Greg In The Desert

Annie, the family dog, died today. Technically she belonged to my sister but lived with my parents. She is a mutt from the pound and was probably abused.

They took her to the Vet a few days ago and she had respiratory problems and maybe cancer. She had lied down on the floor near the front and passed away. Her hearing went out a few years ago so it’s not unusual for her to sleep and not wake up for anything.

I estimate her to be around 15 years old, maybe older. She was with us for around 12 years.

My MacBook Pro isn’t able to go to sleep. As soon as I put it to sleep and pull the plug the system completely turns off. This is due to the battery problems I have. SafeSleep helps.

Normally when you close the lid the system suspends-to-ram. This halts processing and other energy draining procedures but it still takes up battery life.

With SafeSleep the system will suspend-to-disk. Eating up as much power as if it were completely shut down. The upshot is in battery savings, the downside is it takes longer to suspend/resume from disk than to ram.

Saving to disk is normally considered hibernation. So far I have to say my MacBook Pro wakes better from hibernation than it does regular sleep.

Via O’Grady’s PowerPage

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I’m sleeping on the couch tonight because I have a bunch of crap on the bed. I get settled in and start to doze off when I get a loud nock at the door. That freaks me out. I don’t have unannounced visitors at the house at this time of night. I look through the crack in the blinds and I see a Rio Rancho Police patch.

Yikes! I search around for my pants. I open the door and there are two Rio Rancho cops with flashlights out. They ask my name then ask me if I know a few other people. Never heard the names. Then they ask how long I lived here, if anyone else lives here, etc. Eventually, they realize I’m not the droids they’re looking for.

Another lady comes out of the darkness with paperwork and they start discussing it. Not sure what was going on but I suspect they were trying to serve warrants. They ask me a few more questions then they decide to leave. I’m sure they also ran my plates since they asked if that was my truck.

I’ll give them this, they sure are stealthy. I heard several cars drive off but I didn’t hear a single thing when they came to the house, except for nock on the door.

Now I have to try to get back to sleep.

I was trying to sleep in on my day off this morning only to be awaken about 10am. The noise sounded like someone was pounding on the side of my house with a hammer, WTF? After listening to it for about a minute I started to think, no, it can’t be. It can’t be what I think it is, can it?

I manage to get some clothes and shoes on. I walk out to the back yard and there are a shitload of birds all over the place. And what do I find attached to the side of my house? A wood pecker. It’s removed a large swatch of stucko from the side of my house, just under a window.

I guess it was time to get up anyways.

Update: Apparently it isn’t uncommon to have woodpeckers attack buildings in New Mexico. I found this PDF from NMSU on how to control them.

A Dutchwoman, the world’s oldest person on record who swore by a daily helping of herring for a healthy life, died on Tuesday aged 115, the ANP news agency reported.Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, a former needlework teacher born on June 29, 1890, died in her sleep at a nursing home in the northern Dutch town of Hoogeveen.

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I Have this happen to me a lot. It’s usually a flying, floating or “out of body” type of experience. I’m aware that I’m dreaming or something but I cannot move my body. Thankfully I’ve never had the nightmarish versions that some have had.

It took Hufford another year to establish that what he and these people of Newfoundland had experienced corresponds to the event, lasting seconds or minutes, that sleep researchers call sleep paralysis. Although widely acknowledged among traditional cultures, sleep paralysis is one of the most prevalent yet least recognized mental phenomena for people in industrialized societies, Hufford says.

Alarm clocks are a very personal thing. Once you get one that does what you expect, you don’t want to just swap it out without something that will work as you expect. I’ve been searching for years for a new clock and not finding anything worthy.

iPodLounge shows off iH5 alarm clock radio with a iPod dock and integration.

The iH5 also features %u201CGentle Wake and Gentle Sleep,%u201D which %u201Cgradually increases and decreases Alarm/Sleep volume for a more relaxing beginning and end to each day,%u201D and utilizes Reason8 speaker technology to create “sound quality that has outstanding depth, clarity and power.” The iH5 works with the 3G/4G iPod, iPod mini and iPod photo. iPodlounge was told the iH5 will be available in August for $99.99, and that a website for the product will go live later this week.

It’s has the functions of my exsiting alarm clock plus more! Won’t be out till August, I hate when I have to wait.