I got an e-mail this morning from my brother. He mentioned that a friend of his had had an accident over the weekend and had been badly burned, bad enough that they had had to Life Flight him to the University of Utah hospital. Shortly after that I went downstairs and donated platelets. It wasn't until after I got back to my desk and read some replies to my brother that I made the connection. ARUP supplies all of the University Hospital's blood and platelets and since my brothers friend is at the University Hospital it's possible that some of the platelets I donated went to treat him, particularly since burn victims use a ton of platelets.
Speaking of a ton of platelets, there are two measures they use to determine how many platelets you donate: one is based on weight and one is based on a device which tries to count the platelets as they pass by in the tube. On the latter measure the phlebotomist said I had the highest value she'd ever seen. It's fairly common for people to donate a double load of platelets (particularly if you're fat like me) and a triple is not that uncommon, but today I almost did a quadruple... It's nice to know that I'm good at something, although as usual, it's something that just comes naturally rather than as a result of any amount of hard work.
I watched "Kung Fu Hustle," which was excellent. I would definitely see it again, and it probably qualifies as something I wouldn't mind owning. We watched "Amelie" last night, which was also really good. It was somewhat instructive to watch a French movie followed by a Chinese movie and compare the two different styles of film-making. In any case, that's it for now. February starts tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be better about blogging than I was in January.
Caveat Emptor
Ross
I'm old, tired and cold and I think the wolves are closing in. Hopefully the weekend will have a salutary effect.
To be walked on you have to be lying in the mud
Ross
Here's something interesting: it used to be that if I took a nap after 5 pm or drank a caffinated drink after about 6 pm that I would be unable to fall asleep later. Last night I did both and fell asleep just fine. I'm not sure if that's good or bad; probably bad. I do know that I'm tired today... This is going to be a short entry, but before I log off here are a couple of links. The first is a funny story in another blog about my oldest daughter (it's the January 25th entry). The second is an op-ed piece from the LA Times, which begins, "I DON'T SUPPORT our troops." I'll allow you to read it and form your own reaction...
I DO SUPPORT our troops
Ross
For those of you that are working on the "19 problem," the address to the original contest is http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MathQuizOne. Of particular note is the fact that there are actually three problems and the question asks which of the three are possible and which are not, so it's certainly possible that there is no way to get 19 out of 1, 2 and 3, but then you'd have to prove it wasn't possible...
I was going to make this one of the short "forum for my critics" posts, but I guess I have enough to say that I can go on. My wife and I went and saw the play "Humble Boy" last night. We had high hopes, but we were ultimately disappointed. Apparently we're in the minority; most of the reviews I've found are in the A-B range. However, this review from the Village Voice seems to largely agree with my own. The play is billed as an adaptation or at the very least an homage to Hamlet, and as such my capsule review would have to be that it was "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing..."
Late in the day we found out that the babysitter we had lined up wasn't feeling well. So thinking quickly, I walked across the cube aisle and asked a co-worker who's a good friend of mine if he would be willing to do it. He absolutely adores children, and because he's going through a divorce he doesn't get to see his own nearly as much as he would like. As such, he was happy to come watch our kids. Despite his evident enthusiasm, I feel like I owe him big now.
One foot in front of the other
Ross
I realize that I have been pretty bad about posting in my blog lately, and for that I apologize. As I mentioned in my last blog, I had some consultants from Boston on site all of last week including yesterday. As a result, every spare second I had was spent trapped in a tiny meeting room on the 1st floor. Since Monday was the last day, there was a lot of rushing around trying to cross stuff off before they flew out. This would have been bad enough by itself, but it was also the day where we republish all of the test information on the website. The two together made it one of my worst work days ever, but we weren't done yet. They also picked Monday to release the new "Employee Photo Directory," prompting everyone to drop everything they were working on and immediately rush to see what everyone's pictures looked like, causing the server to crash within a few hours.
I could go on, but hopefully you have the picture. The point is the last thing I had the time or the energy for was another blog entry. Speaking of blog entries, on my last entry my wife mentioned that she thought I had a certain amount of charisma; my friends all retorted that sure, I could tell an engaging story, but I was not charismatic. My wife wondered, if holding people's attention while speaking wasn't charisma, what was? At this point I had to explain to her that in Dungeons and Dragons, there is no attribute to represent physical attractiveness, and as a result charisma had to stand in for beauty. Since so much of my friends' worldview is formed by D&D, when my wife said I had charisma, they took it to mean that I was good-looking, and the one thing they are all sure of is that I am not attractive...
Finally, and I was hoping to have a link to the original contest, my Dad told me (and my wife) about a math problem, or perhaps a better word is puzzle, he'd been struggling with. Using the numbers 1, 2 and 3 only once, along with any mathematical symbol, form an equation that equals 19. Initially it doesn't look that bad, but the more you struggle with it the harder you realize it is. I don't know the answer, so far as I know nobody knows the answer, but I'm throwing it out there and we'll see what happens.
Still reeling from yesterday
Ross
I was with consultants in a tiny meeting room in some deserted corner of the building all day today. It was pretty painful, and I didn't have a second to myself, so I wasn't going to blog but then I realized I had missed Friday and Monday as well, so I figured I'd better. There's not much to report -- I took it pretty easy over the weekend. It was quite enjoyable.
I did watch a couple of movies, the first was Spirited Away. It's an animated Japanese import. Most animated films are pretty good, but this one was exceptional. The kids were asking us to buy it as soon as it was over. The other movie we watched was Sunset Blvd, another really great movie, with some really great lines, "I *am* big. It's the *pictures* that got small."
What's really interesting about the movie is how close it is to being a true story. Gloria Swanson, who played the main character, was an old silent film actress who hadn't made a movie in a decade, and who had worked extensively with Cecil B. DeMille. They had other silent film actors like Buster Keaton in cameo roles. In any case it's about time for bed, so that's all for the moment.
Bored and belligerent
Ross
I'm waiting for a co-worker to return so I can go to lunch. I'm surprisingly hungry. I think I may be experiencing actual hunger pangs, a word so close to the its definition that you're surprised that they just don't cut out the middle man and say "hunger pains." Certainly that's what I thought they were saying when I was a child.
In pang
Ross
The TV show "Scrubs" has returned after a brief hiatus. The last couple of weeks they've shown two new episodes back to back, an embarrassment of riches if there ever was one. "Scrubs" is one of those shows that I'm amazed is not more popular, but at least it wasn't cancelled after one season like most of the shows I end up liking. Of course the benefits of cancellation are that it cuts down on the amount of TV I'm viewing. This year was particularly bad I picked up not one but two new shows.
The first was "My Name is Earl" which I believe I've talked about before. Jason Lee's low-key delivery is a thing to behold, and the little gags they slip in that allude to his (or others) criminal past, as just about the funniest thing on TV. Last week he was working on a farm and a Mexican maid he's befriended wanted to come along, since she worked on a farm when she was young. They ask her where that was and in an expressionless reminiscance she says, "Well they took us there with a blindfold, so I don't really no, but my father died in Nogales, so it had to be north of there, and it was east of the "River of Blood", so..."
The other show I started watching this season is "How I Met Your Mother". The show itself is sweet and funny all on it's own, but until you have seen Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Hoowser) as Barney, you don't know what comedy is. A favorite scene from that movie involved Barney convincing Ted (the main character) to go lick the Liberty Bell. As Ted relates the story to a girl later, she asks him what it tasted like. He gets this far away look at says, "It tasted like freedom..."
Enjoying the taste of captivity
Ross
Now that I'm back in the saddle, so to speak, I'm going to return to posting something every day, so that as was mentioned previously, my critics can have a forum. So here you go, criticize to your hearts' content.
Sheathed in teflon
Ross
Well it's been a while, hasn't it. First there was the vacation, then just as normalcy was on the verge of returning, I got sick -- desperately, horribly ill (it started about 2 am Tuesday morning, though I wasn't feeling 100% on Monday night either), and I am just barely recovering. This was a pretty nasty sickness; everyone in my family ended up with it and around 3/4 of my extended family caught it as well. I was only actively vomiting for about 7 hours, but so violent were my exertions that my back is still sore. Well, that's enough about that subject, but it wouldn't be my blog if my first post back didn't involve vomiting...
As if all the illness weren't exciting enough, on Saturday my youngest child decided to shove something up her nose. She got it so far up there, that it took a trip to the ER, four people and some pretty serious sedation to get it out. What was it, you ask? Well you know those pencils with little plastic cartridges holding pre-sharpened lead, that nest in each other, so when you're done with one you stick it in the back of the pencil and push a new one out? Yeah, it was one of those...
Looking back to the week before the great flu pandemic, the reunion was pretty fun. I have to say that while I prefer hanging out with my family (brothers, sisters, father, mother) to hanging out with my wife's cousins, that I prefer hanging out with my wife's cousins to hanging out with my own cousins. And I found out something interesting while I was down there. Someone else who lives in Utah and is related to the Arizona family by marriage (i.e. my own situation) mentioned to her nephew (one of my wife's cousins) that the family was largely humorless until I married into the family and that's when the humor started to return. Needless to say I was touched to be accounted so pivotal in the condition of an entire family...
Mostly harmless
Ross