My wife called the doctor to find out if any results were in … The Catscan came back and they say nothing has changed since the first one, so everything is all the same as far as that’s concerned … This is good news … Now we wait for the other results …
Month: March 2006
Hospital Visit
So I don’t eat or drink anything after midnight … I got home from Grape St. and watch Slapshot 2 until about 4AM … Wake up and get ready to go … No deodorant for the manogram … Get to the hospital at 8:10AM … I register and get a cool new bracelet with my name and birthday on it … It was free!
Go to the radiology department and first up is the ultrasound of my right side … I got a student in the bargain as well … a young girl with long blonde hair … She is present for the ultrasound … I have to pull up my shirt and they pour the jelly on me and begin sailing around my tummy with the thingamajig … After some deep breaths and holding them, I turn on my side … the same thing … Then the woman that did the ultrasound asked if I would mind having the student check it out for a while … Hey, a threesome! So I was into it … She had me doing deep breaths in no time … Done test 1.
Next up was the CT scan with contrast … I go over to that department and I’m asked questions and off I go … They prick your arm and get a tube going in so they can shoot the dye in for the Catscan … That was a bit painful … I could feel that needle swinging around in there until she taped it down … She did a little test and off I went … The thingamajigs start spinning around and then you get all warm all over … I shut my eyes … A little woozy for whatever reason, off I go back to the other side for the manogram … Done test 2.
Sit and watch Regis until they take me to the manogram room … Off with the shirt I point to where I feel the lump and she marks it with a piece of tape that has like a tiny ball bearing on it … They scan both boobies when they do this test … and they smoosh them up pretty good … I’m sure no matter what size your boobies are, they’re gonna get them in this machine … Squish my right, “don’t breathe”, take it from the side, “don’t breathe” … Then the same for the left … I sit and wait while she goes off to see if they’re okay … (I guess to see if I breathed) … She comes back and says they don’t see anything on the test but I ought to get a ultrasound of the lump … great, I was just there … and they can take me in about 30 minutes … Done test 3.
Over to the other side of radiology where they take you in the big table rooms … Xray of my lumbar spine is up next … A cute little girl calls my name and I’m off into a private room with her … After she assesses my sweatpants that there’s no metal in them, we can proceed … Lay on the table on my back, and we shoot a couple “hold your breath” … lay a little cocked to my left with a pillow or something under me … same for the right … Then have to lay on my left side and get my back perfectly straight … Then off she goes to make sure they’re okay while I wait there on the table … I hear people talking … I hear someone yell “You’re going to die!” Not the thing you’d like to hear in a hospital, but it was followed with something like, ‘You’re going to die … How could you tell such and such that about me’ … She comes back and has to redo the straight one on my left side … She positions me as she pleases … “Hold your breath” … Wait again … I can hear her talking to someone about the length of her hair … She comes back, okay! Done test 4.
Back over to the ultrasound people … We watch Tony Danza talking to Mrs. Brady herself, Florence Henderson … David? … I turn around and there’s this girl that looks at me like she knows me … It’s the blonde student from earlier, but she put her hair in a pony tail … This time I go behind a curtain to get “unchanged” … Put on a hospital gown backwards, with the opening to the front … More goo … The student does all the testing this time followed by the teacher … Was in there a while as they played with my boob lump … Had to stay there again while they asked the people that requested the test if they wanted anything else … Nope, I wiped off the goo and got “unchanged” again … Done test 5.
I decided to go full tilt with my first meal of the day and took a ride over to Applebee’s … I think it was 11:15AM when my wife and I went in there … I told her about the tests and the things I had heard in there … The different things they made me do, etc … The student and the teacher said the most things, and it sounded to me like they didn’t see anything, but who knows? They thought there was nothing out of the ordinary the first ultrasound, and then the one of lumpy was just muscle tissue … But again, I think doctors review the pictures that they take and decide from there … So those were the tests … We’ll wait and see what the results say …
Changed it again
So, I decided to change the look of the site again … Went a bit darker this time … I also saved the old format so if I ever want to go back to it, I can … I changed the fonts around too … If you feel like it, you could let me know what you think of it … Is it too small? Is it too dark? Is it just right? … How the heck would I know … I decided to give up on trying to make MSIE happy … It just does weird things that come so easy to Firefox … If you’re not using Firefox, you’re not seeing the WWW …
Moping Around
So I was moping around about the doctor visit, and I was thinking about this coming Friday (today) … I’m traveling down to Columbia, MD for St. Patrick’s Day … Not the best thing I could think of doing for St. Patrick’s Day, but that’s not my decision … Octane is working at Nottingham’s … They wanted us to load in at 11:00am this morning, but that wasn’t going to happen … Two thirds of the crew have day jobs that prohibits this … The thought of sitting around and doing nothing after we load in besides the fact that it’s over a 2 hour drive just to get down there … Blah! Anyway, so I’m figuring that we won’t use what we normally use there …
I usually bring in my FOH board and run through their system … They’re not normally too happy about me taking up floor space, but there’s a nice cubby hole where I go that works well … I’m thinking that for St. Patrick’s Day and amatuer hour that I won’t be brining in a board that costs $7500 and a rack full of about $10Gs in gear not to mention sitting my $2000 laptop on top … So, instead of trying to fit a place for my laptop in a house system situation, I finally broke down and bought the iPod … I thought it might cheer me up having this thing to mess around with … It didn’t entirely … Money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness … Maybe I was concerned that I shouldn’t have spent that money on the iPod … They aren’t cheap you know … $399 plus tax … Then I got the case for it ($35) and a docking station ($99) … Makes it an expensive toy … The case is justified as I think you need to protect something that costs $399 and is that small … I’m sure it will earn its worth in the future …
So here I sit, just hours away before I have to get into it all … Not looking forward to it, but I am usually optimistic about these things … The situation usually warrants that it turns out to be a good one … Octane is a good band to work for in that they play music that I can get into … If I’m lucky, the music usually takes me away from the situation …
Lost
If anyone sees the traffic that my hosting gets, they will have noticed high usage on my T1 … I was lent LOST season 1 on DVD to watch … I had never seen LOST except for flipping around when something else I watched wasn’t on … So, nothing to watch one night, we pop in LOST and begin … I watched those 24 episodes in 2 days … So I’m hooked … There have been 15 episodes aired for the 2nd season already … What to do?
I was talking with someone who mentioned downloading TV shows that they’ve missed … I have no idea whether it is illegal or not, but I had no problems finding the 2nd season of LOST available for download in DivX format … This was my first experience with a BitTorrent client and using that form of transfer … I got something called Azureus and fired that up … Seemed quite easy, but I had to share my T1 for the period of time that it took to download … I then was able to catch up on the 2nd season and I’m ready for a new episode, but they have been reruns … I also downloaded Fedora Core 4 and Debian Sarge, but did that the old fashioned way, FTP …
Note to Feds: If it is illegal to download television shows, I’m sorry, but I was addicted to the show and had to see what happened next … I am not sharing the files I downloaded, only watched them to see what happened next and catch up so I don’t have to avoid the television on Wednesday nights …
Here we go again
While I was sitting at my desk watching these DivX files, I felt a lump in my chest … My wife was worried, so off I go to the doctor … I went Tuesday … I told her I saved up all of my ailments for her (heir doktor) … A cold that never seemed to go away, the things I feel in my body that you go to feel on the other side to see if it’s normal (like having it on the other side too makes it okay) … my lower back pain … chest pain … and the back of my neck revisited …I left there with 6 pieces of scribbled paper … and they took three tubes of my life blood …
Pre1.) a prescription for a pain killer for what she thinks is arthritis in my lower back; Pre2.) a request to X-ray my lower back; Pre3.) a mammogram (which I will be refering to as a man-o-gram); Pre4.) an ultrasound of my right abdomen area, there’s some weird things floating around in there; Pre5.) prescription for Nexium to see if that relieves the tightness and pain in my chest; Pre6.) a CT scan with contrast (like I had before) to check up those little nodules in the back of my neck and see how they’re doing …
I worry, but I take this in stride … My wife worries, but she doesn’t say much … She goes to the pharmacy to fill the pills, and the pain medicine is around $30 but the Nexium is $175 or something … No generic, but Prilosec (which I was presecribed years ago) is now over the counter … She called the doctor to see if this was okay, and they told her to stop by the office, that they had samples we could get … In the meantime my blood results came back, and I’m back on some cholesterol medication … I go this coming Wednesday for a day of poking and prodding fun …
Thunderbird 1.5
I didn’t know it, but a new version of Thunderbird came out … With the new version of Firefox, it does version checking so you know when a new release is available, and you have the option to download and install it immediately … I imagine they have done the same implementation with Thunderbird …
I also got a little creative and tried some themes for Thunderbird and I’ve settled on one called CrossOver 2.2 … It is an Aqua type theme and it is a little more intuitive in its colors than the default Thunderbird theme …
The screen shot I posted here is enough to show you the layout of the screen and the effect that the Aqua type theme has on Thunderbird’s display … It’s also small enough that you can’t make out what it says on the screen without me having to go in there and edit away my email addresses and messages … In addition to this theme, I’ve changed the theme of my desktop to make the window borders small … I don’t like too much screen real estate being taken up by wasted space …
The Crossover 2.2 icons are a bit more intuitive … I now understand what a few of them mean (like if an account is using POP-SSL), and the highlighting is done by color rather than just by boldface … Also viewing messages changes the colors of the quotes and different colors for multi-level quotes …
I don’t know that any of this would simply be possible by going into Thunderbird as it comes and make changes, but just popping in this theme made changes that I’m happy with, so I’ll stick with it … Hopefully you will have desireable results as well …
I can’t stress enough the amazing response I get using Firefox and Thunderbird for my Internet experience … That’s the reason I have links to them on my page here … If you use the Internet as much as I do, these are required for your usage and protection …
AOL Postmaster: Revisited
Spoke too soon? AOL still blocks my FreeBSD mail server … After a third party originally got the ball rolling with AOL last Friday night, and my follow up and resolution Saturday afternoon, the problem persisted into Tuesday morning …
I again called AOL Postmasters and this time they say that the ticket opened that day by the third party was opened and closed at 2/28/06 12:50 EST … They say that whatever happened Saturday was referenced by this new ticket as it did not “take” and that the 48 hour wait time started at this new time of 12:50 …
I asked what they were going to tell me Thursday when I called back …