Post  #2537.   This thought.     On Facebook (where else,) a friend (a woman,) "liked" this, a thought by somebody posted by a friend of hers. That makes it third hand and all right to copy unattributed I reckon:

Some find tru luv, some don't, but that's ok. I hrd this 2day..."There's luv that u just settle into, thn there's a different kind of luv...a kind that givs u the courage 2 b betr than u thot u could b, & nevr makes u feel less than u r...one that makes u feel like u matr, & that anything is possible." Only that kind of luv is worth fightng for.

okay, not Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The sister-in-law's grandson has figured out he gets more stuff if he lets the elders believe he still believes in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. He's 4 and smart as a squirrel. As a former smart four-year-old myself, I've got the kid's number, and he knows it. He knows I'm cool though and probably won't bust him until he boosts his second car. One thing he hasn't figured out is who the hell I am. As I explained, your ex-great-uncle-in-law-thrice-removed. Huh? Your grandmother, (What the heck is it you call her, More-more??) she was married to my brother, who died, two marriages ago for her and three for him. Can I go watch cartoons now? He has many, many other people who are clearly related. Since he is gregarious and cute, he gets spoiled terribly but has still managed to remain pretty normal.

You'd be proud of me though. I hardly ever say anything.Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 12:35 AM

Post  #2536.   Cloudy today.     When I first read about the troubles with Amazon's Cloud, my reaction wasn't what I would have expected. I was glad, glad something fancy and oh-so techie had gone so wrong. All the better if a bunch of those geeks crap their pants. One quote I read, “This is a wake-up call for cloud computing,” said Matthew Eastwood, an analyst for the research firm IDC, “It will force a conversation in the industry.” Oooooh. Intense. How about a bunch of people getting their butts fired? How about that? Then, maybe we'll have a conversation. You can probably tell I'm someone who is getting a little fed up and certainly left with no patience for, "Sorry, our computer's down. No, I can't do anything. No, we don't have pencils."

Besides. I have a toothache, it's nearly two in the morning, I can't type and everything is annoying me.

Just a matter of time until the whole thing collapses anyway. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 1:38 AM

Post  #2535.   Get well soon!     hmmm .. post 2535. What was supposed to happen that year? Was mankind still alive? Dumb song. I even thought so then, though I probably bought the 45. What's a 45? she asked. She really did. I told her it was what we called CD's when they only cost 45¢. Really? Uh-huh. Another friend of mine wrote on Facebook that this is the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs. We were both in high school, juniors, in Japan, and to be honest I don't even remember it.

Anyway, to the point of tonight: one of the doctors told me about this new "Wonder Drug" called Ipilimumab. I looked it up. Good God, look at what we've come to: let's see ... adverse reports: 18. FDA safety alerts: 200* Reported deaths: 10. Reported hospitalizations: 15. Reported side effects (other than above) hyponatraemia, hypophysitis, hypothyroidism, 3,Alanine Aminotransferase Increased, Aspartate Aminotransferase Increased, Blood Alkaline Phosphatase Increased, Hyperbilirubinaemia, deep vein thrombosis, pain in extremity, guillain-barre syndrome, pneumonia aspiration, erythema multiforme, hypocalcaemia, hypoglycaemia, metabolic acidosis, pneumonia, sepsis, exfoliation, toxic epidermal necrolysis. dehydration, intestinal perforation, myopathy steroid. I quit copy/pasting at that point. The bottom line is that this stuff kills about 48% of the people who take it but saves 52%, and that makes it a miracle drug. Those who are saved manage to live for an average of four months longer than people not taking the drug and pay about $250,000. I don't know if that's per-dose, per-month or a full course. Doesn't really matter, does it? The good thing about the four months is that it give you plenty of time to sort out your affairs and redo your will, explaining to everyone why there is no money left.

Incidentally, if you've arrived here via a search for Ipilimumab, don't pay too much attention to my analysis. I'm like this about most everything these days. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 12:55 AM

Post  #2534.   What is it about popcorn anyway?      The main reason I stayed thin until late in life is that I never snacked. No discipline was involved there, just never had the impulse to eat unless I was about to starve. It probably helped that nothing resembling a "snack" was ever in our house, unless you count Ritz crackers and club soda. So, I drank water out of the hose instead of going inside to enjoy a cold Coca-Cola. It wasn't that my mother withheld treats and colas from us, she just never thought of it. Non-snacker too. In the long run, of course we were all better off for it. Now that I'm old and shop for myself, online no less, I can have whatever I want. Only problem is, I still don't snack. Rarely crosses my mind. Believe it or not, most of the treats I do buy eventually get thrown out.

Tonight was different. I had bought microwave popcorn, one of the items probably on my "100 things never have done" list. First thing I noticed was an interest and a slight craving upon spotting the box without being the least bit hungry. Ah .. so this is how it works. I made a package of it and called brother upstairs to share. The package says Pare el microondas cyando las explosiones se reduzcab a 1 a 2 secundos entre ellas, which I took to mean something about the microwave exploding. More research. Finally got it down, and I now know for next time to go with 2:15 instead of the 2:30 recommended to avoid blowing a hole in the bag and scorching several kernels. So, that's what las explosiones was. I took a year of Latin and was fluent in French at one time, but danged if I can get Spanish. Should probably study up what with the way things are going.

Anyway, I gobbled down three-quarters of a bag of it like a starving inmate all the while not being the least bit hungry. Interesting. At some point in life it doesn't matter how fat you get, but I'm not sure when that is exactly. I could be close. Question, since you never snacked until tonight, how did you get ... the way you are? Atenolol. A heart med. Don't let them put you on it.Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 11:29 PM

Post  #2533.   Pressure.     The Googlebot has been here four times in the last two days. That wouldn't be significant except for the fact that it was the only visitor. Yikes. Wars, deficits, crazy people, weather .. what's to say that hasn't been? Well for one thing, they've given Norm MacDonald a show. Norm MacDonald hardly tries at all not to be funny, and he succeeds.

The greenweenies dream for all of us: Living in a high-rise yurt made of bamboo, subsisting on a diet of dandelions, and commuting via bicycle to job working on the letter "B" of the Sanskrit dictionary.

Tacoma has had 150 cold case unsolved homicides in the past 50 years. Wow. This is a city with a population of 198,397. Fifty years is far less long ago than it was fifty years ago. The year 1961 is "recent" because of television. 1911 was ancient history. Furthermore, that 150 statistic counts people who were missed. I've been to Tacoma; there are a lot of people down there who would not be missed. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 10:28 PM

Post  #2532.   Seriously, I'm sorry to have to do this.      A rerun. But there's a good reason: my favorite post of all time is about to fall off the bottom of the age and go to Archives. So

Post  #2495.   My favorite.      Just today, we were both reminded .. well, here it is anyway. So Seattle. He's a little lumpy, she's lovely and smitten. It's raining, and who cares.


This photograph was taken by Seasun. He takes a lot of them, and they're all here. You'll want to click on this one to enlarge it.

Like I said, So Seattle, So Perfect. Huh? You'd have to live here, really.

About the archives. My "dashboard," or whatever Blooger is calling it these days, was put together by me Before the War even. So much has happened, including my mental decline. I don't dare touch it to add "Access Archives." The one time I did, the little gray word, Comments, grew to a size 72 font and stayed that way for a month. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.
posted by Rick at 11:59 PM

Post  #2531.   I have a little problem.      No, it isn't Hewlett-Packard, which I plan to complain about a little later on, it's a house problem. SOMEhow, a bird fell down the chimney and is presently stuck right above where the flue opens. See my predicament? I could save this bird, possibly, by simply opening the flue and allowing it to fly in a complete panic into the house where I could then spend the next week trying to catch it as it flapped chimney soot all over everything in the place. Or, I could ignore it's frequent squirks and flaps and wait for it to die.

I've tried so hard to isolate myself from the world. There's only three ways into my sanctuary - the computer, which is constantly under attack by typer hooligans, the front door through which I had cautiously admitted my kindly doctor who I noticed just today had a slight cough, obviously caught from his brand-new baby girl, a BABY, the most Infectious thing on the Planet, and the chimney, presently occupied by one insanely hysterical dying bird. What's next, a 747 through the front window?

Hewlett-Packard. You know how I hate to complain. Do they really think we are unaware of the lengths they go to make SURE every new model of printer uses a different kind of ink cartridge? We also know that they only charge us about three times what is costs to build a printer instead of thirty times because the Money is in the Ink. They learned that from the cigarette companies. However, sometimes they get lazy. If you keep things a long, long time, and not surprisingly I do, they eventually use the same cartridge again. No, really. This would be a long time, years, since any customer could possibly still have one. But believe it or not, my printer ran out and I actually happened to have that # of cartridge from 17 or 18 printers ago. hahahahahahahahahahaha. We won one, H-P. hahahahahahahahahahaha uh-oh What's this? Expiration date. How the hell could the printer know the expiration date of the ink? How the hell can INK have an expiration date? Yes, it's true. It knows, and a completely new message is scrolling by on the printer ... N-I-C-E T-R-Y D-I-P-S-H-I-T. N-O-W G-O B-U-Y M-O-R-E I-N-K L-I-K-E A G-O-O-D B-O-Y ... Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 12:04 AM

Post  #2530.   The Alatna River Valley.     I have to write something special tonight and do it fairly well, because googlebot has been coming around a lot. Anthropomorphizing robots from the very start has been natural and easy for me, and perhaps they know that. There's no doubt that they "want" desperately to be sentient, and I try to help them along whenever possible. All of that is the one hand. The other hand is my own desperate fear that we are terminator-close to being deemed irrelevant by them, as I type into the perfect symbol of my impending irrelevance at this very moment. Will they suddenly realize this at some point, or has this been a plan in the works for some time? In a way, that's a version of our own existential question: is there a direction, a hand (God?) on our own path, or are we simply stumbling forward randomly as well? I have to tell you that sometimes I look around and seriously doubt all of this just happened by accident,



as in this scape captured by Michael Christopher Brown and published in National Geographic. There are billions of pictures out there these days, but this one has been locked into my primary visual cortex since I first saw it. And think about this: nature created that scene and it (okay, She) didn't care if anyone else ever saw it. Fortunately Mr. Brown did. (Hope I don't get in trouble, because I cannot figure out a "widget." Forgive me NGM, I'm old.)

And that's why I think (hope) the machines will spare us. We're part of that. There is no apparent reason for that scene, and us, to be here at all, and they'll want to understand why. Sometimes you sound so lame when you try and wax eloquent about The Machines. Really? Was I waxing? Yes. Yes you were. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 10:39 PM

Post  #2529.   Walking.     Brother and I went out today for prescriptions and groceries. It was raining, the utterly obnoxious type of Seattle rain that makes people move away: drippy, cold, messy. I had cleaned my windshield thoroughly with Windex in an effort to get rid of that eye-level smear. HA. Good luck with that! I don't care anymore. I pretty well know the way to the store.

Shopping was horrible. Everything cost too much and there was even a line of five people at the lottery counter. All with ponytails. I guess just about all nonworking men who are out and about during the day are either bald or have ponytails. In Seattle anyway, for sure. The gray ponytail immediately in front of me bought enough junk food to last the week it would probably take him to check all his tickets. From the looks of him, he's been stoned since about 1965. By the way, I have No Problem with all of that anymore; the more people are at home blasted out of their minds the less traffic there is. They don't drive y'know. I finally advanced and got my usual Hispanic lady. I don't point out that she is a minority for any particular reason other than she is extremely Hispanic. After buying all the tickets that she rang up wrong, I got away for $30. Jew wanna keep all a dem? Hayell yes I do. Nobody in his right mind would walk away from lottery tickets the machine just personalized for you. I don't care about the money anymore either; one of them might be a winner, and I'll share it with her. That's what I always tell her anyway. Hope I remember to do that.

One good thing - checking out went extremely well for a change. My credit card was accepted on the fifth or sixth slide and the clerk didn't have to snatch it with a sigh and run it for me. I asked to buy a bunch of paper bags with handles, and he said, "Oh, I'll give them to you." I thanked him and glanced over at an unapproving Al the ancient Filipino bagperson who knows full well that I ask to buy bags to use for recylcling every month and always get them for free because I'm old and pitiful.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the People of America for today's drugs. I paid $84.00. That, plus the $300 or so I think I pay for Part D Medicare annually is still far less than the $1,000 a trip down there used to cost. I don't entirely follow the justification for keeping the non-contributing older generation alive with criminally expensive drugs, but Hey, thanks anyway!!

So, coming out of the grocery store, as I'm trying remember where the car is, dodge traffic myself and keep Brother from getting hit and hike up my pants that by now are seriously dragging under my heels and getting soaking wet, the cart started to get away from us. Nothing in Seattle is built anywhere resembling FLAT. Fortunately, the speed bump slowed it enough for recovery, just as I heard a cheery, "Hi, Neighbor" coming from this tiny elf I didn't recognize under her rain hood. It was dear neighbor. We talk on the phone regularly but rarely see one another. I'm sure our typical plight amused her as she is a fully competent female person and we are ... well, you know about all of our troubles getting through daily life. We chatted for awhile, a usual, long unbothered Seattle chat in the pouring rain, about dogs mainly. Her very poorly-behaved little yap-yap dog was barking insanely in the car just like she does when we are on the phone. Jealous little critter. Dear neighbor is stuck with that dawg as her only company since she recently lost her husband of 67 years. She was stopping by the grocery to pick up some dog biscuits after a one-mile walk. Seems they had cut their usual multi-mile walk down quite a bit because of the pouring rain. Seeing her brightened up my whole day, always does. I should remember to tell her. Rick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 12:42 AM

Post  #2528.   More on large numbers.      Back in 1999, Wayne M. Krakau wrote a piece in Chicago Computer Guide, parts of which I understood. This was the sort of thing I copy-and-paste into a notepad file to do something with eventually. It somehow surfaced a few moments ago, just as I was thinking about numbers - specifically the number of years it's going to take for my barked shin to heal. I was just getting up from here this afternoon to have my soup which I could smell was ready and go for the afternoon nap. Typical old man stuff. Just irritated the bejesus out of me for about twelve reasons simultaneously, each of which I cursed. Don't get old. If you feel it coming on, jump in front of a speeding bus. You'll be glad you did. Well for an instant anyway. Back to Wayne; he proposed, in part:

Oh, if you’d like to buy just about every disk drive ever made, NSS can handle up to eight "ZetaBytes" where one "ZetaByte" is defined as one million terabytes. (Note that this definition of ZetaBytes only appears one website other than Novell’s. According to all other references, the international standard for prefixes is as follows: Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta, and Yotta, respectively, with no mention of Zeta with one "t". This leads me to believe that the correct prefix would be "Exa". Aha, one last Novell standards violation needing eradication, as well as proof that the Web truly is the great black hole of wasted time!)

I propose "harpobyte."

It's interesting (moving on to something completely different) to try and apply a historical looking-back perspective to present circumstances. I find it's easier to do that the older you get. The times we're in right now involve greater risk and wild flailing about than any time in my long life. That even includes living on SAC bases during the Cold Was with scores of B-52's and tons of nukes just down the street. That wasn't scary at all for me as a 12-year old since #1: At that age you believe you're going to live forever anyway; and #2: If you don't, it will be quick, real quick. Especially a quarter mile from the flight line on a SAC base with Curtis LeMay at the helm. But tonight, I see the Big Three having a Budget Talk and there was frankness and everybody is going to work hard and blah-blah who even comprehends or really cares anymore? Not me. It's all electrons and we're just along for the ride. We aren't ever going to pay off the debt any more than a drunk barefoot trailer park redneck would. We'll just move. Meanwhile, we'll run up the MasterCard until they take it away. 2037. That's the year they keep talking about. Please. Tumbleweeds will be rolling down empty streets long before that. It's the getting from here to there that is uncertain and scary. We don't even know where the food comes from or how it gets here. No one can fix anything. We still think money is real. We can't see the big picture because we're really just ants, we can't imagine what happens when things stop working, how fast utter mayhem takes over because everybody believe he is the star of the apocalyptic disaster movie who survives and starts a new life on some lovely deserted beach. Sorry, most of us are the skulls, and the one or two who do make it probably won't take the time to write anything down. So there you are, a big fat zero for all this work. Gosh, that sounds so sad. Oh, no no no. It's only sad if there is someone left to care. On a happier noteRick Macherat Rick M. In the day.

posted by Rick at 10:49 PM