zen.org Communal Weblog

I just got my Irish passport in the post! Whoo hoo! It has these neat security features in it…no, not drop of blood for DNA testing. My pic and signature have been digitally engraved into a hard plastic page. And then, the clear plastic coating on top of it has my pic digitally engraved into that (just seen from an angle-type), and the other side has it too. It’s really neat.

Now fingers crossed that P’s passport arrives before we leave….

Things are just…being. We did, however, get the results of P’s allergy blood tests back. Apparently, we’re doing everything right. His IgE levels for milk and egg have gone down. Not huge amounts of down, like outgrowing it, but enough to give us hope. Our avoid list is still the same. But…since we were the ones who mentioned the tomatoes thing to the doc, he didn’t test tomatoes. So we’re testing them at home today. First step: cut tomato in half (okay, first step was running up to friend’s house up the road to see if we could borrow a tomato.) Second step: rub a little of the cut side on P’s arm. Third step: give it a few minutes. If any reaction, stop there, and keep avoiding toms. If no reaction, tomorrow rub a little on his bottom lip, and see if there’s a reaction. Again, if reaction, stop. If no reaction, move on to the next day, and let him lick the tomato. (You get the drift.)

Do it slow and easy, and see where were are. I would literally KILL to get tomatoes back.

There might be reactions with wheat and potato and beef, but not enough for the doc to make us restrict those. So, with all that, we’re still in a holding pattern. But there’s a good chance that he’ll outgrow it all. Phew. Nice to know that we did the right thing.

Food allergies suck.

Although it was in April 2004, if you haven’t yet read the story “I fought the scammer… and I won.” it’s worth your time. A sysadmin at a Dublin Internet cafe snags a spammer with their laptop still hooked up.

For all you conspiracy theorists out there:
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Black Americans suspect HIV plot

…with an alarming twist towards the end.

Just discovered pocket-lint.co.uk in the UK, similar in idea to what you get at ThinkGeek in the US. Tons of stuff. Try not to think about the current exchange rate for the US $ or the Euro €.

Okay, so day 3, using patches, gotta start somewhere. Moral support accepted. Two days, 17 hours, 42 minutes and 33 seconds. 32 cigarettes not smoked, saving €10.27. Life saved: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

My father, 余艾蕾 and I have finished remodelling Rerun’s (aka zen.org‘s) room. First my father came in and put in a Pergo® floor. Second, 余艾蕾 and I repainted and put the molding back in. Then 余艾蕾 reorered the furniture a little.

The entire time Rerun was sitting in the middle of the room, all alone. I funally put my desktop back together. I would put up a picture, but the batteries to my digital camera are dead and some time in all the moving the recharger went missing. Sigh.

I’ve been drowning myself in Quicken trying to get our records up-to-date. (I looked at GnuCash a couple of years ago but there were some things it didn’t do for me to get me off of Quicken.) Everything up til now has been fine. I’m nearly done with entering and balancing stuff, with only a couple of accounts left. The first is on hold until the credit card company sends me statements that I never downloaded (and thus cannot reach, since they only let you get the last five). Oh well.

The second account is by far the most complex of all of them, and of course I let balancing slide for months on end. The result wouldn’t be that big of a deal, just some time, except for the “original statement value” number I’m supposed to see when I next reconcile the account. It says the previous statement balance was a number that has actually never existed on any statement. Hmm. Then I looked at one part of the account, and a number was way wrong—instead of something like 1,234, it was 0.007148393. A bit more than a year ago I moved from using Quicken under WinXP to using it under Linux with Wine. It’s been really strong and good, but somewhere in the move something (and perhaps it was be copying the wrong qdata.qdf file) got messed up. I can’t revert back to a previous version, since I’ve just finished entering and balancing all of the other accounts.

Now I’ve got to go back about 2-1/2 years in statements and find where the discrepancy starts.

Fuck.

FactCheck.org seems to be active again.

I emailed a question to someone about my car (getting a km/h odometer face to replace the mph one), and got a one-sentence reply from someone today. One sentence, their name, then this stuff stuck at the bottom. Kinda makes the old tradition of 4-line signatures burn in Hell:


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