Got to the hotel after determining I got to the 30th street rail station a bit too late to get to Reading Terminal Market (I jones for the apple dumplings). It’s a flat fee for taxi rides to the airport from Philadelphia, so I got that fee and a receipt for the expense report.

Next: Wait 30 minutes to see about dinner, since I only had a 3-egg scramble for brunch, and am hungry.

After I stopped trying, my XBox 360 finally found (and I noticed today) my laptop, which is set up to stream music to it. This is cool because then I can take advantage of the nice built-in speakers on the TV of DOOM, as long as I keep my laptop on anyway. I copied about 40 GB of music to my laptop today from one of my external drive backups and am streaming, currently, Great Big Sea to the XBox 360/TV.

Also, movies:

• Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Now, yes, it’s my first time seeing it. After playing LEGO Star Wars, I figured I’d gleaned enough plot and didn’t have to torture myself, but it turns out that my current co-workers and friends rely rather heavily on Star Wars for metaphorical communication, so I decided to rent and watch. It’s awful. Anikin’s actor couldn’t act his way out of some old aerogel. All he does sort of well is angry and even that is pretty non-committal. About halfway through the movie I was wishing he was played by Keanu Reaves, which should let you know how bad I thought it was. Anyway, now I have the plot I can try to forget the acting. Lots of pretty CG, though.
• Stomp the Yard. Good movie. Tearjerker, and it made me nervous enough to start sweating, but it was a good flick, and the protagonist’s actor is not only good looking, but compassionate, and for me, a very sympathetic character. Anyway,  I watched it partially because I have a fascination with stepping, but didn’t know it’d be a decent movie beyond that.

I have a plug-in self-freezing ice cream maker, as many of you know.

Mostly I have overdone chocolate in ice cream. In an effort to make it very richly chocolate, I put too much solid chocolate in and then when it freezes, it freezes HARD.

I finally found and followed a balls-to-the-wall recipe to within a reasonable degree of accuracy, and I think it came out well. Out of the freezer/churner, it came out like gelato. We’ll see how it survives the actual freezer.

Wish me luck.

Even computer professionals (who should know better, in my opinion, given that in general they are also in support roles and know how frustrating it can be to have it done to you), cave to the temptation of handing over a broken system to those responsible to it with a very vague wave of the hand, a cursory description and big expectations.

So far today, I’ve dealt with one such in an escalation from our internal helpdesk (long on conveyed user complaints, short on actual useful details) and one from internally within our high-level support group (also long on complaint - i.e. “it ain’t working!” - but short on actual useful details so I can start troubleshooting).

In four more hours at the office, I wonder how many more I’ll tally up.

Saw a number of things on both Netflix streaming and just via renting from Netflix.

• Italian Job (2003, w/ Seth Green) - Netflix streaming - I liked it. I thought it was well put together and did a good job of explaining the caper and complicating things and then working out in the end.
• Italian Job (1969, w/ Michael Caine) - Netflix rental - I liked it, but not as well as the 2003 version. It was more comedic, abstract, not as apparently well-planned from the audience’s point of view, and crime didn’t pay.
• Word Wars (2004) - Netflix streaming - I haven’t gone back to finish up the last 20 minutes, but it’s a good documentary about a trainwreck between 4 Scrabble champions who all know each other. These people are various forms of incredibly neurotic. It was a stressful watch, even though a good documentary. I’d sort of like to reserve that degree of stress watching for documentaries about real human tragedy, though, not neurotic Scrabble players.
• A Galaxy Far, Far Away (2001) - Netflix rental - Good documentary about folks obsessed with the release of Star Wars Ep 1. Various whacked fans. Pith-helmet guy was genuinely frightening. I’d look over to H, watching with me, during the times when pith-helmet guy was being interviewed and her look of horrified fascination was priceless. We both agreed that especially these fans in this documentary, were far more frightening than those portrayed in the various Star Trek cons we’ve seen or seen documentaries about.
• Îlé Aiyé (1989) - Netflix rental - An interestingly produced documentary (not the conventional narrative style, mostly un-commented-on video with some picture-in-picture presentation and a very few short clips of subjects talking without filmmakers apparent). I think I learned a lot, but probably not as much as I might have with a more structured narrative, about Candomblé, and African spirit cult that has a lot of crossover, to my mind, with Vodun or Voodoo, as far as the pantheon goes.

I have also been using Netflix’s streaming to enjoy some of the early episodes of the A-Team and Knight Rider. 

As much as I mourn anyone passing, especially young, I have to say that I have no idea who this guy was.

It should be noted that despite refusing to Google him and despite watching broadcast TV in any form except glancing blows at sports bars (work happy hours, usually without audio) and at the gym (while on the occasional treadmill, usually without audio) , I now know that he was some sort of celebrity to do with Brokeback Mountain, so I’m assuming an actor, and that almost all of the folks I read in Google Reader and LiveJounral via my friends list really deeply mourn his passing.

Which is weird to me because I have no idea who the hell this guy was.

In any case, I hope he rests in peace.

My boss is fully committed to all-day meetings this week, my team lead is out on vacation, and we’re full bore, which means I am never getting a break between seeing to my own deliverables through and answering the every-15-minutes (I’m being charitable here) questions from folks who are or who see themselves as my subordinates.
I’ll be sure to let my superiors know about that dynamic when they get back.

Still thinking on the best way to convey that it’s possible to stack up questions/requests and not make the day a continual one of always-more-important interrupts. It was a Valuable Business Lesson I learned one day as a much wee-er Malcolm when my boss freaked out at me at the bank I used to work at after I interrupted him the fifth time one morning for what turned out to be really trivial crap. I’d like to convey the same lesson, but probably not in the same way. I don’t like freaking out at anyone.

Anyhow, on the home front, the router freaked out yesterday but I restarted it a couple times, poked at it and upgraded its firmware to firmware from September 2007. Not exactly indicated by the symptoms but it’s probably a good idea to upgrade it since I’m seeing problems. H mentioned that there was some electrical work in the neighborhood that could have zapped the poor thing. I’ll keep an eye on it and be ready to replace it if need be. It’s about a year and change old.

It seems to be working today. We’ll see how it goes.

VoIP is supposed to be activated today. I’ll keep tabs on that as I can. The number port was supposed to go through today.

I have WiFi access. I can keep tabs on work. I am paying attention to the ongoing meeting, which is a design and planning session, and interjecting, clarifying where needed.

We plan to leave in the early afternoon. Yesterday, leaving at 3:15 or so, we got home around 7 or 8, but there was snow and panicked drivers, and silliness.

This session is pretty good. The main architect is earning her keep, but as an MS employee, seems to have certain priorities she has to talk about. Still, I would have preferred she/the rest of the team come out to our offices, 30 miles/1 - 1.5 hours away. This is one of the things I hate about this region - the traffic/commutes.

This is largely stimulated by a blog post by Junkfood Science from today.

I’ve talked about the dangers of interpreting relative risk before. Even if the actual change in risk is 0.3 (between 99.5% and 99.8%), the relative risk can be 150%, scare the crap out of you and get you to take a foolish risk.

Below is a chart out of one of the links JFS references, which is from a Letter sent to the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2002. The authors analyzed six (at the time) current studies on statin therapies and risk reduction of total mortality among different sets of populations. (click the thumbnail for the full-sized graphic - legible but still not very large)

(From Letter to the Archives of Medicine, “Exaggerated benefit of statin treatment in the elderly?“, by Ravnskov, U, et al., July 20, 2002.)

If you apply these numbers to actual total time per individual potentially saved between statin and non-statin lifetime use, you’re actually looking at (and this is especially stupid) about 15.6 days extra life after treatment for 30 years. 30 years of taking expensive medicines with potentially very harmful side-effects for a little more than 2 weeks extra life, statistically, which means basically no guarantee for any specific individual. If you look at the chart above, you’ll actually see that some of the studies show better mortality rates for folks not on statins.

But still you get (ethical or not) medical professionals willing to testify that people, even seniors, should take (expensive, risky) statins for the rest of their lives for the sake of (no promises now!) a couple extra weeks of life. I guess it’s up to you, but I’d rather not take the statins, or pay for them, honestly.

We thought it was squeaky struts, but apparently our control arm bushings are shot. Two are split, two are worn to the point of being about to split. If control bushings fail, apparently the damage can be catastrophic.

So it’s about $250/wheel or bushing including labor. They think. I guess we’ll find out.

Looking on Google, it appears that bushing kits are about $10 - $40/wheel, so the rest must be labor. I hear the labor’s a “pain in the ass”, so I guess we’re not getting nailed too badly.

Here’s an example of bushing replacement on a jeep/dodge/chrysler/etc. Looks like they’re all made about the same way. A bushing’s a stout metal and plastic or rubber part that helps distribute load for parts of the suspension. I can see how a failure could pretty much suck for the car and the suspension.

It also looks like “total pain in the ass” is a completely reasonable descriptor for the amount of labor involved.