Nothing funny about feldspar » Ack!

In which I realize that I am not as organized as I flatter myself to be.

Orthoclase — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:18:22 +0000

It’s tax time again, and I’m even further behind than normal. I have no idea how to file taxes for my mom and dad who both had 2006 income. I haven’t started gathering up the papers for Plagioclase’s mom’s return. I don’t even know where to look for the papers to file our return.

Looks like there are some extensions in our future, but I hate doing that, because you have to do your return anyway to figure out how much you should have paid in to pay it in when it’s due in April. The extension is for time to file, not time to pay.

And it’s sunny out, and I’m out of clean clothes so I’ll be stuck in the basement. But at least I can put off the taxes for a couple more hours…

Somebody’s been eavesdropping on us!

Orthoclase — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 13:17:57 +0000

Today’s Real Life Adventure.

Where’s the outrage?

Orthoclase — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 16:00:21 +0000

A story found at the very bottom of the Google US news:

Los Angeles officials announced criminal and civil charges on Thursday against a hospital accused of dumping an elderly homeless woman in a gown and slippers in a rundown section of the city’s downtown.

I am speechless — I would have never read this story if I hadn’t been bored and clicking links in Google News. Why isn’t this story more important than concrete?

My week, the shorter version

Orthoclase — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 23:46:15 +0000

Monday: Go to doctor with mom — she has a blood drawn, we drive three hours to our house.
Tuesday: 10am urgent call from the doctor’s office. Weird lab results — go to the hospital in Columbus, there’s a room.
Wednesday: Need to adjust medicines to drop blood pressure — kidneys showing signs of decreased function. Oops — too much cardizem.
Thursday: Now that’s out of her system, she’s just getting her meds adjusted, should be out of here in a couple of days.
Friday: call at 7:45am — your mom’s having difficulties verbalizing, and some weakness in the right side. Get to the hospital. She’s just about to get an angiogram to pinpoint/repair the clot. Mechanical removal? Not as effective as drugs and difficult to do well. Chemical removal? Risky, since she was given heparin for a suspect EKG, but it’s been a few hours so it should be out of her system. After the (chemical) procedure, she’s in ICU. Ventilator ’cause they’re not sure her brain will make her throat work properly, and she’s been short of breath and so might have a pulmonary embolism. We won’t know what’s affected for several days at least.
Saturday: Short visit… waiting, waiting. She’s able to move her right arm and leg now, and her eyes track together (which she wasn’t doing yesterday). But she doesn’t seem to hear/pay attention to people talking to her. She looks scared. And so so small.

How many times do I have to say “I’m old” before I’m old?

Orthoclase — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:10:03 +0000

I have reached “old.” I’ve said it often enough: “Kids these days!” and “I’m getting too old for this!” and “Remember when that was a …?” But now I realize that I truly am getting to the point where learning new stuff isn’t so easy anymore.

For years I never needed a text processor — at work we used (ugh) WordPerfect (and then later Word) for reports. When I started blogging I needed to use a text editor so I wouldn’t get the extra crap from Word. We already had BBEdit, so I started typing with that. Then I started doing some more sophisticated text editing, and really came to rely on some BBEdit features (like word wrap and Find All).

Then along came TextMate, and its code folding¹. I really like this feature — get finished stuff out of the way. And the screencast where they show making an HTML-syntax list with only one set of keystrokes, well, I was panting to try it.

And so I did. For 30 days. Then I deleted my plist and tried it for another 30 days. And I just can’t make it go. I can’t remember keystrokes. I can’t replicate the movements on the screencasts (except by accident, and then I can’t recall what I did). I searched the snippets and the bundles and all the other bits I could think of, and I can’t word wrap or Find All.

In the meantime, BBEdit has updated to allow for code folding — but in the process they broke some other things that I rely on, like prefix/suffix lines… and my AppleScripts all fail now. But the code folding! Oh how I love it. It makes doing HTML so much easier.

I’m really sad that I can’t make TextMate work. Plagioclase loves it (when he uses a text editor at all) and bought it. I’m about out of demo time for the new BBEdit, and I’m not sure I want to pay to upgrade since it is really broken for some things I use frequently (and yes, I reported bugs, but got no response).

So I’ve got a dilemma. Do I become the old dog learning new tricks? Or do I stay in my ratty old slippers, that are comfortable but not entirely useful?²

I tried SubEthaEdit and it wasn’t doing it for me, even though other people doing similar text editing like it well enough
What kind of metaphors are these?! They’re not exactly comparable, are they? Oh well. I never said I did well in English comp.