Month: October 2007

I’ve been having trouble with my right leg for several weeks now. It started with the foot and has ended in the knee.
Having nursed it for the last couple of days with ace bandages and a cane, I thought I was over the worst of it until the knee “snapped” again this morning.
My doctor wrote a prescription for physical therapy, but there must be a lot of people with soft tissue problems, because it’s extremely difficult to get an appointment.
Guess that’s what happens when you live in a county with the highest percentage of “seniors” in the state.

RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby.
REST is nothing new, it’s been around for at least five years, but it’s getting a lot of play right now, maybe because some of the big players like Google are deprecating their SOAP services.
For a readable explanation of REST as a web services architecture, see this .ppt presentation at xfront.com by Roger L. Costello and Timothy D. Kehoe: http://www.xfront.com/REST-full.ppt.

The fall cleanup made it to the transfer station today, but it took three trips.
On the last of these, Peter loaded and then unloaded nine boxes of books, about half of the library which I’ve been stupidly transporting all these years. This included a massive set of the Encyclopedia Britannica – Peter says you can buy the digital version now for only $70 – and some outdated computer books.
I was able to either recycle or donate most of it, thanks to a new service that reuses CDs and the old reliable services that recycle books, plastics, paper, metal, glass, cardboard and chipboard.
I’m still nursing my leg, so took the rest of the day pretty easy. Earlier this evening, I cooked a small pork loin, mashed potatoes and homemade applesauce with cranberries and maple syrup, enough for at least three meals.
I picked up the cranberries yesterday at Makepeace’s annual festival, which was a lot of fun and educational as well.
Today was cool and cloudy, a nice contrast to yesterday which was a little too warm for October.

articles I’ve seen on ASP.NET internals: http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/iis/ASPNETInternalsIISAndTheProcessModel.aspx

I’ve been cleaning out a closet for the last couple of days, and even though very little has actually made it to the transfer station, am starting to see progress.
I’m about on track with the 80/20 rule: 75% of the “stuff” is sorted, and most of this is recyclable or donate-able, like shoes and clothes, some in very good shape.
I’ve even found a couple of things that I can use, like a pottery wind chime and a travel alarm clock.
I don’t usually like making trips down memory lane, but this one has been painless, at least psychically: I’ve had only one good leg to work with.
The intimidating part of this exercise, though, is that it’s taking a while just to clean out one closet. I’ll eventually have to do the same to the entire house, plus about half the basement.
It is a consolation that closets are the worst because they’re the places for stuffing clutter.

The spin-off from Geico’s clever Caveman commercials was, as predicted, a train wreck (or car wreck).

Continue reading Truly Random Thoughts

I’ve been a Shelley Powers fan for years.
This, from her essay for O’Reilly’s Women in Technology series:
I’ve long felt that the IT field is one of the few where the participants are focused on the tools, rather than the tasks. I believe that integrating IT into the engineering field as a complete and separate discipline was a huge mistake