I have 5 GMail invites left....
If you want one, email me.
Thanks to asv108 for hooking me up a while ago.
Of course, I'd also like to thank the producers and tha academy and my mom and dad for making it all possible.
The gimp seemed an appropriate category title if not category.
Alright, I spend about 99% of my comments on
I was diagnosed in March. I had to have a mediastinoscopy to biopsy the hilar lymph nodes in my chest in order to make the diagnosis. It's actually a same-day surgery but it's still dangerous and I had to go under general anesthesia so I pushed for March 31st rather than April friggin' fools day. Obviously, it all worked out.
The Surgery
A 3 inch incision was made on the crook of my throat just below my adam's apple and just below the neck-line of a t-shirt. Right about the spot you'd expect a tracheotomy to be. Chicks dig scars so it all worked out - I can play the sympathy card on my wife by showing her my scar.
The doctor inserted some gizmos into the incision and followed my windpipe all the way to the center of my chest behind my zyphoid to cut out some of my hilar lymph nodes. The dangerous part was that he had to "sneak" right past my aorta, pulmonary artery and my heart to get there. Hooray me. (Hooray me is funny if you've seen the Red Stripe been commercials).
I woke up some time later with a pain in the neck. It actually didn't hurt nearly as much as I anticipated. The surgery was on a Wednesday - I went back to work for a half day on Friday.
The Disease
Sarcoidosis is a weird, fibrotic, auto-immune disease. Nobody knows what causes it and there's no cure. This page explains it best.
Anyay, I'm not really upset that I have the disease - I'm really upset with 1) the symptoms and 2) the treatment.
1. I get really frustrated because it affects my lungs and really hinders my breathing. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm huffing and puffing sitting here in a chair but I can't play sports like I used to, I can't do a lot of the physical things to the same degree that I used to. That pisses me off.
*Background*
I'm 6-4 235. I played football since I could walk. I turned down dozens of college div 1A scholarship offers to join the US Army and (eventually) become a sniper and combat weapons specialist. In other words, I'm a very physical kind of guy. I gave up football years ago but I used to play Wallyball at a local gym on my lunch breaks. I also have some land with woods and a small stream in my back-yard and it takes some work to keep it up. It frustrates me to no end to be limited by my stupid lungs. Bah, who needs 'em.
2. The treatment is prednisone. Prednisone is a corticosteroid. It's only purpose is to halt and potentially shrink the inflamation in my lungs and lymph nodes. That's all well and good and it does work - I can breathe much better when I take it. Unfortunately, it's immunosuppressive and it has about every nasty effing side-effect you can dream of.
I'm experiencing some side-effcts except the irregular menstrual periods. I'm still regular so I got that goin' for me. (think Carl from caddyshack).
So, the punch-line here is that I don't mind the disease so much as the treatment.
Prednisone is also one of those drugs that takes a while to build up in your system and you can't just stop taking it abruptly. Whenever I miss a dose of prednisone I get mean as hell. I mean I get pissed-off, don't fuck with me mean. It's a horrible thing. It's like driving a truck with no brakes - you can steer it but you can't stop it. I KNOW that I'm pissed off and I KNOW that it's because I missed my dope but I can't stop being angry and irritated. I'm like the Mastiff or the Great Dane - it's ok if the Chihuaha or the dachshund get's angry - it might nip at your heels but don't fucking stick around when the big dog gets mad 'cause you aren't going to win. I hate it when I feel that way. It's just horrible for everyone - I get short and yell at people, my wife, my buddies at work. They all know why I'm pissed off too but that doesn't make it right or any better. The worst part is, when I finally get my fix, I feel 10 times worse for being that way. It's a nasty drug and I don't envy anyone that has to take it. As long as I don't miss a dose - and it's not really very often - I'm pretty good.
I missed today's dose which brought out Mr. Hyde but I hurried home and took it this evening and I'm feeling much better. I warned my wife so we could avoid that whole mess and me feeling like a big jerk when Dr. Jekyll came back.
It's ok to make jokes about the disease to me - I'm cool with it and I joke all the time with my buddies about it. I don't take life too serious - no one gets out alive. I know sometimes people get weird about "What do you say?" and the whole stigma attached to diseases. How 'bout "Nice scar, dude.", for starters.
I don't know why everyone keeps on about same sex marriages.
It's a fact. Once you're married, the sex is the same.
I'm fortunate enough to have the Y chromosome so the mere suggestion of having the same sex in my marriage is fine with me....
Well, that's all for now, I'm off to the lovenasium.
I try to be understanding and respectful of others beliefs but...
An 8-year-old girl who suffers from a rare digestive disorder and cannot eat wheat has had her first Holy Communion declared invalid because the wafer contained no wheat, violating Roman Catholic doctrine.
This defies all logic. It's 11th century praxis. Their desire to perpetuate a centuries-old doctrine with no adaptability to the knowledge of a modern world makes it irrelevant.
I've been thinking about this all morning and I can't come up with too many things more annoying than when a person puts the entire contents of their email in the subject line.
Unfortunately, the ones that do it are also habitual offenders.
There should be a law against it. Perhaps some logic in the mail client that won't allow it.
Write your congress person today but be sure to include some text in the body of your email.
I post a legitimate comment on slashdot and I get modded flamebait - flamebait? But then I post a legitimate flamebait comment
I'm fed up with the broken pages, 503's, and stories that are regurgitated 3 days later
There has to be a light at the end of whatever tunnel I'm in. I should have taken that left at Albuquerque.
According to my inbox lately, it seems there are a lot of people that owe me a lot of money for my mortgage.
I'm replying to all of them - I can't wait to start cashing checks.
Or are a lot of the stories on slashdot just regurgitated from CNN two hours later? I'm getting bored reading stories like This One on slashdot 2 hours after it hit CNN.com.
C'mon people. Find something original. News for nerds, stuff that matters.
I've recently acquired some new hardware. Well, it's not exactly *new* but it's new to me.
From a buddy I work with, I picked up a Dell poweredge 2300 and from work, an old custom-built file server. Cost: $0
Highlights:
Dell:
Misc Server (this thing's old)
The Misc server is a machine that we custom-built ourselves a *couple* of years ago. It had Novell 4.11 on it before we wiped it and overall, it was a damn reliable machine. Even though it's only got 24GB of storage (RAID 5 loses the 7th drive), we used it for a file server up until about a year ago when it was replaced with a 300GB NetApp box.
So, my dilemma now becomes what to do with them. I'd love to use the raid server for a file server at home but it only has 24 gig of storage. Since the RAID controller is a PCI card, I thought about upgrading the mobo to something reasonable but the stupid case has an AT power supply. The Dell on the other hand, I can think of several uses for. Dual PII 350's aren't going to set any records but they're not too shabby either. I'm seriously considering making it a multi-media server. Since it's got plenty of room to grow in the storage department and I can bump it up to a gig of ram, it's got a lot of useful life yet so I want to put it to good use.
That brings me to my next point - what OS to install. My first inclination is to put Gentoo on them both - I never looked at the hardware support but I'm guessing I'd have to use the 2.4 kernel on at least the raid machine. I've always wanted to mess with Solaris and I finally have a machine in the Dell that has complete hardware support for the x86 version.
My biggest problem is going to be figuring out all of the hardware. I'm not a hardware guru and all of this stuff is industrial-strength like SCSI, RAID, tape drive, etc. Unfortunately for me, it's not as simple as hda and
Any thoughts on what I should use them for or what OS to use?
P.S. Whomever owned this Dell prior to my requisition of it is a bonehead. I booted it up to discover it has never been wiped - Novell 4.11, Groupwise 5... hacking the admin pwd on this might be more fun than figuring out what it's good for.
I'm pretty steamed right now but I know I'll get over it - in the meantime, I needed to jot this one down. Due to the nature of the business of the company I work for we must be HIPAA compliant and we keep a lot of private information about our clients and their employees. Naturally, there's a certain expectation of privacy and security that goes along with that. We write all of our own software and naturally use a lot of user IDs and passwords for most everything.
About 18 months ago, I changed the login procedures for our main CRM software package to use MD5 Hashes. Instead of storing the uid and pwd in a cookie as plain text, I only store the byte values of the MD5 hash and, in the database, I only store the MD5 hash of them as well. Naturally, this makes the uid and pwd case-sensitive.
Now for my rant: This morning I was informed by the owner of our company that it stinks. From now on I'm not to make any case-sensitive login credentials. I was told that it's ridiculous, over-kill, and frustrating for him to use. Certainly if it's frustrating for him, it's frustrating for everyone. I was told to scrap that whole "MD5 junk" too. When I explained my logic, I was told "yeah, yeah, but the trade-off isn't worth it.
Needless to say, the first thing I did was removed all of my own, not-required-to-get-my-paycheck information from our database
Background: Johansen and iTunes and DRM Watch
Jon Johansen, the Norwegian teenager responsible for the DeCSS and resulting uproar, is back at it. This time, he found a way to dump the memory location of Win32 QuickTime to gain access to a protected music file and potentially convert it to an unprotected format suitable for use with just about any other player. His code does not actually do the converting, nor does it actually involve breaking the FairPlay encryption provided with QuickTime. This presents an interesting conundrum since it doesn't appear to violate the DMCA or any similar European laws until they're interpreted in some perverted way.
I have to say, as a software developer, I'm not an advocate of copyright or any other type of IP infringement. I dislike and disagree with the *AA organizations' business models and litigation tactics but that doesn't make what they're doing illegal or, for that matter, unethical. I don't have to agree with it - it's their right to enforce their IP rights as they see fit, within the limits of the law. Having established that fact, I do believe that the rights of the music and film industries are infringing on fair-use rights and I question where this will lead and when it will end.
My real intention for this post wasn't to be a tirade about the RIAA or MPAA as I'm just as sick as most everyone else of hearing the tired, regurgitated rants. Rather, I'd like to compliment Johansen on his ambition. All litigation aside, he provided the DeCSS code at age 15 and now QtFairUse at 19. I've got to admit, at 15, the only things I was interested in were girls, sports, and counting down the days until I could legally drive. Yet, here's Johansen, with nothing better to do than crack encryption schemes and butt heads with the MPAA. I certainly don't envy him from the standpoint of having to defend himself in court but I would like to give him credit for his ambition. Maybe it's ambition. Maybe it's guts. Maybe he's just a bonehead. Whatever it is, the kid did more for his career by 19 than I did.
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones
