I woke up last night with my eye “glued” shut – I had to gently pull my eyelids apart to see out of it again. The drops seem to have helped prevent the thick stuff from building up all the time, and now it’s just a bit runny. But it’s still red and a little puffy.

It’s better than it was yesterday though. I’m hoping that it will be good enough tomorrow morning that I can go to work then. (I don’t like knowing that I’m missing being paid for not being there, since I’m on an hourly contract rather than salaried.)

Now that I’ve been out of bed for a while, I feel better too. It’s a strange trade-off. I need rest, but it also aggravates my sinuses to be lying down.

It turns out that I have an eye infection. I got through the emergency room at the hospital in record time – just 20 minutes or something. It’s not conjunctivitus, or anything else contagious, but it’s still annoying.

After taking the antibiotic drops, the redness has gone down, but I’m still getting “goop” built up that I need to swab away with a QTip every hour or so. Plus, I have this constant feeling that there’s something in my eye. (The goop on my eyeball no doubt.)

Just something else to add to my few weeks of bad timing…

I came down with a fairly nasty sinus cold shortly before the first day of work at my new job. I managed to weather it out until, last Monday, I thought that all was better. Then I got a sore throat again. It seems that things migrated down to my chest. I’ve been coughing and having chest congestion since then. Now I’m taking Robitussin DM to try to clear things up. So I’m at about 3 weeks here and counting. I really hate going to the doctor / medical centres, and the last thing I want is to take antibiotics if it will go away on its own without them. So, I’m going to hold out a little bit longer and hope that it does goes away. I suspect, however, that if this lasts for another week I’m going to have to do something – if for no other reason than that I need to get better so that I can start talking on the phone by next month for my job.

In addition to everything else, I got one of my “infamous” nosebleeds last week. I’ve had these ever since I was a teenager, about once every year or two. It’s like somebody just turns on a faucet and the blood starts pouring out. Once I get to it, I normally have to sit around for 20 minutes or so until it stops. It will also normally happen again another couple of times in the following week. Well – having it happen while in the middle of a cold wasn’t the kind of situation I would have earmarked for it, if I’d had any choice. It’s gone on longer than a week now, and has happened more times than normal. All because of my need to have to blow my nose and remove “sinus waste” in other ways. Irritating my nose like that isn’t conducive to the healing process, and my nosebleeds have continued – although, thankfully, not to the same extent as when they first started.

In general, I’m feeling pretty good now except for the cough and a kind of sub-level sinus headache that I’m still getting now and again. I do, however, feel the worst when I wake up in the morning. (I also seem to get most of my nosebleeds when I get up in the morning, or in the middle of the night, as I move from a prostrate position to a vertical one.) Lying down doesn’t help anything drain – I end up with a stuffed up nose, tight chest, and runny, crusted, red eyes. Once I’ve got up and been standing or sitting for about half an hour I feel much better. (Michelle was pretty horrified one morning when she saw me immediately after I got up – even though that day, after I was up and about for a while, I felt much better than I had in a while.)

I’ve just recently finished implementing a postfix content filter so that my email server will, itself, append signatures and random taglines to the bottom of any user’s email message. This means that it doesn’t matter what email client the person is using, they’ll still get their signature and random tagline when sending anything and using the server as their outgoing SMTP host.

This is pretty cool, because it means that I’ll get my signature now whether I’m at home or at work. While Imp (the Web based email interface that I use when I’m away from home) supports signatures – it does it by simply putting the text of the signature in the body of your message, rather than adding it after the fact. Which can cause some problems if you’re repyling to somebody and delete it. Also, Imp doesn’t support taglines, something I’ve been using for 15 years now.

Okay, that’s absolutely not true. Michelle’s got a head full of really wonderful things. It’s her personal Web site and blog that’s a blank slate. I set this up for her a couple of months ago, and not much has happened since. (I really quite like the format of it too – at one point I considered converting this site over to something similar, but mine’s just as effective in its own way and it would be more trouble than it’s worth. However, I think I might, at some point, insert an “Interesting Links” box somewhere on here – if I could figure out where.)

She keeps saying that she doesn’t have anything interesting to say – I don’t believe that for a minute. I think it’s all just a matter of getting into the right frame of mind. Or, perhaps, remembering that it actually exists (which is related).

Maybe this will encourage her – if she’d like to see me issue a public retraction of the above state of affairs!

It looks like we’re good to go with our mortgage refinancing. In addition to now having a higher principle and extended term, we also had to get a supplementary loan for some more money. (Ironically, we’ll effectively be paying off our first loan with the refinancing, then just getting this other one.) The extra $25,000 equity on our condo (that’s the amount it went up in value due to 2003 properly tax assessements) had a big part to play in our being able to get this.

Due to some annoying bureaucratic red tape, we were unable to qualify for the refinancing if we had both our credit card debt and our car lease. Since we couldn’t do anything about the credit cards, we decided to pass our lease over to somebody else we knew, qualify, then take it back again. It turns out that once the lease is signed over (in this case to my mother) we’re not able to take it back again. So, she’ll end up being the “owner” of the car but everything else will stay the same. (Although it may cost us a bit more in insurance.) The bank is insisting on the updated lease papers showing that we no longer “own” the car – so it’s not possible to just claim that we don’t and get on with things.

The stupid point of all of this is, of course, that the bank should be looking at what our financial situation will be after we’ve got the money to pay off our debts, not before. It’s the height of Catch-22 absurdity, to say we have to get rid of our car, in order to qualify for money that will let us pay off our credit cards, which will then bring our debt/income back into line again – and put us in a situation where we can afford to pay for the car. By then, of course, it will be too late… The “best” option would have been to borrow $50,000 from somebody for a couple of weeks in order to pay off our credit cards, get that debt out of the way, qualify for the refinancing, get the money, then pay that person back – perhaps with a little extra for their time. Unfortunately, we didn’t know anybody with that kind of spare cash lying around. (Nobody who we wouldn’t be afraid of dealing with anyway!)

Still, it will all work out – even if it will be in this convoluted fashion. Even better is that while the refinancing is in process, our mortgage payments are on hiatus. So we get about a month of a “payment holiday” in the short term. Hmm. I haven’t had any “spare cash” in quite a while now. I’m not quite sure what I should be doing about it. Oh, yes. We need new tires on “our” car…

Well, I’ve finished my first week of “work”. Although, actually, it’s just sitting in a classroom with 18 other people listening to somebody talk about NT. (Support for which will be dropped shortly anyway, so I’m not sure why we’re dealing with that.)

In any case, I have two interesting observations to relay. (Aside from the fact that I leave home very early, and arrive back very late.)

At one spot inside the actual Microsoft building is a sign that points to a washroom. If you follow it, you will eventually get to a washroom – but it will take you twice as long, and in a slightly more convoluted path, than if you’d turned and gone in the opposite direction. Somehow, I find this to be entirely analogous to the whole Microsoft software experience…

One day, when we were let out early, the sun was still up. Upon walking back up the street, I noticed a sign that I hadn’t been able to read before – “Police dog training ground”. At that point, I also took note of the several obstacle course objects on the ground. (It’s actually a big field.) You can’t see a sign on the big grey building at the back of the field, so I’m not entirely sure what it is. I may have to walk over there one of these days and take a look.

My one little adjustment to the alignment of text in paragraphs ended up ballooning into something far more extensive than I’d ever originally intended – but all to the good.

In addition to the recently mentioned changes to my personal site, I expanded them out to the Inferno Enterprises site as well.

The main changes are that blocks of text now appear on a grey background (just like they have with my journal entries for a while now) – rather than the text sitting “nakedly” on top of the background image. It’s not quite as stylistic – bit it’s more legible, which is important.

I’ve also removed all instances of the JavaScript I’d been forced to use (before I knew how to do it differently) that had got IE to “lock” the navigation buttons along the top right and top left of the pages in place. (Since IE doesn’t follow standards and always needs workarounds…) Since the pages themselves no longer scroll, only text boxes inside the pages, there’s no longer any need for this as the buttons won’t even be tempted to go anywhere any more.

Along with these visible changes were some backend code changes – most noticeably the fact that I added more stylesheets for common layout presentation. Now it’s much easier for me to adjust everything in just one place.

The only thing I can’t quite figure out is the bottom “padding” for my grey background boxes (with text inside). Even though I’ve defined bottom padding, it’s not actually applying it. (For some reason, the more padding I specify the greater the height of the box becomes – which makes little sense.) On the main page of my personal site (and a few other pages here and there) I’ve “faked” it by adding an artificial “spacer” to make it appear as if there’s proper padding. But on most of the pages I didn’t bother with this. It has something to do with the way that I’m defining fixed percentage box heights – but it’s not significant enough of an issue for me to really investigate at the moment. Assuming I ever have any free time again, and nothing better to do, I may try to solve the mystery. (I can do it easily enough by adding an extra “box” inside the grey background box that has its own padding – but that would mean reworking some things and, although it would work, it wouldn’t actually tell me why it’s not working as it is…)

Later: Yes, I’ll go with the additional “invisible” box, even though I’m not sure why I have to.

Some time I ago I wrote a journal entry on the bad journalism of Global News over a report on the disappearance of Cecilia Zhang – and included a copy of the email I sent to the station.

This time, I noticed a discrepency in a report on Global National with Kevin Newman:

Subject:

Mis-reporting events.

Message:

On your 6:30 pm Global National broadcast for Tuesday, December 23rd, Kevin Newman reported that small amounts of marijuana remain illegal. However, the news story made it sound as if it was Paul Martin who was reponsible for this decision. In reality, it was a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that brought this about – and it had nothing to do (overtly anyway) with Paul Martin’s cabinet specifically.

I object to the reporting of this newscast as it associated the decision with Paul Martin, making it appear as if it was him and his cabinet that was responsible, as opposed to the non-partisan court system.

(It was only when I checked your online news Web site, which reported it accurately, that I realised the actual source of the ruling.)

After changing the text justification, it made it obvious that the padding between the comment boxes and the actual paragraph text wasn’t big enough. So, I set out to change things. At the same time, I wanted to make sure that, in the future, I could easily modify what I’d done.

In doing this, I ended up causing all sorts of layout problems. However, I did manage to fix things within an hour or so, and everything’s looking better now. It just goes to show how much of an affect one little thing can have on everything else.

Later: Looking at the layout prompted me to make some more overall changes to the way that the two panels (personal history and journal entries) are layed out.