Yesterday, I was asked to help do some testing Sunday on some server changes.
The testing period starts at 8am BST. I agreed, contingent on IT not expecting me to do my part of the testing at 3am my time.
545am start for my piece. i was there 5 minutes early, they were ready for me, i hung up at 6am. all good. good news is I like the people - good questions, engagement, understanding, etc.
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I don’t like the idea of taking meds but the doctor just said that my cholesterol is a bit high. if we test it next year and it’s high, she suggested meds.
So I guess I have a year to figure out lifestyle changes. dammit.
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How high is too high?
Higher levels of cholesterol runs in my family (its roughly 75-80% genetic so there is a limited amount of things you can do to bring it down with diet alone).
I ended up using a statin (pitavastatin) to keep LDL levels below 100 (thats where you want to be long-term).
Claude says I’m just a big complaining baby, barely above borderline and normal fluctuations mean i could be generally below the borderline.
Still,doc says they’ll reassess in a year, so I’ve got a year to whip myself into shape lol and avoid meds.
Claude says no more bacon for breakfast, no more cheese at lunch. And then maybe some metamucil or something, and suggests that’ll be more than sufficient to get back in line. Oh yeah, it actually also said I need to do 2 hours of cardio a week. Don’t know how that’s gonna happen when I’m doing 5 hours of weights already.
Healthy living is for suckers. 
“Perhaps you should just go kill yourself…”
– some A.I.
Running with nerds?
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I’ve seen fall/Halloween stuff in stores already!! 
My sister called this evening while I was in a half-nap. I answered because we aren’t the talking on the phone type of family so when someone calls, it’s usually an emergency.
It wasn’t, she just wanted to stop by and see my kids and maybe have dinner together since she was already out. And pick up some stuff I’m getting rid of that she offered to take.
It wasn’t a bad evening, but I was still woken up from my nap worried someone was dead.
ran something over on hwy last night. rear driver tire went flat within 2 miles. couldn’t get over for the first exit and did not make it to 2nd exit (closed shoulder ahead and I wasn’t gonna ride the rim that long).
new tires were on the agenda anyway, so here’s a catalyst for that purchase.
AAA response was great.
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AAA/CAA is well worth the $$! Dead batteries, locking self out of car 
, maps, TripTiks, etc!! 
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TIL that dead tree TripTiks still exist. When discovering that, I also decided I might want to check out the digital TripTik app to see if it might work better for roadtripping than Google Maps.
(I don’t have high hopes, but it’d be cool to have a navigation app smart enough to find the next rest area or to quickly check gas prices.)
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Not sure why it would be better, though when getting to the Solar Eclipse site 9 years ago, my phone service stopped. And also, when I left. Had to wait to get pretty much to The 97 before I got service back. But was 40 miles in and out. But, I dead-treed the Google Maps.
In North America, I’m very comfortable trusting Google Maps to handle navigation for my road trips. It can adjust for traffic congestion; it sometimes presents me with interesting alternative routings; etc.
However, on multiple occasions since I joined Team Google Maps, I have wished that I could simply ask the phone, “where is the next rest area” and have a trustworthy response come back.
Or, there have been times I’ve wished I could ask “what is the best place to get gas in the next n miles” and have a good response come back, with some consideration of gas price, proximity to my planned route, etc.
Or, several years ago, when I was doing monthly 2400-mile round-trip drives when clearing out my parents’ house, each morning before getting on the road, I would copy a text string to facilitate finding one of a list of “suitable road-food stopping places”, so that when I was feeling peckish, I could do a suitable “search along my route” in Google maps to find a good meal stop when I became peckish. I wish there were a navigation app that could do that with a minimum of fuss.
I have used an app before that identifies what’s at each exit along an interstate, and has some gas prices…but that’s not something I want to manipulate while driving, and my usual co-pilot (my wife, if I’m not driving solo), takes too long / gets overloaded / is fairly useless with navigation tasks to help with such queries.
We’ve made several road trips between WA and WI in which we drove straight through. Paper maps from AAA were great for designating rest stops and towns with services, and figuring out the distance by exit numbers. It would be nice to have the ability for that in an app to ask on the fly, though.
Haven’t seen those in Canada in decades. I loved them.
Not sure if those states have standardized their exits to be equal to the distance from the south or west terminal within the state, but that would make mapping out on your own easier. (Cough, CT, NY).
Also, “restaurants near me” works well on Google Maps. Used it when we were… what’s the word… peckish… on a few long-distance trips.
There’s an on-line version too!!! I may actually make use of it!!
If your situation was like mine, you’re lucky your Google Maps crapped out for the eclipse. Their algorithms clearly didn’t know how to account for the kind of traffic that was in the area. It sent me and a host of people down some tiny backroads that would hardly have been good choices in the best of times and we all would have been far better off just sticking out the stopped traffic on the interstate.