In the dark

There are a lot of people at work still in the dark on what is happening with our re-organization. Myself included. We know the high level, but that is it. Hopefully everyone will be told soon. I had someone from another section come to me today and ask me if I was going to be their new supervisor and all I could say was, I don't know. I did see a draft of what might be possible, but that was subject to change. Per my understanding of the draft she would not be one of those reporting to me, but since it was subject to change I couldn't give her a definitive answer. I discussed the draft with my current group to give them some idea of how things might go, so if they had issues with it, they could bring them up to be discussed now. I had a staff of 5, which a few weeks ago grew by 3. The last draft I saw had me with a total of 18. Needless to say, I am staying busy, and if the draft is even close to the final outcome, I will only be busier.

Ford Service Part 10 - Something else

The squeak has not come back in my suspension, although there is what seems to be a loose kind of noise at times, for lack of a better description. Not something reproducable enough to have looked at. This time the Focus is going in as the check engine light has come on and it is acting as it did when they had to replace the exhaust sensor early on. We'll see if it is the same issue this time. Additionally, I was driving out to my father-in-laws last weekend and noticed that the cruise control is not working. It is mostly driven in town, so the cruise control is not used that often, but when you want it, it is nice to have it working. We'll see how it goes.

The pin is out.

It was week six and time to remove the pin.

As I am a standing (or maybe I should say laying down) member of the Vasovagal Club. In other words I tend to faint, not by choice, when it comes to some medical procedures, even just discussing the details can bring about some of the symptoms.

As a result of my reactions to simply talking about the procedure when getting my stitches out, my wife decided it might be good to have someting to relax me a bit. The Doctor agreed. Thus he prescribed a few Diazepam (generic Valium).



In the splint before starting the procedure.


Last time I was in the Resident asked how I did with the IV for my surgery. Once I said fine then she said I would have no problem with this. I was at physical therapy for my back last week and a lady there said she had a pin removed from her foot and it did not hurt at all.

The doctor took pushed on the end of the finger a bit where the pin sticks out and so did the resident. The doctor took the forceps and worked on getting ahold of the pin. He tried a couple of times with no luck. He asked the resident if she could feel it and she said that she did, so she tried. As she put more and more pressure on it to try to get a grip of it, I finally came up off of the table. That is when the doctor said they were going to have to numb it up and make an incision to get to it. Below is the needle with numbing medicine.


Here you see the snake bite left by the needle. It did numb up the finger and the top part of my palm as well.


The resident worked on getting it out. It took some several pulls and some twisting to finally get it out.






Below you see what has been in my finger for the past six weeks. You may be wondering how that helps keep one from bending you finger. Well the splint itself helps, but I guess shoving a thick piece of metal (surgical steel???) in through the bone in your finger gives you know choice, but to keep it straight. If they could have gotten ahold of it to begin with and pulled I might have made survived it, but you won't find me running around telling anyone that it doesn't hurt. I was going to keep it, but it was thrown into the biohazrd disposal container before I knoew it. Oh well, I got the picture.


Forceps.


Now two more weeks in the splint, followed by two weeks of only wearing it and night and my finger will be free. If it does start drooping I am suppose to call the doc.

HP Photo to Snapfish

It has been a while, but it looks like they are getting close to finalizing some thing on the Snapfish-HP Photo deal.

Ten Commandments

A hot topic in the news. I guess there was a ruling today on something similar in Texas. Now it is a big deal all of the sudden, that this monument of the Ten Commandments sits on the Capitol Grounds in Jefferson City. It has been sitting there since 1958.




Update 6-29-05: I saw a picture of the Ten Commandments Monument on the Capitol Grounds in Texas on the news yesterday. It was from a distance, so I couldn't see the detail, but it looked like the exact same monument that is on the Missouri Capitol grounds.

Jeep

Jeep

Jeep Commander

It is kind of funny that the new Jeep Commander has some of the look of the old Jeep Cherokee sold in the United States only larger.

I understand that the Jeep Liberty sold here in the United States is referred to as the Jeep Cherokee in other countries. I read on one of the automotive blogs that for 2006 the Jeep Liberty Renegade Edition will have different sheetmetal than the other Liberty models. It stated that those that have been wanting a four door Wrangler may be pleased with the look of the new Renegade. I tried to find pictures, but have yet to see any. I am picturing a body similar to the that of the Jeep Dakar from the car show circuit about five years ago. I guess time will tell.

Photoblog charts

It is also interesting to look at the time zone and language charts for my photoblog in relation to my main blog.

Granted I don't have a lot of traffic at either, but my main blog does seem to garner more than the photo blog for some reason.

Time Zone Chart

I also find the Time Zone chart interesting.

Language Detection

It is kind of interesting to see the Language Tracking now that Sitemeter has it working. All along it has simply said English.

Finger progress

The finger is doing much better. I didn't get a picture of it between getting my stiches out and now. The scabbing didn't look real good, but since it has healed more it looks pretty good. There is a bump inside the green circle. The doctor said it could take up to a year for it to go away.




A side view. Looking closely at it yo can tell where the stiches had been.





The H shows the pattern of where the stiches had been. The pin comes out a week from today.

Gwen Stefani Camera?

I have got to have one of these. NOT!

Hey Baby, Hey Baby, Hey, what is up with HP?

Cheap Prints

If you ask me that price doesn't sound to bad.

I was a bit surprised though when I went to their site and it said 12 cent prints.

Paint.net

I have mentioned it before, but I will mention it again. Paint.net is pretty cool for the price. Yes, it is free. you do need to have .NET Framework 1.1 and XP, but I have XP now, so not a problem. Maybe I'll stop griping about all of the programs that require XP to run now.


If you forget the address to the site to download, not only can you follow the link from this post, but if you pop it into Google, don't forget the quotes or it will think you are looking for the url paint.net.

Mail Account Size

Ugh. I keep getting the old "Your mailbox is over its size limit" messages lately. I am luckier than some, my limit is set at 50mb. Now considering that I have some stuff dating back to 2000, I think I have done pretty well. Being in the Technical/Development environment there are a fair amount of attachments to deal with. If not needed for long I'll simply delete when no longer needed or possibly copy the attachment off to a folder, but if I need to keep the e-mail and it has a file attached, I want to keep them together rather than move it off and try to match them up later. Some people move there stuff to a .pst file. Of course, if they simply do this to the hard drive, it is bye bye files if they forget when getting a new machine or have a hard drive crash. If they think about that scenario and put it to a network drive then one has simply moved the storage to anoher location on the network. I don't agree with that philosophy. If you are simply moving the storage from one location to another on the network, why not leave it where it is and simply allow for more storage. I imagine this issue will be revisited with new management. My free Gmail account which has mail that is much more trivial compared to what I have at work has a 2,321MB limit and yet I am limited to 50MB at work. I imagine there are a lot of people that could use the reverse of that or at least a more evenly distributed limit between the two. Oh well.

IntelliPRINT

If you work in the Notes world you are probably more familar with the IntelliPRINT name, than that of the company it comes from, Cybernet Software Group. The product group has now spun off into it's own company under Cybernet Software Group. The name of the new company; Synaptris.

Missouri Digital Govrnment Summit

The 3rd Missouri Digital Govrnment Summit was held today at the Capitol Plaza Hotel. The past couple of years the previous Governor was invited to speak, but never accepted the invitation. That was not the case for the new Governor. He came and spoke to the IT crowd. He expressed the need to utilize Information Technology to better serve the State and its citizens and basically said to accept the CIO's words as his own, as the CIO has his full backing.

Reorg

Our Departmental reorg has been announced as well as our IT reorg, but only high level details have been shared at this time. We had three divisions, Taxation, Administration, and Motor Vehicle and Driver License. IT was spread across all three. The IT reorg is about consolidation within our Department to ready us for the larger statewide consolidation that most agencies were a part of this year. We will be rolled into it next year. The Department still has three divisions, but they will be Legal, Fiscal, and Customer Service. IT falls within the last one.

Let alone some of the big stuff, there are a lot of little things based upon the setup of the org, from distributions lists, the Intranet, to many internal applications. It should keep my team (pc developers and since a couple of weeks ago, the web team) busy.

Advancements in Technology

I walked by a couple of programmers with paper all over a desktop and a couple of tape dispensers. They were taping all of these pages together end to end. The wonder of the advancements in technology that they have been provided with. You know, the handy network laser printer, yet what one of them would probably give for an old dot matrix printer with some continuous feed paper at this moment in time.

I did mention to them that there is a plotter back in one section that would allow them to fit what they wanted on one continous sheet. As they will have to print this again in the future, they stated they would look into it.

A bit more space on the old computer. Yeah.

Ugh!

I have been reading enough contract stuff that I have not had time to do any blog reading.

Out of Office Reply

I received this out of office reply from someone I work with. He is a pretty funny and a nice guy. I thought it was good enough that I had to share. (I have blanked out names and numbers to protect the innocent.)

I will be out of the office until Tuesday June 14 pursuing my lifelong dream of becoming a competitive synchronized swimmer. If you need help during business hours, please call at xxx-xxxx. If after business hours please call xxx-xxxx.

If you'd like more information on synchronized swimming please visit this site: http://www.usasynchro.org/

Don't Panic

Of course, I had to send another note once I received the out of office response:

And I was going to bring your nose plug back that I borrowed for the competition last weekend. I hope this finds that you did not drown without it.

Back

Here is the x-ray of my back. I believe the area causing problems is in the red circle and more specifically in the green circle where the bones are out of alignment a bit causing the bulging disk, but I'm no doctor. At physical therapy last night he said that he was going to try and help relieve some of the pain with stim (I am guessing simply stands for stimulation). Basically putting four patches on my back and I am guessing it is stimulating (okay lets use the real word - shocking) your muscles. The amount cycles from weak to strong and back. At the same time he put a cold pack on my back. He said to pay attention to it last night and when I go in Friday let him know if that helped with the pain. Yes, it definitely helped, increase the pain. Ugh. I don't want to do that again.

Stitches

I get my stiches out this afternoon. I really don't care about the stitches, they don't bother me. I really just want to get the stupid pin out.

I'll try to get a stitchless pic posted at some point.

Suggestion - LifeDrive + Treo 650 = Cool

Have you seen the new LifeDrive from palmOne. 4GB hard drive! Okay PalmOne, listen up. Combine the LifeDrive with the Treo 650 phone capabilities and then send me one.

Posts are going slow.

Posts are really going slow, but it has nothing to do with the technology, it has to do with me finding the time to post. I am defintely staying busy with added employees and in addition serving on an evaluation committee which they want completed in time to award a contract and order from it this fiscal year.

Interesting times

Things are staying interesting. I am in one of the two agencies that did not fall under the statewide IT consolidation this year, while 14 others did. We will fall into the statewide IT consolidation in FY07 (7/1/06). Although we may have a year, IT in our agency is being reorganized to help facilitate a smooth transition in a year. To top it off, the whole Department is reorganizing as well. We have seen where IT fits in the whole new org chart, but the IT org chart has yet to be completed. It is expected that the structure for it will be put in place on 7/1/05, so we could be in for very little change, or we could end up seeing a lot of change. Right now it is still up in the air. The beginning of this week I had an additional group assigned to me. I guess that makes me fill a bit better about my position not being eliminated, yet within a few weeks I could have a totally different group of people and/or I guess the possibility exists I could simply become one in a group. Only time will tell.

Today I am off to try to pursue getting some MSDN Universal Subscriptions. I have been trying to get this done for the past year or so, but the prior administration simply kept telling me there wasn't any money to do so. Now would be the time as the price will only be going up with the introduction (probably October timeframe) of Visual Studio Team Edition with MSDN Premium Subscriptions. Depending on the version, etc.. one buys now they can be grandfathered into the new licensing at certain levels, etc..