The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • NIU

    Dave pointed me to this:

                               alias: skazmie2
                            name: Kazmierczak Steven Phillip
                     pretty_name: Steven Phillip Kazmierczak
                      first_name: Steven
                     middle_name: Phillip
                       last_name: Kazmierczak
                           email: skazmie2@express.cites.uiuc.edu
         student_department_name: School of Social Work
            student_program_name: MSW:Social Work -UIUC
       student_level_description: Graduate - Urbana-Champaign
              student_major_name: Social Work
                         address: 1207 W. Oregon
                                : M/C  140
                                : Urbana, IL 61801
                  office_address: 1207 W. Oregon
                                : M/C  140
                                : Urbana, IL 61801
                           title: ACADEMIC HOURLY
                      department: School of Social Work
                            type: person phone student staff

    That’s right. The shooter at Northern Illinois University yesterday was a current student at our alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

    😦

  • 2 Month Photo Shoot

    We’ve got a few more pictures here for you tonight.  David is 2 months old today!

    And here’s what may be my favorite…

  • In your best Ghostbusters’ voice…

    We’ve Got One!

    View some more…

  • Vista System Restore

    I know a lot of people that disable the System Restore feature of Windows (XP and Vista), and I just don’t get it.  Whenever an update is applied to the system, a checkpoint is created of the system configuration (some registry keys, services, system dlls, etc.) and if something goes wrong with the update you can quickly rollback to a checkpoint.

    This has saved me on more than one occasion from an errant Windows Update and even regular software install.  Case in point, this morning I went to upgrade my copy of VMWare Workstation 6 from 6.01 to 6.0.2 and the install sat there for 30 minutes before I had to kill it.  That left VMWare in a completely toasted state and wouldn’t start.  Greaaaat.

    After looking around my system, I saw that none of the app’s files had been removed.  It just looked like one (at least) of the services that it depends on was removed from the system (just a registry entries).   Whew, a system restore to a checkpoint of just an hour earlier (due to a Windows Update) fixed the problem and I’m back up and running.

    I highly recommend leaving the System Restore feature turned on.

  • ITP Update

    We had the second meeting with Ana’s new hematologist today.  Some good things and some less-desirable things came out of it.

    Good things:

    • Liver and Spleen scan came back negative for any abnormailities
    • 4 or 5 other tests came back negative
    • Test for blood platelet antibodies came back positive
    • This doctor knows that a 9:40am appointment means 9:40am, and not 11:40am.

    He describe, as we’ve known, diagnosing ITP is done by ruling out other causes.  Unlike the previous doctor, he is actually actively running tests and ruling things out.  As expected, everything is ruling out ITP and getting her prepared for a potential treatment by the spleenectomy.

    Not so good things:

    • The prior hematologist has had Ana on a dosage of prednisone that doesn’t really follow the recommended treatment pat for ITP.
    • She needs to be on a higher dosage and THAT will provide a baseline and determine the next actions.  4 Months of her previous prednisone usage gets tossed out essentially, as far as determining treatment path.  That’s depressing.

    So she’ll be on the full dosage of prednisone for two more weeks.  If her levels go down, it’ll indicate that the steroids aren’t doing anything and she’ll be weaned off them and the next step will be the spleen removal.  If after two weeks her counts are stable, they’ll ween her after 4 weeks and keep testing.  If once she’s off, her counts drop, the spleen will be removed.

  • Brrrrr!

    Another cold spell hit Central Illinois this morning.

  • Chef 1.3

    Chef version 1.3 is released!

    The big change in this release was the conversion over to a tag-based system for Categories (both Recipe Categories and Ingredient Categories).  So now instead of going to a separate tab and drag-dropping a recipe into categories, you just type the categries in as a comma-separated list.  For example: “eric’s favorites, desserts, chocolate” will put that recipe into 3 categories that you can then search by.

    The recipe slide show was also updated to make it more usable.  The ingredients are now shown all of the time alongside the directions, with the applicable ingredients highlighted for the current step.

    And as usual there were bug fixes and other small changes here and there.

  • Moving pictures

    He has been starting to smile a lot more recently, although trying to catch it with a camera (still or video) seems to be about as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster.  Anway, here’s a quick little clip followed by some hiccup action.

    David Smile Video Clip

  • Dozer Close Up

  • David is ready for the day

    Or, maybe someone wants some more rest…