"Real nice channel you have here...."

"Real nice channel you have here.  It'd be a shame if anything happened to it."

You know you're an asshole when you're so offensive you can base an extortion racket on getting people to pay you to stay out of an IRC channel.

Medical updates

Well, I'm back in physical therapy again.  Mostly the same exercises as before the surgery, with a few new ones and a whole lot of electrical muscle stimulation.  The swelling around my knee has mostly gone down, but it's still not completely gone; my knee is enough smaller that the knee brace my orthopedist gave me after they took the sutures out doesn't really fit any more.  I think when I see him on Tuesday I'll see if I can get him to give me a smaller one.

My appointment with the neurologist on Thursday was pretty uneventful.  He did the standard set of reflex tests, looked at the CAT scan from the skullsplitting migraine I had in December and pronounced it clear, but said he thinks neuropsychological testing would be a good idea.  Since my therapist is already trying to get this in motion if we can get the insurance to approve it, he asked to see a copy of the report if it gets approved.

All change

Yesterday's big project, from which we're now mostly recovered, was to rearrange the livingroom.  EVERYTHING in the livingroom.

Well, OK, everything except the rack.  We weren't going to casually move that, and there was no real reason to move it anyway.

Most of this amounts to swapping the positions of my desk and cymrullewes' desk.  However, my desk is an L-shaped steel-cantilever workstation desk five and a half by six and a half feet, and hers is a solid-wood desk not very much smaller, but quite a bit heavier, that came out of a bank.  Neither one is light, and moving them around each other and other furniture in a room 10'4" x 13'2" that also contains another 30"x4' desk and a 72" full-cabinet rack was interesting.  Then, of course, we had to reconnect all the machines we moved (five PCs and two Macs) to the network, recable everything, boot everything back up (well, not everything; none of the servers went down, because we didn't touch the rack), swap out a failed sound card from llioness and compile and load the correct kernel module for it, figure out how the reorganization affected where we'd put things...  During the course of all this, we determined that one of the Mac video cables we've been intermittently trying to use is definitely bad, and almost certainly has a broken core on one of its sync wires.  So we need to find another working Mac DB15-HD15 video cable from somewhere, so that we can retire the oldest and probably most power-hungry Mac monitor, a Radius 17" that uses a 5BNC cable.

Upshot:  Although the new arrangement doesn't leavea clear space in the middle of the room the way the old did, I think that (counter-intuitively, to me) it may actually give us more overall usable space.  Plus, instead of being tucked behind the corner of the wall and the basement door, I how have clear line-of-sight from my desk all the way to the kitchen window, the front door, and the bottom of the stairs, and I'm right by the glass sliders to the deck, giving me more fresh air and daylight.  Plus, I don't have to get up any more when one of the cats wants in or out¹, and we have space now to put the HP color scanner on the end of Goose's desk instead of balancing it on top of vorlon's case.  (We do, however, need to pick up a longer USB cable to connect it to vorlon.)  We also have room to open the rear door of the DeskJet 2500 without having to move it, when we need to do so to clear a paper jam (I've got it mostly behaving itself now, except that it seems to almost invariably jam on the first sheet of paper it feeds after coming out of standby).  We do have a bit of a bottleneck between Pirate's chair at the end of cymrullewes' desk extension, and the heavy square oak corner table that the DeskJet 2500 sits on, but I think we'll be able to live with it.

[1]  And in, and out, and in, and out, and in, and out....  Cats don't see the universe the same way we humans do; they perceive a door as an intriguing topological object related to a Möbius strip.  To cats, doors only have one side... and it's the wrong side.

The world LED-er (not!)

Since we had a (standard incandescent) torchiere light short out internally and burn up its socket rather spectacularly last night, I went looking to see if there was an easy way to replace its guts with an LED solution.  And I found something very interesting.

Briefly, if you google for LED home lighting, you'll find that there's all kinds of LED home lighting devices on the market ... in Australia.  Here in the US, there ain't jack, and what little there is, is horrendously overpriced -- $130 for a standard-form-factor medium-base bulb that, as far as I can tell given the inconsistent and confusing way they list the specifications, appears to be the rough equivalent of about a 30W incandescent bulb.  (At that, it consumes 13W -- so if their published specs accurately represent reality, they've managed to make an LED light that's only about half as efficient as a compact fluorescent that costs twenty times less.  Who in their right mind is going to buy that?  They should surely be getting a HELL of a lot more light output from 13W worth of LEDs.)

For now, I guess I'll be just putting a new incandescent fitting into it.  Hopefully, I'll be able to find a decent-quality one.  (I shudder every time I look at replacement light sockets at the hardware store and see cardboard insulation.  Whiskey tango foxtrot, over?!?)