46 today. Don’t feel a day over 45.

…to my wife, who no doubt deserves better.

Thanks, honey!

My son is home from law school, which is terrific. He brought his laptop, which apparently has a good, or a series of good, malware programs.

The combo has it so his IE won’t go to windows update, other addresses get hijacked in the browser, and it seems to prevent Spybot Search and Destroy from launching. Likewise Adaware.

I tried running Spybot from a copy on USB, no luck. The antivirus cannot find it, let alone fix it.

Ideas?

Hmm, I’ve not seen this at work in the ED (though I have injured myself at home with similar problems, so I won’t say it doesn’t happen. 

HEALTH & SCIENCE

Ho ho woes: Wrap rage results in lacerations and bad tempers

Emergency department doctors report that thousands get medical attention annually for wounds related to packaging.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. Dec. 22, 2008.

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Images of colorfully wrapped presents under a Christmas tree are not supposed to trigger feelings of frustration and risks of possible injury. But trends in the packaging of many popular gifts have been diagnosed as the cause of this scenario — what sometimes is called "wrap rage."

The real culprit, of course, is the "clamshell" or "oyster" packaging that encases many toys, electronics and other products. These hard plastic containers have emerged as a favorite of manufacturers and retailers because they protect items during shipping and prevent theft from store shelves, while still allowing shoppers to see what they are buying. The problem for consumers, though, is that these coverings are intensely difficult to remove — often requiring tools, muscle and swearing. Sometimes the experience results in a trip to the hospital.

Get a package opener (I have one, and it works terribly well).

The Aerospace Genius (which I called him even before this) has yet another birthday today.

Many happy returns, from all of us.

On a recent visit to the eldest daughters’ family, the story: grandson (aged 8) announces he’s ‘going to be in there for a while’, and takes a lined notepad and a pen into the restroom.

Ten minutes later this came sailing out of the restroom:

Heh.  Resourceful.

A new baking stone and a new recepie. Delicious.

I have some anecdotal evidence.

My grandson is 8, and has recently joined the Boy Scouts.  He just announced an interest in ‘going hunting’ to his mom.  Mom, not being dumb temporized with ‘you can go with GruntDoc when you’re 10, but the first thing you’ll do is a snipe hunt’.

Those of you who know what that is are already smiling (those who are puzzled can ask someone or read on).  Grandson is nothing if not a problem solver, so he asked his teacher what a snipe hunt was.  Teacher replied ‘I don’t know’, which wasn’t the answer he was looking for.  (Teachers are smart, too).

He called me to ask, and I told him it was a hunting ritual to a) catch the elusive snipe and b) show your hunting partners you had the skill and stamina to be a hunter.  I appear to not be as reassuring and educational as I thought.

The other day his mom called and related that he’d gotten up extra early, started up their computer, and looked up ‘snipe hunt’ on Wikipedia.  Cat’s out of the bag, but wait: he has been going through his stuffed toys to find one to use to fool me, to prank me for planning to prank him on a snipe hunt.

Kids are getting smarter.  Really. 

(Yes, he occasionally reads this blog.  His mom has changed her startup page away from this one in order to tell this without him seeing it.  We hope.  But, he is pretty smart.)

And best wishes for many, many more.

Yes, the power is back.  Get a kleenex.  Air Force home after a 14 month deployment.

Welcome home, Airman.

17th birthdays are in that limbo; not 16, not 18, etc.

But it’s still an occasion to celebrate, as our littlest girl grows up too fast.

She’s applying to colleges.  Seems like only last year she was sleeping in a shoe box.

We’ve been thinking about a kitchen remodel in a year or five, and that got me to thinking about the one big addition we’d like to make to the kitchen appliances, a double oven.  So, always planning ahead I thought I’d go ahead and run another 220 service to the area of the ovens.

This makes more sense because the basement ceiling is all torn up (wrong description: I tore it up to fix a persistent draft due to bad construction) and that made tearing out more of the basement ceiling to get to the oven an easy decision.

I planned a route, and ably assisted by an un-named co-conspirator, down came more drywall.  Then we went to Home Depot to buy 220 wiring; we were dissuaded on discovering the wire we thought we needed had to be special ordered for the run distance we were going to need (circuitous routing of a circuit).

We came home to decide whether to order a huge amount of cable the size of my wrist, and had an idea we should have before we did in the drywall: we looked up the Amps needed for the double oven.

Guess what?  I currently have a 50 amp service.  The most I need for the biggest double oven that we could possibly need?  40 amp, exceeded by what’s installed currently.

See why she’s a saint?

For the last several days, my DSL connection has slowly been losing speed.  It’s been interesting to see it slowly slide from my normal 1200 or so downstream to about 650, and no amount of power cycling the modem will change it.

(I have a 2Wire DSL modem/wireless gateway that very conveniently shows speeds on its status page, so it’s not a subjective ‘things are getting slow’ thing, it’s an objective measure).

That doesn’t mean much to SBC/ATT; I was patiently running the Level 1 script earlier today, but balked at ‘restart your computer’: I refrained from being rude or angry, but did say that wasn’t going to happen, it was a line problem not a computer problem, and we agreed to stop there.

I find that techies at 0300 are either more knowledgeable or more likely to listen to people, so there’s now a repair scheduled after only 10 minutes on the phone, surely an AT&T record.

I’ll keep you posted.

Happy Fourth of July!

And, let’s be careful out there…