Month: March 2007

Saw TMNT “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” tonight and its actually a really good movie.

Being an old-school “Eastman and Laird” TMNT fan I thought the movie was very much in the style of the old TMNT comics of yore.

Interestingly, the movie actually had a story and some really good cinematography for a fully rendered film.

So, go see it if you haven’t yet… Though if you can find a theater that puts shock collars on the inevitable small screaming children – go there.

Oh, and finally Master Splinter gets some butt-kicking screen time – and the audience reaction was similar to Yoda finally getting an action scene in “Episode II”. (grin)

Well, here it is, the middle of March already and Colorado is rapidly closing in on ‘mud season’… See here in Colorado when it rains in Spring the state turns into a muddy mess as its mostly dirt and rock where people haven’t covered it with an attempt at a yard.

I’ve started getting things ready for warmer weather… Yesterday I put $415 into the car at my local Chrysler dealer; tune-up (plugs, wires, and other engine fiddling), brake pads and rotor turning, and an oil change. April 15th I’ll be getting new rims and tires and putting the current rims and winter tires in the garage.

I also picked up a $200 ‘cat tree’ for Marshal… The thing is about 5 feet tall and 3 feet square with tubes, platform boxes, scratching posts, and completely covered in beige carpet and hemp rope. It’s sort of a feline Habitrail, and he loves it. I also picked up a few more cat toys now that I have a better idea of what he likes. The newest are two ‘mice’; the one he is currently destroying is made of rabbit fur and opens to hold fresh catnip. The other is nothing more than a 3 inch ball of wool with a strip of leather through the middle which is knotted on one end to make a nose and tail, but its something he can really sink his teeth into and he carries it around by its tail all the time… The best part of the ‘wooly bully’ mouse is that when he gets it good and ragged, I just put it in an old sock and toss it in the washer. It comes out looking new. 🙂

Marshal has also fully adjusted to the condo now and his sneeze is about gone. It’s now time to migrate his litter box and food bowls to the room designated for his use rather than a corner of the living room. Everything was placed out here so I could monitor him and as he really wanted to be with people early on it made it easier for him to have everything out here.

Work-wise it took them almost three years and over 50 projects, but they finally found something I couldn’t do… The project I’ve been on for the last three weeks is a three-parter, and when they came to me with the inquiry I told them then that we couldn’t do it; we simply didn’t have the hardware to generate the type of loads they wanted *and* I didn’t have the expertise in what they wanted tested.

(feline attention pause)

So the proposal went out anyways after a half-dozen teleconferences and about 40 hours of writing and re-writing the proposal to make the client happy. See, the sales manager was preparing for his quarterly trip to Mexico, needed the commission to cover it, and wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer.

After all the hoop-jumping though, we won the contract we couldn’t do for a client who was guaranteed to be a pain in my ass.

See, once you’ve done this sort of thing long enough – and I’ve been doing this for over ten years now – you can spot a ‘problem’ client at about 300 yards, and these guys had ‘problem’ written all over them…

Immediately the main contact on the client side set up daily hour-long afternoon teleconferences for ‘status reports’, wanted to see templates for the reports so he could ‘comment on them’ before testing was even underway, then wanted to see the Phase A report prior to the report being finalized so he could ‘ensure the format was correct’… This is the sort of client that isn’t here for the test data, but is really looking for how many feet of paper I can generate and has to ensure that my use of the semicolon is correct rather than making sure their application works correctly.

So I started on Phase A, a ‘proof of concept’ phase that I added into the proposals about two years ago just for such occasion. And I *was* able to create the data types the client wanted on the very small scale of the P.O.C., but once that was over we ran smack into the wall that I pointed out three weeks ago; namely that the user levels the client wants for Phase B testing will require about $16,000 worth of hardware we don’t have.

So now everyone is running around at work trying to figure out if we want to buy the $16,000 worth of hardware and invest a week of man-hours in building, configuring, and re-staging (another $10k approximately) for a contract that only nets us a few grand less than the hardware costs…

But the sales manager had an excellent week in Mexico…

Now, to add to all this the sales manager landed a few more contracts, and they all conveniently overlap for the next few weeks so I wind up working two or three projects at the same time…

Yes, I bleed commission checks.

I honestly had no idea that a cat had so many life-and-death jobs to do around the house… It’s really a wonder I made it this far without a cat around. 🙂

Marshal’s day starts the same time mine does; about 5am. Immediately Marshal takes it upon himself to make sure I’m up to speed by weaving about my feet as I stagger to the bathroom to get ready for work… This feline-powered obsticle course ensures that I’m awake and coordinated enough to not kill myself in the shower.

Now Marshal has to get up on the counter in the bathroom and inspect everything from my toothpaste to my deodorant to make sure no one has replaced them with something dangerous. From here his job is to sit outside the shower and periodically meow – I am expected to meow back so that he knows all is well and if I don’t he sets up with quite the caterwauling and will bang on the shower doors till I make some kind of acknowledgment.

From here his job is to thoroughly inspect the clothing I’ve laid out for the day while I dry off. I gather that the shedding all over the clothing serves as a warning to all the bad things in the world that I’m protected by a cat and messing with me means they’ll be answering to him.

So we move on to the cat-maintenance portion of the morning where I gather up all the cat toys, put them in the unused cat bed, and take his food and water bowl into the kitchen for a cleaning. During this Marshal sits on the edge of the kitchen sink and makes sure I don’t drown while cleaning his food bowl. Now I offer up the day’s food choices and he selects one, the food and water bowl is placed back on his mat, and I commence the cleaning of the cat box… While I sift litter Marshal has to make sure nothing is hiding in the trash bag by near-mutilation of the plastic device.

With cat-maintenance over I get a chance to check my email, so I power up the laptop and remove Marshal from the keyboard. I get a glass of orange juice and my vitamins while the machine boots and return to remove Marshal from the keyboard. Now I place the glass of OJ on the desk and remove Marshal from the keyboard so I can sit down in my nice office chair and remove Marshal from the keyboard… Once seated Marshal takes up residence on my lap or shoulder and makes sure I don’t do anything stupid on the Internet.

And this is how things stay for about 45 minutes till I leave for work. As I put my socks on Marshal ensures there’s nothing in my shoes, then helps me by making sure I tie them correctly by untying them several times.

I’m not sure what Marshal does during the day, but it must be important and exhausting because I always find him curled up and asleep under the covers of my bed when I get home.

If I stopped to get something to eat on the way home, Marshal inspects it (and occasionally samples it) for safety – otherwise he sits on the counter next to the stove and makes sure the ingredients are fresh and that I don’t burn the house down or something.

The rest of the night he alternates between tearing around the house to entertain me, sitting on the couch next to me and watching TV, or does this ninja-like trick of replacing the mouse with his fuzzy head while I’m playing whatever game I’m playing on the computer.

At precisely 9:45pm he sits in the hallway to the bedrooms and meows to let me know it’s time for bed.

From here it’s pretty much the inverse of the morning routine; he makes sure nothing in the bathroom is out of place, tries to trip me several times on the way to bed, then curls up next to my head and purrs me to sleep.

Once I’m passed out he usually returns to the living room for a few hours and watches TV with ZeZe, then at midnight when ZeZe heads for bed he returns to my bed, worms under the covers and becomes a fuzzy heater for the rest of the night.

And that appears to be a cat’s life…

For the 3.5 of you who don’t know I work in the games industry, well, I work in the games industry and as such I tend to follow a lot of game information, web sites, and more than a few comics based on the genere…

Today the guys over at Penny Arcade threw down some funny that hits home around here in a purely “I’m *not* on the menu” sort of way…

After showing off some photos of Marshal to the cat-ladies here at work (and getting a chorus of ‘oooohs’ and ‘aaahs’ – apparently he’s quite photogenic) I have been told that he’s what they call a “Snowshoe Siamese” which is an actual breed as of 1974 or something.

So, having my curiosity piqued I consulted the oracle of Google and found lots of photos of cats who look quite similar.

So, I guess he’s something of a rarity… Not that I mind much – to me he’s just a good, old fashioned cat. 🙂

He’s getting on great here in his new home… As with most Siamese he has a penchant for sleeping on one’s head and once evicted from there refuses to merely sleep *on* the bed; he must be under the covers, curled in a ball, and producing about a billion BTUs of heat.

He also follows me around the house and if I get out of sight sets up with quite the chorus. Hopefully the time I’m away tomorrow at work won’t be too traumatic for him.

He’s also go a bit of a sneeze right now, which I’m attributing to either his recent shots or the time in that box at the shelter. If it’s not gone in a few days it’ll be a trip to the vet to make sure nothing is wrong.

Well, a new roommate arrived today in the form of a male three year old seal-point ragdoll mix cat named “Marshal”.

Marshal was picked up from “PetsMart” tonight after an intense telephone interview, a $75 donation, another $100 of ‘cat stuff’, and a rather uneventful trip in the cat carrier.

Right now he’s meandering about the condo like he owns the place. So far he’s proven to be extremely friendly; flopping about on the floor, tail thrashing, and purring like a well tuned V8 whenever petted.

He’s very much the image of the stereo-typical Siamese; bright blue eyes, long flowing movements, and a very active and quite strong tail that’ll knock anything you aren’t expecting to be toppled over in a heartbeat.

He and Zeze have already made friends with Marshal camped on Zeze’s lap and watching TV, then wandering off and ‘breadboxing’ under the couch where Zeze sits.

All in all, Marshal is a great example of the breed and seems like he’ll make an excellent roommate.

I’ll have a few photos up as soon as Marshal is really settled in.

Yesterday I introduced Lyon to the wonder that is ‘Firefly’… As usual, after the third or fourth episode he exclaimed, “And FOX took this off the air why?”. (chuckle)

I really do hope SciFi or some other network with a brain picks the show back up and runs with it someday.

Wolf has been completely absorbed into the WoWbeast… As Lyon and I watched Firefly downstairs, roaring with laughter at the great one liners and discussing the backstory of the series, Wolf sat alone, upstairs, in the dark, and played WoW.

I’m a little worried as the last wife I introduced to an MMO, Zeze’s ex, got so caught up in it that they eventually got divorced over it. But I don’t see Wolf getting so involved as to forego everything else, including work, for the sake of a game.

Other than that, I’m doing better health-wise. My week of solitude comes to an end today as I pick up Zeze from DIA at 10am. Pitty I didn’t get more accomplished, but with work being a rat bastard right now and the Thursday morning ER run, most of the week was shot right out of the gate.

Oh well.

Well, now that I’m feeling well enough to post a bit, I supposed I should.

Thursday night I went to bed at my usual time, about 10pm, and was feeling pretty good actually. At midnight I was awakened by severe chills… And I do mean severe. I was shivering so badly I barely made it to a hot shower, which fixed it. Later I was to discover that I was probably causing brain damage with the 104 degree temperature I was running plus the hot shower… Yay!

This event was repeated two more times at roughly 1am and 2am. At 3am I awoke feeling like I was on fire and the bad disk in my neck had shifted from all the shaking, pinched that bad nerve I have in there, and had shut down my vision on my right side…

Oh, and I was in absolute agony. For those who’ve never pinched a nerve the sensation simply cannot be described.

So, my roommate out of town and being 3am, I literally crawled over to my cell phone and called 911, then managed to stumble to the front door and unlock it for the paramedics.

Here’s where things get a little fuzzy because all I have to go on is what I was told.

The ambulance got here and I’m told the paramedics found me slumped over on the couch. All I remember are the two Russian nurses trying to take my shirt off around an IV line in room 22 at the ER in the Aurora medical center…

It is really amazing what burns into your brain when it reboots – I can tell you everything in minute detail about that room from when I first came to; from locations of people and equipment to the positions of the lights and the labels on the cabinets. Really freaky.

Anyways, on the trip to the hospital the paramedics tried 3 times to get an IV into me and I have these huge black bruises to prove it. Apparently I go so dehydrated in the 5 hours since I went to bed that every time they stuck me, the vein burst. But they eventually got one to stick for a bit in the top of my left hand.

Once in the ER they gave me and injection to reduce my fever in my lower right leg. This will become important later in the story.

So once they got me conscious and could prove I wasn’t a vegetable – and believe me, I got *real* tired of them asking me my name and birth date over and over and over – the battery of tests began.

I was on my third bag of fluid when they came to get a sample of snot from me, which involved squirting some NASTY fluid up my nose then forcefully running a vacuum tube through my left nostril and into the back of my skull… Then it was time to take blood samples, and four wine bottles and a handful of vials later it was time to pee in the cup.

I was heart monitored, blood oxygen measured, blood pressure cuffed, oxygenated, and IV’d… I must have looked a mess… And it didn’t help that the IV in my left hand kept leaking and several times I bled all over their floor…

So here I lay in this crazily uncomfortable ER bed for about four hours total while they run every test they can think of to figure out why I was at 104 and unconscious when I came in. The result? Another “we don’t know”…

All they found was that my white blood cell count was a bit high. That’s it! I nearly die and they don’t know why.

And I have to PAY for this? Sheesh…

So, eventually, the doctor gives me a prescription for Vicodin to keep the pain from my pinched nerve at bay for a few days while I heal up, and told me I was free to go.

Now, here’s a problem: I was delivered by ambulance so my car is at home, I don’t have my wallet so I can’t pay for a cab, I feel like shit and I don’t have a coat, my roommate is out of town on vacation, and it’s 7 in the morning on a Thursday and everyone I know is either at, or near, work.

Well, I learned two things that morning, namely that some cab drivers take credit cards these days and that a rare few will take you home on the promise that you’ll run inside, grab your card, and pay them. I gave my driver a nice bug tip for being such a nice fellow about the whole deal.

So I call into work and let the HR guy know I won’t be in for obvious reasons and probably sounded like a loon thanks to the pain medication, and promptly went to bed.

At about 2pm I wake up with my lower right leg on fire, and get to see this really hot and angry looking rash covering my entire leg from ankle to knee…

Yay me!

So this time I call my doctor and explain what’s going on. He asks about a zillion questions, determines I won’t die immediately, and schedules an appointment for me the next day, Friday, at noon. He also tells me to keep taking the Vicodin for this pain too.

So Friday morning I head into work… I have a big project running right now and I’m the only one there who can do it, so I figure I’ll work from 7:30 to 11:30 and finish up building the test harness.

I get to my doctor’s office at the appointed time, he looks me over, determines that I have a skin infection now on top of everything else, and proscribes me some antibiotic horse pills and ups my prescription for Vicodin figuring I already have some and they’re working, I might as well have more… He also wants a chest xray and some more blood work…

So I run downstairs at the medical complex my doc is in and go to the lab. Once there the nice lab-lady takes one look at the huge bruises on the insides of both arms and calls a couple of junior lab-ladies over to explain how *not* to do an IV. I give another liter or so of blood, wondering how much of the stuff I have left, and am sent over to the xray-lady.

The xray lady tells me the big xray radiation tube-machine is perfectly safe, while tying a lead bib to my lower half then retreating to another room, and I get a few xrays done.

So I get my sack of pills from the pharmacist also in the same medical complex and eventually make it home…

So for the last three days I’ve been alternately in pain, stoned, or feeling ill.

What a week.