Update on Lucky’s health

For those who hadn’t heard, Lucky developed some kind of severe G-I issue more than a week ago, which we were unable to get under control despite several visits to the vet and everything we tried at home. This eventually culminated in us admitting him at the Ottawa Veterinary Hospital on Friday night. The great … Continue reading “Update on Lucky’s health”

For those who hadn’t heard, Lucky developed some kind of severe G-I issue more than a week ago, which we were unable to get under control despite several visits to the vet and everything we tried at home. This eventually culminated in us admitting him at the Ottawa Veterinary Hospital on Friday night.

The great news is that he seems to have stabilized, under the excellent monitoring and care of the OVH staff, and we brought him home again today. He’s still on several different meds, and is getting many small meals of a custom “Gastro” diet, but hopefully a few more days of TLC will have him all fixed up. We still don’t know whether there is some underlying issue that needs to be resolved, but for now we are not going to go for further tests, unless he gets worse.

Update: We’re not out of the woods yet; he was off his food again this morning (Tues). 🙁

Update 2: We’re now on a third antibiotic. As long as we can prevent his appetite from failing again, this one should do it. (Thurs.)

It’s Spring!

Ah, Ottawa in the Spring. What a wonderful time of year. Birds singing, the grass starting to show, the trees budding… To give some of you less fortunate ones a chance to understand what their missing, here’s a shot from outside my house this morning: Just beautiful.

Ah, Ottawa in the Spring. What a wonderful time of year. Birds singing, the grass starting to show, the trees budding…

To give some of you less fortunate ones a chance to understand what their missing, here’s a shot from outside my house this morning:


spring

Just beautiful.

If my mind was this cluttered… Oh, wait.

I’ve been busy on many fronts lately, and haven’t had time to blog. In lieu of real content, here’s a picture of my office… (Click on it to get a bigger view.) Some things to note: You can see by the height of the chair that I have put my desk back in “stand up” … Continue reading “If my mind was this cluttered… Oh, wait.”

I’ve been busy on many fronts lately, and haven’t had time to blog. In lieu of real content, here’s a picture of my office…

my work desktop
(Click on it to get a bigger view.)

Some things to note:

  • You can see by the height of the chair that I have put my desk back in “stand up” mode. I’ve only been at it for a couple of days, and so my back (and feet) are still pretty sore, but I must say it’s a great way to remind myself that I need to lose weight. It usually takes about 3 weeks to get used to it again.
  • I do still juggle, especially on conference calls [pssst… don’t tell anyone. 😉 ]. The balls on the desk are actually made of wood; they’re great for training you to catch properly since they hurt if you do it wrong (but you don’t lose fingers like you do with knives). The pins (stuck in the back of the desk under the Escher print) are just for show, I haven’t used them in years. Oh, and there’s a unicycle just out of frame behind the cello case on the left. 🙂
  • The silent cello is still at work. I try to get 10 or 15 minutes to play it at lunch, but that’s about the best I’ve done.
  • Yes, my main development machine is a MacBook Pro.

Anyway, stay tuned hopefully after EclipseCon is over, next week, we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming updates.

New Years, Resolutions, and Weighing In

I’d like to wish everyone a Happy New Year. But more than that, I’d like to remind us all that, for that wish to be fulfilled, we need to support and care for our friends and family; we are living in interesting times, and our love for each other is our best defense. Those of … Continue reading “New Years, Resolutions, and Weighing In”

I’d like to wish everyone a Happy New Year. But more than that, I’d like to remind us all that, for that wish to be fulfilled, we need to support and care for our friends and family; we are living in interesting times, and our love for each other is our best defense.

Those of you who see me regularly know that I have been putting on weight lately. I’m currently over 250 pounds and, even for me, that much weight is a problem — the obvious indicator being that it is now difficult for me to get “crunched” enough to put on my snowboard boots. Ugh!

As such, I’ve decided to join the ranks of the New Year’s resolution makers:

I will lose 50 pounds this year.

Now, in general, I’m pretty good at sticking to a resolution (particularly, one that I’ve told the world about 🙂 ), but losing that much weight will be a challenge, so I am asking for your support. Please feel free to remind me if you see me acting in a way that would run counter to the goal. I won’t let it happen deliberately, but it’s certainly possible that I just might not notice.

Wish me luck.

Peace.

My vote (in Canada) and a U.S. political note

I hate the idea of strategic voting. I’ve always been a strong believer in voting for the party/candidate that most strongly reflects your world view. This year, however, I’m strongly tempted to vote Liberal (even though I think they’re idiots), simply because I believe the prospect of having a Conservative majority in government *now*, at … Continue reading “My vote (in Canada) and a U.S. political note”

I hate the idea of strategic voting. I’ve always been a strong believer in voting for the party/candidate that most strongly reflects your world view. This year, however, I’m strongly tempted to vote Liberal (even though I think they’re idiots), simply because I believe the prospect of having a Conservative majority in government *now*, at the point when the world is about to go through a significant upheaval would be tragic.

The thing is, when I look at the state of the world — ecologically, socially, and economically — and how I feel that we will have to respond to it, it’s clear that the party that best reflects my views is the Greens. I also believe that many, many others in Canada feel the same way.

The NDP are also close, if they could just figure out that sometimes “Environment first” is going to have to trump “People first”, so that our kids get to have a world worth living in too.

So what to do… hm…

Btw, do you realize that if the Americans aren’t careful, they may end up with a vice-president who believes that Christ will return during her lifetime (or at least believed this at one point during her life).

Random, unrelated question: Is insanity grounds for disqualification for leadership in the U.S.?

What I did this summer [warning: long post]

As most everyone knows, I’m not a fan of traveling, so I like to find some other way to commemorate my vacation — usually by doing something significant around the house. This year, we chose to move Dennis’ bedroom to the basement. He’s almost 16 now, and it seemed like he needed more privacy than … Continue reading “What I did this summer [warning: long post]”

As most everyone knows, I’m not a fan of traveling, so I like to find some other way to commemorate my vacation — usually by doing something significant around the house. This year, we chose to move Dennis’ bedroom to the basement. He’s almost 16 now, and it seemed like he needed more privacy than being in a room that shared a wall (and a cold air return vent) with his parents’ bedroom.

Now another thing most everyone knows is that our house tends to be filled with stuff. This means that as a precursor to any significant work on the house, we need to purge the stuff to make room. We started by giving away the last of Dennis’ Star Wars toys and Lego to friends with younger boys. Then we got rid of our excess pocket books… Hm… that comment doesn’t really do the situation justice. Here’s a picture to give you a better idea:

More boxes than you can possibly imagine

What you’re looking at are 36 “2 cubes”, almost all of which are full of books that we are going to donate to charity, along with a couple of bicycles and a several bags of clothing and material.

With a bit more room to think, we settled on the following plan:

  • Deb would take over Dennis’ old bedroom as both a study and sewing room.
  • I would move the stuff from my room in the basement to Deb’s old study (i.e. the front bedroom).
  • Dennis would move down to my old computer room in the basement. [Added feature: the futon couch that was in Deb’s old study would move to Dennis’ game room.]

In a frenzy of simultaneous shifting of stuff, we attempted to converge on this plan, but ran into a couple of snags:

  1. I had one of those plastic sheets on the floor in my computer room — you know the ones that make it easier to roll around on a wheely chair. Unfortunately, sandwiching a carpet between a layer of plastic and a cement floor turns out to be a bad idea; when we lifted the plastic sheet, we discovered that the carpet underneath had gone moldy. This threw a major monkey wrench into the planning, since we couldn’t move any of Dennis’ stuff into the room until we could get the carpet replaced, which of course meant that Dennis ended up with his bedroom strewn all over the house while we worked.
  2. When we originally put the desk in Deb’s study we actually built the desk in the room. So, when it came time to move it, we discovered (of course) that we couldn’t get it out of the room without dismantling it into several pieces. At that point we made the snap decision to just leave Deb in her old study, but use the space we got by removing the couch (and some other re-organization) to give her a sewing area as well.

Those were the unexpected big issues. There were also a couple of other painful (but expected) things that we had to deal with:

Dennis wanted space more than storage.
This meant that we had to remove all of the shelving units and cupboards that were in my room, which was a big job since they were all wall mounted and there were quite a number of them. Also, there wasn’t room for most of them in the room upstairs, so they too ended up in the garage, to be given away. (You can see them in the background in the picture above.)
The network router and file server needed to move.
Even if there had been space for them in Dennis’ room (and there wasn’t), I end up fiddling with them too often to want them to be two floors away from me. I also wanted to make use of the wired connection in Deb’s study as the main conduit for running the network through the house, which means that, now that she isn’t switching rooms, she has inherited our dsl modem, router and (the imaginatively named) FILES the file server. They’re sitting on top of her bookshelves. [Insert obligatory short person joke.] My machines (including the server that provided this page) are sitting on the other end of a matched (WDS) pair of Airport Extremes. So far, I’ve been happy with the result. In any case, with the help of another wire pulled through the basement ceiling to reconnect Dennis’ setup in the basement, we’re all up and running again.

Things are starting to converge, finally. Here are some pictures to give you an idea of the new layout. First my room:


 


Note the new M-Audio Axiom 49. There wasn’t room for my old Alesys QS 8.1 between the bookshelves and the treadmill (just out of sight in these pictures).

And here’s Deb working in her new space:

I’d show you a picture of Dennis’ room in the basement, but I keep forgetting to snap one, and it’s time to get this posted…

Rosco!!!

Well, the deed is done, the name is picked. Say hello to Rosco: At 8 weeks, he’s already two feet long when lying in that position, and his paws are so big he looks deformed. What have we gotten ourselves into?!?!?!? I’ll take some more pictures of him when I can get him to stop … Continue reading “Rosco!!!”

Well, the deed is done, the name is picked. Say hello to Rosco:



At 8 weeks, he’s already two feet long when lying in that position, and his paws are so big he looks deformed. What have we gotten ourselves into?!?!?!?

I’ll take some more pictures of him when I can get him to stop moving long enough.

Bill C-61. Ugh.

I saw Pookzilla’s post about C-61, and that reminded me that I hadn’t blogged about this yet. I too think that C-61 is an epic fail, and for the first time ever, I felt sufficiently strongly about it that I wrote my MP. Here’s what I wrote: Sir, I am writing to express my strongest … Continue reading “Bill C-61. Ugh.”

I saw Pookzilla’s post about C-61, and that reminded me that I hadn’t blogged about this yet. I too think that C-61 is an epic fail, and for the first time ever, I felt sufficiently strongly about it that I wrote my MP. Here’s what I wrote:

Sir,

I am writing to express my strongest possible displeasure with the new bill C-61. This bill is a sledgehammer, where deftness is required. In a misguided attempt to prevent a small number of illegal activities, it will introduce new, significant constraints on the legitimate activities of all Canadians. As one small example, imagine a world where, as a parent, you could no longer load one of your children’s MP3 players with songs you had legitimately downloaded — that is a very real, likely outcome of this bill. The impact will be far reaching, and serious.

Please research the situation as thoroughly as possible, with particular reference to those who do *not* have a vested interest in profit over the rights of Canadians, and vote appropriately.

For context, I am a 48 year old member of your constituency who is:
– a software architect (see http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/team-leaders.php)
– a published author (http://safari.awprofessional.com/0321256638)
– an electronic musician (http://mikew.ca/wp/?p=336)
– and a member of an orchestra (http://www.divertimento.ca)

Despite being an obvious potential beneficiary of some of the provisions of the current bill, I feel that it should be strongly apposed. This is the first (and may in be the only) time you hear from me. Please do net let this effort be wasted.

With complete sincerity,
Mike Wilson