Christmas

Well another successful Christmas has come and gone. My family had both sides get together over the past week and we did the usual Christmas Eve dinner and Midnight Mass thing as well. Over all everyone involved had a great time.

The funniest thing post Christmas was trying out the new Wii Fit. It seems to think that I'm fat and old. I do know that over the past little while I have put on some weight but I blame my current employer for that.

To everyone out there I wish you all a great New Year's celebration and see you all in 2010.

Fun times

Well as Bubbles and I noticed the furnace wasn't acting up to par over the past little while. The heat exchanger was popping and creaking when the furnace turned on. Heat output on the second floor was marginal at best and when the heat did come up it was only on for a few seconds before the furnace turned off again.

With all that we decided that we needed a new one. This was the plan but it was next year's plan not this years :( Anyway we got the new one installed yesterday, along with a new water heater, and everything is going along just fine. The house is a more normal temperature and better regulated cycle to cycle. Tomorrow's experiment will be if I actually drain the hot water tank when I take a shower, I could with the old one and it was only for half an hour.

Before everyone is up in arms about "Why not get them fixed?" it should be noted that both were house original pieces which dated them at about 26 years of age. Both have had their due and could be replaced without shame. Besides you can't get parts for a "Clare" furnace any more.

Somehow this seems right

Well most of it at least. Maybe not the donkey but the rest does. C-A-D you kill me sometimes. Anyone else think that it is true to life?

Funny in a painful way

Now most people know that I have a wild talent for injuring myself on broad/blunt/simple things. Well I managed to really wound myself yesterday with something that I figured was unimaginable. This actually tops my lemon burn. Yesterday I was pulling apart a cabbage leaf by leaf and low and behold I managed to wound myself under my thumb to the point of bleeding.

Does this make it a new high or low for me?

Final destination

We got Five's ashes back yesterday and found a surprising thing in there as well. They took a clay footprint of him before the cremation. It was sweet and something I will hold onto for a long time.

Final Journey

Well today when I came home after a long day out of the house I found that Five had about every symptom to look for when deciding when to put him down. His eye had so much goop in it there were bubbles forming. His back end wasn't walking the same path that the front end was walking. He hadn't cleaned his paws or his body since walking in the rain hours before hand. All of that made both my wife and I decide that now would be the best time to put him down.

I found an animal hospital that was open that could do the job so I packed Five up for the last time and took him away. The process was quick and painless from what I could see and I held his head until well after the fact. Now he is taking a journey that has no return and I hope he finds his paradise along that path.

For now I'll be thinking about him while trying to juggle a new born baby. Oh what conflicted times.

Fading Five

Most of you know what is going on in my personal life so no point recapping that except that photos will be coming soon.

Anyway Five is starting to fade faster than I thought he would. It looks like the problems have spread to his left eye and maybe his spinal cord. He has problems walking sometimes and going up and down stairs. Rarely right now his back end doesn't follow the front end when it is going places. He gave his head a shake like he had water on his head and the back end almost fell flat on the ground.

His condition is distinctly more troubled than it was, especially since last Friday.

Where's Waldo

Actually it is closer to "Where is Five"? but he hides so well. The funny part is watching him watch squirrels wander by and not do anything. Silly kitty.

Five's new activities

Well over the past week Five has been more and more cat like outside. His hunting skills are improving enough that this morning he actually caught something. You know those large bugs that look like mosquitoes but are about two inches in size? Well he caught one today, then promptly ate it. This is a vast improvement on just sitting there and staring at the world going by.

He hasn't clued in about defending his territory against squirrels though. I saw three of them in the yard and wondered where Five was. When I looked down I got my answer.

After the specialist

Well we visited the cancer specialist and the short version is he has two months to live if we do nothing. If we put him on prednisone it will add two more months and if we give him chemotherapy that will give him an extra four months. All of that is considering if he fell in the average. Prednisone is only a couple of hundred dollars and mostly covered by insurance while we don't think that chemotherapy is covered at all and is ~$5 100.

Needless to say that sometime between Christmas and my birthday Five will pass away and there isn't much that can be done about that. In the mean time I will be keeping everyone up to date about what is going on with him and posting pictures when I have a chance so we can all remember the crazy beast.

Health update

Well we are off to see the specialist tonight at 19:00 to see what, if anything, can be done for Five.

The good news is currently he doesn't seem to be in chronic pain. He has been outside recently, off leash, hunting, poorly, the local wild life. The best he has managed to do is be half the yard away when his intended pray flees. The only painful part for him from what I can tell is going up and down stairs. This isn't too surprising right now as his kidneys keep getting in the way when he climbs.

Five is eating less these days and having a few issues going to the bathroom. His bladder isn't suffering any at least.

Aside from that he is still acting Five-ish and all is going well for now.

Sick definied

To say that I'm sad about this seems unfair to Five as he doesn't know what is happening.

As I noted we went to a vet yesterday to see why Five was loosing so much weight so suddenly. Initially it was though that he had more room to run around in and that he wasn't eating as much so a little weight loss was expected. After a little time the weight loss didn't stop and became an issue.

The vet felt around and noticed something odd about his kidneys which needed a specialist to look into. An appointment was made today for 12:00 which I arrived at 11:45 for.

Initial view from the specialist's assistant was that the kidneys were definitely enlarged and needed to have a closer look. The specialist came in and commented that the best go would be an ultrasound to see what was wrong and a quick "thin needle biopsy" to see what was going on. Luckily the all the resources were available and they could get it all done in 20 minutes.

When they came back they said that Five's kidneys were between two and three times the size they should be, should be 3.2cm were 9.0cm. This was being caused by cancer that had developed. They weren't sure how serious it is but a new specialist would be showing up on Saturday to take a look at the results and get a better idea of what can be done for Five.

Right now the given options were a) steroids which would delay the inevitable or b) chemotherapy which would delay the inevitable or even possible remission. They didn't say it but the chance that Five will see Baby E's first birthday is close to zero.

So right now I'm sad that I'll be loosing a friend but also sad because that friend will never know why this is happening.

Sick cat

Well Five has taken ill but we aren't too sure how ill. We went off to the vet today to see if we could find out. The result was that Five's kidneys are "wrong" and need more help than what a simple vet can provide. We will be off to see a specialist tomorrow to see what they can see.

I'm not looking forward to the long drive into the City.

Strange things

Ok the strangest thing that I have seen in the past little while is that our "Cat" likes to eat yogurt. Though really it isn't as strange as Bubbles and I owning a house. How strange is that?

Ender in Exile

Well here is my first review of something so I hope it will read well.

Ender in Exile is the fourth book written in the Ender's Game Series however, it takes place as book two chronologically. The book starts shortly after the attempted take over of the I.F. by the Warsaw Pact. The children of Battle School are still in flux about what is happening and when/if they will be going home.

The book tracks the life primarily of Ender Wiggin and his sister Valentine as they pass though close to sixty years of Earth based time. Very little time passes for them as they spend most of their time at relativistic speeds and thus only see about four of their own years pass.

Hyrum Graff is also followed in this book from his departure from the Military to other duties and finally retirement. He keeps Ender up to date over time to the goings on of Earth and other political events that he may want to know of.

The other Wiggins are also talked about in the book as well. For those that have read "Shadow of the Hegemon" you also get to have updates to the events as they transpire. There is a lot of overlap of the Bean Series as they both cover the same time span. If you haven't read the Bean Series you will find a few spoilers in here as some events are revealed, I haven't read "Shadow of the Giant" so there were some spoilers that I expected.

Overall this brings nothing new to the series that couldn't be guessed at before. The only enlightening thing that happened was the finding of the Chrysalis in great detail. Before it was always cited that "he found it exactly where the game said he would" but after that nothing. To wait until chapter 18 to find out so little seemed to be a bit of a let down for me.

Characters get introduced that seem to be discarded halfway through the book as if they were just filler. There are some characters that seem to last a chapter or two and then they are left by the way side creating plot lines that aren't needed to actually propel the story forward in any way.

Humor in the book is rare but worth a good laugh when it does happen. A good snippet is:

   ...."Has anyone ever mentioned that when you smile,
   it would melt steel?"
   "Inconvenient, in a spaceship.  I'll smile less."

Overall I would rank this book as a "skip it" but not as bad as a "beating a dead horse for more money". I guess that means it gets two out of five stars.

Chain e-mail

Ok. I received an e-mail that included 140+ e-mail addresses in it. Considering that e-mail addresses should be private the question was rattling around in my head about what I should do about this. This has happened two other times this year so I have had a thought. My conclusion is this. If anyone sends me an e-mail that doesn't have trimmed e-mail addresses I will add all of them to a mailing list and send all material back through it. Not in an evil sense just saves myself some time posting back to everyone. I'll even be nice and unsubscribe people, at year's end, if they don't want to be there.

Oh before anyone gets annoyed about this it is actually better than publicly posting private information for all to see.

Teeth

Well I'm out four more teeth. This puts me down 8 from a full mouth. I'm having a nice time recovery and good food thanks to the parents.

Conference

Well Conference this year was a good conference. There was only one minor oversight that lead to an issue but it was quickly corrected. There was plenty of time to go walking around and enjoy the conference and again see what was going on. Well that was true until I started taking video of the various events which then resulted in me having to edit them and get them ready for publication. I had hopes that I would be able to get everything done before the end of the conference but that didn't happen but the good thing is that I should be finished by the end of this week and be ready for the wrap up meeting in a few weeks. This means there will be many happy people as they will have a good memento of what happened.

The new laptop made all of this work very easy and quick. I am very pleased with my new toy and looking forward to many more happy conference years. Good bye year 15 and hello year 16!

Hardware purchase

Ok I finally broke down and got myself my first new laptop. Even though I have had two previous laptops, \\Fenris and \\Murgatroid, both of these were second hand. Both have served me very well so I figure now that I have a laptop that is my pick it should last longer. The only downside is that it comes with Windows Vista. Now I'm not a fan especially after all the press it got but I figured I should at least try it out. So far I'm not completely disappointed but the boot time and application load times are .... terrible.

Many years ago my APC SUA-1000XL died because it was involved in a flood has finally been replaced with an SUA-1500 which is oddly cheaper but has a longer batter life and higher output. I'm not sure how that works but there you have it. Even though this is for the entertainment centre it matches the one that I have safe guarding the workstations/servers so if anything happens I can easily switch them while worrying about the recovery later.

Last but not least I got a new Acer 19" LCD for my main system. This brings me to using dual monitors which personally I think is long over due but will allow me to be more productive on the book work that I have ahead of myself. I know this isn't a grand monitor but it isn't intended to be. I love my Viewsonic PS790 and it still works great. The best part is that it doesn't have the ghosting issues, and other technical faults of LCDs.

Busy life

Well it looks like life has become busy enough that I have been withdrawing from the virtual life. At best I have been checking my e-mail accounts and the social networks about one a week and as you can tell my blogging has kind of come to a stop.

The short news is:

Fallout 3 looks great with the new video card. It makes it playable now.

I have completed another contract and I'm out looking for a new one so if anyone is looking for an Windows System Administrator feel free to drop me a line

Tax season is looking good this year!