Out of Cheese

I’ve now missed three days of work with this cold, which really isn’t much fun at all. I keep thinking I’m getting better, and hopefully one of these days that’ll be true. Or I’ll just magically wake up tomorrow morning and be able to breathe again. Wouldn’t that be something?

Laura and Alexei brought me dinner from BJ’s tonight. How cool is that? I didn’t feel up to eating all that much of it but I can re-heat the leftovers, and at the pace at which I’ll get through it I’ll have something other than pasta to eat until sometime on Sunday.

I don’t know if the PodBrix designs are legal — I seem to recall Arnold Schwarzenegger successfully suing someone for creating a doll with his likeness without his permission — but they’re very cool. Just as almost anything made of Lego is. (Link from Chuq.)

Somehow I’d managed to stay healthy all winter, despite things like visiting Adrienne when she was sick over Thanksgiving and seeing many friends and coworkers get sick at various times. But Tuesday morning I felt a cold coming on, and by Tuesday night I’d decided to stay home from work today. I’ll probably be home tomorrow, too.

I’ve been taking DayQuil, mainly because it’s worked reasonably well for me in the past and because really strong medicines like NyQuil worry me — I weigh a lot less than the average person, so anything strong is likely to hit me really hard. This is the first time I’ve taken the pill form of DayQuil instead of the liquid and I’m fairly happy with the results so far. It costs a lot less and tastes better (no taste at all versus that disgusting medicine-y taste that everything but Dimetapp has).

I did note the text on the packaging saying that my DayQuil pills are made in Canada. Here we keep being told that Canadian drugs are dangerous and shouldn’t be used, and yet our own FDA allows things manufactured in that cesspool of lax industrial regulation to be sold over the counter here. How dare they?

Maybe it’s due to the sneaky Canadian manufacturing techniques, but DayQuil’s actually a lot stronger for me than I’d expect. Each pair of pills lasts six hours, and about an hour after I’ve taken them I get really tired. That wears off about four or five hours into the cycle, so I’ve spent today in this odd state where I’m awake for two or three hours, then asleep for two or three hours, and so on. The liquid doesn’t do this to me. Maybe the pills are stronger? I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ll hopefully be better in time to get back to work on Friday.

I’m in Redmond this weekend for PuzzleHunt at Microsoft. If only I’d managed to get enough sleep this week to be able to be coherent for the entire weekend. Oh, well. Regardless of how long I can stay awake, I’m sure it’ll be fun.

My heat at home had been working sporadically for a week or two before it finally decided to quit working altogether earlier this week. My landlord came by this afternoon and poked at it and a couple hours and a visit from an electrician later he’s found a broken solenoid or something like that. Apparently those can’t be purchased on weekends, so I’m going to be cold till Monday. I’ll just pretend I’m in Lambeau Field when watching the Super Bowl tomorrow, I suppose.

Actually, it’s a good thing I’m in the Bay Area rather than, say, Boston. When I say it’s cold here, that means it gets down to 62 or so without the heat. If we had a sudden cold snap it’d be another story, but even if that happened I wouldn’t be able to leave my ice cream out in the living room without having it melt.

A big part of the plans behind the Rotor (aka. Shared Source CLI) project was for a community to develop around the variety of projects that were possible with the release of the code for the core of .NET. A web site went up at sscli.net and a few projects got off the ground, but the interest quickly dwindled.

Every so often I’d point people to the browsable code at sscli.net, where they could find good examples of how to implement various Win32 APIs on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. But when I went to the site a few weeks ago, it was down. It has stayed down, and I don’t have any way to know when or if it’ll come back up. I wonder if anyone other than me has noticed.

The Shared Source CLI site at Microsoft is still available, but all it includes is the tarball for the Rotor 1.0 release. That means it doesn’t have browsable code, it doesn’t have any of the side projects, and it doesn’t have things like my changes to get Rotor to build under Panther.

Maybe Microsoft will build a new version of Rotor when the next release of .NET is out. If they do, hopefully the community around that release will last a little bit longer than this one did.

I made a quick trip to Philadelphia over the weekend and realized that Southwest apparently intends to have the highest percentage of on-time flights in the industry. It’s pretty simple to do that if you always estimate arrival times that are much longer than you’d need to reach the destination.

On the way out, we were half an hour early getting into Philadelphia. On the way back to Oakland, we were an hour early. In both cases the pilot announced we’d be that early just after takeoff. I certainly don’t mind arriving early, but it sure would’ve been nice for the people picking me up at each end if the original estimates had been close.

On a semi-related note, Southwest seems to be very happy with the state of their business in Philadelphia, but I wonder how well the Oakland to Philadelphia route is doing. There were only about 30 people on each flight. I loved having a row of my own each way, but I’ll be less happy about it if it means that the direct route won’t last much longer.