Ryan's Musings

Cigs Out; Herbs In

2011-06-29

Smoking Update: I’m one calendar month in with no cigarettes. Still going strong. And my wife would like me to mention that she is at one calendar month + one week (as in, she’s winning).

We stopped by the local home improvement store a couple of weekends ago and picked up a few supplies to start an herb garden in the back yard. Nothing serious yet; just a few basic plants. I absolutely love the smell of basil. Nolene put some other plants in there, but I’ve no interest so long as the basil is still alive. I now eat a caprese salad three days a week.

14 days in; I can breathe!

2011-06-12

I’m not terribly active, but one of our dogs likes to run as fast as she can on her last walk of the evening, and I’m the one being dragged at the other end of the leash at least a couple of nights each week. To be clear, I’m talking down the street and back – less than a hundred yards total – and I would always be completely out of breath for 5-10 minutes after.

Now that I’m a non-smoker, a single lap accelerates my breathing for a minute, maybe two. We’ve started taking two laps. I tried three one night, but the dog gave up half-way through the third. I think my pace left her bored.

I’m going to try roller-blading with her again, but last time we tried this she attacked the roller-blades. While I was in them. Hopefully she’s lost that instinct in the last two years.

Smoke Free; Extra Angry

2011-05-30

So I’m on day #9 of quitting and I haven’t had a cigarette since around 10 AM yesterday, the 29th. In general, I’m fine. Certainly no nicotine cravings to speak of, so Chantix is doing its job. My mood is…well…a bit altered. I’m definitely much quicker to snap when annoyed, and in this regard I wasn’t terribly slow to begin with, so…

Case in point, the garage door (which we’ve had issues with for at least the last 3 months) refused to close on Saturday night. We were leaving to get to a surprise birthday party, so of course being late was not really an option. And the damn door wouldn’t close.

I completely lost it – yelling…no, SCREAMING…at the door, demanding to know WTF its problem was, why the @#$! it can’t work just ONE time, etc, etc, etc… Definitely not one of my finer moments, and I suspect Nolene was considering which hospital to call to have me committed. Of course, the door was just doing its job. The sensor had gotten bumped and, unlike our last opener which wouldn’t move at all in such a case, the new one would start closing and then quickly stop and reverse itself. Took two seconds to adjust the sensor, and pushing the button again resulted in a fully closed garage door. Crisis averted.

Crazy thing is, I was well aware of my own insanity. I was completely embarrassed by my own behavior after the fact. I’m pretty sure I recognized how ridiculous it was to get worked up while I was getting worked up, but I couldn’t doing anything about it; couldn’t stop myself from losing it.

So…in the interest of sparing my wife from having to put up with my new, more-insane-than-usual personality, tonight’s Chantix dose will be my last. Nolene managed to quit both smoking and the Chantix around day 5 or 6 and, though I realize this isn’t a contest, surely I can continue to avoid smoking without finishing the 12-week drug regimen.

Time to Quit (again)

2011-05-20

I had a small health issue about a week ago which led to a visit to my doctor, which led to a CAT scan and ultrasound, which was followed up by hearing the standard and expected “smoking is bad for you”. This time, however, the suggestion came with a new twist: the effects of smoking are no longer a “some day” concern; the damage is already apparent and will, of course, only get worse.

Nolene and I had a quick “we should quit smoking” chat between the doctor’s office and the lab where the tests were done. Listening to the review of the test results and hearing several unpleasant phrases in reference to the condition of my lungs was enough to seal the deal: it’s time to quit.

She called our doctor soon after and the prescriptions were available for us to pick-up at our pharmacy the next day. We would both start taking Chantix to help us succeed.

She started taking it this past Tuesday night; I’m taking my first pill this evening. The side effects can be quite severe, so I wanted a bit of separation between the two of us starting the drug. I’ve actually taken it before, several years ago, and found that it helped dramatically with my desire to smoke, but I couldn’t handle the nausea it induced. While I expect the same effect again, this time I will either find some way to counteract it or just deal with it. Being nauseous for several weeks will be unpleasant. Lung cancer would be far worse.

Wish us luck, and our apologies in advance for any strangeness we may exhibit for the next month or so.

The coffee table is safe...

2011-02-12

We received a DVD of photos from our wedding photographer a couple of months ago.

My wife has asked several times that I create a few copies.

At this point, I am the proud owner of not one, not two, not three, not four… [let’s jump ahead a bit…]

I’ve got 9 “coasters”. N-I-N-E.

It’s 2011. Is copying a DVD successfully too much to ask for at this point? If so, when will we have this technology down pat? 2015? 2020?

I’m going to wind up paying somebody to deal with this task. Once I’ve invested more than an hour, I’m done.

Big Visible Cruise++

2008-11-26

Inspired by Jeffrey Palermo’s recent post, I figured it was time to finish my post on our “information radiator” setup which has been in my drafts folder for about 6 months.

When we started using CruiseControl.NET for continuous integration a few years back, it didn’t take long for us to decide we needed something more visible than CCTray to let us know when a build was broken. The first solution was an Ambient Orb and a customized version of CCTray running on one developer’s machine. If the orb was green, all was well; pulsating yellow-to-orange meant a build was running; solid red meant something had gone wrong. It worked for a while, but as the team grew and we moved from one office to another, it became difficult to find a location for the orb which would allow it to be seen by everyone on the team. It was time to come up with another solution.

We were moving into a new space yet again back in May of this year when one of the devs on the team came across Big Visible Cruise. Since we work for an audio/video integration company, getting our hands on some spare LCD displays wasn’t terribly difficult, and thus the “App Dev Display Wall” was born (“App Dev” being “Applications Development”, the name of our department within the company).

The four displays are hooked up to a spare PC buried under the two desks seen in the photo above, and they are definitely visible from anywhere in the room. In the photo below, you can see that we’re currently utilizing three of the four displays, with the bottom-right running Big Visible Cruise. The bottom-left is running a web browser pointing to an internal URL which displays a few metrics for some of our production applications. The top-left is also running a web browser and is currently configured to show a count-down to the next major release we have scheduled.

We also made a few minor modifications to the source of Big Visible Cruise, adding in such things as custom sorting (by last build date/time), number of minutes/hours since the last build and some tweaks to the styling of the individual boxes to make them a little prettier. (We have not yet submitted our changes back to the BVC project, but we’re looking into doing so.)