Greg In The Desert

I have a feeling there will be some last minute changes that will still allow all states driver license. If not the situation could get ugly.

The Bush administration passed the law, designed to stop terrorists from entering the country, after Sept. 11, 2001. All 50 states have to comply with its regulations by Jan. 1, 2010.
Sec. Rick Homans said the clock is ticking and New Mexico is nowhere near close.
“The way it is right now, come Jan. 1st, residents of New Mexico and residents of about 25 other states wouldn’t be allowed to board airplanes unless they had a valid passport.”

This is not looking good.

Sen. Udall: Yeah. Well, as you are probably aware, the situation that we’re in now — we have health care on the floor — where if tried to move to anything else I think it would make it much more difficult procedurally. So I think if — I don’t see us getting to Pass ID on the Senate floor between now and the end of the year. So I think it would be very helpful for you to issue a statement — you might use this as an opportunity to do it — to assure people that after December 31st they will be able to travel with something other than a passport. I don’t know if you want to do that at this point but if you decline that’s fine.

Sec. Napolitano: I think I will not accept that invitation at this point in time.

On Thursday a week ago I went into work and had an large ice tea. I went to Dion’s for lunch (I am not blaming Dion’s for the following, it is very unlikely it had anything to do with them) and had a sandwich. I went home for the rest of the day and had water and some homemade soup while I worked on my house.

Friday morning I woke up about 7 am to go to the bathroom. No problems during the transaction and I went back to bed. At 8:21 am I woke up and looked at the clock and thought it was strange I was dizzy. Then I could feel I going to throw up.

I ran to the bathroom and spent about two hours at the toilet. I had no food in my stomach yet I experienced uncontrollable vomiting. I was extremely dizzy. I was sweating more liquids than I was vomiting and was freezing cold. I became disoriented.

The disorientation is hard to explain but my brains ability to tell which way is up or down was gone. It’s kind of like when a picture is turned on it’s side and it’s difficult to make out until the picture is rotated correctly.

Sometime during my marathon vomiting session I had to go to the bathroom. I managed to get myself up on the toilet and continue to vomit nothing into the tub. Crapping my pants wouldn’t have helped the situation. I am very thankful that didn’t happen.

After about two hours of what felt like a month I managed to stagger my way back to the bedroom. I was still vomiting but I had nothing to vomit so I wasn’t making a mess. It took a lot of concentration and stillness to get my vomiting to stop. Meanwhile I was still dizzy and cold. It was at this point that I considered calling an ambulance but I finally stopped vomiting and I didn’t want to start again by moving.

I managed to text a friend after a while, something about “HELP”. They brought me some crackers and electrolyte liquid. The throwing up stopped about noon on Friday and I spend the next two days eating crackers and mostly drinking water and electrolyte liquids. And sleeping.

Over the next week I had little appetite and it even seems like I forgot what hungry was. I had to force myself to eat real food. I also had body aches and headaches to suffer with.

I’m sure I had salmonella poisoning. I couldn’t be the flu since I didn’t experience a sore throat, coughing, sneezing, fever and other flu like symptoms. I could be pregnant but that seems unlikely.

I was already on the weight loss path due to lifestyle changes (as in I’m not dieting) and I can attribute at least 5 lbs of weight loss to the food poising. Although it was nice to get a boost in weight loss I absolutely cannot recommend this method.

Some more coupon codes for Smarthome. No free shipping is bad. 20% off is good! Can’t combine coupon codes is bad (as far as I can tell).

Update: Here’s a direct link to the 20% off coupon code: Hurry - Beat the Clock & Save at Smarthome! Up to 20% off entire order   3-23 to 3-31-07

Beat the Clock Sale:

• 20% off Friday 3/23- Monday 3/26/07. Use Promotion Code: EWBTC20
• 15% off Tuesday3/27-Thursday 3/29/07. Use Promotion Code: EWBTC15
• 10% off Friday 3/30-Saturday 3/31/07. Use Promotion Code: EWBTC10

March Madness Promotions:

• $8 off $80 purchase. Use Promotion Code: EAELITE8 Expires 3/27/07
• 10% off $40 minimum purchase. Use Promotion Code: EAFINAL4 Expires 4/3/07
• Free ICON Dimmer (2876DB) with $100 purchase. Use Promotion Code: EA200601C Expires 3/31/07.

Click here to go to the Smarthome Insteon page.

Crufty: “Poorly built, possibly over-complex.”

Since upgrading to Tiger, I have been unimpressed with the performance of the Mac OS. I had more problems then I want to count with just getting installed and I’ve had these exact same problems.

With Safari blowing up on me every time my web server squirts some funny Ajax on it, iPhoto exiting when I rotate a photo and Mail.app taking ages to even acknowledge that I have switched to another folder, I guess it’s time to take a hard look at how things are going.

Now, Mail.app has “lost” some of my mail, some in a specific folder that is from the important people. I cannot add things to that folder in mail and the finder gives me a “error -51″ when I try to delete it there. It is also amazingly slow at updating the folder displays, sometimes it doesn’t do it at all.

In Mac OS 9 I always used the blinking time separators in the menu bar clock to determine if my system is “thinking”. When Mac OS X came out this was no long a indicator because it would always blink even when the system got bogged down. Now I again are relying on this indicator because my system will become so bogged down that even those stop blinking. This happens much too often, and never happened prior to 10.4. Nothing is more annoying then having to sit there waiting for the computer to finish doing whatever it’s doing, sometimes for as long as 5 minutes.

It’s still better than my shiny new T-42 running Windows they give me at work, but Apple needs work on the quality side to prevent things from getting any worse.

This week’s Photo Friday is “Tiny“. These surface mount components are from a 266Mhz iMac G3 motherboard. I had to remove one of the resistors from this when I lost one when trying to over-clock my iBook. Talk about tiny!