Shakira’s hips may not do everything, but she certainly does something else for me…
Hey, it got a chuckle out of me in the middle of hell at work, what more can you ask from a 5ive?
Monthly Archive for July, 2006
I’ve never been a fan of Rocketboom. The idea was always interesting, but Amanda Cogdon’s personality just annoyed me to no end. She reminded me of that stupid blonde in high school that was an amateur valley girl and never understood a joke that required more than 3 IQ points. Sure she might not actually be anything like that personality-wise, but the intonation and mannerisms were all there, and that I just couldn’t handle.
Since I’ve never liked the show, I came in to the story about Amanda being “let go” from it a day late (and more than one dollar short… damn expensive booze…). Through Scoble, I saw the Techcrunch article about it, and it made me realize one of the main reasons I enjoy reading Techcrunch so much…
Michael Arrington is brutally honest and doesn’t hold back…
For example:
The funny thing is, based on what looks like really happened, she’s full of crap. Or both of them are.
How many bloggers who focus on companies like this for a living would come right out and say that they’re most likely full of crap? Not many. That’s the beauty behind Techcrunch… Arrington will review a new startup Web 2.0 company, and then talk about how useless they seem in the market.
And this is why I love reading blogs… Brutal honesty… If only more things in life were like that.
I threw together a little app to load up some rather large text files into a new SQL Server 2005 database I setup (we’re talking about 6 gigs of text). It’s now been running for 48 hours straight, reading a line at a time, building an insert statement, and passing it to the database.
When last I looked (call it 20 minutes ago), it had processed 155 million records, and was only now in the T’s in the final (and largest - about 4.5 gigs) file.
I can just barely see the light at the end of the tunnel, where I’ll get my development laptop back (foolish me ran all this in a debug session - probably also not the brightest move ever).
Hey, could be worse… It could be written in Java… 
I really wish we could afford to buy stuff like Active Directory Reports at work. Unfortunately, with just 60 people working there, we can’t drop $500 on a package that only “shows pretty graphs” (as my boss would say). The fact is, you can get that information other ways (like running around to each machine), and it’s just not worth it…
*Sigh* I can dream though, can’t I?
An Unpleasant Conversation
I had an unusually unpleasant conversation this afternoon that just entirely ruined my mood.
For just under 3 weeks now, I’ve been taking Ambien to help me sleep. Apparently you can take either a 5mg or a 10mg dose every day, so my doctor decided that it would be best to start with 5mg and see how we do (and by we I do, of course, mean me), rather than max out the dosage and have nowhere else to go. He also told me that if 5mg didn’t work out, not to worry about taking two a night if I really had to.
Well, I had to…
5mg was great, assuming I was already tired and half-way asleep when I took it. Now, you may be asking yourself why I would need medication if I were already half-way asleep at night. Well, you would be right, smart ass.
So, since I was taking 2 pills a night instead of one, I obviously went through my prescription much more quickly than anticipated. Since Ambien is a controlled substance, you can only get a prescription filled once every 30 days. Since I was still 12 days away from the 1-month mark, they wouldn’t let me get my refill Wednesday night when I tried.
Ok, now we have a problem. I’ve got a night and a half left (at 2 pills / night), and they won’t let me have anymore.
Well, fortunately the pharmacist is a really nice guy. Being quite familiar with Ambien, he knew that for someone of my body weight and age, 5mg wasn’t going to do crap (which was accurate). The regular (and recommended) prescription for those under 90 is 10mg. Being the nice guy he is, he offered to call my doctor and ask him to authorize me an increase to 10mg. It’d be a change in the medication level and a new prescription, so I’d be able to get my refill immediately.
Two days later, my physician finally calls the pharmacist back…. And says ‘no’.
So I call my doctor. His insanely hot secretary answers the phone and I ask as politely as I can if I could please speak to Dr. Stafford about one of my medications. She puts me on hold and a minute or so later, Dr. Stafford picks up. Here’s (give or take a word or phrase), the overall conversation:
Now tell me… Given what I’ve told you, was there any reason for him to be a prick about this? He told me that we could go up to 10mg if we needed to, and not to worry about taking a second pill each night if I needed it and one didn’t work. Then the pharmacist is nice and offers to call him directly to get the dosage increased when I need a refill, rather than me having to call the doctor and the doctor then having to call the pharmacist… Somewhere in all that, we decide to switch on jackass mode.
By the end of the conversation, I was one shot away from telling him to shove his 5mg somewhere and that I’d go find another regular physician who wasn’t an asshole when someone had a problem with their medication. But I was nice and simply let it play out… It did, however, have the side effect of ruining my wonderful mood and giving me an upset stomach. It’s amazing how one little conversation can cause your entire day to turn completely around, isn’t it?