Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

 It wasn't on 9/11, but a few weeks later I realized it. I do not remember the specific class, I remember the building and the classroom.  St John's University, Engle Hall, first floor.  It was a morning Management class.  And it was all in the details, somehow.  The prof took roll very occasionally.  I thought it was funny, yet odd.  With a last name starting with D, I may not be first, but I'm pretty early in and alphabetized list.  And in this class I was fifth.  One student's last name started with A, one with B, one with C...  and two of us with D.  And I was the second one.  I don't know why it stuck in my head, but I do remember #2.  Tom Burnett.  Yes, the one on flight 93.  I don't know that I would have had the courage to do what he did, but I am glad that I live in a world where people like him did have that courage.  I do wish it had not been lost in such a horrible way, but I do know that their e...

 Yeah, I have been here, busy as all heck, and ... believe it or not, getting better. I had surgery in June for a strictured urethra.  So if it hurts to pee, tell your doctor you need a referral to a urologist - or get yourself to a urologist.  My problem came to ... well, I'll call it a peak last September 11th.  I was having more pain an more trouble urinating, but did not do any internet research.  I did see an article on CNN that says it was written by a urologist, who had been having problems urinating, but found himself constipated.    In desperation, I had taken a laxative, and was totally unable to pee - but I had diarrhea.   So my wife took me to the ER where they tried 3 times to catheterize me - they could not.  They called the on-call urologist and took me into the OR...  and that was where they diagnosed the issue.    I had that catheter in for a month, then we scheduled surgery to correct the issue....

It's been a busy fair few months, I do apologize. I've been doing OK, for the most part, albeit with more than a few challenges.  I was able to get my strictured urethra repaired, with a few complications.  I spent 8 days in the hospital with the charmingly-named "cellulitis of the groin" kicking me in the squishy bits regularly.  That's been the major malfunction I've had to deal with, although there's also been another death of sorts in the family... That one's a bit more and less painful in some ways.  Back sixteen years ago, now, I had to replace one of my computers.  More correctly, I had to replace "my computer".  I went to Bloomington and visited a store named "The Box Shop".  This wasn't a chain, just a small store that used to be a bakery or candy shop or something most likely food related that a fellow had leased and filled with bits and pieces of computers.   I'm sure he had some sort of relationship with a few la...

 It has occurred to me over the past few years that I'm, well, not getting younger, as much as I'd prefer it to be otherwise.  I am closer to the end of the story than I am to the opening credits, I guess.   And it's made me even more sentimental than usual.  I guess I've always been one of those people who really prefers to attach my memories to physical things that remind me.  It's a bad habit, I guess, but I really cannot help it.  I have memories that are more attached to places and people, but there's a certain amount of me that's just missing some of the things I've lost.   Aside from family that I've lost, there are a few places that made me who I am, that no longer exist.   The first is the first home I ever recall living in.  I've been told it was my third home, after my parents brought me home to where they were living after they got married.  They moved from there into a short-term rental after they purchased th...

 It's no secret - I work every day asking insurance companies to make a decision on whether or not a patient can receive a particular medication. It's much more complicated than that, but the bottom line is simple.  A doctor meets with a patient, reviews their medical condition and history, and then uses their judgement to select from a growing field of medicine a particular medication that will treat the patient and improve their health.  Quite often it's not a cure, as most of the time these are conditions that don't have cures.  It's usually a treatment to help the patient feel and do better.   The insurance company will tell you they aren't making care decisions, they're simply using their best medical judgement to determine whether the prescribed treatment is going to have a positive response.  Certainly, the medications are expensive, but they aren't fooling me.  The reviewer, who is also a trained medical professional, looks at the medical ...

 Well, I guess my background of fine-tuning my own HTML leaves me disappointed with this editor.  But anyway... Today marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Prince.  A rather famously anti-drug person, he sadly died from an unexpected (I'd guess) drug overdose.  Now his initial explosion into the music world here was well below my radar, as I really wasn't all that tuned into the local music world.  I was pretty focused on popular music with a rather intense interest in what we used to call hard rock. When Prince took the skills he had developed locally and blew up the entire music world, I disagreed at the time, but as time went on, I had to agree with my wife.  While Prince was ground breaking and a gigantic talent, he likely had as much of an influence on popular music as the Beatles had.  Yeah, I know, they had very little in common on the surface, but if you step back a bit, you will realize exactly the same thing.    In the ea...

  The episode in which your regular Cranky Correspondent muses rather crankily on the current state of AI and where it could really make a difference... I know, I know, but the thing is We Are Not Yet getting Artificial Intelligence. There are many ways to define "Artificial Intelligence".  The classic one is when you hold a conversation with something which you believe is human, and can't tell the difference.  I'll give you a little more complex one.  True Artificial Intelligence will be able to respond to a situation it has not encountered or prepared for and selects an appropriate response.   What we have today are expert systems.  The way you know that is because they are trained.  They are exposed to situations others have experienced and the things that others have done to respond to them.  They then develop their response based on previous responses.  So yes, I have also just described much of what some people consider traini...

This weekend I got to do something I haven't been able to do much of over the last few years...  Spend time with some old friends.   Going back thirty-plus years ago, I was a much younger man (half my age, in fact), and a soon to be young father.   I was told by one of my sisters that there was going to be a meeting at my parent's house of a newly forming Star Trek Fan Group.  Yeah.  So in part because I was still feeling the Protector and concerned about what was going on, I told my wife we'd be visiting my folks.  Mind you, this was about 75 minutes north of where we lived, which was Burnsville.  We didn't have kids yet so we were pretty free and loose with our schedule, but it was still a commitment of limited resources, being both gas and time.  We got to my folks house and met this young couple.  She was pregnant, much more so than my wife, but they didn't strike me as any sort of shady folks.  He was a bit different than ...

I used to see people brag about their weight loss and say "nothing tastes as good as... " followed by some weight loss goal.  I still like food, but I'm down aalmost 40 pounds so far.  It's not a lot, at least not where I'm going, but I do like the numbers when I get on the scale.  It's going to be a long slow journey, I guess.  Then again, it did take years to get here, and I can look back and see all of the mistakes. My first out-of-college job was a continuation of the job I had held there - Wendy's.  I started out as a grill closer.  I busted my butt to learn the job, kept learning more positions and roles.  When the opportunity came along to run the closing shifts every night, I took it.  I learned how to do the dreaded "Saturday Night Books".  Every week we did a full food inventory.  Every other week was a full check on all of the consumables, down to the ounce.  And once a month were the Saturdays that the managers did - the...

As with every winter here in the tundra, we get those "oh, hey, you think winter's done?" storms.  They usually fall on weekends during March, and so for some reason Minnesota state high school tournaments tend to get, well clobbered.  This weekend was the Girl's State High School tournament, and while we had athletes and their families from every corner of the state coming to Minneapolis, where, of course, this blizzard took it's square aim on the metro area and south - because most storms tended to go north or otherwise just miss us this year.   So Saturday morning we had sun and the yard was almost completely cleared of snow.  The few remaining spots were in the shade on north sides of trees and down slopes that do not get a lot of direct sunlight this time of year.  Across the street is an elementary school, and the snow piles on the edge the lot had fallen from sixteen feet to about three feet tall.  By about nine Saturday night, when we took the ...

More than a few years ago, my wife and I were living in our first two-bedroom apartment.  I got a call from my old Campus Computing superviosr who was in the process of upgrading the St. John's University student computing environment to a new VAX system.  He wanted to know if I wanted the old VAX 11/785 computer they had.  Yes, the VAX which was about the size of two side-slide file cabinets, needed an external cabinet about the size of a two-drawer file cabinet for the operating system disk and the storage disk, the big free-standing tape drive, and the nearly-as-big max-bus cabinet.  Yup, the one I helped to connect to the then-new TOMUS system that networked the library card-catalog systems between my university and the others in the MIAC conference that St. John's belonged to - all of which were small private colleges in the upper midwest, most in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois, at the time. And my wife said I had to say NO.  Talk about disapp...

 I am still here, trying to manage my time and energy.   Most nights I sleep in bed, now, though still on my back.  My weight restrictions are gradually loosening, I think I'm up to 25 pounds now, still a long way away from walking the dogs - between the two of them they're about 110 pounds, and when they decide they want to sniff something over that way, they can pull me - and I'm not small. Still doing cardiac rehab 3 times a week, from 2-3 pm.  I go in, get hooked up to a portable heart monitor, they take my blood pressure and blood sugars, then I spend 10 minutes walking.  I switch then to the recumbent bike, and do 20-25 minutes while they again take my blood pressure and remind me to hydrate.  Then weight training and stretching, final blood pressure and blood sugar checks, disconnect my monitor, and home I go to get back to work.  I take my lunch and an extra hour or so, with the approval of my supervisor, then back to work. ...

 I hope your Christmas celebrations were more fun than mine.   It's been a while, so let me sum up.  Back on 12/19/2025 after walking the dogs around the parking lot across the street, as I did nearly every evening the weather permitted, I came into the house and realized I was having a real problem catching my breath.  I put it down to the increased humidity and cold out there, combined with a seasonal respiratory issue - no infection, just a seasonal collection of mucous in my head that did not want to leave.   I tried laying down in bed, but it got worse.  So I told myself I'd sleep in my recliner.  I did get an hour or so of sleep, but things weren't getting better, despite the decongestant.  Then I thought "what if it's a problem with the furnace?"  I calmed right down.  I'd replaced the batteries in all of the smoke/carbon monoxide detectors just a month before, and standing outside didn't seem to make a difference. ...

        It was November of my Senior Year in High School. The band director, my favorite teacher in the school, tagged me and another drummer at the end of Concert Band. We had been heading out, but he managed to corral us for a moment.  We had no idea that, in a few months, the room we were standing in would be abandoned because a portion of the rear of the building - the building which had two upper floors that had been closed off due to the deterioration of the building that had been built in 1891, if I recall correctly. But it was there, the risers around us taking the upper level in the rear of the room about three feet above the lower area where we entered and the band director's podium stood next to the piano.   He had been asked by someone - he was vague as to whom - if he could find a couple of drummers to participate in a Veteran's Day observance out at the Veteran's Home. Well, we knew where it was - it had been the destination of every Memo...

 Back in the ... well, I started reading quite a few folks who ware no longer with us, and thinking "ya know, maybe I could do it."  And I kept it up for for  a few years, but things have...  Well, changed a lot. For starters, no longer being responsible for other folks computers has been both good and bad.  I still enjoy working on and with computers, but I do not have to be responsible for what happens when one of my fellow employees clicks on a link in an email that might seem harmless...  and never is.  I haven't clicked on a link in an email message in at least 20 years now.  At where I work now, there are regular "phishing" messages that show up and we're supposed to report them as phishing.  I usually do.  But most of the emails with links that come into my work address get deleted immediately.   Other than that, I'm doing well health-wise.  I'm not twenty, or even forty, but I'm feeling much better than I had....

I'm still here, kicking a little less, fighting some stupidity...  I guess. Back in 2008, I was hospitalized for over a week.  I had a significant amount of pain in my leg, went to see the doctor, and got an antibiotic shot.  And i was told to come back if my foot got "redder".  Two days later I was told to go to the ER.  They ran me through a bunch of tests, and a surgeon opened up my left shin and dug out a lot of infected tissue.   I guess I was lucky to keep the leg, the next 90 days were about as difficult as they've been lately.  i learned a great deal about managing my diabetes.  And I learned a little more about the world.  Which was, aside from my wife and kids, not too many people gave a great deal of crap about me.  Sure, I have friends, but when it comes to help solving problems, many of them land on me. Back in 2008, I came home with a stack of prescriptions.  A couple were for test strips, lancets, and a blood meter....

I recall an old "joke" I stumbled over a few years ago which is even more painful now than when I heard it originally. "If I knew I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."   Not that I had any reason to believe I was going to die young.  I have managed to get myself past 58, where my father had a massive heart attack, and while I do have a pacemaker earlier than Dad got his, I do attribute that to better detection and knowing what we now know.  My father was having episodes where he would essentially faint and have what my mother called "shakes".  I was out of the house by this time, so the tales of what he went through were weird.   The doctors attached him to monitors in the office, and nothing stood out.  They sent him home with a monitor, which one of my sisters described as a "tricorder".  It hung on a strap from his shoulder, and was about the side of an old-style cassette recorder - maybe a foot long, three ...