digital retrograde

September, 2007 [Reset]

9/29/2007 6:03 AM

Photo

Safety Training

Up until today, I'd been only mildly irritated by the safety training that my company does. Usually it'd be something harmless about hardhats or the dangers posed by mildly corrosive chemicals dripping on your skin. At worst they could be written off as snoozing time and at best immediately and permanently forgotten. (Until they began repeating after a year or so.)

But today's was different. It was an hour long, VHS-to-DVD transfer of a man speaking to a filled conference hall in the mid-90s. He recounted his disdain for safety precautions before describing the terrible refinery explosion he'd accidentally created. Then, for half an hour he went on to recount:

Praying that he would die because of the unbearable pain

How his mouth had been burned away because he took a breath

The combination bleach/antibiotic baths that he was dunked in on a daily basis while the dead skin was scrubbed away with a brillo pad

Screams of the dying in the burn unit

The hundreds of reconstructive surgeries

How it cost him his marriage and caused his daughter's attempted suicide

Varied but numerous other horrors.

Several times during the hour I thought I would have to bolt from the room while choking back the lunch I'd just eaten. The HR lady who ran the session acknowledged that it might have been "a bit gorey". Walking out of the room I was dazed and nauseous. This was all for the benefit of a group of office workers whose biggest safety hazard on the job is from sitting still and accumulating the fats in their thorasic arteries that will someday lead to a heart attack.

Maybe I'm squeamish; it didn't seem to faze anyone else. I sat back down at my desk and put my head down -- couldn't focus enough do any more work, so I called it a day.

9/26/2007 11:12 AM

Life

All Done

Before

After

After a pitched battle, the guest room is all done. The bunny that formerly adorned the wall has been obliterated, but we'll probably still call it the bunny room.

9/24/2007 10:48 AM

Life

1000th Post!

Hooray! This is my 1000th blog post on digital retrograde. I started posting here almost exactly 3 years ago; to say that things have changed would be a mild understatement. Back then I was stuck in a job I hated, living alone in town that I didn't like. Here's to another 1000!

This weekend I woke up Saturday morning and started painting the spare room. I just finished the third coat a few minutes ago and hopefully it's the last. The blisters make it a little hard to type.

9/23/2007 9:38 AM

Life

Fixed, Mostly

To celebrate getting the blog back in one or two pieces and the fact that Fall is right around the corner, here are some pictures from the weekend's trip to a local orchard. They're not very good to be honest but I need to get back on the horse.

9/19/2007 9:31 AM

Photo

Moving Day

Successfully transferred the content's of Krista's apartment to my place. The weeks of pre-moving made the process much easier. Hopefully the rest of the weekend will be spent doing as little as possible.

As you may have noticed, the blog is still broken. I can't edit templates to fix them. This upgrade has been an unmitigated disaster, so IF YOU'RE A NERD don't upgrade to Movable Type 4.0 for awhile. I'm considering the nuclear option: going back to a home-rolled system.

9/15/2007 9:34 AM

Busted

My blog is well and truly broken. I tried to updated a Movable Type template and it inexplicably blew most of my formatting away. Worse, I haven't been able to fix it because I have no idea what I'm doing. My web interface is also broken so I only have one shot at posting new entries. I hope my spleling is good.

(Updates have been over at Snips.)

9/12/2007 11:57 AM

Weblog

Snips Update

The "Edit User" page on Snips is now functional, you can change your profile image and some other, mostly useless, profile data.

9/10/2007 12:11 PM

Software

Under Reconstruction

My brother went down to see the progress on the bridge reconstruction downtown.

9/9/2007 9:39 AM

Life

Snipr = Snips

![Screenshot](http://digitalretrograde.com/Photos/screenshot.png)

I've been sending items of interest to my [Link-blogging experiment](http://digitalretrograde.com/Snipr/View.aspx?user=eric_hcr80) for almost a year now and I just put up some updates. It now has an RSS feed and you can view entries by date. I've renamed it to 'Snips' from 'Snipr', so there shouldn't be much more confusion about whether I'm 'snipping' items or 'sniping' them to death.

You can create your own Snips-blog [here](http://digitalretrograde.com/Snipr/AddUser.aspx) if you're inclined to using buggy software for dubious gain. But, if you're interested in what I'm Snips-sing my RSS (Atom) feed is [here](http://digitalretrograde.com/Snipr/Atom.aspx?user=eric_hcr80).

9/6/2007 9:35 AM

Strangest Thing

For some reason my blogging software stopped allowing me to type entries. Everything else works, but when I click on the box I use to type entries I get a javascript error. In all the browsers I have. It's really the strangest thing I've ever seen with the software.

It's a good thing I wrote myself another way to post!

I hope I don't have to re-install the thing, but so far Google denies that my problem exists. Also, I realized that from my previous post title, 'Careening' is a verb. I never was good at diagramming sentences.

UPDATE: Immediately after I posted this, it started working again. In all my browsers.

Computers suck.

9/6/2007 9:34 AM

Weblog

Careening. Adj.

A little bit of a scare today at my sister's horse show today. We were sitting in a nice, shady viewing area for the cross country event (think 3' jumps on a golf course), when the announcer blurts out "Heads up, folks!". A spooked horse was on the wrong side of a barbed wire fence, barreling towards the crowd. The rider snapped some low-hanging branches and then was flung off as the horse crashed through the fence. Unfazed, it continued on up towards us and through another rope fence. People were skittering around trying to get out of the way, us included.

The horse ended up about a foot from where we'd been sitting. Luckily for my parent's expensive new camera, he didn't try to sidestep the crowd members who were wrangling him. Priorities: humans first, electronic gadgets second.

The rider ended up flat on her back and motionless for several minutes. She did manage to get up and walk to the ambulance which they kept around for just this purpose; a good sign after a spectacular fall.

Bizarre end to an otherwise idyllic and eventful week.

9/2/2007 12:05 PM

Life

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