What was I thinking?

A few days ago I had a rather severe senior moment. Or junior moment. Or something.

I was doing my job. I was writing some Java code and made a weird typo. I think I was trying to type a left parenthesis and went way off target. I suddenly had a strong feeling that I had done the keystrokes that I would have done had I been typing on an IBM 029 Keypunch.

Through most of my time at New Mexico Tech we wrote our programs on decks of punch cards. I was good at touch typing on them. I knew how to type all the special characters.

So when I felt that I had regressed to my key punching days, I panicked.

I searched for a chart of the key punch's keyboard layout (isn't the Internet wonderful?) to see if I had indeed been confused about the kind of keyboard I was using.

I wasn't.

Neither of the key punch's parentheses was anywhere near where my misguided finger was going. I just slipped. I hope.

But this gave me the opportunity to reminisce about my college days and to be amazed at how much things have changed in such a short time.

It's been more than 30 years since I've used keypunches. But there is one behavior that I picked up from using them that I wish I could unlearn.

If you look at the keyboard layout chart you'll see that there are "Numeric" and "Alpha" keys where a normal keyboard's "Shift" keys are. Letters on a keypunch are all capitals. Pressing the Numeric key and a letter key gives you the special character on the letter's key. Numeric-N gives you the left parenthesis, for example.

In normal use of the keypunch you would rarely use the "Alpha" key. The Alpha key would be used only when a program card is used. The program card could set to make certain columns to behave as if you were pressing the Numeric key when typing. If anything shows up in the first six columns of a line of Fortran code, it has to be numbers so you could make a program card that effectively presses the Numeric key for you when typing in the first six columns. If for some reason you needed to type an alphabetic character in one of those first six columns when such a program card was used, you'd have to press the Alpha key. I was an expert at making useful program cards that would do numeric shifting, tabbing, duplicating, and whatever.

Anyway, I used only the left shift key when typing on a keypunch.

To this day, I use only the left shift key on a computer keyboard. When I need a capital Q, A, Z or an exclamation point, I press the shift key with my pinky and my ring finger takes over the pinky's duty. My ring finger gets quite a workout if I have to type something like "WES SAW A WAX SAX!"

I suppose I don't really need to use the right shift key but I wish I could.

It's finally time to celebrate

Last year I posted the story of my reaching my official 30th anniversary with Teradata. I said that I would be getting yet another cheesy lapel pin with my years of service rendered in Roman numerals. I'd never worn any of my other milestone lapel pins.

My XXX lapel pin never came.

The manager of my department just dropped these things off when he got around to it. I figured that he was a busy man and that it was sitting in some drawer and would surface some time before I really needed it. I would never really need it so it would be delivered soon enough.

Well, this isn't your stodgy old NCR!

A few months ago a bunch of us got emails announcing that Teradata had come up with a new program for recognizing multiples of five years of service. We were told to expect another email giving us the details soon.

The day came and we got our emails that had links to the site where we get to choose a reward from several categories.

We could take a lapel pin, not the tacky one we had been getting all these years but rather one made of real gold and three little real (!) diamonds. We could get other jewelry like chunky silver rings for men or earrings for women. There were traditional gifts such as crystal bowls. They had a mountain bike. They had an Emerilware Deep Fryer for those who don't want to slog through another five years.

These were nice things!

I chose a watch.

But wait! There's more!

The back of the watch carries a bonus!

It had been branded with the company name! Sweet!

I finally have a service award that I actually use!

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

The guardian of the bed.

(This turtle was already in the queue before it was featured in JerBear's Den!)

Una Poca de Gracia

Jerry and I go to Palm Desert to celebrate our birthdays. We spend the day going into the many galleries up and down El Paseo Drive. We look for good stuff then at the end of the day we go back to any galleries that had pieces that spoke to us to see if they they really want to go home with us.

Adagio Galleries is one whose artists have always appealed to us. It's a rare trip to the desert that we don't come home with something new from Adagio.

Yesterday's was an ordinary trip.

With extraordinary results.

We came home with a new sculpture. It's "Una Poca de Gracia (one must posses a bit of grace)" by Pokey Park. Here are a couple of pictures of it.

It's a Navajo-Churro Sheep dancing "La Bamba." Its title is a line from the song.

This piece is on her web site but I can't link you directly to it. Her site is completely Flash based so you have to do your own clicking. (Hasn't she read Steve Jobs's Anti-Flash Manifesto? Flash doesn't work on mobile browsers so I couldn't check it out while I was there.) Go to her web site, select "Portfolio" then click on the "Goats, Sheep and Rams" link on Page 2. There it is. If you click on any picture you get a larger view of it. You also get a nice, long story about the piece on the right side.

Her work is at Lumina Gallery north of Taos if you New Mexicans want to have a nice outing to see pieces in person.

We had never heard of Pokey Park. She does turtles, too. Art can be expensive.

Who needs to save for retirement?

Some Pretty Flowers

And some past-their-prime-but-still-fascinating flowers.

Mom wants to see pictures of flowers so here we go.

First, flowers that are past their prime.

Last month I told the story of the return of our Pride of Madiera field. They are now finishing up their show. Here's what they look like today.

I had said that I didn't see much variation among the flowers. It turned out that there were some with purple flowers, some with blue, and some with very pale blue, almost white, flowers. Some of the flower heads were pointy and some were rounded. So I guess the two varieties we had originally planted had mixed and produced some nice variants.

I'll have to go out and chop off their big heads now that they're finished blooming. That's what the books say to do.

A couple of years ago I showed (again, at Mom's request) pictures of flowers around the yard. One of them was a Matilija Poppy. The patch of poppies is very happy this year.

The plants in front of the poppies to the left of the roses are the giant squills whose flowers I showed off last year. I hope they have a good year, too!

Here's a close-up of poppies.

They're at the top of an 8-foot tall plant. They smell real good!

OK, one last picture.  Last year I showed you our tabebuia.  I said that it was putting on a better show than ever before. Well, I think this year's show was better yet.

This picture is a month old. It's wrapping things up now. It's got fewer flowers and a lot of leaves. But it's still pretty!

Oprah doesn't know what she's talking about

You know those pieces of unsolicited commercial emails you get that tell you that you, too, can lose more than twenty pounds using Oprah's method? This is accomplished, they say, by buying some concoction that flushes all that sludge from your intestines.

Well, it ain't gonna work. Save your money.

Yesterday (and through the night), I flushed (flushed, and flushed again) every bit of sludge from my intestines.  This morning I was 2.4 pounds lighter than the previous morning. I'm guessing that most of that was from dehydration.

This morning I had my first full-length colonoscopy.

Five years ago, I had a doctor who said that a flexible sigmoidoscopy every five years and annual fecal occult blood tests statistically have the same chances of detecting colon cancer as colonoscopies done every ten years. The sigmoidoscopy requires no anesthesia and has fewer risks of damage since it doesn't go as far into the colon. Since I studied statistics in college (I have a degree in math!), I went for the less intrusive tests. (I didn't look into his claim about the statistics but had to believe what he said. He is a doctor, after all.)

That doctor left the group to open a franchise in a cosmetic medicine chain and my new doctor doesn't believe in sigmoidoscopies. (As far as I can tell, my old doctor's laser skin care shop didn't work out. The chain's web site shows only one location in operation.) Five years later it was time to start getting this test.

Yesterday I got to drink water, clear juices, and a couple of liters of prepared MoviPrep. That's nasty stuff. I had a long stare-down with the last glass (the eighth) of the stuff. It was hard to summon the courage to swallow it.

We went in for my 8:30 appointment, filled in the little bit of paperwork and was taken right in. The nurse strapped on the blood pressure cuff and poked in the IV needle. She thanked me for bringing big veins. She told me some of what to expect and said that I wouldn't remember anything after they tell me to "roll onto your left side." She wheeled me into the examination room.

The doctor came in and told me a bit about the procedure and that it would take about half an hour. The nurse put the drug into the IV and told me to roll onto my left side.

No polyps were in there. Come back in ten years.

Jerry took me home before 10:00 and fixed me a toasted sesame bagel and orange juice. He told me that I savored every bite and that I told him that "I'm savoring every bite." This was my first solid food in about 36 hours, after all. I then gently beeped his nose and went to sleep. He told me that I got up from my nap and read the report of my procedure then went back to my nap. I don't remember any of this.

I finally woke up at 2:00 and resumed making lasting memories. Then I napped a lot more.

I didn't get any pictures or videos of the procedure. Instead, you can watch Katie Couric get hers.


I'm glad that's over. The procedure and its weird aftermath weren't unpleasant. The preparation for it was.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A lampshade finial.

Oh, you want detail?

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Wall jewelry by Thom Wheeler.

The note on the back says it is aluminum, bronze, copper, and blue onyx.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Turtles (and their froggy friend) who scrub your kids clean.