Oh my what delight
Barking spiders in the night
holding sheets down tight

In the nearly three weeks that I have been out of the hospital, my white counts and red counts have been like rollercoasters going up and down. I had a doctor appointment on Wednesday and while my red counts were fairly normal, my white counts had tanked. Two weeks before my white counts had fallen dangerously low, but I was feeling fine, did a lot of walking that weekend and 3 days later my white counts had recovered to the low end of normal on their own. Since I was showing some cold-like symptoms on Wednesday, the doctor ordered a Neupogen shot to help boost my white counts so they could better fight the cold-like symptoms. He explained that the stem cells tend to concentrate on either red cells or white cells at any given time, so my counts go up and down as the stem cells work to remember what they are supposed to be doing. While they do have memory, they are apparently not very good at allocating their memory between more than one task at a time.

I hadn't planned on photographing the super moon today.  From our house the sky would be too dark to get any detail around the moon, other than the moon by itself surrounded by black sky. A bright moon hanging in a black void certainly doesn't give any sense-of-scale for how large the moon appears when it first rises above its surroundings.  But then I found myself having to stop by the store on my way home from work. When I pulled into the parking lot, there was the moon, front and center, staring me in the face as it rose above the north end of the Sandias.  With all the lights in the parking lot, I was able to get a shot of the full moon rising, looking very large over the lightly illuminated surroundings in its super luminous state.

A seed floats
Aimlessly on fall’s cool breeze
Above tall grasses
Of basketweave walls
Searching 
Searching for bare ground
A place in the soil
To lie down and rest
Sleep through winter
And wait 
Wait the wet kiss
Tears of happiness
Shed in spring
To wake
Wake embraced by
A warm summer sun
And grow
Grow strong and tall
To send out seeds
On breezes
Fall’s cool winds
Floating aimlessly 
Searching

The super moon will be full on Monday; however, the sky will be dark when it rises on Monday. The moon will rise after sunset on Sunday, so I went out to the river late in the afternoon to photograph the super moon as it rose a little before sundown, giving me the opportunity to get it rising over pink Sandias at sunset.  I also captured canes flying in front of the moon in the twilight.

A long time ago after the great iBang created cyberspace and time, prehistoric devices that once filled rooms evolved into the dinosaurs that sat on desktops. Laptops were coming of age as iMolucules coalesced from the accelerating iMatter predicted by Moore’s Law. Handheld devices where still only a twinkle in Apple’s eye, with the exception of the Palm Pilot which was brought to market in 1996, five cyber millennia before the iPod was introduced in 2001. In 1999, 2000 cyber years before the iPod, and 11,000 cyber years before Apple released the iPad, the Palm Pilot came of age with the introduction of the Palm V. 

Not long after Y2K failed to wipe out humankind, my boss bought his first Palm V. Not long after he got it he forgot it was in his pocket, sat on it and crack the glass. He ordered a new Palm V, gave me the broken one and told me to figure out what to do with it. I called Palm’s help desk to see what it would cost to get the cracked Palm V repaired, and discovered they had a program where I could send the broken one back and they would exchange it for a refurbished Palm V for $100, which was a super deal at that time. Needless to say, my boss kept forgetting he had his Palm in his pocket, so I ended up with a half a dozen or so refurbished Palm V’s.

One of the many services our office provides is facility evaluation. We have evaluation forms for different facilities which are ±40 pages long, and the evaluators had to take the forms into the field on clipboards, along with measuring devices, cameras, film (before 2004), ADA sticks, floor plans, site plans, etc. and walk through every space in each facility marking off the items on the forms, assigning scores for the condition of the spaces, and writing notes about each space. Then they would have to add up the scores by hand on each page to come up with total scores for the building, the site, and the adequacy for how the buildings were used and occupied. It was a cumbersome process that persisted on paper for many years.

However, with scads of Palm V’s at my disposal, I found a database called TinyDB in 2002 that ran on the Palm V, and I proceeded to recreate the evaluation forms for the Palm V using TinyDB as the base. TinyDB worked amazingly well and I was abled to get all the questions, scoring and comments into an app that added up the scores, and filled them into the summary sheets and stored it all in TinyDB. Then I was able to download, store and print the forms by connecting the Palm V to my desktop computer. I thought I had come up with a great way to reduce the amount of stuff the evaluators had to carry, by giving each of them a Palm V with the evaluation froms app that even added up the scores for them. 

I loaded the app on several Palm V’s, and started giving them to the evaluators.  You would have thought I had given them a device with the plague on it, as every evaluator in 2002 refused to use the Palm V, opting for their trusty papers and pencils instead.  So much for the future. I simply gave up after that, and let the dinosaurs suffer and laughed as we gave them back their paper forms to re-add each page, as many of them were arithmetically challenged.

The evaluators continued to carry paper evaluation forms on clipboards in the field for the next 12 years, until 2014, when we were preparing to evaluate a school district with over 200 facilities, the client told me he wasn’t going to pay for the printing of all those evaluation forms, which would come to around 10,000 pages. He wanted everything to be paperless and was willing to pay for us to develop an evaluation forms app for the iPad and Android devices. 

We developed an app for the iPad using FileMaker Pro as the database, because we needed a stand alone app since we couldn’t get internet in every school, and, therefore, a web based app wouldn’t work. In the process of developing the app for the iPad, I discovered just what a little miracle TinyDB was on the Palm V way back then, because iPads struggle with the size and complexity of the evaluation forms, and we have never been able to develop a version of the evaluation forms app for Android devices because the Android OS simply can’t handle the complexity of the evaluation forms. 

Now, 14,000 cyber years after my initial move to make electronic evaluation forms, the evaluators finally have their evaluation forms, floor plans and site plans for each facility on their iPads, and the process is now almost paperless.

Brontosaurus fight
Fighting pink yellow mask blue
Who will win the match

No poem today. Only a storm behind the traffic lights.  However, I do want to point out that I added two dropdown menus to the menu bar across the top of the page: "Cat Blogs" and "Tales From My Youth". People ask me about these blogs, but they are hard to find if you don't know what to search for. By adding them to their own dropdown menus, they are now easy to get to, especially for people who are new to the blog and hadn't seen the cats in action or read about some of the rather strange things that happened when I was young.