today was a good day

Things are looking up slightly . . .

This coming Monday, it looks like I'll be raising toasts to the season at British embassy thanks to my good friend Farah who has wrangled me an invitation. She's kind of a force of nature when it comes to doing interesting things. Thanks Flail! I have to see if I still fit into my suit. Crap!

Second, my second "interactive" article will go up on MSNBC.com probably later today (it's like 1:00 AM now) thanks to my other good friend and all-around good person, Helen. She's awesome. Yay Helen. I'll post the direct link once it's up.

Third, I just had dinner with my buddy Stan who I got to know while I was in grad school. He's one of those friends you get so tight with that you can pick up years later without skipping a beat. His wife and daughter, who I met for the first time today are great too. I look forward to staying in touch with him better.

Working with computers makes me want to be a builder or painter.
pic by: Andreas Solberg on Flickr

And finally, the most personally relieving, but probably least interesting to the public at large . . . . I got my dev server working on my home computer, and even installed code(s) to diagram my MySQL database and let me play around with AJAX we should have on the website I'm building already.

Update 1 - job?

Where to start, where to start?

On the job front, I guess.
I'm hoping for a reasonable offer from this company I've just had a couple of interviews with. They're called hapax and their natural language processing software is off the bleeding hook - so much so, that it could probably parse this sentence and tell you that I think highly of their software. I don't know how it handles recursion, but I expect it does so well.

The short of it is that you feed the software text and it reads it and tells you things about it. Remarkable things - possibly even where it's easy to confuse the antecedents.

So, your civic Daniel-duty is to cross your fingers and hope that they offer me a job (and that the salary isn't less than what I was making two jobs ago at Consumer Reports).

I ache . . .

And not in a romantic, yearning, Yeatsian way either I'm afraid. Not even in a robust, post-athletic fashion.

No. Instead of pursuing a meaningful social-life or mastering unruly abs, I've been hunched, like some information-age Bartleby, over my monitor and keyboard trying to stay on top of this website I'm building with a couple of friends.

I'm the "project manager" - quotes heavily intended - and html/css monkey. Another friend I know from my last job is very able handling the PHP and databases. Nevertheless, I'm pooped. More than once I've thought "I'd prefer not to," mostly where it concerns error testing.

Anyway, twice recently I've had to turn down interesting, lovely requests from good friends to come visit with them and their children. If anyone reading this feels I'm ignoring them recently (rather than perennially), you've got my sincerest apologies. If you feel I've been ignoring you for longer than three weeks or so, you should call me and shout.

Flu

In addition to providing medical documentation that I'm lean and svelt, going to the doctor reminded me that it's flu-shot season.

Ever since I learned about flu-shots in my epidemiology classes, I've been fascinated by them. I think the facts are fairly cool.

Every year, flus grow in China. Why China? Because it's got the proper mixture of pigs, chickens, and humans living in proximity, and I suspect, a class of people who then get on planes and go elsewhere in the world - thus spreading the flu.

Now, every year I hear people denigrate the flu shot because "I got one last year and then I got the flu". Yes yes. The thing is, you got a flu, not The flu.

Because the other thing that happens each year is that doctors and epidemiologists and immunologists and tinkers and clowns and God-knows-who-else, all get together and try to identify the most virulent and fast-spreading strains of the flus likely to come out of China this year.

Then they put vaccinations to as many of the most dangerous and/or contagious strains as they can in a cocktail and someone else jabs that puppy in your arm and it feels like you overworked your delts yesterday and you get to whine about it all day.

Sometimes they guess wrong about which strain(s) of the flu will do the rounds of the globe, but we continue to hope and believe that they stop the next one that has its eyes on upstaging the strain that affected about 20% of the world's population in 1918 and managed to kill dead about 10-25 percent of those it infected.

So, to sum up:

• Flu isn't a single disease - it has more and less contagious or virulent strains
• The 1918 flu pandemic killed more than twice the number of people that WWI did.
• The point of the vaccine isn't to stop you getting a flu, it's to stop you getting THE flu (and incidentally, to stop you from giving it to your nearest and dearest).
• It's a good idea to get a flu shot this year.
  

Not fat

If I'm being honest, the last couple years of my life have not been the best of the bunch. I won't dwell though, because I'm English and that's not what we do.

However, good news was delivered today. It doesn't really make up for the preceding 30-ish months, but perhaps because of them, this lifted my spirits. I am back to my college weight.

The best part is that I haven't been trying to get back to any weight whatsoever, so it's like an unexpected gift.

I'm living it up in MI

I'm back in EL again to hang with Manny.

So far, I've been working on a website for a friend (hey Eric!), fighting off some cold or something I picked up by previously staying up way too late working on said website, and setting up Skype with a webcam so Manny can chat with his wife (hi Mom!), daughter (hi Janet!) and granddaughters (hi Rowan and Jael) across the Pond.

If you are reading this, use skype (or want some help learning how), and know Manny or me, drop me an email a we'll be video-conferencing toot sweet.

Also, stay tuned because my next humor/tech thing for MSNBC might go up any time and I'll post a link here when it does.

this is a funny "Web 2.0"-ish explanation

of why a web-comic I read (shut your hurtful mouth) wasn't updated this week.

It has some naughty words in it though, so don't click this link if individual words have the power to make you cry.

I call it Web 2.0, because folks like Flickr popularized the use of honest and/or humorous client-facing verbiage in modern web businesses. Also, paradigm and synergy!

http://www.freakangels.com/?p=59