Day in the Life 12918, Those Things That I Do...or password changes, the work reset, yearly physicals, and...I don't know, stuff.

BLOT: (11 Oct 2012 - 10:25:31 PM)

Day in the Life 12918, Those Things That I Do...or password changes, the work reset, yearly physicals, and...I don't know, stuff.

The funniest thing I've read in the news today is the story of a woman charged 11.721x10¹⁴ euros for a phone bill and then had the call center try to set up with a payment plan. The second funniest thing is possibly an editorial gaffe, since in the middle of nowhere an article about a man trying to hide drugs during a drug raid drop this line: "Police said Rowe was trying to swallow marijuana that he had hidden in his anal cavity." I mean. What?

At any rate, enough of that. Life's been fair to middlin. Actually, life's been good but in that way that I could not explain in any particular terms and convince you. Doing so would justify fears that people have about such things as Twitter, that we are just talking about what we had for breakfast. Cereal, by the way. Cereal.

In the last general this is my life post, I mentioned that there would be some work changes. Most of those got rescinded before they began. Scheduling a librarian across two departments turns out to be on the tricky side, and I don't know all the reasons against it going forward, but there were apparently enough. Since the increased experience was going to come at the expense of basically every weekend for a semester (and all that entails when it comes to sanity), it probably is best, but in the couple-three days I did train there was some interesting gaps in knowledge filled. I'm now a proponent of "send your reference staff/faculty to work days in other departments so they can better answer questions" plan. A big one.

One thing that did change was my passwords. I have been planning a system for a more rapid password changeover in which nearly every site had a unique password and have put something like that in place. It is not necessarily a perfect solution. Dozens of complex passwords (average length is about 17-18 characters) that are meant to be changed about once every three month is going to require some sort of password retention system (there are a few third party . Then I can retain the top 3-4 needed ones that I use more often, and that's workable if not pretty. I kind of plan on posting some info on the system I use, probably tomorrow, so I'll leave it alone besides to say that I understand why we should, and I understand that frequently changing complex unique passwords is the number one way to stay generally safe assuming lazy-ass sysadmins with business degrees and lies on their resumes don't screw it up, but there is a reason why no one does it. Except me. Poor, pathetic me.

Oh yeah, Doctor Who. A couple of years ago, give or take a year, I started watching the entire run of classic Doctor Who at the Key To Time saga (middle of Tom Baker's tenure). Now, I am on the last 11 episodes of Patrick Troughton's time, after looping around, and have about 18 or so stories (probably about 90+ episodes) of Jon Pertwee's and I'll have watched all of the original Whos (I went back, about the middle of watching Hartnell's stint, and finished off the earlier Baker stories). Since I have watched all the new series, already, this is kind of weird to think about. As for Big Finish, I have heard about 2/5s of theirs. That's a lot of damned Who. Tonight I finish "The Space Pirates" and then get on to "War Games". I think I'm ready to kick it back into color (and besides, so many of Troughton episodes are missing that it has been like 3/4 audio...and many of the stories are fairly repetitive despite Troughton being generally lovely).

I'll end with my physical that I had on Wednesday (and/or yesterday, assuming you read this right away). I got generally high marks. Ribbed about my weight, naturally, but blood sugar and all stats were dead on except for my LDL which was 125 (they were looking for below 100) and my HDL was about 38. Since my LDL was 211 a couple of years ago, that's nearly half what it was. I'll go ahead and attribute the standing desk for that, even if that doesn't make sense. The blood sugar is always a weird one to watch doctors grapple with, since you can see the spectre of type II diabetes just wanting to bust forth from their mouth, but despite being a fat guy I am fairly active and don't eat like complete crap, and so avoid the vast majority of their "AH, GOTCHAS!" they want to break out on me. Outside of smashing my knee into pavement, and tearing my ankle after a four mile walk, I don't even get the joint issues that skinny people get at my age, so I consider that a win. I know, one day, that it will all break down, and that will be a bad day. But for this day, where it hasn't, well, that's cool, too.

Peace and love and good happiness stuff, to you.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: October 2012