Saturday, August 19, 2006

What not to do

Ok, here's something not to do. Thursday night I was going into my spare bedroom, with the computer in it, carrying a cup of soda. For some reason I decided to switch the hand it was in, missed the pass, and managed to drop the full cup onto the floor. I did this heading for the computer, so naturally the liquid splashed toward the computer. I thought I checked it and only found dome droplets on the front and cleaned those up. WRONG! I own a Power Macintosh G5, the one with the cheese grater front. I looked at the computer this morning (Saturday) and realized that yes there was a lot of liquid that had splashed inside, so I spent most of the morning cleaning the front facing fans, the DIMM memory modules and the motherboard of dried on soda. First I cleaned it with paper towels that I applied window cleaner to, then I cleaned the window cleaner residue off with isopropyl alcohol. By some miracle (so far) the computer seems ok.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Floyd, how could you?

If you follow sports or cycling, you know what I'm talking about here. If not, you aren't interested. I have found a good detailed post on the testing of Testosterone from July 27th and its follow-up from August 1st. For now, I am going to assume the testing process was legitimate and Floyd did in fact use something. In all of that has been said about this, very few have asked "Why Testosterone?" As has been pointed out, using it for a single day's boost makes no sense. So, assuming it is true, then Floyd has been using it all along and had been masking it, possibly by boosting his levels of epitestosterone to put the ratio of the two into balance. Unfortunately, for Floyd, on the day he made his breakaway and won the stage his ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone was off. Since he won the stage he was tested, along with the wearer of the maillot jaune and three random riders. He just got unlucky the day he won the stage, but did manage to get it right the 5 or 6 days he was in yellow.

Makes perfect sense.

Right?

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Smiling on Thursday

So why was I smiling while being escorted out of the building on Thursday morning? Yes, I was just laid off, and I was smiling! The reason is pretty simple, I was tired of working nights, I have been job hunting anyway, and now I get all my accumulated vacation, a severance payment, and outplacement support. The total money works out to about 10 weeks pay which is good for me. But mostly I realized I was looking forward to sleeping nights and being up days. And for the last few days, that is what I’ve enjoyed doing. Until today, I hadn’t realized just how tired and wrung out I have been for the last few months. I setup this Blog with the intent of just occasionally commenting on goings on in the world. I haven’t posted because I simply haven’t had the enthusiasm to do it. Too bad, you missed a couple of good ones along the way. At some point I might go back to those thoughts and share them. Going forward, my one thought is ‘Floyd, how could you?”