• Life is like,

    How often has a Gallagher stand-up routine been a good metaphor for your life? You know, when life hits you with a sledge hammer and you end up splattering everyone within a thirty foot radius.

    I’m actually doing pretty fair at the moment, just thought it might be amusing to say. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about Gallagher. I wonder if he’s still working?

  • Another PC project

    Not that I need any external pressure to fool around with my PowerBook, but I was feeling it from two different directions this weekend. First there was the peer pressure. That’s right friends; peer pressure isn’t just for adolescence anymore. It’s just as relevant to a 34 year old computer nerd as it is for a 16 year old dermatologist’s patient. It seems that a friend of ours aspired to digitizing his entire music collection. Yes, many moons ago I too aspired to digitizing my music, but only a selection of my music – that portion that I actually listened to on a semi-regular basis.

    I know, it seems so naive now, but you know what they say about hindsight.

    The second, but considerably less important pressure came from our families’ general lack of space. A large CD collection takes up a lot of it, a digitized collection, not so much. Twenty hours of my live later (but who’s counting), I’m sitting in my office listening to music I haven’t bothered with in ten years. Yes, iPod. Don’t you? If you don’t you really should.

  • Too much of a good thing

    I got to work this morning and had some caffeine. I would tell you that I sat down and enjoyed a morning cup of joe, but I’d feel dishonest. We all know that coffee is just a delivery device for caffeine anyway, so,. After some morning “go” juice I was clipping away at a healthy pace, whistling while I worked. You walk through a state office building and see how many people are whistling. There’s no surer sign of mental illness. Ah, but you see, it wasn’t THAT kind of whistling. I’ve got this nagging cough, with accompanying irritated airways; a holdover from three weeks of fighting the good fight against all sorts of viral and bacterial invasions. If you must know, it’s driving me a bit batty.

    Flash back to two years ago. I was talking to a nurse at my allergist’s office about my then (as now) nagging cough. She said that some of their patients took the occasional, as needed, puff on their “rescue” inhaler. This sometimes alleviated their cold related symptoms. She didn’t recommend doing it all of the time, but she reassured me that a couple of hits wouldn’t kill me.

    Flash forward to the present. I’ve got this nagging cough that’s a real downer man. That visit to the allergist came to mind, so I decided to give it a shot.

    First off, let me bring you up to speed on “rescue” inhalers. It’s a metered aerosol spray that you suck through your mouth and into your airways. It is prescribed for people with asthma, or people like me that occasionally have undesirable reactions to allergy shots. “No Mr. Kauffman, the shots are not supposed to turn your throat into a woodwind instrument.” Your garden variety “rescue inhaler” is a stimulant that works almost instantly, absorbing into the tissues in your airways. Picture caffeine, chopped up into a fine powder, and snorting it; that’s how it feels to suck on a “rescue” inhaler. Think instant go. Now imagine that you had already taken your daily dose of caffeine, and then took a puff on that inhaler. That’s some soak your pants in gasoline, light ’em up, and get up and go!

    I just hope I don’t need any fine motor control this morning.