morning all

Hi Tall

@Jolenealaska hey jojo

Hi you. Good Morning?

can't complain

apart from a slight backache

but that is just me getting old

You?

I totally missed the VA today so I still have a broken tooth, but it occurred to me that I have another solution.

Since I get Social Security, I also have medicare.

It's a stupid thing, I've never actually used it, but...it covers dental.

So in the morning, I find me a dentist.

Preferably one who believes in saving the tooth, not ripping it out of my head.

@Jolenealaska In Alaska? Good luck!

This is how I imagine a typical Alaska dentist:

Heehee...stereotypes aside.

That's my grocer.

Have you seen that version of True Grit?

No. Space romps notwithstanding, I don't care for westerns.

Tut

You have to see it

It's brilliant

Hilarious

Ok, you're not the first to say it.

If you never stepped out of your comfort zone, how would you experience anything new?

Most of my life has been outside of my comfort zone.

And yet you refuse to watch a superb black comedy with an Oscar worthy performance from that guy from Tron

Now I am into cozy.

I get outside of my comfort zone by making Ciabatta.

I still haven't finished Serenity.

tut, tut and thrice tut

I've got it cued up right now. When I'm done I'm going to visit IMDb.

They miss me there.

But, I had the decency to mention that I was taking off!

indeed

tis very strange

the case of the missing cat man

"I don't know" "Good answer"

I went to bed 11 hours before the alarm went off and I'm still tired

@Yamikuronue too much sleep can be as bad as not enough

I don't think that's the problem

The quality of my sleep reminded me strongly of my experiences the first few days after I got my wisdom teeth removed, while I was still on the good painkillers >.>

perhaps you woke up in the middle of a sleep cycle

I've had my tea now, I'm reasonably alert but I keep yawning and my limbs feel heavy :(

Hello!

Did you ever feel you weren't getting enough air while you were sleeping?

No

I just kept waking up, being aware that I had been asleep and was awake, shifting position, and going back to sleep

At one point when falling asleep I suddenly was aware that my hand was not under the blanket, which startled me back into waking. It was pretty much like that all night.

interspersed with vivid, strange dreams

Hmm.

Could it be stress?

Or cold?

I suspect it's because I usually wake up soon after my husband gets out of bed, and he's gone for the summer

so my brain assumes it's morning all night

and that I've overslept

Aww.

That's kind of sweet, but uncomfortable.

I almost drove off the road like three times yesterday falling asleep behind the wheel >.>

pretty much climbed into bed as soon as I'd eaten

Oh, you were also very tired yesterday?

yeah

I've been tired basically for a week >.>

but yesterday was really bad so I went to bed early

And this started when your husband left?

yeah

I've simultaneously been sleeping less well and had to take on more in a day to make ends meet

Hmm.

Where is he anyway?

Internship a few states away

Ah OK.

So it could be a combination of factors?

Must be frustrating!

Set an alarm so you won't oversleep next time?

I do have an alarm. Two alarms. I never oversleep :)

Ah OK. But you slept 11 hours last night?

I would feel groggy and bleh.

yeah. I got home around 6pm, had a small nap, ate food, called my husband, and he sent me right to bed as soon as video kicked in >.> laid down around 6:45, kept waking up in between vivid dreams, and felt like I could use another 6 hours when I woke up at 5:30am with the alarm

I'm still yawning 4.5 hours later after 12oz of tea

Maybe go for 8 hours tonight?

I usually aim for 8. I just couldn't keep my eyes open

Sunday night I got to bed a little late, so it was more like... 7.5 hours?

maybe 7?

Psychological factors are often a cause for low-quality sleep.

So it could be the stress from your increased workload and absent husband?

Probably

Still, maybe see your doctor if it happens again.

A sleeping pill might help?

Last Monday, when he left, I helped out with the cooking, managed to do about 50% of the work. Tuesday, I was sore and exhausted all day

Poor Yami!

I have a doctor's appointment in a month, if I'm still exhausted by then I'll mention it

I would go sooner if things don't improve!

But they probably will!

So far it's not affecting my ability to work very much, and I do have a roommate who can help out if I need to

Ah, the ambiguous one.

Don't drive into a ditch, though!

Or another car!

:)

I'm wondering if I'm going to regret my lunch choice today... I'm walking .4 miles to a food truck gathering instead of bringing my lunch today

@Yamikuronue Exercise can be good!

They always recommend it for everything.

yes, but I'm worried my legs will be in pain all day after.

ah well, I keep ibuprofin at my desk for a reason :)

Update: The walk wasn't so bad, and the gyro I bought when I got there was worth it

fyi: kickstarter.com/projects/anova/…

^^ inexpensive sous-vide

Wow

They're looking like they'll sell out of pre-order backer rewards even

I totally want one but can't justify paying full retail price this year :(

yup

they're almost to the point where the stretch goal makes it a stainless steel base :D

I put wasabi in my girlfriend's facial mask cream and now she says she's in so much pain that she can hardly move. What should I do?

Buy lots of flowers and make up the couch? ;)

oh dude! I just looked into my sock drawer and all of my condoms are out of their packages. They smell like wasabi so I think my gf opened them, smothered them in wasabi and neatly rolled them back up thinking I wouldn't notice -_-

@Yamikuronue I think what I really have to do is stop watching Japanese game shows.

Definitely

I'd probably divorce my husband if he did that :)

Then again, he knows I have sensitive skin and can't eat spicy things so

:p I was just kidding. I wanted a good hook as my introduction to this chat room! Hi, my name is Matthew. I like bread. yum, yum, yum

@Yamikuronue Do you think if you ate something spicy you'd get spicy sweat? Maybe that would be a good Stack Exchange question.

I would not, but I don't have the Asian Flush gene, I'm just a Supertaster

I did apparently barely miss the Lactose Intolerance gene

@Matthew bread is goooooood

Asian flush, I had to look that up. Why prepend 'asian'? most people flush when circulation increases to their head.

Isn't that the-- oh, nevermind, that's the thing with alcohol isn't it? I was trying to remember what the spicy sweat thing is called

There's some gene that makes you go bright red when you have just a little bit of alcohol, it's fascinating to watch but otherwise has little correlation with ability to metabolise it

I never have enough spicy food to have any other symptom because even a little causes literal pain on my tongue so I can't eat it

:( aww, sorry Yami. Have you been able to enjoy Indian food at all? Is asking for no spiciness at a restaurant good enough?

There's mild curries and so on I can eat

but I've had to read the ingredients myself a lot of the time, people's idea of "mild" can include what is (to me) unbearably hot

like, say, anything with jalepeno

I agree! I can't even have jalapenos on a subway sandwich or a pizza, but ... strangely... I can eat my best friend's mom's spicy Indian home-cooked food.

I've found I can handle a lot more cumin than red pepper, and often sub cumin in recipes calling for pepper. It's a different kind of heat, more mellow, I find

I currently live with three people who do not eat pork so I've gone without for a few months. A former co-worker of mine has not eaten beef in a few years and thinks he may have a violent enough reaction that he'll puke if he did try eating it again.

sub cumin? I have not heard of that.

That does happen

Oh, you substitute cumin. hehe

sub as in substitute, as in removing pepper from a recipe and adding cumin instead

yeah :)

I've migrated from stack exchange and I'm currently at work coding a site in PHP so my brain is else where ;)

ah, should I have said s/(red )?pepper/cumin/ instead?

gack, now my brain wants to improve the regex... s/(crushed )?(red |jalepeno |cayenne )?(pepper|paprika)/cumin/

haha, in PHP that would be str_replace('cumin', 'jalapeno', $recipe);

Cool! You know regex.

only a little :)

I like people that are good at lots of things and Stack Exchange is a place they gravitate toward.

I think your arguments list is backwards >.> isn't that replace cumin with jalepeno?

Oops. -_- don't tell my boss.

:)

workday is almost over and I finally found my boss to tell him the news I'd been working on :) today has been productive

@Yamikuronue what news?

The TDD experiment is going well and someone asked me to consult on how long it'd take to make one of our sites cross-browser, a client finally requested moving away from IE

ooh, a guide to onions!

seriouseats.com/2014/06/…

I used to work for the City of San Diego. They are firmly entrenched in Internet Explorer. I once upgraded IE7 to IE8 on one of the machines and it broke the time card software -_- @Yamikuronue

I think most city governments are like that

Anyway, congratulations on your accomplishments and on being able to go home soon.

heck, big huge not quite gov't orgs are like that. One of our biggest clients still uses IE6...and they're um...probably one of the largest power producers in the US :(

@rfusca, your profile picture is best described as you having a 'wry' smile. Like you're having a private laugh and no one else gets the joke.

For utilities I understand sticking to older hardware and software. NASA uses a lot of super old hardware because it is more reliable and it takes a long time to test new hardware for different environment scenarios.

Our clients are generally car companies and groups of dealerships. I'm surprised one of them is moving away from IE, but I suspect it has to do with not wanting to upgrade out of XP

@Matthew yeah...they are slow moving

@Yamikuronue makes sense...almost...there is enough stuff running in XP that people don't want to rewrite that....

yeah

I guess the idea is that if the car company is going to update their web-based software to be cross-browser, and tell all the dealerships they can go cross-browser, they want their vendors to do the same

@Yamikuronue are you out of Wisconsin right now?

which would be great for us, especially if they're going to pay us extra to do it

nope

@Yamikuronue yup

I met some guy on the east coast over Steam a few weeks ago that programs the robots that manufacture parts for Honda :)

I work at one of those places you've never heard of unless you work in a dealership, we always sell things branded to our client's brands instead of our own

nice!

sadly (and happily) software dev is not a service we provide to our clients at this time...

My boss' boss, who pulled me in to consult, mentioned wanting to write up test cases and automate them as a way to verify that we're cross-browser compatible. I could have cried with joy :)

@Yamikuronue CDrs are also manufactured for multiple brands. There is also a company in Italy called Luxottica that manufacturers over 70% of the world's glasses brands.

One of the directors is throwing out things like "eh, 20 mins per page to click through it, right?" so I was glad to hear that

20 minutes to click through?!

@Matthew Oh yeah, there's a ton of things out there that's like that. Routers, for example, often branded with the cable company's logo but are big-name underneath

Not unless the primary customer market is those with parkinsons disease. and... that was a bad joke.

20 minutes of manual testing per page (per browser? he didn't specify), which is unrealistic and assumes they're going to catch everything without guidance

Oh, that's what you mean. I thought you meant he assumed it would take 20 minutes per user to click through the page to find what they came to find.

Nah. Well it might if we're on the search page and they suck at searching, but otherwise nah

We'd probably be hung by our own SLA if we served the pages that slow :)

Ta~

Toodles

@Matthew mouseketools, mouseketools, here are your mouseketools!

Lipstick?

(toodles ^)

Oh, you were playing off my 'toodles' comment.

Yeah.... I despise Disney.

I have a 2 yr old...most of what I hear right now is "want watch mouse!"

this after the 5yr old mostly aged out of clubhouse :(

Same thing happened with my friend and his son. He used the DVD as a way to keep his 2 year old occupied.

Every concept, even the lessons that the producers tried hard to spoon feed to the young audience, was lost on the kid. I really think children are attracted to children's entertainment because of the songs and colors. I do not see kids learning anything from children's entertainment.

YAY! The company that makes the wasabi peas that broke my tooth have responded to my email. It sounds like they are going to pay my dental bills!

So you didn't end up admitting to them that the tooth the peas broke was out of a schoolroom hanging skeleton's skull? @Jolenealaska :p

Did you have to send pictures or where they anxious to appease you?

They sound pretty anxious to appease.

They asked if I still have the package (I do), and they said that the insurance company will contact me directly.

They're also going to send me stuff, like a gift pack I suppose :)

@Jolenealaska nice

Just no wasabi peas please!

@Jolenealaska would you take sriracha ones?

hmmm, wasabi flavored sriracha...

I said in my initial email that I will sign away any right to sue if they'll pay the dental bills. That seemed to do the trick.

It's a big company, they can afford my dental bills. I like the idea of sriracha peas, but the ones I've had have been too sweet.

That was also reasonable.

I love soy/wasabi almonds. I wish I got those instead of these peas.

@Jolenealaska those are really good, I should get some of those

I need a new desk snack

They're addictive!

but... what if we find out in a few years that wasabi peas cause a mutation in humans that cause us to perpetually crave high fives? 0_0

Then you can't sue anymore. You already waved that right.

Oh well, it's a calculated risk.

You'll be the only human stuck with an impulse to high five, a super red palm, and no $500 settlement check.

searches desk drawers...wow I have an old bag of wasabi peas here...

eats wasabi peas

they're sadly expired though and don't have much punch :(

Mine have enough "punch" for both of us :)

@Jolenealaska are you going to look into the gift horse's mouth or what?

Now the trick is to find a dentist who will bill me.

I find it terrible that there are societies on earth where your best course of action is to saddle the (in my view innocent) producer of the peas with your dental bills, and it is the company's best course of action to pay them.

I don't blame you for doing it, I would probably do it too in your situation. I just wish it could be some other way.

Yes, it is a sorry state of affairs.

And why wouldn't the dentist bill you?

Most require payment up front.

Maybe if you can show them the company's insurance firm's paperwork, they will agree because they know the insurance is certain to have the money?

One of the few dentists in town that accepts medicaid is having their office manager call me back.

I'm still waiting on the insurance company, so it's not a completely done deal yet. They may yet refuse, but the person at Roland seems to think they will pay the bill.

Sometimes dentists can be very reasonable. 5-6 years ago, my then-boyfriend had a nasty dental problem, but he was longterm unemployed and the insurance would only pay for him to have metal fillings, the ones with mercury. The dentist told him the price for plastic ones and agreed on a payment in multiple rates afterwards. There was never talk of upfront payment, he'd just have sent a bill if my boyfriend hadn't told first he can't afford it at once.

Medicaid will pay some portion of it, I don't know how much.

I think here there are too many that just won't pay. So dentists that will bill are rare.

@Jolenealaska Are dental bills also less covered than medical bills in the USA? Here, most procedures at a physician's (even at a specialist) are covered without copayments, but dental coverage is quite limited.

@Jolenealaska Yes, I imagine this has to do with attitudes.

Yes, dental insurance is different, and medicare doesn't cover dental at all.

Germany is one of the rare countries where people really pay debts in general, I believe.

Two weeks ago, I was at a career building event. One of the speakers was a freelancer. He said that in Spain or Italy, he always requires part of the money up front, and that he is much more lenient in Germany.

He also said that once a customer of his went bankrupt in Germany, but he still got the money from them later. Without suing or such, they felt obligated to scrape it together to pay.

Somehow, that's a part of the image Germans have to Americans, that they are responsible that way.

There is also the inequality part, of course. Your income range is much more spread, with too many people who just can't afford it.

Yes. Richest country in the world, yet medical issues can swoop down and ruin families.

At least you get veteran care, right?

Yes, not dental though.

Had I not made the rather impulsive choice to join the Army all those years ago, I'd be dead today, or my family would be bankrupt.

One never knows what impulsive choices are for, hehe :) But I thought that you get a normal life expectation with MS, "just" a bad quality of life.

It wasn't MS that almost killed me. It was a side effect of a drug used to treat it. It killed my hips, the pain was unbearable. The VA replaced both of my hips. I would not have survived much longer.

oooooh that sounds truly terrible. Was this a clinical trial? I wasn't aware that there are MS drugs with such strong side effects.

I'm happy the VA was there so you can be here with us now.

Nope. Common drug. Steroids.

SoluMedrol. #1 cause of avascular necrosis.

I can't even start to imagine what this must have felt like.

It was pretty damn bad. Thankfully, it's over. One great thing about MS compared to other chronic diseases is that it's rarely painful. I have decided that I don't like pain.

I always thought it was painful. I was more surprised to learn that it has the funny symptoms (although it is somehow logical, seeing that it is a nerve problem, that your perception will suffer), but I would have imagined it being painful.

Still, just for living on your own and moving around with MS and synthetic hips, I see you as a hero.

It can be, but not usually. I get a weird pain in my legs, but it goes away with Gapapentin, a drug I handle just fine.

:) blush

I recently read a book by an MS patient, she described painful cramps which kept her awake for weeks. And also a bouquet of other stuff, starting with the feeling of "champagne bubbles popping in her head". It was fascinating, but also totally unnerving to read, even for a healthy person.

But you at least didn't have symptoms when you were in the army, right? Or did you have to fight while suffering?

I just realized I don't even know if you ever fought a battle.

The champagne bubbles thing is really common. It happens every time I bend my neck forward. I do get leg cramps, but not terribly often.

Nope, I was diagnosed in 2002. I left the army in 1991.

Hello!

Nope, I never saw combat. I was a spook :)

Hi Cerby!

Ahh you devil!

hi Cerberus!

I think your judgement is usually fine btw.

Haha, a spook! I would have thought that one grows into this kind of job somehow (if I ever thought about it), and that it is the guys with the guns who sign up impulsively.

My friend has weird tingling sensations in his hands and legs. They thought it might be MS, but I think it turned out to be something else.

Nope, not too personal. I wouldn't hesitate to say if something makes me uncomfortable.

Or just change the subject.

Or ignore the uncomfortable question.

Right?

yep!

What have you been cooking today?

The Army doesn't get braniac recruits very often. Brainy recruits end up at NSA.

So, what did the spook job posting look like? "Come to a comfy job where you visit foreign lands! You can while your days away by listening to gossip, and get paid for it!"

lols

hi @PrestonFitzgerald

My dad was a career submariner. He replied to a newspaper ad that said, "Hiring nuclear engineers, no experience necessary"

Howdy :D

Haha, what??

Yup. A little understated, eh?

They spent $85,000 on the background investigation. They talked to my elementary school teachers!

Okay, no experience, but at least he needed diplomas, right?

Nope.

@Jolenealaska Impressive! But wise.

I mean. These days, yes.

They'll send you to school if you're the right person though.

Huh.

And if you sign your life away.

How do they determine whether you are "the right person"?

20-year career all from a random little newspaper ad. Kind of crazy, huh?

Lol. Ask Jolene.

:D

Quite!

I have a friend who works at Defence.

@Jolenealaska wow, if your government could spend that kind of money on education and medicine, you'd be living in paradise

They came to my other friend's house to ask her all sorts of private questions about said friend.

No shit.

Nah. War is our only product. Gotta keep the family business up and running.

@rumtscho Then again, perhaps our governments also spend lots of money on recruits in very sensitive fields...

I know someone whose friend works at the main spy agency.

I don't know this friend's name, though.

Who knows what they did to clear him?

@Cerberus Possibly. But still, these agencies' money doesn't flow as freely as the americans' counterparts.

@rumtscho Yes, they spend about 700% more per capita on spying than we do, I believe.

And I think 200% more on their army.

@Cerberus these 200% sound low. I thought Europe is spending much less on army in general.

Spying and counter-spying.

Per capita per year.

Not less per soldier perhaps, but we have much less soldiers overall, and also less programs for developing new military tech and the like.

@rumtscho Maybe you're right, let me look it up...

I'd like to see peace during my lifetime.

Not banking on it though

We've been in the Middle East my entire life.

I thought I should say that we have less wars too, but I think Europe has sent forces to each American war at least since Kosovo. I didn't even notice the existence of news before that, so I can't tell for earlier.

@PrestonFitzgerald Oh, are you army too?

I think Europe is about 1.5–2%.

@rumtscho But far fewer troops than they did.

Nah. Just a brat. I've worked around the military on the civilian side, but never enlisted.

And we spent far less per capita on those wars.