Toronto Bound, Blood and the High Resolution Cat

The Great North
Claudia is in Toronto now, having left earlier this week. I'm sure she'll have a great time there as there's much to do and see (assuming she can escape from the conference). She does need to bring back a maple leaf for Tinto since he likes to collect them so much.


IMG_0070
Originally uploaded by spbutterworth

Early Riser...
Today (Thursday), he brought me a leaf at 4am. Bear in mind I didn't get to bed until 11.30pm and was tired having started Wednesday at 3am. So this morning's 4am call was "useful" since I had to be on a conference call at 4.45am. It gave me extra preparation time. Evidently he was exhausted after this effort.

Olympic Snoozing
Originally uploaded by spbutterworth

Blood
So today I got the results of my quarterly blood tests. My endocrinologist tracks my glucose levels closely and until July, I was treating a fairly serious type 1 diabetes with pills and inexact insulin. Having taken on an insulin pump that provides insulin all day, every day, my glucose control is much better. To show this, the A1c test that shows the long term (60-90 days) trend was 9.8 three months ago and had been climbing for the past couple of years (non-diabetics have a level less than 5.9 apparently).

My level as of a week ago was 6.6. That's a huge drop in a short time thanks to the technology. Well worth the $6,000 my insurance company paid for it :)



High Resolution Cat
So I can now take higher resolution pictures with the XSi - 12.2MP up from 7MP. Hopefully there will be an equally decent leap in composition and quality as a result. I'm sure I'll be hearing from some....

High Resolution Cat
Originally uploaded by spbutterworth

Week in review - August 10th, 2008

Another fun week.

From 2008-07-26

Not work
So I've ordered the camera :) Canon XSi with a couple of lenses (17mm-55mm IS and 55mm-250mm IS) so that will set me up nicely for the trip to San Francisco in late September and of course for our European trip in December.

Since we're doing this trip and I want to make sure I don't take 3,000 crappy pictures, I decided to take a refresher photography class - my first since 1986. This one is about photographic composition and perspective and is a six week course starting early September. By then I should at least be familiar with the device. No doubt I'll be posting my results online :)

From 2008-07-26

From 2008-07-26

This coming week, Claudia is in Toronto for a conference (Tuesday - Sunday) so it will be just me and the cats. I hope they like chili since I'm making a huge pot of it for the freezer.

Work
I'll keep this one brief :)

So the end is in sight. I successfully was able to hire a new DBA to join our team and he starts towards the end of August. That will add a third to our Oracle group and mean we'll have more coverage (i.e. less time on call). Very exciting news for us.




Book Review
I'm still working through my current books (previously mentioned), so nothing new there. I did get the Paris one but that's at least a couple of weeks away from being cracked open.

Movie Review
I have to say I haven't watched anything this week....