10:00 I notice that my posts are all a day late--and at least a dollar short, as well. As I anticipated, I don't seem to have the time to write a blog entry, at least not within the span of a single day.
After a relatively sleepless night due to a combination of worrying over the probability of having phlebitis and the possibility of not having our EDUCAUSE presentation ready in time, I woke up at the usual time and made my way to the gym. In the locker room, I looked at the back of my slightly swollen, rosy left hand and another rather disturbing looking discolored bruise further up the same arm, also the result of a bungled syringe stick, and I decided to head back to my office. I didn't want to have to repeatedly explain these questionable markings to my colleagues in the gym. Also, conveniently, my phone was buzzing up a storm as a result of two mail servers that were down for the count.
When I got to my office, I called my doctor to find out what his schedule was today. The recording said his office opens at 7:15, and I called right then (or thereabouts) for an appointment so he could look at my various sore spots. They had an opening at 1pm.
In the meantime, I spent the morning alternately reading email, answering the phone, perusing a presentation for EDUCAUSE that Eric is delivering tomorrow, and chatting with him about the events of the previous night that resulted in the email server malaise. Turns out it was the result of new code gone awry, resulting in flurries of error messages being sent via email to the administrators of the system, which includes me. I received something like 45,000 of them. Multiply that by six (the number of people in my group), and you get about a quarter of a million of these messages between 9:30 last night and 7:30 this morning. Needless to say, the mail servers were unhappy, though our Exchange back-end was pretty responsive as I deleted them all.
This system gone awry, fondly referred to as SIMS (short for Special Identity Management System) is the subject of the talk Eric will be delivering tomorrow. I don't know whether or not we'll want to augment it with a "sometimes bad things happen" scenario based on our experience last night and this morning. I guess it depends on whether or not there's currently enough material to fill the 45 minutes allotted.
5:00 - Dr. Leibowitz diagnosed the redness and swelling in my left hand as an allergic reaction to the radioactive material injected there rather than phlebitis or something worse. He said that if it didn't go away in a few days, I should call back. The redness further up my arm at another injection point he said was simply a bruise, which can result from any number of things, including not sufficiently applying pressure to the site when removing the needle. I confirmed that this was the case in both instances (hand and arm), and when I told him that the technician at the cardiologist's office had not only not applied pressure upon withdrawing the needle, but hadn't covered it afterwards, he gave me a long look which I took to mean "are you kidding?" and jotted it down.
After arriving at home, I video-chatted with Eric. We'd begun interactively going through the slides earlier in the day, so we continued where we left off. He basically presented to me as if I were a member of the audience, and I occasionally interjected a question or made a minor suggestion about rewording or reordering material. We agreed that he would make additional changes, after which I'd make an additional pass to shore up any continuity, syntax, punctuation, and other minor anomalies.
10:00 - Eric and I video-chatted one last time at around 8:30. I pointed out the modifications I'd made and asked him a couple of questions. By the time we were done, we were both satisfied. He made the changes, added more notes, and posted the presentation to the EDUCAUSE website where I made myself a copy on a thumb drive and another on my laptop. What it occurs to me that I did not do was to install OpenOffice on my laptop. The presentation is in ODP format, which PowerPoint can mostly read, but not with 100% accuracy. I'll try to remember to do that tomorrow.
Finally, I packed my bags, called Vaughan to confirm that he would put me up for the night (he lives about 15 minutes from the hotel on the other side of Baltimore), read another chapter from "Imitation of Life," and went to bed.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
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