (Sunday). Except for the VCR, which always flashes "12:00", of course. (Assuming you still have one.)

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