The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Category: General

  • Spring Geyser

    Or just a faulty sump line.

    Those have have followed this blog for years may recall that we had a tremendous time getting our sump pump line installed/buried/whatever by the terrible company that built the house – Construx.  They’ve been out of business for a couple years now, thank goodness, but their handiwork strikes agian.

    The “buried” line (in quotes because it ended up being 3″ at most underground) has pulled apart again at a joint and we have a nice little geyser spray up whenver the pump kicks on.  It’s pretty neat, really.  Unfortunately it isn’t neat enough to put benches around and charge people to see, so I’ll need to dig up the joint and repair it soon.

  • Hey TruGreen ChemLawn…

    Dear TruGreen ChemLawn (nice name, btw – “hey kids go roll in the grass that the ChemLawn people took care of!”) 

    Two years ago you offered to get rid of the grubs in our lawn – it was a nice gesture.  Well, we paid you… so it wasn’t that nice.  Even less nice is that the grubs seemed to thrive on whatever you sprayed on them – so thanks for that too.  We ended up using Scott’s GrubEx to really get rid of them.

    Anyway, back to why I’m writing this.  You keep calling us.  We keep telling you to leave us alone and never call again, but you insist.  You also canvas our front door with your propaganda and offers for further service.  WE DO NOT WANT ANY MORE OF YOUR “HELP”, THANKS.   NOW LEAVE US ALONE.

    To top things off, I’m sitting here working today and I look out of my window onto my porch and what do I see?

    That’s right, in addition to the litter you placed on my door Monday you also deemed it neccessary to leave your papers on my porch.  Stop littering on my property!

  • Few Days

    Since it has been a while since I’ve posted a photo…

  • Edward

    Just a quick update on Edward McConaughey – He’s doing great and growing like never before!

  • Some Chef Updates

    Just a few Chef notes…

    A couple weeks ago I reported that I had gotten rid of SWREG in favor of E-Junkie with PayPal and Google Checkout.  Since then I’ve processed a couple of orders successfully so it’s good to know I didn’t break anything.    That’s always a concern of mine when I make changes like these, Murphy has proven to be an evil guy at precisely the wrong times.

    Early last month I decided to give Download.com a try so I signed up and submitted Chef to be listed.  So far it’s showing a whopping 53 downloads.

    The past week has been pretty busy with bug fixes and other support things.  Tomorrow night I’m going to try my hand at connecting to a customer’s PC to see if I can check on a problem they’re having.  Since I haven’t done this before I decided to go with Fog Creek’s Copilot software to (hopefully) get us connected.  I use their (great) FogBugz software for Chef and at work, so I have high expectations for Copilot.

    I just posted 1.3.18 with the bug fixes from the past week.

    I think that’s it!

  • 307,000

    That’s the number of platelets floating around Ana’s body today.  A marked improvement over her previous dismal countings of 7,000 and 10,000.

    So that was the real, first post-spleen-removal test they’ve gotten counts from her on.  Definitely a positive sign.  More tests next week to keep verifying.

    Thanks again to everyone for all of your help, prayers, and good wishes!

  • Morning

    Just a quick update for everyone – Ana is fine this morning, no more of the shoulder pain from last night.

  • Home.

    It’s 2am and we just got back home.  The surgeon that removed Ana’s spleen (and the one that had her go into the ER tonight – errr, last night) actually came in around 1:30 and talked with us and did a quick checkup.  He said that the pain wasn’t due to the gas used in surgery because the xray showed no gas pockets anywhere.  So, the mystery shoulder pain remains that for now.

    Time for some sleep!

  • Unexpected trip…

    To the hospital.  Tonight Ana started experiencing very painful shoulder pain that was making it painful to breathe, so her surgeon advised her to come into the ER to get checked out.  They’ve done EKGs, xrays, and the like and everything looks ok.  It sounds like the best guess is the gas they put in her for the surgery on monday causing the shoulder pain.  We had been told about this, but it had sounded like that should have been done with 24-48 hours after surgery (whereas this started tonight).

    So we’ve been here for a couple hours, she has gotten more pokes and prods.  Hopefully we’ll be going home soon, the pain is slowly subsiding it seems.

    They did do a blood count on her – she has one scheduled for tomorrow – and they said they couldn’t get a reliable platelet count due to clumping BUT they said there were a normal amount of them.  Whew.

    We’re both tired, just want to get some sleep (it’s 1am right now).

  • Wireless Broadband Rental

    When we found out that Ana was going to be in surgery this week, I went on a hunt for a way to get a good internet connection at the hospital.   In past visits the free St. John’s Hospital wireless had proven to be slow at best, and oftentimes unreliable.  So I  was very interested in having a backup plan since we were going to be there for a couple of days.

    My searching resulted in me renting from RovAir.com. How it works is you tell them when you want to reserve a wireless broadband card (3-day minimum), pay $15/day, and they ship a card to along with an envelope/package to send it back when your reservation is done.  I was skeptical that I would receive the card in time, but it arrived as planned before 10am on Monday.   There’s not much more to say than it worked and I would definitely use them again.

    Back to the free wireless connection – it was fast and worked great this visit.  However, due to the power being out for a few hours at the hospital today I did end up using the broadband card.