That was sexy?

  My wife and I watched a program last night where one of the characters did a "sexy" dance to try and seduce another character. All I could think during it was "meh" since the person doing it really isn't that attractive. No figure, stupid pencil thin eye brows and caked in makeup. It was kind of depressing that this program used this as an example of sexy.

  Even later this same character was seduced by the main character and it just didn't work. There was no attraction there at all.

  Now we go on to my wife. Whenever I look at her I see someone with an amazing figure, someone who looks beautiful all the time without makeup, someone who I wish I could hold all the time and do naughty things to. I know what gets me going and so little that is shown on television that is intended to have that effect actually does. Then when I see my wife I know I made the right choice (not that with the way I am I really had that much success with women :| ) in the woman I wanted to be with. She is always a great sight to look at with a real sexy figure. Mmmmmm.

Long days

  Yesterday was one of those days that was too long. It started with a very busy day at work which included some more people being laid off since we need to be cash neutral to get some investment that we would like to have. That led to people who were either not working on something core to the company or were just not productive enough were let go including some guys I interviewed and we hired last year. Sucks to be them. We also got rid of our CEO since he really hasn't done anything worthwhile for the company since he has been here.

  I then got to leave work early so I could take my wife to physio. That went ok although we know have the problem of getting her doctor to prescribe more physio sessions. Then we drove over to see my wife's endocrinologist who we were supposed to see at 4pm. We were then told she would see them at 4:20. My wife went in at 4:10 and it wasn't until 5pm she came back out, very slow although not as slow as the old doctor she used to see. Overall she is doing well there but apparently is still doing too well so may be able to take less medication which is a good thing. During this I nipped over to see another doctor in another part of the building to find the cost of doing some scar revision my wife would like. That is going to be freaking $2500 for something the doctor messed up in the first place. Talk about frustrating and greedy.

  So after all this we finally got home back to town and decided bugger it and went out for some food. Mongolian bbq was scoffed although we didn't go for a second bowl since as per our usual impeccable timing a mass of people arrived after we did and the line was still huge when we finished our first bowl of food. Going there always satisfies us and lets us have whatever we want to eat. It really is a good restaurant for us eating out wise. That made things a little better before we got home to our hungry and happy to see us cats.

  Oh and one more thing. Play Draw Something if you haven't. I love playing it with my wife and don't actually play with anyone else since I don't think I could deal with some of the idiots out there my wife seems to find to play against.

Nerdery

  My wife saw a flash of my extreme nerdery last night. We were watching the last episode of Alcatraz, an interesting program that needs better main characters. As part of it since it is set in San Francisco (yeah right, that much miserable and rainy weather in SF?) they decided to do a homage to the famous car chase scene in Bullitt. They used modern day versions of the same cars and went on roughly the same route. It had a similar beginning, the same reappearing green beetle and similar suspension destroying jumps. I was commenting on it as it went along. It was at that point that my wife despaired of my knowledge of things and realised yet again she is married to someone who takes interest in stupid nerdy things.

  I've never seen it as something other than who I am and I love my wife for accepting that I am this way.

Basic mistakes

  I see a lot of people try to put together complicated technical setups to try and make some fancy complete solution for something. Whether it be here at work or some setup I see posted online or wherever. Then you see them make basic fundamental mistakes in something that means the system as a whole could never work. Yet these people claim to be technically literate. Just because you are aware of lots of technical things does not make you an expert. You really need to know why and how things go together to get them to go together properly. If you know that then you will not run in to problems. So many people just bumble along and things just happen to work through luck, not through some form of proper design or understanding. Then when things fall apart they think that something must have broken, not that there initial setup assumptions were broken in the first place.

  If more people understood the basics and less people made stupid simple mistakes my life would be so much easier. This is pretty much true for most things even though I see it more in technical areas.

  This post brought to you by an idiot at work that doesn't understand that synchronous data on a line will get errors if every piece of equipment uses a different timing source.

I missed my calling

  It seems the world is missing out on my true talent. My way of drawing a word in Draw Something is truly weird I think. Some things I can draw with ease since they are easy to convey, even if my skill at making them obvious is lacking. Then again you get the drawing I did for werewolf, a man with an arrow pointing to a wolf (bare recognisable) with a moon in the sky (ok a circle) with an arrow pointing to the man. Very clear yes? Well ok maybe I need to visualise my thought process better sometimes but the idea was there.

  So with all this my wife and I are really seeing how far our non verbal, purely symbol communication goes. So far it seems to go quite a way although we occasionally come across something that only one of us knows about and that makes it a little harder to guess the clue we are giving each other.

  Still I think I will give up this well paying career I have and go off and live the life of a poor artist. Sounds like a plan.

Silliness

  So my wife and I have joined the multitude of people playing Draw Something today. We are just doing it back and forth on our phones sitting next to each other. I think it is much more fun this way since we get to interact with each other as we sends silly pictures back and forth. There have been more than one occasion where we stare incredulous at what the other has drawn and especially me have resorted to giggles at our astounding art abilities.

  It really is fun to play something like this with someone. I play a lot of things on my own, or at least interacting with computer controlled opponents. Sometimes it is nice to do it with a real human and having them there with you is even more fun.

Good burgers

  While at physio for my wife the other day apparently her physio person and some of the others there were discussing this new burger place near us. It is known for this burger where they put 1/3 lb of cheese over the burger such that it forms a skirt around the burger and ends up all melty and crisp around it. Kind of a UFO shaped cheese ring that sticks out of the burger by a good inch from the looks of the pictures.

  I like a lot of burgers and a variety of things in them. Eggs, jalapenos, all sorts of veggies, cheese of most sorts (other than blue), sauces of most kinds. To me however this looked and sounded kind of horrible not to mention a huge increase in fat and calories for very little taste benefit. Not to mention they are charging around $8 for this and using kind of crappy meat in the actual burger (hoping to cover it up with the cheese I suspect).

  I wonder why people are so drawn to something just because it is new and are so willing to declare it as better. Some new things are but a lot of new things are not always better, just a way to get you to pay more for what you are already getting :| . Another thought on this, it is just before lunch and I'm now drooling for food. I really need to get something to eat. See you next time.

Bloody useless doctors

  It seems most doctors just have one trick up their sleeve. They try one thing to see if there is something wrong and if that comes back negative they give up. This is especially true if there is nothing obviously wrong with you other than the fact that something is not quite right. They rarely push to see what it actually is and just take the easy way out and say there is nothing wrong with you. If your body is not acting normally then there must be something wrong given the evidence presented. If someone is doing everything right yet something is still wrong then something must be causing it. Go find out what it is damn it.

  The post brought to you by my wife's lazy GP.

Female role models

  It is quite interesting to see the hype leading up to the new film "The Hunger Games" where the main protagonist is female. Compared to the past hysteria over the twilight films and it is quite obvious the difference of the two and which one is actually a better role model. Given the obvious differences and the way the females are portrayed it is also dismaying how many people view the twilight example as the way for females to be shown. That way is quite clearly a totally subservient and almost self loathing way of portraying women. The other way though shows that they can stand up for themselves and actually be the main focus of a story without it devolving in to them trying to shape themselves in to what they feel the men in their lives want. They are still a person without turning in to someone who just lives to please their man.

  My wife wants to see The Hunger Games and I agree with her. It looks like a good film. Thank god however we both have zero interest in seeing the drivel that is the twilight films. I just with there was more of the former in the world and less of the latter so that people see more of what they should aspire to or at least what people sometimes try to emulate. I don't know how much of an effect this kind of thing has but it clearly has some otherwise people wouldn't fawn over it so much.

Bug finding skills

  It seems I have some skills when it comes to finding bugs in games. I ran across the only known bug in Mass Effect 3 last night that prevents you from completing a quest. I had a similar experience in Skyrim where I ran in to several of the known quest bugs in that game, most of which have now been fixed. And don't get me started on Far Cry 2 which has several points in the game that outright prevent you from progressing any further to which the publisher's response was I "was playing the game the wrong way". Still pissed at that one since they didn't even bother to admit the bugs let alone try and fix them.

  It seems to be in games though that I only ever have this kind of skill. For all the other pieces of software I use and code I write I can never seem to just come across broken code. Other than functionality that is clearly not there but is purported to be I rarely if ever see something go wrong. Yet I look around me here at work at people using things and all sorts of stuff breaks. I don't know how they do it, am I just using everything the way it was intended to or are they simply way more unlucky than I am?

  Anyway, I just hope that my luck at finding problems with games doesn't extend in to other areas of my life like my luck at actually being reasonably healthy or still being paid to do a job (which feels kind of strange to say I've been doing for almost 18 years now). My bad luck can stay in my game playing I think.

More cats

  My wife and I had a bit of a down moment over the weekend. We were shopping and went to the pet shop to get a new cat bed since our cats seem to love a particular type that we have and we don't have enough for everybody. While in there we went to look at the cats for adoption, which is where we got Daisy and Lucy. In there we saw a couple of cats that we would liked to have brought home, one lovely siamese that was a couple of months old and another 11 week old tabby that was starved for attention. I didn't want to leave them there but we can't afford to have more cats at the moment and we don't have too much more room for them. In the end leaving there is pissed off my wife and made me sad having to leave them there.

  So I ask anyone to please adopt as many cats as you can. I know we will always have lots of cats, our 4 at the moment will be the minimum number until we get too old or poor to look after them properly. I know we could have more if we had a larger place to live and a little bit more money to give them what they need. Cats are incredibly affectionate if looked after properly, even our ones that are slightly more aloof than the other crave attention when they need it.

Horrifying

  Had a completely horrifying and traumatising experience at work this morning. I walk in to the bathroom and in to a stall and am greeted by a god almighty stink. It seems someone had used the toilet over the weekend and then not flushed. Given that these are automatic flushing toilets I don't know how they managed this. So it was a bowl full of shit (literally) that had sat there for a couple of days. I flushed it and walked back out and went to the toilet on a separate floor.

  Not a good way to start the week. I suspect even my wife who has a very bunged up nose at the moment from a cold would have been able to smell this. Some people are just slobby slobs with no regard for other people. Gah, I'm almost puking now recalling it.

Everything falls in to place

  This week turned out to be a relatively successful week in the end given the uncertainty at the beginning. There was problems at work with people breaking my feature (yeah, I'm calling it mine since I'm responsible for it), my wife was not sure her doctor was going to prescribe more physio, other appointments with doctors had yet to happen. So lets look at how it all fell out shall we?

1. My wife got more physio booked and her arm is getting great movement now.
2. The ophthalmologist  only wants to see my wife every 6 months and her eyes are not getting worse, a great thing.
3. My work project got through basic testing and will be in the full release we are putting out soon. Code will be merged in today or Monday.
4. My wife got another doctor appointment done where she will have less pain for 5 years. That can only be a good thing.
5. We got another appointment done to clear up some of the scarring my wife has from previous surgeries.
6. We had a delicious pissaladiere (which firefox thinks is a misspelled world) last night and no huge smelly farts this time :| .
7. Only bad thing this week, we both seem to have a cold or partial cold. Runny noses and/or sore throats for both of us.

  That's all for this week I think, bound to be more fun next week. Until then (or I feel like posting something on the weekend).

Don't want to know what happens

  I'm in a dilemma at the moment. I'm playing Mass Effect 3 and enjoying it and the story it is telling and finishing up (since it is the last game in a trilogy). However a lot of the gaming world is also playing it and talking about it. I frequent a few sites to do with videogames and it is hard to avoid spoilers about what happens in this game. Especially the ending which seems to have polarised a lot of people with how they handle it. I have no idea why but will probably find out when I get there.

  My problem at the moment is that in order to keep up and find out what else it going in with games I run the risk of coming across a spoiler. I do my best to avoid them but it is impossible to not see something. Do I let my enjoyment of this one game cut me off from everything else I enjoy reading about games or do I just be really careful.

  So there is my current, obviously totally important in the grand scheme of things, problem to be solved. If only everything in life was this uncomplicated.

Bloody nostrils

  Not literally thankfully but they seem to be slightly bunged up and runny right now which is really annoying. My wife is making a great steak and Guinness pie and it should smell great in the house if I could actually smell it. The only time I get a whiff is if I am within a few feet of it. There is a good side to this though, the cat litter trays around the corner are completely invisible nasally to me.

Assume the worst or lazy?

  Just got up and did a little bit of work today. Looking through things I need to deal with it looks like someone looked at a problem one of our testers had. Rather than work out why something is happening they decided there is a generic problem with a build and assumed that the build was totally broken and would never work. Never mind that 5 other people have no problems with it, just this one test engineer does.

  When I get people like that I wonder if they are a sky is falling type of person or if they are just too lazy to try and find the real root cause of the problem. More often than not they are just being lazy so that they confirm their always worst case view of the world. In other words both are true.

  Can those people please bugger off. You don't help with anything and just cause more work for everybody else who does try and work out why things aren't working.

Hello little dudes

  Just nipped out to the car to check something and it is actually raining around here. It's been dry for a while so it is nice to see some water actually falling from the sky. One thing I did notice however is there are so many little snails around on the pathways outside. We used to get them like crazy in our previous house, something about the bushes we had out front they really liked. It seems to be the same way here at work, I saw probably two dozen of them scattered around the path in the mere 30 feet or so I had to walk outside to the car. I was extra careful not to tread on them as I walked by, it would be too easy to crunch one or two underfoot.

  I suppose it is just something different about living in the US than living in the UK. In the UK you would get snails but it was generally damp enough that they always found somewhere to stay. Here though snails seem to hide away in plants and when it rains come out in to the open to revel in the wetness everywhere. It really is that rare that it is wet enough for them I suppose. Just one of those strange little differences you notice once you have gotten over noticing the really big differences between places.

Trophy unlocked

  I had a major achievement this weekend. After a good weekend away with my wife, where we actually got out and about in nature and some quieter places in California, we got back home with no worries or arguments. Now normally going away in the caravan can have problems since I'm still getting used to maneuvering it about. I've driven a far way with it now but going forwards in a general straight line is easy. The problem comes with reversing.

  Due to a bit of luck where we store the caravan had empty spots to either side of where our caravan is. So when we got back, rather than the usual back and forth on our mobile phones (which make great walkie talkie replacements) and me doing the wrong thing something miraculous happened. I pulled along the row where we park and got ready to reverse in. My wife got out and in to position to guide me in. Then since there was nobody around causing a tight gap I reversed back, got the caravan straight in the spot and went back far enough until my wife told me to stop while staying straight all the time. Basically a perfect reverse and park first time with no arguments or wrong turns. I think my wife and I both about looked in disbelief that I had done it.

  Now the only challenge is doing it again next time :| .

Holy crap health insurance

  If I did not have health insurance through my work I would now probably be bankrupt. We got the paperwork for my wife's shoulder surgery over the weekend showing the cost, copays, deductibles etc. The surgery centre which simply provided the facilities for the operation tried to charge $20000. Yeah, freaking $20k. The insurance company negotiated a "discount" of $17500. So if I had not insurance I would be charged $20k but because I do have insurance the actual cost is only $2500. What they hell? I have no idea how they get away with this. Not to mention that the insurance company can't add up, they showed the $20k being charged twice when in fact is was two billing codes for the same charge. So the total they showed was $40k since they had to list the items separately but then show the payments correctly. Talk about a dumb system. No insurance company, you did not "save" me 98%, you only saved somewhere near 60% if you take the amount we have to pay compared to the amount the insurance paid due to their "discounts". Talk about a screwed system.

Some stuff

  A few things happening at the moment, life as normal would be the best way to describe it. We have:-

1. Took Boots to the vets yesterday to get something checked out. After $666 (yes, we have a devil cat :| ) nothing was found and today he is being an angel.
2. Since we decided to go away in the caravan this weekend the clocks decided to go forward an hour. Damn you stupid time change for removing an hour from our time away.
3. After 3 hours of Mass Effect 3 I'm finally through the initial tutorial and story setup sequences and can finally start going and doing what I want to do. I wish those parts of games would go faster so you can get to the good stuff.
4. My wife made donuts last night and they came out great. Need a little bit of flavouring added maybe but great texture etc.
5. A dentist visit for cleaning went well yesterday. 40 years of good teeth and no fillings. *boast*

 Thats all for now, need to do some work :( .

My wife is the greatest

  It is well known that I really enjoy videogames. I don't hide it (not that I should really) and am proud of what I get out of them. Last night however I had an easy choice. Play games or go to bed with my wife. Going to bed won out with no struggle at all. I know I play a lot of games and spend a lot of time doing it but when it comes to my wife she comes first. I can let everything else in my life slide just as an excuse to play some games but never my wife.

  Having said that, sitting here next to my wife writing this I do have an itch to go play some Mass Effect 3 :| . (Never mind I'm meant to be working from home today....)

Soft doc shuffle

  I don't know what happened today. Three different doctors tried to move appointments around, some by days, others by literally 20 minutes. All that happened within the space of a few hours. I know things can come up and sometimes they need to move around but it gets a little silly how often it occurs. With the number of different doctors my wife sees we really get to see how much their scheduling really does downright suck sometimes. Making things happen on time can be hard but doctors more than anybody else I know move stuff around on a whim to meet their needs. Is it too hard to ask that you keep your predetermined appointments and not treat your patients as pawns to shuffle around? Just a little frustrated in this since they rarely seem to care when they do it and expect you to be able to jump through hoops to meet their timetable.

Here there and everywhere

  It is busy time at work, testing of the new release has started in earnest which means I'm doing a lot of triaging and assigning of bugs as they come in. Some I need to fix but I can farm out a lot to other people. Add on top of that I'm trying to arrange things for my wife's upcoming birthday, the visit of a friend from the UK, getting the brakes fixed on the car, making sure all is sorted for going away in the caravan this weekend, making sure all of my wife's doctor and physio appointments are running smoothly and probably some other stuff I really can't remember and at the moment it is a bit of a mad house. I don't even have time to post anything here other than a quick minute to scribble that I'm busy.

  Still, to my wife. I love you. I always have time for that.

Lovely food

  My wife is a great cook. She hasn't had much chance to do it recently due to her surgery, dietary concerns and other stuff. This weekend though she made us a meal that was downright scrummy. I wolfed it all down wanting more with a big grin on my face. How I grew up with my mothers ok at best cooking I don't know. She would feed us stuff and since we didn't really make any comments would keep giving us stuff even though there were better things out there. My wife though makes the absolute best food, its a shame I don't have anywhere near as much skill at cooking and coming up with food ideas as she does.

Yay meaningless numbers

  Ok, so this is one post too late since I only just spotted it. That last blog post is post number 500. Not bad for one little old me guy.

Why money?

  I know in a rough form why money exists but why does it have to be such a barrier to pretty much anything in life. We should have progressed to the point now where we can do away with the need for money and just let people have what they need. Yeah that could be seen as a pretty socialist point of view since you have to take in to account that some resources are limited and you need to find a way to dole those out somehow. But it still brings up the point of why do we need money in the first place. There has to be a better system in the long run that doesn't cause so much strife and conflict. A better way to let everyone live happily let alone just barely survive like some of the world does. Let people who deserve things and actually contribute to the betterment of life on earth reap the rewards of what is achieved. I know that sounds like being paid money for what you do but the concept of money as a reward barely matches actual effort. Too many people in this world get far more than they deserve for what they do and far too many people don't get enough.

  Bah, now I'm annoyed at all the rich idiots in the world who do literally nothing for what they have. Send some money the way of my wife and me can you?

Bounce bounce bounce

  I don't look forward to seeing many films, there just aren't a lot that interest me. Some of the few that did were the Lord Of The Rings films. Films where someone took something I knew to be good and made great film adaptations of them. Similarly I'm looking forward to The Hobbit films when they come out. In a similar vein I enjoy a lot of the superhero and comic book films, heck I even enjoyed Thor a film most people my wife included didn't enjoy. So when I saw this trailer yesterday I found another film I'm looking forward to for a change.

Are things better yet?

  I'm sitting here busy working at work (I know, novel concept right) and I'm wondering if I am actually managing to make things better at work for me. Has my insistence on getting to work on things I enjoy rather than the drudgery crap I have had to do actually changed anything? I know I've been given more money and stock options but are my longer term prospects improving? These things are never sudden and total, they happen over time. That makes it harder to see that it has changed properly since you end up not recalling exactly how bad it was due to the bad things slowly stopping and potentially other bad things starting. I feel like I'm just running in place sometimes with no hope of improvement. Then other times I look at what I have achieved and wonder if I can or need to do more.

  Then I could go on to the love of my life, my wife. I know I'm not perfect for her right now, there are things I can do better. I just wonder if the efforts I'm trying to make to improve things are having any effect. All I really want to do is make her happy and spend my life with her. Balancing all the things I do to make that happen gets lost in my head sometimes. There are so many things I want or need to do I sometimes forget something and it annoys me that I do so. I should be able to do most if not all of it.

  Anyway, enough pondering for now. I find it I think about these too much I lose my mind even more and end up doing nothing. I need to actually do things.