Tag: pittsburgh
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"Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle."
--Mal Reynolds, Firefly
I've been relying heavily upon timed posts these last few weeks because my mental health has been forcing me to choose between being able to get essential stuff done (read: work) and, well, anything else. Come the end of the (work) day, all I have the compute cycles to do is goof off with a side of doomscrolling (because when I don't I get blindsided by The Next Damned Thing). Mostly, seeing the world operate on Covid Standard Time is disheartening and the …
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For reasons I don't quite understand I always equated growing up with situations where you can walk into someplace to do something, talk to someone, and immediately have a real conversation about life where you live. I was struck by this when I went to the car dealership to sell my mom's car the other day. While at the dealership talking to the salesman we chatted about where we were from (the yinzer shibboleth of "I'm from Pittsburgh," "Oh - where at in Pittsburgh?" "I'm from X." "I'm from Y, great to meet you!"), which lead to who we knew, when …
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In September of 2019 a conference called Please Try This At Home was held in Pittsburgh, PA. One of the talks was given by Dr. Mixael Laufer on the topic of how to acquire pharmaceuticals such as mifepristone (local mirror) and misoprostol (local mirror) for emergency personal use. I spoke with Dr. Laufer and the person who made this recording, and they both agreed to let me post it for download and archival as long as I sent them the links to it. So, here it is.
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Stuck in the asphalt on Smithfield Street, where it's been there about as long as I've been alive.
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Something that’s fascinated me for a while (if you’ve been been keeping an eye on my blog for any length of time) is rapid prototyping, or the use of automated systems to build modular components by laying down successive layers of plastic, ceramic, or other materials. While the technology has not advanced sufficiently to make it truly useful to end users (i.e., your grandmother won’t be using one to make a new coffee mug anytime soon) it’s a subject of heavy development right now and the state of the art is advancing every day. For …
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As I write this, Bill (my father in law) just came out of surgery to implant a defibrillator to monitor his heart. I'm told that the procedure went smoothly, and he's recovering nicely. He'll be spending about four days in the hospital while they experiment with his medication a little.
After work on Friday night, Lyssa, Laurelinde, and I packed our gear to make the trek northward back to Pittsburgh, by way of Chili's for dinner just of the Beltway (to give the bridge and tunnel crowd a chance to get home and clear the way). We packed as little …
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The powers that be saw fit to give everyone at work an opportunity to go home four hours early on 24 December 2008, the better to go home and get ready for Christmas Eve. To that end, I sniffled and honked a bit and set course for home where Lyssa was still hard at work. I sat down to fill out my paperwork for the week (such is the life of a professional contractor), packed a duffel bag for the weekend, and slowly came to the conclusion that I'd somehow caught the beginnings of a cold earlier in the day …
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To preface what I'm about to write, I never thought that I would have missed so many details pertaining to what happened a few days ago. Shortly before the wedding, Lyssa gave me a piece of advice from her friend Michael: stop every few minutes to take a mental snapshot of what's going on around you, so that you'll have more to remember from your wedding. I didn't really do that until after the ceremony was over, and thus much of what happened was lost to the peculiar entropy that steals moments of our lives from us as we grow …
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OK, OK, OK, -1, -1, -2, -2, -3, incap, regenerating, dead.
I haven't been posting a whole lot lately since Lyssa and I got back from Pittsburgh two weekends ago; we'd gone home to finalize the wedding plans that remained, such as getting hold of the marriage license, agreeing on the floral arrangements, and whatnot. Unfortunately, this involved a lot of driving, totalling out in the neighborhood of twelve hours behind the wheel, a bit more if you factor in actually driving to and from Pennsylvania itself.
The first thing we ran into was the wedding license. To save ourselves some time and energy we decided to go to the Greene …
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Late on Friday afternoon, Lyssa and I hurriedly packed our bags, jumped into the TARDIS, and set course northward once again for southwestern Pennsylvania and the general direction of home. As I've alluded to a few times, we're getting married in October and thus there are many plans to make, things to get, and arrangements to hammer out. In the early twenty-first century we can do many of these things over the net or on the telephone, but sometimes matters require the up close and personal touch. Things like tasting samples of wedding cake and taking recon photographs of the …
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