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Category: Barbara

Friday, 21 October 2011

09:55 – Barbara seems to be fully recovered from the episode on Tuesday. I’m still keeping a closer-than-usual eye on her while she’s in the shower and so on, but I think the risk of a repeat episode is pretty small.

I seldom do breaking news, but I figured I’d make an exception in this case and report the results of the EU crisis pre-summit scheduled for this coming Sunday and the EU real-summit-between-Germany-and-France scheduled for next Wednesday. On Sunday, the press release will say that the major parties have agreed to agree, and that the crisis will be defused at the following meeting. After the real meeting, the press release will say that major steps will be taken to address the crisis. If a particular step is to be taken soon, no details will provided about what exactly is to be done. If details are provided about what exactly is to be done, those actions will be promised only for the distant future. On Wednesday and Thursday, mainstream news sources will report that decisive actions have been taken, and the markets will breathe a sigh of relief. On Thursday and Friday, everyone will realize that exactly nothing came out of the summit meeting, and the crisis will return and intensify.

Remember, you read it here first. My new slogan is “Breaking News, Before it Happens”.

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Thursday, 20 October 2011

09:37 – Barbara is back to using her regular cane. She used the walker frame on Tuesday, my four-foot cane yesterday, and declared last night that she was ready to start using her regular cane again. She took the final anticoagulant shot yesterday, and started this morning on one 325 mg aspirin daily, which she’ll continue for a month.

I see the Greeks are revolting, for what good it will do them. Most of the MSM are calling it “protests”, but throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the police is a bit beyond protesting. Attempted murder, say. It seems that most Greeks are blaming the EU and IMF for their problems, and the socialist government is near collapse. No one knows what will replace it, but the Communists are pushing hard. I expect we’ll see the current rioting devolve into actual revolution if things don’t greatly improve soon. And things are likely to get much, much worse, not better. As the infection spreads and other southern-tier countries default, we can expect to see similar violence as governments teeter and then topple in Italy and Spain and Portugal and Belgium and France. Not Ireland, thank goodness, nor the northern-tier eurozone countries. Unless they’re foolish enough to commit their economies to subsidizing the southern tier.

Unfortunately, the US is on the same course, albeit probably five or ten years behind. And there’s no one to bail us out.

13:32 – Barbara went to the doctor this morning, just to get looked over and have a few tests done. Her doctor didn’t seem too concerned about her brief loss of consciousness Tuesday. He seems to think it was caused by her severe pain immediately before the event, which caused her body to be flooded with adrenaline. He’s going to keep an eye on her low hemoglobin levels, but for now he basically said to take an extra multi-vitamin tablet every day and be sure to drink plenty of fluids. He also said that she was doing extremely well in terms of knee movement and so on, especially for only two weeks after her surgery.

Here are a couple of articles that caught my attention. First, despite the Guardian’s early report that a consensus had been reached before Sunday’s upcoming crisis summit for a huge effort that would finally resolve the euro crisis, it soon became obvious that not only had no such consensus been reached, but that Germany and France were farther apart than ever. This article sums things up pretty well. Franco-German deadlock over ECB’s role in rescue fund

Then we have Who Will Bail Out the Rescuers?, which starts by talking about the inability of France to contribute to bailouts and then goes much farther afield. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the article recommends stocking up on firearms and ammunition to shoot back at rioters. And police.

15:04 – Okay, this is interesting. I’ve had Sons of Anarchy S3D1 at the top of my queue since several weeks before it released, which has been a month or two. The status has never shown anything except “very long wait”.

We’re on the two-discs-at-a-time plan, and my DVD queue is getting down to the dregs. Other than Sons of Anarchy S3, Netflix just shipped us the last disc I really care about today. Our anniversary date is next Wednesday, and I’d already put a reminder in my calendar to downgrade our account to streaming-only and wait a few months for more DVDs we wanted to become available. And then this email arrived.

Re: Arriving Later: Sons of Anarchy: Season 3: Disc 1
From: Netflix
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
Date: Thu Oct 20 13:43:20 2011

****************************
NETFLIX – Shipping update
****************************

Dear Robert,

“Sons of Anarchy: Season 3: Disc 1” was not available from your local shipping center. Fortunately, it was available from a shipping center in another part of the country. It’s on its way and should arrive within 3 to 5 days.

You’ll notice we also recently sent the next available DVD from your Queue to enjoy while “Sons of Anarchy: Season 3: Disc 1” makes its way to you.

Your Queue now shows this extra DVD rental. Enjoy.

-The Netflix Team

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Wednesday, 19 October 2011

09:56 – Barbara’s recovery continues. She had a minor problem yesterday during physical therapy when she felt faint. Fortunately, her physical therapist is 6’8″ (203 cm) and about 300 pounds (135 kilos), so he just caught her and sat her down.

Barbara’s blood pressure is normally on the low end of the normal range, and she’s been giving herself daily injections of an anticoagulant that lists low blood pressure as a side effect. She gives herself the shot early in the morning, and until yesterday the physical therapist had been visiting in mid- to late afternoon. Yesterday, he came in the morning, not long after she’d taken the drug. We’re convinced that the problem was due to the anticoagulant. Fortunately, today was the last day for that. Now she’s supposed to take one 325 mg aspirin tablet daily for the next month.

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Tuesday, 18 October 2011

09:15 – Barbara’s recovery continues. She’s doing better than anyone could have expected. The nurse made her final visit yesterday, and said that the incision had healed completely. Now it’s mainly a matter of Barbara continuing her exercises to rebuild strength and mobility in her knee. She’s getting along fine with her cane, and has pretty full mobility inside the house and out in the yard. She’s not doing stairs yet, but I suspect she’ll begin doing that before long. We went to the grocery store yesterday, and she was able to cruise up and down the aisles picking out items.

I’m still working hard on the biology book, including a lot of re-write to take into account the change from monochrome images to full-color. The fact that the book is now full-color means that it’ll be a lot more illustrated than it would have been, because I can now use images where it would have made no sense to do before. For example, when we’re doing Gram staining, the original draft had no image because showing a monochrome image of Gram+ and Gram- bacteria was useless. (“The violet-stained Gram+ bacteria are visible in Figure 3-8 as gray, and the pink-stained Gram- bacteria as … gray.” or “The green chloroplasts are visible in Figure 4-12 as … gray dots.”)

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Monday, 17 October 2011

09:27 – Someone emailed me yesterday to say that Europe wouldn’t have to inflate the euro because the EU €440 billion bailout fund could cover any shortfalls. Where to begin?

First, the ESFS €440 billion reserves aren’t really €440 billion. After accounting for monies already allocated to Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, they’re actually under €300 billion. And that only potentially. Second, the size of the fund is sufficient to cover only a small percentage–less than 10%–of at-risk EU sovereign debt. Third, this so-called fund exists only on paper. There aren’t stacks of gold bars in a vault somewhere. The EFSF has the right to issue bonds–to borrow, in other words–to make up that €440 billion total. And investors are not lending to Europe now, or for the foreseeable future. Even if they were, they sure wouldn’t be buying EFSF bonds. Why? Because those bonds are backed in large part by the sovereign economies they’re intended to bail out. It’s true. Spain and Italy, both on the brink of default, are major guarantors of the EFSF bonds. As are Belgium and France, both of which are little better off than Spain or Italy. None of these nations can pay their own bills, let alone someone else’s. That leaves the FANG nations, none of whom are willing to pay off the bad debt of the rest of the EU. So, while the EU authorities talk about building a bazooka to firewall Spain and Italy, what they have right now is barely a firecracker. And no prospect of getting anything bigger.

Barbara is recovering very well, better than anyone could have expected. She just showered by herself, using the walker frame in the shower for stability. Which, oddly, made me think of Steve Jobs, that supposed marketing genius. Barbara mentioned that she’d shaved her underarms and legs, which made me think of a true marketing genius, King Gillette. His primary market, men, was saturated, but Gillette wanted to sell more razor blades. So, in a stroke of genius, he somehow convinced American women that leg and underarm hair was undesirable. Were it not for his times, he’d probably also have gone after their pubic hair. To this day probably 98%+ of American women shave their legs and underarms, and no small number shave their pubic hair as well.

13:44 – I see that Greece is almost shut down, and this before the 2-day general strike that’s set for Wednesday and Thursday. The unions can protest and riot all they want, but that won’t change anything. Just to be clear, no one, and I mean no one, other than the Greeks themselves, is even slightly concerned about “saving” Greece. Greece is unsalvageable, and everyone is fully aware of that, including many Greeks.

The fundamental problem is that Greece is not even remotely competitive with first-world economies, including the northern tier euro nations. For the last decade or more, Greeks have enjoyed a standard of living similar to those of the citizens of Germany, Holland, and the other productive northern-tier nations, while producing only enough to enjoy half that standard of living. In reality, Greece is a third-world nation that’s been living as a first-world nation on borrowed money. So, assuming that Greece is able to maintain its current productivity, for the next ten years or more it’s going to have to get used to tightening its belt. And not just to half the previous level, but to more like a quarter. Once Greece defaults, it will be left to its own devices. And the unions will just have to get used to that.

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Thursday, 13 October 2011

09:43 – Barbara continues to do very well. She’s using my four-footed cane now, other than when I use it while walking Colin or while she’s taking a shower, when she uses the walker frame. She came back to bed around 0600 this morning. I guess sleeping on the sofa is getting old. The only reason that concerns me is that we have a 25+ kilo puppy that loves to jump on people.

Brian Jepson, my editor at O’Reilly, emailed me to ask if I had an image suitable for dummying up a cover. I told him I didn’t have anything suitable, and suggested they might use a stock photo until I have time to shoot a real cover image. That needs to be portrait orientation, with a white background and items placed to take text placement into account. I’m not sure what I’ll include in that image to suggest “biology”. A microscope, certainly. Maybe a test tube rack with some test tubes stoppered with cotton balls, perhaps a couple 50 mL centrifuge tubes hand labeled and with some leaves and chlorophyll extract in them. Some dropper bottles of stains and other reagents. Perhaps a box of microscope slides and a couple of Petri dishes. I’ll work it out, I guess. If I’m going to go to the trouble of setting this up, I’m not going to do it to shoot a dummy image. I’ll shoot real cover image candidates, which means devoting some time to it.

12:46 – Here’s what I just sent Brian as a first sample. I shot it handheld and without paying any attention to lighting or color balance, but I wanted to give him and the cover designer some idea of the “stuff” we could include in the actual cover image. Obviously, there’s way too much stuff, and I paid zero attention to composition for leaving areas clear for text. But at least this gives us a starting point to get a real cover image put together.


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Wednesday, 12 October 2011

10:05 – Colin is really a Fearsome Predator now. This morning, he caught a chipmunk. Six times. The first time, the chipmunk froze. Colin pounced on it, and came up with it in his mouth. I shouted, “Drop it!” and he did, whereupon the chipmunk ran for its life. Colin gave it a headstart (seriously) and then overran it in about five steps, again coming up with it in his mouth. Again, he dropped it and it ran under a pile of leaves. He grabbed it again. This went on until he’d grabbed it six times. I’ve heard it said that Border Collies have had all the kill instinct bred out of them, and it’s obviously true. Despite the fact that he had it in his fangs repeatedly, he never bit down on it. The last time he dropped it, the chipmunk staggered away slowly and I dragged Colin away from it. I hope the chipmunk was just stunned rather than injured, but I’ll go out and look for it later.

Barbara is doing extremely well. This morning, she tried using my four-footed cane, which I need only for balance, particularly at night. I’ll borrow it back when I take Colin for a walk, but otherwise she’s welcome to use it. She’s still sleeping on the sofa, and will keep the walker frame for use at night if she needs to get up and also as a physical barrier to keep Colin from jumping up on her.

I just officially transferred my Kindle to Barbara. I connected it via USB and deleted dozens of titles I knew she wouldn’t want to read, but that still left her with 140 titles to sort through and decide whether or not she wants them. Most of those are free or $0.99 ebooks that I downloaded from Amazon because they sounded like something she might like. If she finds some authors/series that she enjoys we’ll buy the rest of the titles in that series, assuming they’re not outrageously priced.

Overall, I think the Kindle is nearly perfect. The exception is that its file management sucks dead lifeforms through a small tubular object. The fundamental problem is that Kindle uses a flat file structure unless you use its incredibly awkward organization tools. I should be able to create a directory structure on my hard drive and copy individual titles into that directory structure. If I then copy that directory structure to the Kindle, the directories should show up as top-level categories that contain the individual books. It doesn’t work that way. If, for example, I create a directory called “Downie, Ruth”, copy her four Medicus books into it, and then copy that directory to the Kindle, the four books show up as individual titles at the top level. In order to categorize them, I have to create a category named “Downie, Ruth” (or whatever) with the Kindle’s tiny little keyboard, go find each book, and manually transfer it to the new category. That takes lots of keystrokes and lots of time. It sucks. Nor is calibre any help. I can use it to organize the titles with no problem, but according to the calibre docs, Kindle makes no provision for transferring that organized structure via USB. The only consolation is that the Nook is just as suckful. Apparently, the only company that gets it is Sony, whose ebook readers support transferring organized structures. Still, I’ll never buy a Sony product, so there’s no use worrying about it.

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Tuesday, 11 October 2011

09:25 – Barbara is doing well, and Colin is delighted that she’s home. The only thing I’m dreading now is Barbara returning to work after Colin having several weeks to get used to having her full-time attention. He’s always demonic on Mondays, after having her home for just two days, so I suspect he’ll take a long time to adjust after she finally returns to work.

The news is full of articles about Netflix’s reversal of its split. The general attitude seems to be that Reed Hastings is incompetent and that Netflix has made huge mistakes from which it may not recover. My attitude is that it’s a mistake to assume that a smart guy like Hastings has suddenly turned stupid. Everyone seems to think that the decrease in Netflix’s subscriber base is a Very Bad Thing, which simply shows that most people can’t think. Netflix may have lost something like 3% of its subscribers, true. But those 3% were mostly subscribers that Netflix didn’t want, ones that were actually costing it money rather than contributing to its profits. Ones like me, in other words.

If Netflix had left its pricing unchanged and somehow still gotten rid of those 3% of undesirable subscribers, they’d have increased their profits. As it is, they also increased their prices, which means many of the remaining 97% of their subscribers are paying significantly more than they had been. Much of that increase will be spent on licensing additional programming–Netflix has added about 3,500 new TV episodes in just the last couple of weeks–but no doubt some of it will go to the bottom line. Netflix will be much more profitable than they otherwise would have been. Which is why it’s stupid that the stock price crashed. It should have skyrocketed. And it likely will, once the market realizes what just happened. As I said, Hastings is a very smart guy.

11:00 – I just ordered a cane for Barbara from Costco. She’s currently using a walker frame that belonged to my mom, but she’ll probably be off it and using a cane before too much longer.

We actually had a big argument about which cane model to buy. She ended up getting her way, and I ordered her a plain old cane-cane for about $18 with shipping. I tried to convince her to go with an upgraded model with a built-in 12-gauge shotgun, but she flatly refused. So I went to Plan B, and tried to convince her to go with a model with a built-in 32″ (81 cm) sword blade. She wouldn’t go for that, either, so I went to Plan C and tried to convince her to get one with a built-in tear gas dispenser. No dice. So she’s getting just a plain old cane-cane.

11:53 – Barbara has been using the regular toilet since she came home, so we moved the potty-chair frame into the shower in our master bath for her to sit on while she showers. I didn’t want to move it, so I just took a shower in the downstairs bathroom, next to my lab. There was already soap, regular shampoo, and so on in that shower, but I happened to notice a bottle of oatmeal and baking soda shampoo with a picture of a pretty Golden Retriever on the front. It promised a smooth and glossy coat, so I decided to give it a try. Sure enough, when I came upstairs, Barbara commented, “You sure have a smooth and glossy coat”. Or something like that.

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Monday, 10 October 2011

09:04 – Barbara went to the hospital Thursday for knee-replacement surgery. Everything went extremely well. She was released yesterday and will now be recuperating at home for the next few weeks. Colin, of course, is delighted that she’s home. Few things worry a puppy more than having a litter mate disappear. He was obviously stressed the entire time she was gone. He had been just about perfect on house-training, but that suffered while she was gone. There was constant whining, yipping, and wandering around the house looking for her, and that was just me.

Barbara left the hospital with only two prescriptions, one for 10 syringes of an injectable anticoagulant and the other for a hundred 5 mg oxycodone tablets. She insisted on stopping at Walgreens on the way home to get the prescriptions filled, so I handed them to the pharmacist and waited while she filled them. I was quite disturbed at what happened. When she’d finished making up the prescriptions, she told me that they had only two of the anticoagulant injectors in stock and that I’d have to stop by Tuesday to pick up the other two. The other two? I was expecting eight more. I figured maybe the injectors were multi-dose, but when I got back out to the car I asked Barbara and we checked the paperwork they’d given her. Sure enough, we were supposed to get ten syringes. So I went back in and waited another five or ten minutes to talk to the pharmacist. When I mentioned the problem, she treated it very casually, saying that indeed I was supposed to get eight more syringes on Tuesday and that she’d been confused by the dosage of 0.4 mg into thinking I was to get a total of only four. Isn’t the first duty of a pharmacist not to make such mistakes in dispensing medication? In this case, we caught the mistake, but we shouldn’t have had to. I’m still thinking about whether to report this to Walgreens. She seemed like a nice young woman, but mistakes like this could have fatal consequences.

10:18 – This is cool. My old friend John Mikol just emailed me:

Leo Laporte was plugging your chemistry set and book, I hope it sends some sales your way.

It’s about 32 minutes in: http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/twit.cachefly.net/ttg0811.mp3

13:24 – Incidentally, I just realized I hadn’t commented yet on using the Baby Kindle 4. Side-by-side with my Kindle 3, the Baby Kindle 4 is noticeably smaller and lighter. Not that the Kindle 3 is particularly large or heavy, but the Baby Kindle 4 is enough smaller that it’s much easier for me to grip securely. With the Kindle 3, I was always afraid that I’d drop it if Colin nudged my arm or something. I can grip the Kindle 4 securely. And it’s still running on its original charge, despite the fact that its battery is half the capacity of the Kindle 3’s and I used it fairly heavily while Barbara was in the hospital. Overall, I’m very pleased with the Baby Kindle 4 and happy that I chose it rather than the touch model. Even the ads aren’t intrusive, although I understand there’s now an option to remove them by paying Amazon another $30.

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Tuesday, 4 October 2011

08:25 – Barbara had another scare last night, when her sister called to tell her that she was taking their mom to the emergency room. She’d hurt her leg that afternoon while volunteering at the hospital, and of course at her age there’s always concern about broken bones. All turned out happily, though. Barbara’s mom had only sprained her knee. The emergency room docs put a brace on it and allowed her to return home.

I got email last night from my editor, Brian Jepson, with great news. O’Reilly has decided to do the biology book in four-color. Every book has a budget, based on expected production costs and projected sales. The only way Brian had been able to get this book approved originally was to put tight limits on page count (extra pages cost money) and printing costs (four-color costs a lot more money). So we went into the project with a strict page-count limit and a center section of full-color plates. Before long, I asked Brian if I could trade the color section for more page count, to which he agreed. I really didn’t want to give up color images completely, but I really needed the extra page count.

But apparently the cost of four-color printing has come down somewhat, and Brian said that when he was discussing things with his colleagues they commented that it makes no sense to do a biology lab book with monochrome images. I suspect the sales history of the chemistry lab book also might have had something to do with it. That book is what publishers call an “evergreen” title. That is, it continues selling steadily for many years. That’s in stark contrast to most titles, which sell 90% or even 99% of their total lifetime sales within a few months of publication. The biology lab book should have a similar sales trajectory to the chemistry lab book

10:15 – I just checked my Netflix disc queue and found that there isn’t much disc-only material that we care about. When I upgraded a couple weeks ago from streaming + one-disc to streaming + two-disc, our disc queue was jammed with 30 or 40 discs that we wanted, most of which are series that Barbara likes and that were initially disc-only. Several of those quickly changed to add streaming, including the most recent seasons available of Army Wives, Brothers & Sisters, and Grey’s Anatomy. As soon as that happened, I pulled them from our disc queue and added them to our instant queue. So we’ve gone from 30 or 40 discs we want down to four Sons of Anarchy S3 discs and a handful of others.

Meanwhile our instant queue now totals 94 items, including a dozen or more series that between them total hundreds of episodes. We are not, to put it mildly, short of things to watch, even without discs, particularly since Netflix is adding more streaming titles every day. Our anniversary date is the 26th of the month, so in three weeks I’m going to downgrade our plan to the $8/month streaming only option. We’ll do without discs for the next few months while we catch up on streaming material, if we ever do. Once there are a reasonable number of disc-only titles we want, I’ll bump it back up to include discs for a month or three and then drop back to streaming-only.

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