January 2007

ipaq returns

My ipaq is home! On the weekend a fellow phoned, the manager from radio cabs. He found it in the lost and found he said and it took this long to find an adapter to turn it on and find out to whom it belonged. I think the story is a little fishy and the situation is more likely that he was going to keep it, didn't know what to do with it or how to use/personalize it, and finally had an attack of conscience and returned it. At any rate it's like a lost child returning. I'm loving having it. I feel a bit guilty having 2 winmobile devices. One has the wifi, one has the cellular... I still want to get a wifi sdio card for the audiovox and when I do, it's likely I"ll finally not have use for the ipaq. Then I'll convert it over and see if Dan can learn to use it. He should and could be able to but it's hard to say if he will. He's never gotten into the palm but that is a crappy device. The palm interface is too simplistic and the device too weak and simple. There's too little it can do compared with the ipaq. So we'll see. For now I'm carrying them both around.

excellent quotes

http://www.mentalanarchy.com/quotes.html Offers some wonderful quotes from such visionaries as Seneca, Nietzsche and Frank Zappa (RIP).

Harriet end of day 2

Harriet passed the day with good vitality. Her foot looks clean and pink and the wound is well scabbed over. I got her out of her cage and dipped her first in warm salt bath then rinsed in warm clear water bath. She needed yesterday's blood washed off and her good foot had poop smeared on it. She got a toenail clipping on her good foot and medicated for the day and I changed her cage lining. Set her up cozy for the night and after she had time to dry and snuggle I turned off the light and put her to bed. This morning was frightening lifting the cover. What if she's dead? Tomorrow I'll assume she is alive. At this point it's all about infection watch. Keep doing antibiotics and carry on. I dont know how long to keep up the pain killer, whether to carry on for the full 10 days or not, but I guess it's not important. She won't get addicted in a hurry at all. Even so she'll get cut off cold and that's that. It's after all a very small amount.

canary update next day

It's day two of the canary amputation, day three of the trauma. Crazy little bird lives yet and her foot looks pretty good today. She was bugging at it a bit and so I parked next to her for awhile and every time she aimed for it, I blew on her and said "no." She seems to have caught on and has quit pestering it. It hasn't opened up again. If we get through today without it bleeding we should be safe on that account and then it's just about keeping her clean enough that it doesn't infect. She's on the table next to me because my parrot took an interest in her. I don't want to leave her in another spot unsupervised in fear he'll damage the cage. She's pacing anxiously at the uncovered section of her tiny cage. I do wish she'd settle down, I may have to return her to the light and cover her up so she settles down. Restless isn't good, she should be resting, not agitating at the cage trying to get home to her husband. I think Petey has lost interest (for now.) He's got a toddler's attention span.

thoughts on compassion and gadgets

If you'd asked me last summer how far I'd go to care for this canary hen, I'd have said "not far." I never cared personally for her, I don't tend to care that hard about my twits. They're short lived creatures and easily replaced and hard to do medicine in. So this bird breaks a toe. You can't kill someone for breaking a toe, right? You tend the injury. So here I am tending the injury, it's become life threatening. I find myself really worrying and caring about her. Far more than I thought I would and feeling closer and more affectionate to her. Wanting to reach out and soothe the little thing. I figured it out. Compassion comes from the acts of compassion. By doing as though you care, you begin to care. To extend it to a human situation, if you were to go volunteer at a soup kitchen and act like you gave a damn about these people who currently offend you (and my canary's ugly naked head offended me,) then by acting in compassion you would develop it. You would discover in a few days or weeks that you cared about them as people and that you wanted ot reach out and help solve their problems.

Now, that sort of thing can easily go too far and one can lose sight of realism and wind up bankrupting oneself trying to solve problems that are the responsibility of others, but you can, I hope, hear what I mean. The act creates the sentiment every bit as much as the sentiment would create the act.

Now onto the gadget part. I just want to sing the praise of something I thought was frivolous till I started using one. The little accessory marketed for laptops, the USB lamp. I could see it had limited use for people who hunt and peck to type but being an accomplished touch typist it seemed silly to me. I thought, hey, the screen provides light. Then I found myself sitting on the couch in the evening having to grab a flashlight to find the right function key for turning the audio down or the screen. Hmmm well, now, that is interesting. I went ahead and added this accessory to my life. Since then I've discovered it's a great light for fixing breakfast in the dark without too badly disturbing the birds. That insane society finch cock still crows at it but for the most part they stay resting, don't get up and start their day. It would even make a handy desktop light for low-light use plugged into a usb hub near your keyboard. You can see well enough to clean your nails or check a piece of paper for data or, of course, hunt and peck your keyboard. When you need only a little bit of light and don't want to wake up or disturb someone else in the room (small homes, for instance) then here you are, usb light might just be the solution

injured bird

I'm nursing a canary who just had a toe amputated. Sick with worry, it started to bleed a bit again but I can't tell how much or if it's closing off. Oh dear oh my, such a twist in my tummy. Doc said call her back if the bird was bleeding and try to stop it with corn starch and pressure meantime, but I"d rather not stress her out grabbing her if it's going to stop on it's own. Delicate balance, you know? Bleeding also helps prevent infection although these tiny creatures can't stand much loss of blood. Such a worry. Looks to have stopped and by the look of her beak, she picked it open! ~sigh~
Yesterday in the morning I found her with the toe badly broken and flapping around with a sore at the knuckle. I patched it,taping it to the next toe, but the patch was badly applied and didn't last. Today I took her to the vet and they amputated since the toe had clearly gone dead. Poor thing is hurting and afraid. she did nibble at her food a bit though and drink water eagerly when it arrived, so that's promising. I need to keep a close eye on her and see that she does keep eating and drinking as well as keeping her as quiet as I can.
Lately I've been tracking my food and exercise with a new website I discovered via stumble-upon, a plugin for mozilla firefox. It's called Calorie Connect. You create a profile, it's free, and then track your input and output with their simple interface. It has a page where it graphs your levels based on your information. It figures out from what you told it what your levels should be and adjusts them according to exercises you log. It has many foods already in it's database and you can add foods yourself either by calculating the components togther and then dividing down to serving sizes (like scratch made salad or casserole) or by taking the information from the package it came in. It's making the difference for me to be able to restrain my sugar and junk cravings and to ensure I eat enough but not too much. The sense of hope and assurance alone is enough to keep me on the straight and narrow. I know this should work and so it's worth the period of privation when I can't eat candy and nonsense. I'm even avoiding restaurants because it would be too difficult to log the meals. However after I've done this awhile I could probably just skip a day on the charts (the website allows this) and know well enough how much is a meal so when I did eat out I wouldn't have to log it but wouldn't go over my safe limits for food either.
My body has started to fight back though. I'm craving binges of fats and sweets. I figure that means I'm losing some weight. Still it's aggravating. I wouldn't be able to cope if I didn't have this resource telling me where I stand nutritionally! I haven't actually lost any weight yet but I"m hopeful. It's only been a couple weeks nd when you reduce weight responsibly it goes slowly, I think.

personality type

further thoughts on anarchy

I just want to argue the point from the article linked in the previous blog wherein the author states that distasteful tasks would have to be assigned by rota and social pressure put to bear on folks to ensure "nobody shirks his quota" of the jobs in question. Jobs that usually are mentioned include such things as sewer cleanouts, garbage pickup, and similar jobs. However I'd like to point out, as a cleaner, that there are plenty of people who truly don't mind these jobs. They do them now. All that is required for them to continue doing them is sufficient rewards. Pay us well and praise and thank us regularily and nobody has to do these tasks on rotation at all. I truly believe that for every job there is an ideal match. I like cleaning. It's refreshing, enervating, and rewarding. I get good exercise, provide a valuable service and get direct results for my effort. The part I don't like about my job isn't the part where I reach into urinals or haul eighty pounds of stinking trash. It's the part where people look down on me for doing it. It's being paid the most measly wage they can possibly get away with paying. I don't in fact do it for the money, as there is insufficient recompense to keep me going, but because I know they need me and I find the work pleasant enough. I don't love my job. I don't enjoy it all the time. I often just want to quit or go home, but on a whole, as a task someone has to do, I find it satisfactory and I willingly do it for what amounts to an honorarium even in spite of feeling under-appreciated.
I truly believe that whatever job you find distasteful there will be someone who does it and expects to continue to do it even if he "doesn't have to." My worst idea of a job a desk jockey. I couldn't stand sitting at a desk in a nice outfit day after day smiling and interacting with other desk jockeys, no matter what tasks I completed at that desk. Yet there are plenty who aspire to these jobs. There are a variety of reasons and not all are ambitious. Many is the person who is perfectly happy to remain an administrative assistant or small time manager. All most of us ask is that we feel like our place in society is wanted and appreciated and our needs are being met and will continue to be met.

stumbling into the surf

I finally got to using the firefox plugin called "Stumble Upon" which is a targeted surfing tool. Users share sites into the database, using tags and keywords to archive a site. Then you set up your favorite topics every now and then and hit "like it" or "dislike it" as you go to refine the sort of tags it uses to serve up your websites. It's random surfing at its finest! So this is a site I found that I really want to post and share, Everything you ever wanted to know about anarchy. I think it does a fine job of explaining things even though I haven't yet read it through. LOL. Dan's immigration lawyer wants to barter my painting skills for her lawyer time. Sounds like a fine idea to me! We were over at her large house on the prairie today. It was a splendid view of winter that she had and the house is incredible. Kind of bedraggled right now from raising five kids and two dogs, but the possibilities in there are massive. I wanted to move in and decorate and enjoy it. I can't though. Not only is the idea of moving to a house out of the city alarming, but the house is worth over a quarter of a million dollars. Not in our price range in the least. I'll be slapping paint on fake wood panelling all over the place. No matter what you do it comes out looking cheap unfortunately but at least it will lighten the place up. Those walls need drywall, not just paint. The new home owners are likely very much to rip out the panelling entirely and replace it with drywall. I would anyway.
I took pictures and I'll be using software I have to paint the walls in the pictures to the colors she's selected so she can see the results. I have to figure out the colors that belong to the color chips we selected so we get the best results. The color in the software doesn't even come out identical when painted into the picture so I'll have to spend a little time fussing with it. We also have to calculate quantity of paint so we can price it.