Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Had a follow-up appointment with the doctor today. He was pleased with the progress I’m making with my blood glucose levels. Morning blood glucose levels have been in the 100s for the last couple of days. I think my body is getting used to the lower levels now because I don’t feel all weak and low-blood-sugar-y like I used to when it went down that low.
I’ve definitely noticed an improvement in the way I feel. The eyes seem to be working a little better now too.
Southeast Linuxfest has always been a pretty casual event and everybody generally has a pretty good time.
Linux geeks are usually pretty creative at hacking together a solution. What do you do when you need to enhance wifi coverage? Stick a wireless router on a pole.
Computer geeks like coffee (generally), so the people at Sudo Make Coffee came up with some varieties.
What would a computer conference be without the requisite rats nest of Cat5?
Of course, everybody loves Dave “Sexy” Yates.
Tom Callaway’s opening for his keynote was pretty hilarious.
Usually it’s a wedding or wedding reception that gets party crashed. This time a wedding crashed the SELF party.
Tux was stolen…
and then returned
and then stolen again.
Another successful Southeast LInuxfest in the bag.
This year’s event didn’t seem quite as busy as last year. No firm numbers yet, but I’d guess somewhere around 400 or so. Looked like somewhere around 200-300 for each of the keynote sessions. Both of the keynote sessions by Jon “maddog” Hall (phone rant) and Tom Callaway (Cloud cloud cloud) were very entertaining.
Most of my time was spent running around doing miscellaneous errands, taking photos and manning one of the video camera for recording sessions. Ended up with over close to 500 photos, that I’ve whittled down to around 350 after the first pass. Will go through them one or two more times to weed out a few more before posting them.
Highlights of SELF included the mingling of Linux geeks with a debutante ball, another awesome performance by Dual Core at the SELF party, the SELF party getting crashed by a wedding party. There were apparently many more drunken antics that I missed.
Tux was stolen, returned, then stolen again. A good session on regular expressions by Tom Good. Lots of great Drupal sessions at DrupalCampSC. Learned about a lot of neat things that I want to try out. Discovered sudo make coffee and brought home a couple bags to try out.
Already looking forward to next year.
Two weeks post diabetes diagnosis and my blood glucose level is starting to get to a much more respectable level. Fasting blood glucose (FBG) has been under 140 for the last few days and I’ve been able to keep my blood glucose levels below 160 throughout the day for the most part. Still needs to go lower though, but at least progress is being made.
I’ve been using a program called OnTrack on my Cliq to keep track of things. It’s a pretty handy little program that’s very customizable so you can track all kinds of things. You can even email logs and charts with it.
So far the biggest challenge has been cutting back on the carbs (which has drastically cut down/out much of what I used to eat) and the sweets. Drastically reduced are most of my beloved starchy foods like rice, pasta, potatoes along with all the things that fuel my sweet tooth, particularly chocolate.
The new focus on diet has put me back in the kitchen though, which is a good thing. The last few years I’ve been pretty lazy about cooking for myself and not doing much in the way of being creative in the kitchen. Starting to reacquaint myself with my cookbooks, looking at different recipes with an eye towards low carb modifications. Picked up a few new ones too.
There is more emphasis on veggies in what I cook. This had started somewhat with joining Ambrose Farms CSA, but now even more so.
I’ve been making an effort to try to be more active, although those efforts got hampered somewhat from catching a cold last week.
The metformin I’m on has a few unpleasant GI related side effects, but I’ve found that as long as I eat a good amount of food before I take the pill, I don’t really encounter them. If I don’t eat enough, hoo boy look out.
On the plus side of all of this, I’m down about 20 pounds since the beginning of the year. Ironically that was one of the things that prompted me to see the doctor, leading to my diagnosis.
Looks like things are running pretty well on OpenMelody so far. Left behind all the plugins, so everything is plain vanilla Melody. I might bring a few things back, but I’m kind of liking this clean uncluttered DePo theme.
Still not sure what the deal was with the error I was having with the dynamic archives. It still happens seemingly randomly as I’m clicking on things in the back end and publishing stuff. Might have to resort to posting a question somewhere.
In a couple of weeks, this blog will be heading into its 9th year. 9! 8 years and 2385 entries here! Just doesn’t seem like it’s been that long. Time flies.
Blogging has slowed down a little because of time constraints and partly from not having a clear notion of what I want to put here. There are always lots of things tumbling around in my head that could probably go here. They usually never get well formed enough to be turned into anything coherent enough for a blog post though.
Guess I’ll just continue the rambling for another year.