This morning, another release of OmniGraphSketcher 1.1 (this time: beta 2) was released. It's getting more full-featured with every release, and I have to say, it is fast approaching my favorite visualization tool - DataGraph.
I think OmniGraphSketcher is focused on the Keynote-style graphs, and DataGraph is focused on the scientific journal market. Still, they are getting closer, and that's great news.
This morning the Panic guys released Transmit 3.7 but rather than it being a major release, the release notes simply state:
- Fixed an encoding bug that could cause issues with both international filenames and WebDAV.
which seems a little anti-climactic, but so it goes. Still, a great app by a fine bunch of indie Mac developers.
Today I spent a good bit of the morning finishing up a few things on my first yearly review here at The Shop. One of the most disappointing things about the review was that I needed to create a development plan for the coming year. This makes sense then you're talking about a 27 year old kid - but by 47, if I'm not on the top of my game - and able to stay there, then I shouldn't be in this position. It's like asking Tiger Woods "Yo, Tiger - what are your plans for a better game next year?"
I'm not saying I'm the Tiger Woods of coding, but I also don't need to have a development plan because people are put-off by my intensity, and some are scared to approach me. While I don't see this as a wonderful asset, I have to say that the review pointed out that my skills, speed, quality of work, and communication are the best around. "Raising the bar..." and "Setting the standard..." were quotes from the review.
So yeah, I can be focused and intense, and this can put off some folks. I don't mean it to happen, but then again, it's not like it's a mystery, either. Anyway... I needed to finish up some stuff with the review. Tomorrow it'll be over, and we'll see what happens as a consequence of this with the bonus. That will be very enlightening.
Once I was done with that, I had to mess around with this web app I inherited, and once again, found how horribly built this code is. The original author decided that comments were unnecessary at the time, and subsequently was not able to help me with anything I needed to figure out. He's a nice guy... I like him, personally... but if I were his manager, I'd tell him that if he did this again, I'd have him on app support for six months. It's a disgrace.
So I had to struggle through this bad codebase trying to figure out what needed to be done, and while it was only about 3 hrs of work, it seemed like an eternity. I want to do a good job, but it's tasks like this that make me want to scream.
When I got done with that, I was able to spend a little time fiddling with Filemaker Pro 10 on the application for a friend's office that needed a few changes. Interestingly, the changes were very minor - the format of a date field, the change of a report field, the calculation of the rows in a table... pretty simple stuff. It took me no more than an hour and all the things they've been worrying about for months were fixed.
It's amazing how unimportant customer service is to some folks. The original developer was getting $80/month for this app, and they wanted a few changes. He probably could have changed them in 10 mins, but chose not to. Things kept getting nasty, and finally, he told them it's over. That's a first - the developer firing the client. But that's when they came to me.
Too bad. He's out $80/month and they get what they wanted all along. His loss.
This morning I noticed that Hulu Desktop 0.9.8.2 was out. It was only a week ago that 0.9.7.2 was released. This could be part of the build-up to the stated plans by Hulu to start charging for content in addition to the ad revenue. While I'm not against someone charging for something, it will make me delete the application as I have no interest in paying for content like Hulu when I can get all the content I want in iTunes for a price.
It's their choice, but I have a feeling this is the motivation for the quick update.
No release notes are available.
I was reading Daring Fireball this morning and the following was a posting that hit me the second I read it. It's an interview with Cormac McCarthy:
WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?
CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
I love the passion expressed in that one line. Create something so utterly fantastic that it demands of you years of life or nearly every shred of your sanity. If you're doing less, then you could be doing more. And if you can do more, then you should do more.
I can't find who said it first, but this Life is not practice for anything. Do, and be, and follow your passion. And if you have none, see if you can find someone to infuse you with some. You'll be happier for it.
Big news from the alternative browser space - Camino 2.0 has been released and is out there for all. It's not my top-flight browser choice, but you need to have a bunch of them to test all the pages you make, and this one is nicely Mac-like with the Mozilla engine behind it. It looks like it's got a new tab overview - like Safari's latest pages feature. Could be nice, sort-of like Expose for the browser. We'll see if it's really useful.
This morning I noticed that DrawIt 3.10.2 is out with a nice little update list in Sparkle:
- Slightly updated user interface in the filters stack
- You can now click an effect in the favorites to add it, instead of having to drag
- The visible and locked symbols are now displayed properly in the list
- Adds Noise and Random Noise filters
Had to upgrade, of course.
This morning I noticed that they finally had an official release of Cyberduck 3.3. This new release is Snow Leopard compatible, and 64-bit all the way. Not that I use an FTP client a lot, but this is one of the cleanest I've ever seen. It does it all.
This morning I noticed that they have released an update to Skitch, the incredible networked image tool, to 1.0b8.4 with a few improvements for Snow Leopard and extending the 'beta timeout' in the application. I'm guessing that someday they aren't going to extend the beta period, and that's when I'll need to cough up the money to purchase it. It's just that valuable to me.
This weekend has been a pretty stressful weekend. Liza hasn't been feeling well, she had to spend the night in the hospital for tests... it was really stressful. I heard someone say that being in a hospital is like entering a time warp, and I totally agree. There's nothing that happens quickly in a hospital - unless you're in real trouble, and that is a good sign, I suppose.
It started last Tuesday (11/10) when Liza told me she couldn't open her right eye all the way. It didn't sound good, but she's not one to run to medical help if there's not broken bones or bleeding. In this case, it wasn't warranted, and since there was no blurred vision, no outward signs of a stroke, no dizziness, she thought "I'm getting old". So she let it go.
Wednesday (11/11) it was getting better, she could open it more, still had a headache from the day before, and now things didn't taste right. The ice cream she had in the evening didn't taste right. I told her that tomorrow (Thurs) she was going to the doctor to get it checked out. And she did.
Thursday (11/12) her right eye could open up almost all the way. It was very hard for me to even tell there was a problem, but she could tell that the right eyelid wasn't opening up as quickly as the left. When she called the doctor and explained her symptoms, they wanted her in right away. She, of course, had a few things to do, and went in around 3:30-ish in the afternoon.
The doctor saw that the right pupil wasn't responding to light like the left one, and tried to get her into the opthamologist that afternoon. No luck there, but the next morning (Friday) was going to have to do. She tells me that he didn't look very lad back and happy after seeing the pupil dilatation difference. He even gave her a list of "bad things" to check on overnight. The worst of which was a ruptured carotid artery. Nice.
I knew I needed to go with her on Friday as it was going to mean pupil dilation, and that's no fun to drive home with. So we went. The doctor was very nice, and checked her out from top to bottom. He couldn't see any evidence of the differing pupil dilation, and in general, couldn't see anything wrong with here in the complete exam. So we left with no idea what was causing the problem.
When we got home, I started doing a little taste-testing with her. What was it in her taste that was really effected? Turns out, it was sweet and sour. They are connected, so that makes sense, but her sense of smell was totally unaffected. That was odd. We both remembered that your sense of smell is tightly coupled to your sense of taste, but I guess the reverse is not necessarily true. She could smell lemon juice, but it wasn't sour in her mouth. She could smell sweet cookies, but she couldn't even taste raw sugar on her tongue. Very odd.
The next morning, Saturday, we decided to go to the emergency room as waiting another two days for a chance to she her primary care physician didn't seem like a good idea any more.
Saturday morning we had a volleyball game to coach, and after the game we got a little lunch and then headed out to the emergency room at the local hospital. We had expected to spend the rest of the day there, but little did we know Liza wouldn't see the light of day for more than 30 hours.
We got into the emergency room, explained the story once to the nurse. She got the vitals and we started to wait. That afternoon, she got a CAT scan, and explained her story now fewer than four more times to doctors. I told her we needed to write it down before we came and then just hand out photocopies. In the end, by 4:00 pm we hadn't seen a doctor for more more than an hour, and we were convinced by their stunned silence that they had no idea what was happening.
Hey, that's OK. As long as they don't know, then it's not something like a stroke, tumor, etc. All those they'd recognize and we'd be in a lot worse shape than if we didn't know. So I took this as a good sign, and about the only thing they could do yet was an MRI. We figured, OK, that'll take an hour, let's get cookin' and get it done.
Silly me.
They had to 'admit' her, but they really didn't, we later found out. They had her as an Out Patient in-house. Very odd, but that's what they wanted to do. Still, we didn't learn this until long after, but it's interesting that they believe all these little details are "beyond" the typical patient. I say, tell me the facts, and let me decide.
Rather than get her up and going, it took several more hours of waiting, and then about 7:00 pm, she was in her room. When I returned from checking on the kids and making sure they had dinner, we found out that she wasn't going to have the MRI until the next morning. Now while some people might not mind this "mini-vacation", she and I wanted to be back at home and not sitting in some hospital room. It's not restful, no matter what you hear.
I left at 8:30 pm on Saturday to be with the kids for the night. Telling her I'd be back in the morning as early as I could.
On Sunday I arrived at about 6:45 am and she was awake and waiting on the MRI.
Finally, at 8:30, they took her to the MRI. Good. Maybe we can be out of here by noon. Sounds very reasonable. After all, this is a simple "covering the bases" test as they have no reason to believe it'll uncover anything, but OK... we go.
By 9:40 am, she's back in the room and we sit and wait for the neurologist to come in and tell us the results, and then we can leave. So we say "Noon. We'll give him to noon, and then we'll ask them to contact him."
Good plan.
So we wait.
At noon I get up and go talk to the nurses and ask if they have the ability to call the doctor and ask when he's going to come in and give us the results. Here's where my wonderful experiences with the nurses up to this point sours. They say that they can't get ahold of the doctor, and there's nothing they can do. In fact, they can't even be sure he's coming in today.
OK, I'm not an idiot, but what about some healthcare professionals thinks they can treat me like one. Do they think I'm dumb enough to think that if she goes into a seizure they will not be able to get ahold of him? Wrong. Simply silly. Of course, they can contact him... they just won't.
If it's honest, then I can deal with it. Tell me you won't, not that you can't. Then, I can say "Give me the number, and I'll call" - to which they can again say they won't (or not), and we can go from there. But the lies to save them from having to look bad or incompetent are really quite annoying when it's your health on the line.
Finally, I got a nurse that told me that if they called, the doctor would hang up on them. To which, I said "Give me the phone number", and I called him. Amazing how a little personal presence can get things moving.
He wasn't up to speed on the case, even at a different hospital (possibly), but he felt uncomfortable enough that I felt we'd gotten his attention and at 4:00 he walked in the door.
Of course, his answers were the same as we'd heard all weekend: "No idea". But the MRI was clear, and finally we got to leave. Liza finally got the prescriptions for something to kill the migraine, and that was good, but it was days late, and my poor wife had to sit in a horrible hospital bed for more than a day for an hour-long procedure and be told the same thing as the emergency room doc said.
I'm exhausted. I know she is. It's been one heck of a weekend.