18th October, 2007, we lost a dear old friend, a (mostly) Siamese cat yclept "Gwai-loh." Gwai was quite vocal, as are many Siamese; he also had some strange characteristics, for instance you could hold him upside-down on the ceiling and he would walk around - inverted - for as long as you were willing to hold him up there. For years, we kept him around the office, and he had a habit of coming up for affection when whoever he was approaching was on the phone. So he'd come up to you, get right up to your face (and the phone) and let loose with a really loud meow. Which you would then have to explain to the customer. One time I was on the phone with a rather famous Hollywood special effects dude when Gwai let loose with this, we had a good laugh over it. Eventually, we put up a web page on our site with a .wav of Gwai's signature meow, and a picture of him staring at a screensaver on a ginormous (for the time) monitor. A surprising amount of the code in WinImages was written with Gwai warm and settled either in my lap or across my arms.

Well, eventually, the old boy's liver failed, and I put out a rather startling amount of money to see if we could get around that, and amazingly enough, it worked. We got two more years of Gwai, all of it of quite high quality, before he finally laid down for the last time. His last couple of days were spent purring and head bumping while all the while refusing to eat or drink... finally, he just didn't wake up.

I miss him terribly. Sometimes it hits me right between the eyes and I can't even think straight. I can't dig over a decade and a half of unconditional love and affection out of my system with any amount of rationalization or any other flavor of self-bullshittery. Here's to my grizzled old friend. I only hope he knew how much I loved him in return.

One more dose of metro, and it's over. A bit less nasty than P28 was, but still quite unpleasant. In the last week, tho I must still painfully bend my fingers back, I'm more able to use the mouse than before. Also, my mind seems more stable, more "together" than it had been. I really hope it stays that way after the usual post-pulse apoptosis. If it does, it will have me eagerly anticipating pulse 30.

Right from the start, pulse 28 was a bad one. I endured, and rode it out, as I lost all use of my left hand. Spent several days post-pulse in bed, unable to put my contacts in, or even straighten out my fingers enough to drive my powerchair. I was a wreck, both physically and mentally.

Then, slowly, things began to improve. After much painful work hyper-extending my fingers, my hand regained some functionality. My legs are showing some similar small signs of improvement too, and even my brain seems to be on an upswing.

Pulse 29 is due next weekend. I REALLY hope it's not as bad as the last one, and that I start seeing more improvement, soon.

Is anyone else as annoyed as I am by words and phrases in web articles that pop up boxes because my mouse pointer happened to cross them, temporarily hiding the content I was reading in the first place? I didn't click on anything, and consequently, I don't want a context change. I find these annoying to the point of noting what the site is and not going back. Anyone else feel the same? Anyone have a defense of the practice?

I went to this article today to read it in response to a slashdot posting, and managed to accidentally activate the wireless mouseover / popup as I was reading. Bam. Content hidden, thought stream interrupted. Isn't this essentially popups, revisited?

A special mother's ring I made for my mom: 10kt gold, with (right to left) alexandrite, CC garnet and green opal.

In fluorescent light

In incandescent light

So I wake up this morning, and Putin has dissolved his government.

Then, same morning, Russia announces a bomb with nuclear-level destructive capability. But they say they're not escalating.

Then, later the same day, the US announces they have a matter-antimatter (proton/positron) annihilation laser, which, they say, is to normal lasers as nuclear weapons are to normal bombs.

At the same time, Bush, old "We'll never pull 'em out", is about to announce a troop pullback in Iraq.

Oil's hovering around $80 a barrel. The dollar is in the outhouse, and we've basically had many of our civil rights eliminated or made irrelevant.

Did I miss something here?

A review of the last few years of published climate change papers show that just 7% - seven percent! - of the 528 published papers explicitly support AGW. A nearly equal 6% explicitly DENOUCE AGW. And in fact, the vast majority of actual climate scientists are neutral - not sure if global warming is caused by man or not!

We need to take a LONG HARD LOOK at the whole pro-AGW cartel. And I use that word cartel appropriately - they are pushing to use laws, under the guise of "helping the environment", to mandate a massive transfer of wealth via carbon offsets, mandatory funding of new technologies and the like. Billions of dollars are being dedicated to AGW-mania with apparently little confidence by the scientists.

Apparently, Al Gore's "The Science is Settled!" is far from reality...

Complete mokume gane set
Just the ring shank

It turns out that a system migration to a new hard drive on a different drive controller resulted in the windows kernel booting from one location, but the boot file listed it on the old drive. So the update would install and link the kernel back to the old drive instead of where it should have been, and boom instantly unlinked boot sequence. This happened with any update that changed the kernel.

I attempted to do a complete reinstall from the original windows home cd, but it was so old it didn't have the required SATA support even with the required sata and raid drivers added in during installation. So I used a spare winXP pro license I has acquired for emergencies like this, and the re-install worked like a champ. Computer works fine, and I got almost everything I need/want/use from my backups and archives so it's actually a bit better now than it was.

Mokume earring dangles and pendant

Pulse 26 was difficult. I had thought I might have a UTI, so I was taking an extra antibiotic. The pulse went well, but the aftermath was pretty bad. I plan to wait until the weather cools off, before doing another pulse. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

As always, there are rumbles of discontent from the scientific community with regard to global warming. This article (vile email registration required) from R. Timothy Patterson, professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, lays the overriding mechanism of climate change squarely at the feet of the various solar cycles. In the article, he explains that solar energy impacting the earth is part of the mechanism, while the sun's solar wind drives cloud formation in a complementary cycle that enhances the effect of the actual heat input. But that's not the kicker. The interesting part is he is predicting global cooling, rather than warming.

But wait; there's more. This months Discover Magazine (print version also) has a lengthy article about this same mechanism, that is, cloud formation driving the climate and the sun driving cloud formation by way of modulating the effect cosmic rays have, by Henrik Svensmark, the 49-year-old director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen.

Svensmark says that we are in a warming trend, so his conclusions are at odds with those of Patterson; but they both agree that CO2 isn't nearly the looming threat that it has been made out to be with regard to climate change.

Hi Journal, 's me again. I am done with my 25th heavy antibiotic pulse, treating my MS. Over the next week or so, I'll recuperate and see what abilities I re-gain, then I do it all again. And again. And again, until I no longer improve. So far, it's working well - I typed all this in under an hour.

Again, I'm seeing more trivial improvements. Still waiting (im)patiently for something more dramatic, but I think I'm only a few pulses out. I'm aiming for EDSS 7.5 or better, from a 9.0 two months ago.

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