Enemy of Entropy

That’s It. I’ve joined the cult.

16 November 2009, 3:43 am. Comments. Filed under Family.
thats-it-ive-joined-the-cult
Cur­rent Mood: busy

Of the iTouch, that is.

It started rel­a­tively inno­cently. I got my first iPod this sum­mer, finally giv­ing up the wee lit­tle mp3 player that has served me fairly well for years. That and an older Palm PDA were all I needed, right? I mean, I’m not the pod­cast nut, and I’m at home most of the time any­way, so I’ve got all the music I could want at my fin­ger­tips any­time I want it.

I finally admit­ted that I’d out­grown those solu­tions and per­mit­ted an iPod clas­sic into my life. I was shocked when I real­ized just how much music would fit into 120gb, believe you me! Then I got some­what obses­sive about get­ting every­thing tagged prop­erly. And adding cov­ers. I’m try­ing, very, very hard, really, to resist the feel­ing that all the albums should be com­plete and all the songs should have lyrics. They don’t all have to be per­fect. Right?1

I refused Sam’s sug­es­tion of an iTouch at the time. Nope. Didn’t need one. No way, no how. Couldn’t imag­ine it. The Palm T|X I’d inher­ited from him was more than suf­fi­cient, thank you. Con­tacts, cal­en­dar, med­ical infor­ma­tion for all of us, first aid ref­er­ence, an entire library of books, Pocket Quicken, Bejew­eled, Glyph, Mahjongg, migraine and mood track­ers, WWCalc, Doc­u­ments to Go, jour­nal, ear train­ing coach, pho­tos — yep, got it all, thanks. The PDA had occa­sional con­nec­tion foibles, and Pal­mOS absolutely will not sup­port WPA2, so I can only con­nect via Blue­tooth on one of our PCs (I’m not self­ish enough to demand that the wire­less router be left unse­cured so that I can play with my PDA!). But I was home pretty much 24/​7, so it still wasn’t that big a deal.

I res­olutely avoided even touch­ing Sam’s pre­cious, partly because he wanted me to fall in love with it so much. He praised it. He waxed enthu­si­as­tic. He got more effi­cient because of sweet lit­tle things like Gro­cery Gad­get.

I have to say I’ve been very, very glad of the iPod over the last week, as the power sup­ply on my desk­top died, and with­out the iPod I wouldn’t have access to most of my favorite music! We had to ship the power sup­ply back to the man­u­fac­turer to get it replaced, and are still wait­ing for the new one, so I’m using the lap­top for now. I adore my lap­top, but that’s not where I store the music most of the time. The iPod has saved my sanity.

Any­way, things have changed a bit from this sum­mer to now. I’m out and about more, going to sev­eral appoint­ments a week. That’s partly thanks to hav­ing a newer, more reli­able car, and partly thanks to hav­ing a sweet lit­tle scooter that greatly improves my mobil­ity. In any case, I’m not at home as much, so hav­ing reli­able infor­ma­tion at my fin­ger­tips is more impor­tant than ever — as is portable music to block out the noises of the world around me while in all those wait­ing rooms.

And the PDA is get­ting more and more annoy­ing. Airset, the ser­vice we’ve used for the past few years to share fam­ily infor­ma­tion, has got­ten really annoy­ing recently and just will not put con­tacts into the address book I spec­ify when I syn­chro­nize. I end up with mul­ti­ple copies of them in my per­sonal address book with dif­fer­ent tags, and none in the shared address book, so Sam and Katie can’t get to the infor­ma­tion when they need to do so. I got fed up enough this week that we started up the lat­est round of the quest for work­ing, afford­able fam­ily group­ware. And hon­estly, being on more than one plat­form just makes that more com­plex than it needs to be.

So as of tonight, I’m the owner of an iTouch. It’s syn­chro­niz­ing now. It won’t have every­thing I’ve come to expect on the PDA — for instance, Read­er­Ware doesn’t run on that plat­form, but there is a sug­gested workaround for it. It has some things I couldn’t get on the Pal­mOS, like the new offi­cial Weight Watch­ers appli­ca­tion, and Gro­cery Gad­get, Pan­dora, etc. I haven’t found any­thing that comes any­where close to the func­tion­al­ity of Health­Files Plus, unfor­tu­nately. There are iTouch/​iPhone apps which might come close, but there isn’t a com­pan­ion desk­top appli­ca­tion for any of the ones I’ve seen, and there’s sim­ply no way I’m going to sit down and enter all of my and Katie’s med­ical infor­ma­tion and his­tory into any portable device!

So speak to me, oh fel­low cultists. What are your favorite appli­ca­tions? (I’m not one for games so much, except the puz­zle sort, hon­estly, although I did grab some of the free ones.) And while we’re at it, how do you and your spouse/​partner/​kids keep your cal­en­dars and shared con­tact infor­ma­tion syn­chro­nized? How do you han­dle tasks and lists? Or are you back­ing away very, very slowly from the con­trol freaks who would even con­sider fam­ily groupware?

I know what my fam­ily did when I was grow­ing up, and what (I think) my par­ents still do. Mom kept a cal­en­dar on the kitchen wall, and some things went on it, and some things were for­got­ten. Peo­ple made appoint­ments while away from the house and if they con­flicted with some­thing already on the cal­en­dar, there was a big to-​​do with mak­ing calls and chang­ing them. Num­bers and addresses were scrib­bled in a book that was kept in the microwave cab­i­net, or on pieces of paper stuffed into that book, or some­times on scraps of paper stuck on the fridge with mag­nets. Or maybe they were in Daddy’s pock­ets, and he’d empty his pock­ets at the end of the day, and they’d live on his dresser for a while, and…you get the pic­ture. In any case, every­body asked Mom about how to con­tact so-​​and-​​so and what was hap­pen­ing when, and if she could find the infor­ma­tion you were in luck, and if she couldn’t you were out of it, and if it was a bad time, oh well. So Mom had to put up with peo­ple who really should have been able to look all that up them­selves bug­ging her when I’m quite sure she had plenty of other things to do. In fact, to this day, if I want to know how to reach most of the extended fam­ily, I have to call Mom! After I became the Mommy, I decided pretty early on that I didn’t want to be the keeper of a book under the microwave or any of that stuff, so I focused on set­ting up access to infor­ma­tion rather than being the source of it myself. 

1 OCD? Who, me?

Music from Defying Gravity?

12 September 2009, 8:04 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Music.
music-from-defying-gravity
Cur­rent Mood: nerdy

We’ve been watch­ing Defy­ing Grav­ity on Hulu, and enjoy­ing it. The music is one of the appeal­ing fac­tors, but I can’t find any infor­ma­tion about what songs by which per­form­ers are used in most of the episodes. TV​.com has infor­ma­tion for two of them, but not the rest. I don’t sup­pose any of you know where to find more information?

Vacation?

1 September 2009, 11:40 pm. Comments. Filed under General.
Cur­rent Mood: (pleased) pleased

Cur­rent Mood:Playful emoticon Playful

You’re pack­ing for vaca­tion. What are you most likely to for­get? What do you wish you’d packed after you get to your destination?

What was her name?

5 August 2009, 4:52 pm. Comments. Filed under Relationships.
what-was-her-name
Cur­rent Mood: (curious) curious

While I was read­ing friends’ updates at Face­book today, some­thing reminded me of a girl I knew back in high school. She went to my high school, and as far as I know she was in my grad­u­at­ing class. I didn’t meet her at school, though, and I don’t think our paths crossed there. I knew her from church. She intro­duced me to the guy who became my first hus­band (who she had dated in the recent past).

Now I’m dri­ving myself nuts, because I absolutely can­not remem­ber her name! I can see her face, plain as day. I remem­ber that she had a some­what uncom­mon last name. I think she had an older brother who had been a big deal on the foot­ball team a year or three ahead of us. Why can’t I remem­ber her name?

I’m really bad with names, hon­estly. A Face­book appli­ca­tion was ask­ing me to ver­ify 130+ peo­ple as high school class­mates, and truly, I didn’t rec­og­nize many of them at all. I didn’t remem­ber most of the peo­ple I saw at our five year reunion. After 25 years? I’m hopeless.

Maybe I should get my old year­books out and look at Face­book and the year­books at the same time. I don’t know that I’d be any bet­ter that way, either. I need con­text for most peo­ple — not just a face and a name, but also some­thing like “that guy from home­room who was always draw­ing cars in his note­books” or “that soprano who bathed in Emer­aude” or “the cute geeky drum­mer who sel­dom made eye con­tact with any­body” (okay, him I’d rec­og­nize, and I do remem­ber his name).

Our year­books aren’t the sort that listed people’s activ­i­ties with their pho­tos. You would have to search through all the activ­ity list­ings to find out who did what, which is much more annoying.

Cur­rent Music: “Bele Chere” — Mike Rayburn

An Update Instead of a Book Review!

27 July 2009, 6:25 pm. Comments. Filed under Health.
an-update-instead-of-a-book-review

Cur­rent Mood:Surprised emoticon Surprised

I looked back at my recent entries and real­ized that it’s been a really long time since I posted much of any­thing sub­stan­tive. I’m com­ing out of a long period of being nearly zom­biefied thanks to one of my med­ica­tions. I didn’t real­ize that was hap­pen­ing, as I’d been on that drug for years with­out that prob­lem. Appar­ently, the prob­lem was a com­bi­na­tion of my dosage being increased last fall and inter­ac­tion with other meds. Unfor­tu­nately, I found this out because of an irre­spon­si­ble doc­tor who refused to see me as sched­uled when I was due for refills, and wouldn’t give me refills with­out see­ing me. Crash­ing off the max­i­mum dose caused insom­nia and seizures.

Yes, seizures. Some­thing I have never expe­ri­enced before, and I really didn’t need to add yet another square to my per­sonal Symp­toms Bingo Card. I fell right out of the bed dur­ing one bad seizure last week. We have a captain’s bed designed for a water mat­tress, but have a reg­u­lar mat­tress and box springs on top, so the whole thing is much higher than most beds. I have to use a step­stool to get in and out of bed. So falling out was much more painful than falling out of most beds. Hit­ting my fore­heard on the wheel­chair and whacked my chin but good on the lapdesk didn’t help. I have no idea what I hit with my right fore­arm, but it still looks like a per­son bit me. My left arm has funky bruis­ing and a cut, both knees are bruised and car­pet burned, and my torso is also bruised and sore. Lots of fun! Now my chin is actu­ally black, mak­ing me want to wash my face every time I see a mir­ror. I’ve never been able to feel the swelling in a bruise as dis­tinctly as this one, either.

I’ve seen a new doc­tor, who switched me to a bet­ter med­ica­tion. It’s help­ing to slow down the seizures, but I’m still hav­ing some. I’m still sleep­ing a lot less than I was, which is good. What isn’t good is that I’m hav­ing trou­ble sleep­ing well, period. Hope­fully that will go away soon.

Social Secu­rity is still mess­ing around with my case and hasn’t paid out a dime yet, or sent me a Medicare card. If you ever have trou­ble with the SSA, don’t even bother try­ing to find any­one to take respon­si­bil­ity for straight­en­ing any­thing out. Just go straight to your Sen­a­tor or Representative’s office. I’d been try­ing to get a straight answer from some­body, any­body, in the whole orga­ni­za­tion for about a month with­out luck. Less than 48 hours after con­tact­ing a Senator’s office, I got a mes­sage that my file is at the Bal­ti­more pay­ment office, that they have all the infor­ma­tion they need to pay out the claim, and that we should see money very soon now.

I was really hop­ing to get the Medicare thing started in time to maybe have a pow­ered mobil­ity device before Dragon Con, which would let me go and enjoy the con for the first time in years. The last time I went, we rented a scooter, so if the money comes through before the con I sup­pose we might try that again. 

In more fun news, we fin­ished watch­ing Torch­wood: Chil­dren of Earth last night. Talk about depress­ing! Gwen and Rhys were the only ones who came out of that as heroes. And now I read that there’s going to be a fourth sea­son? Who the heck will be in it?

I’ve slowed down on read­ing books, par­tially because I can actu­ally do some other things for a change. The house is slowly improv­ing! I’m hop­ing we can even enter­tain again before long.

I haven’t been keep­ing up with most people’s Live­Jour­nals or any­thing else, so if there’s some­thing I should have seen, I’d appre­ci­ate a poke in the com­ments here.