A couple of years ago, I bought Guild Wars.  It’s an MMO, but they don’t charge a monthly fee.

I’ve had an online identity of “elyograg” for about twenty years now.  Naturally I wanted to use this name when I created my first Guild Wars character.  Something I didn’t know until faced with it: GW actually requires at least two words in your character name.  I was suddenly on the spot to extend my online identity.  Chomping at bit to get started playing, I typed in the first thing that came to mind for that second word: prime.  I’ve never been happy with it.

I would now like to get that changed to something that I can really identify with and that fits in with with the Guild Wars universe.  I haven’t decided whether I’ll build a new character or pay ArenaNet a fee to change the name of my existing character.

Anyone out there on the intarwebz have any suggestions for me on a new suffix for my character name?  I’m OK with going beyond two words, but I don’t want the entire thing to be super-long.

I am lusting after a bunch of tools for car repair.  Below is what I want at the moment.  If you would like to donate anything on this list, feel free! Originally I was looking at Craftsman for everything, but it turns out that their “guaranteed forever” tool warranty only apply to basic hand tools.

• A nicely outfitted set of hand tools with a lifetime warranty.  This looks like an awesome bang for the buck, and it comes with a toolbox!
• Two torque wrenches, so that I can do torque in both inch-pounds and foot-pounds.  I’m thinking of this and this.
• A set of socket adapters, so the torque wrenches will work with any size socket.
• A hydraulic floor jack, two ton minimum.  This one has a nice price, hopefully “cheap” doesn’t also apply to how well it will lift and hold.  There’s this one too.
• Ramps for oil changing.  I like these.

Last week, I forget which day, I woke up to a little problem.  I’d wet the bed.  The volume of liquid wasn’t huge, but that hadn’t happened since I was a kid.  Our 9 year old son currently struggles with this problem, but he’s got a VERY good reason.  He was diagnosed as a type I diabetic when he was not quite 13 months old.  It’s only when his blood sugar gets out of control that the problem surfaces.

The body treats high blood glucose like many other toxins, by trying to cleanse the blood with the kidneys.  This creates large quantities of urine, and your bladder may fill up before your brain can reach consciousness and get you out of bed to deal with it.

On that morning, I used the handy tools available in the house and immediately checked my blood glucose.  The meter read 130.  Just to be sure, I washed my hands thoroughly and did it again, in case the high reading was due to contaminants on the finger that I poked.  This time it came up at 121.  Taking the meter’s margin for error into account, it meant that the first number was not anomalous.

The night before the literal wake-up call, we’d ordered pizza at midnight and stayed up late watching TV.  A couple of days later, when I had gotten to bed at a more reasonable time but had a fairly carb-loaded dinner, the number on the meter in the morning was 105.

Due to the large amount of fat and protein it contains, pizza is a food with an unpredictable glycemic index.  The glycemic index is a measure of how quickly the carbohydrates are released into the body as glucose.  We can never seem to time our son’s insulin right when he eats pizza, so he either ends up with a glucose level that’s too high or too low.  The other evil food with a similar problem is macaroni and cheese.

In a normal person, a fasting glucose is between 80 and 100, with 90 being pretty much perfect.  For my son, who is completely dependent on external insulin, we shoot for a value between 100 and 120, with anything under 140 being acceptable.  If we tried to keep him at 90, he’d consistently drop below that, which is far more dangerous than being a little bit too high.

I have a doctor appointment this afternoon to confirm what I already know – I am a type II diabetic.  I’m not terribly surprised that this has happened.  I eat too much and I get pretty much zero exercise.  I don’t know whether the doctor will actually write me a prescription for Metformin on the spot.  He probably won’t, waiting until a bunch of labs are done.  Doctors do not like patients to self-diagnose.  It seems to offend their egos.

Today I went to the eye center and ordered new glasses.  Here is what my prescription was in September 2007:

OD: -4.50 x -1.00 x 174
OS: -3.50 x -1.00 x 178

Now it is somewhat worse:

OD: -5.50 x -0.75 x 176
OS: -4.25 x -1.00 x 166

I was worried that I would need bifocals, since I am over 40.  This turned out to not be the case.  There is a slight degradation in my near vision, but not bad enough to need correction yet.  I might need bifocals in the next few years, though.

In 2005, lawmakers passed a law called the Energy Policy Act.  Among its many provisions was a change to Daylight Savings Time (DST) that went into effect in 2007.  Instead of starting on the first Sunday of April and ending on the last Sunday in October, it now starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November.  This is approximately 4 weeks of additional DST per year.  Unless you have been living in Arizona, Hawaii, or off the grid in some way, this is not likely to be new information to you.

DST has a long and controversial history.  As any aficionado of Jerry Bruckheimer films can tell you, the person first credited with the idea is Benjamin Franklin.  For almost everyone in the modern world, I think the energy savings and increased summer leisure time make it a good idea.  It shifts the daylight hours so that more of our waking activities happen when there is daylight.  The idea is that fewer people will need artificial light, and those that do need it will not need it as long, therefore less fuel is consumed providing that light.  In the evening, there is more time with daylight available, to the point that 4th of July fireworks typically cannot start until after 10:00 PM in Utah.  Countless studies have shown both benefits and harm from observing it.

For the past three years, I have some variant of this post going through my head twice a year, but especially in the fall.  I am less than thrilled about the changes our politicians made.  I don’t know whether they didn’t research the impact it would have on infrastructure, or if they decided that since people in professions other than theirs would have to deal with it, they didn’t care.

There are millions (perhaps billions) of devices in the US that automatically adjust themselves to deal with DST.  Only some of those devices can be reprogrammed to the new timeframe.  Sometime in the middle of the first decade of this century, I bought a nice dual alarm clock that automatically sets itself and adjusts for daylight savings.  In 2007, that clock became unreliable for 4+ weeks out of the year.  I have not been able to find a comparable replacement for a reasonable price, so now I rely on other means for waking up.  Other devices are also not field upgradable, like thermostats.  Their owners have either had to shell out a big chunk of money to replace them, or glare at them with frustration for the hassle of manually doing what the device was supposed to do automatically.  My thermostat has a button for daylight savings time, so it’s always been manual for me.

At work, I am in the IT department, where I handle desktop computers, server computers, and network hardware.  Computers rely on synchronized time.  Some things won’t work at all if there is a difference between systems that’s more than a few seconds.  A large part of my job is troubleshooting problems.  Tracking these down requires comparing log files on different systems.  If the times on all systems are not the same to within a few milliseconds, it can be impossible to figure out what happened.  The company heavily relies on the calendar feature in Outlook for recurring meetings.  This feature in Outlook was impacted in a huge way by the DST changes.  Microsoft had to write a special program just for handling daylight savings changes in existing calendars.

My cow-orkers and I had to invest huge amounts of time in making sure that every single computer and network device was either upgraded or replaced.  This is difficult to do when you have mission-critical systems.  The changes required for timezone updates are usually at a kernel level, which means that you must reboot them for it to work.

Unlike Y2K, which was pretty much a non-event despite the hype, there were real problems with the Daylight Savings fiasco of 2007.  We didn’t find all the software that needed upgrading before it became critical.  In March, and again in November, problems cropped up that were difficult to track down, and ultimately were found to be applications, or middleware like Java, that had not been updated with the new time changes.  Even now, three years later, we still find software that does not deal with DST correctly.  Some things, like the management board in our building-level UPS, could not be upgraded.  The only way to fix it would be to replace the entire UPS.  That is prohibitively expensive.  Thankfully that one has not become an issue.  It’s more important that the network management station have the right time than the device.

There has been a nontechnical casualty to these changes as well: Halloween.  This holiday was always right after the time change.  Except on those years that it fell on Sunday (prompting churchgoers to move festivities to Saturday), trick or treating would happen after the change back to normal time, so it would get dark early and kids could count on a long and fun Halloween in the dark, even with an early bedtime.

Since 2007, parents with small kids will get them out early on Halloween and have them home before dark.  In some ways, this is a huge win for safety, but I think that it is marginally less safe for older kids and adults.  The older crowd doesn’t want to be out before dark, which means that in order to blow off the same amount of steam and get that large candy haul, they’ve got to be out later.  As the night deepens, predators become more bold and the general level of craziness due to sleep deprivation goes up.

For nearly 100 years, most of the country has had to deal with the springtime shock to the body clock, waking up an hour earlier than the week before.  The shock wears off within a week or so as you adjust to the difference.  The payoff for this injustice comes in late fall, when the opposite time change means you get a little extra sleep.

What are YOUR thoughts?

We had a large 3-night group camp planned for Thursday July 22nd at Payson Lakes. The day before, we learned that there was an aggressive bear on the loose and they had closed the campground until it was caught.

Not wanting to lose our chance to go to Payson this summer, we looked into later dates and found an available window in the same campground in August. We called and discussed the change with people and reached the decision to postpone. There was only one family we couldn’t reach, Kathy’s brother Bill.

Early Thursday morning, we discovered that the bear had been killed and we were clear to go up. But after losing 24 hours of preparation time and since we had already told most people about August, we decided it would be better to stick with the plan to postpone.

Unfortunately we were still unable to reach Kathy’s brother. Late on Thursday morning, we went by Bill’s house. His motorhome and van were both gone. This trip was a long-planned memorial and ash-spreading for their father. Their brother also died last month and was added to the ceremony already planned. It was very important that Bill be there. Due to the time of day, our best guess was that he was already on his way to the campground.

We didn’t want him to be the only person to show up and wonder what was going on so we quickly called the other parties to figure out what we should do. We decided we would do something crazy — go to both this camp-out and the one in August. Nothing was ready, because until that moment we had assumed we weren’t going. We madly packed up and got to the campground late Thursday evening. But, to our surprise, Bill wasn’t there.

A little further craziness… the group sites at Payson Lakes were renumbered a couple of years ago. When Kathy’s mom went to reserve them, she had known the site that she wanted as Group Site A, but in the meantime, it had become Group Site C. She reserved site A, and that’s where we spent the first night. The people who did reserve site C had canceled because of the bear, so on Friday morning, the campground host let us move. The second pack/unpack was much easier, because we could make multiple trips. It was a very good move. Site A sucks for trailers, site C is wonderful and was what Kathy’s mom really wanted.

Bill finally showed up late Friday evening. He had spent a couple of nights at Bear Lake with his in-laws and got home Friday afternoon. This was all according to his plan, but the rest of us didn’t know anything about it. I imagine the sequence of voice mails they listened to were amusing.

The trip was a lot of fun, especially for the kids.  We were dead when we got back, though.  Kathy and I both got sunburned, despite spending most of our time in the shade.  Aspen trees do not cast very dense shadows.

From the Smith’s at 8th and 9th:

• A four wheeled adventure will soon bring you happiness.

I’ve been so busy living my life that I haven’t been writing about it.  There’s never enough time in the day … after work, I just want to relax, and after I’ve done that for a while, it’s very late and I just want to crawl into bed.  Whenever I pick up a book, I find myself reading late into the night and morning, putting it down only when I reach the end of the book.

A lot has happened.  My wife Kathy and her family have had to deal with the man who runs Goff Mortuary three times in less than two years.  We hope to never see that man again, that we can deal with his son the next time such services are required.

First it was my wife’s maternal grandmother.  She was over 90 years old, and had already made it through a couple of major health scares.  My wife was there when the merciful end finally came.  I first met this amazing lady in February 2005 at her home near San Diego, when we took the family to Disneyland.  I have some blog posts about that trip, and if decide to go find them, you’ll note that I never finished documenting that trip.

Next, it was Kathy’s father.  He had been in the VA hospital for a full month prior to then, having a battle with cancer.  Eventually, its advance was unstoppable.  Once the doctors figured that out, they let him go home for hospice care.  Those last couple of weeks were ugly, marked by extreme pain, unfortunate incompetence from the visiting health care professionals, and the dementia of Alzheimers.  This too was a merciful end, when it finally came.  Kathy had just arrived at home to rest, but the rest of his immediate family was there when his suffering finally ended. They view the tragedy as something of a blessing, because if he had won against the cancer, the rapidly advancing condition in his brain would have been much worse.

Both of these earlier deaths were expected.  A couple of weeks ago, Kathy’s mother and sister visited her brother David, and found him dead.  He had apparently fallen asleep at his desk.  The medical examiner has not yet figured out why he died, and we will not know for several more weeks.  He was 40 years old, just one year older than Kathy.  Despite intense sibling rivalry in their younger years, she was very close to David.

With all these people being lost in quick succession, I think the only person who’s having a harder time than my wife is her mother.  I wish I knew what to say to make everything better.  I bring her chocolate, hold her hand, and give her frequent hugs, but it seems like I should be doing more.  I’m really at a loss for how to help Kathy’s mother.  What do you say to someone who has lost their mother, their husband, and one of their children in close succession?

I suppose we’ve reached the time in our lives when death starts to invade on a regular basis, and that we’ve been lucky so far that we haven’t had to face very much of it.  That doesn’t really make it any harder to bear, of course.

On my work desktop machine, I recently ditched Vista and installed Windows 7.  I had heard from reliable sources (not the commercials on TV) that it was a worthwhile upgrade.  I would classify the difference as night and day, especially in the speed department.  One of the people whose opinion I respect recently stated that he had upgraded his computer from Linux to Windows 7, and his use of the term ‘upgrade’ was intentional.

I finally have a 64 bit operating system on my desk, and I am not running into the compatibility issues that I did when I was running 64-bit XP on my home machine.  If you have a 64-bit OS and 64-bit native applications, you get a nice speed boost, and you can run 32-bit applications with no noticeable penalty.  I say noticeable because there is overhead involved in emulating the 32 bit system.

My work laptop also runs Vista, the original Dell OEM install.  Laptops tend to be slow performers on their best days just because of the tradeoffs required to achieve small size and low power consumption, but I’ve been having serious speed issues with it lately.  Despite having 2GB of RAM, it seems to always run at 70-75% memory utilization, and 70% seems to be the threshold where the memory manager starts freaking out and swapping things to disk while you’re trying to use them.  I believe that Win7 would probably solve these issues, I’ll have to ask if I can have a license for it.

I’ve read in more than one place that Windows 7 is also faster than XP, even on older hardware.  This is not a theory that I’ve been able to test, because my current work machine has never run XP.  I would like to buy a copy for my home PC and take it for a spin.

Today as I was moving my blog to the new server, I discovered signs that the blog site had been tampered with by an outside party. I can’t be sure, but it looks like the tampering may have occurred on 2009-09-03. I think I’ve eliminated the problem.

I know that this is going to be no big deal for some of my readers. If you’re reading this, chances are that you have either flirted with or reveled in the Linux desktop. I have flirted with it, but never long enough to print anything. Today I told my server about the printer attached to my Windows machine, then successfully loaded my résumé from my website and printed it.

I am excited by this little victory, small as it may be.

From Smith’s Chinese:

• Be prepared to receive something special in a large package.

Could it be more vague? I suppose it could, so I better just be quiet.

I will see the new James Cameron movie at some point, hopefully in 3D … but I will be thinking about compassion, honesty, valor, justice, honor, sacrifice, spirituality, and humility when I do.

I am in need of a a new shelf for my refrigerator. The glass got broken out of the middle while it was being cleaned, making quite a spectacular sound which all of us except the nimble-fingered perpetrator heard from the other room. My specific fridge model is Maytag MSD2754GRW. The part number for the shelf is 61004024. This is one of the “beverage spill” shelves, common to both Maytag and Whirlpool 27 cubic foot models. I suppose it could be found on other size models, but that seems unlikely. Anyone got the right kind of Maytag or Whirlpool fridge that they don’t need, with an intact shelf I could have or buy for SUPER cheap?

We are nearing the end of another year, and I won’t have to go into work for the rest of the decade. It seems only moments ago that everyone I know was sitting at work waiting for the new century and with it the flood of Y2K problems that never came. Was that really ten years ago? I can come up with another scary number describing how long it’s been since high school, which also represents the end of an era. We were the last group to ever graduate from South High.

There have been a number of doors opening even as these doors close. My eldest child has gotten her first job, an externship for the Pharmacy Tech college course she is taking through her high school. She graduates next spring. The next younger child is making good use of her learner’s permit, and will probably be ready for the real thing in a few months when that birthday comes around. I hope my wallet can keep up. Her twin sister recently extracted DNA from split peas in her Biology class. The older boy played his trumpet in a Christmas concert and did very well. The youngest is, little by little, starting to get involved in managing his diabetes. All of the kids are very intelligent and learning well.

This time of year is rich with milestones for us. Earlier in the month, one of the boys had his 14th birthday. Tonight, we visit family for Christmas Eve dinner. Tomorrow, the kids open their presents and we have a few friends and family over for Christmas dinner. My nine year wedding anniversary and 40th birthday are also coming in the next couple of weeks.

I love and appreciate my family. I don’t tell them this often enough, and what I do tell them probably gets lost in my grumpy outer shell. I’ve got five kids that are really a pretty good bunch. I can’t say enough about Kathy, who keeps the house functioning despite a continuous battle with her own body. Thank you, everyone.

For various reasons, the birthday party plan I had for New Years eve is not going to work out. This is the way things usually work out for my birthday. I’m not the only one who doesn’t get a proper celebration, though. Kathy’s birthday usually comes while we are at a campground, because it is in the middle of July, which is the ideal time to take school-age children on an extended camping trip.

What we have decided to do is split the difference and have what we

I would like to have a birthday party. On December 30th, I reach forty years outside the womb. Would I get any response to having a combo birthday/new years eve party on the 31st? I’m thinking of a pot luck sort of arrangement. I don’t necessarily want to tell people what to bring, but I would like to coordinate it so… we know what will be there and can be ready to fill any gaps.

Comment here or send me a direct message so I can figure out whether this is worth doing.

From Smiths at 8th and 9th:

• The respect of influential people will soon be yours

Earlier this evening I was having trouble with USB. All USB devices stopped working, so I could only access the computer via remote desktop. This has happened before, but the usual fix (shut down the computer, unplug it, wait 30 seconds for all power to drain) didn’t work. So then I got back in via remote desktop and removed all USB devices from device manager. That resulted in total failure – they were detected as “unknown device” instead.

After a few hours of struggling with system restore and the Intel driver update and getting nowhere, I finally broke down and ran the Windows XP setup that I had long ago copied off the CD and slipstreamed with Service Pack 3.

That worked, but then I couldn’t get Windows Update to work. I had to uninstall IE8, reboot, and now it is just finishing up the 57 updates that it required once IE7 was working.

Microsoft is not my friend at the moment.