Medical team to the bridge
11am tomorrow, H-Hour. That’s when I go under the knife.
I know it’s a bit over-dramatic, but that’s how I’m feeling right now. I just can’t seem to maintain an even emotional keel at the moment. I’ve had surgery before, my hip replacement decades ago and my gall bladder just weeks ago, but this one has me really worked up. They’re going to make the second biggest incision a surgeon’s ever made in my body, and they are going to take a tennis-ball-sized chunk of one of my organs.
The surgeon does dozens of these a year, and has had papers published on the subject. I might well be back home before my birthday. The overwhelming odds are that everything’s going to be just fine. So why am I so worked up?
Starr will be posting to Twitter and Facebook, and passing out phone messages to be spread around. They say I’ll have wireless in my room, so I might even be posting here myself before tomorrow’s over. We’ll use the 21st Century to it’s full advantage. To everyone who’s been sticking by me in person and online, thank you so – I doubt I’ll find the words to say how much it means to me.
In a completely unrelated note, Happy Belated Birthday to southernsinger. I’d have mentioned this before, but I’m a bit distracted.
Telperion’s Flower
Friday morning on the way to work, I listened to an Astronomy Cast show on dark skies: areas far from cities where one can still see an amazing number of stars plastered across the sky. My own most amazing dark sky experience occurred on a 1am drive from Roanoke to Bluefield: it happened to be a perfectly clear winter night, and as I looked up through the windshield for a second, I saw more stars in the sky than I’d seen in my entire life. Darn near wrecked the car, I was so transported by the sight.
At any rate, last night on the way home from an errand, I saw a brilliant, clear moon hanging in the sky over the house. Suburban Chesapeake is far too bright for many other stars, but I suddenly decided that this would be the perfect night to assemble and set up my Galileoscope. It went together easily, though I’m not 100% sure I assembled the optional Galilean eyepiece properly. I’ve since found a PDF with more detailed instructions, but the basic setup worked well enough.
As the instructions mentioned, we had to find a tripod: this is no spyglass. But once we got it focused and aimed, the moon was gorgeous. Starr and Celia and Chris and I all took turns looking through the eyepiece – a little tricky because the moon was quite high in the sky – and initial complaints about the setup time vanished. Even this simple observation with a basic ‘scope made the evening memorable as hell. I think that soon we’ll have to find a dark sky and a cool night and set up the Tasco Novice that Starr gave me a couple of years ago. Awesome stuff!
And then we went in the house and played Star Munchkin.
Subspace radio is down
This Monday, we finally got the DirecTV service replaced with Cox cable. Only problem: the HDTV is upstairs in the bedroom, which was in NO condition for visitors. (You may theorize why.) So, we had the guy install the HD box on an old standard TV downstairs where was located one of the two coax connections the DirecTV used, explaining that this was a temp television for a week or two and that we’d be getting an HD soon. Then I figured I’d move the box upstairs to the other coax connection, since he was nice enough to make sure they both remained intact.
I went to do that tonight, and discovered that he’d hooked up the wrong cable. There are six coax lines running into the house; the downstairs line was working, but he’d hooked up the wrong one of the other five. No worries, I can figure that out. I ruled out one immediately: it was so corroded that the center wire broke off the moment I examined it. I ruled out another because I’d already verified that one wasn’t working; so I tried each of the other three in turn, hooking it up, rebooting the box, and waiting for start up. I did this three times. Nothing worked.
Finally, in a desperate attempt to work out which wire worked, I hooked the output of a VCR to the upstairs cable and dragged a (not especially portable) television outside hooking it to each one in turn. None of the three worked, which startled me seriously – one of them had been working not two days ago. With mounting horrified suspicion, I picked up the corroded cable, stripped it with my Swiss Army Knife, and replaced the coax connector. (Oh, did I mention that dark had fallen by this time, and I did this with just the reflected light from a streetlamp a few dozen yards away?) You know what happened: the TV lit right up with the old Mystery Science Theater tape I had running upstairs.
So, to wrap up the story: a few minutes later, cable box was beginning. We get signal. Main screen turn on. I called the cable box a bug-jumping cork-sucker, and may possibly have danced around the room a tiny bit; but in a battle between me and technology, I’m not backing down until I’ve tried everything. And tonight it paid off. (Wonder what my Shadowrun 2nd Ed. target number was on that one?)
Error! Faulty! Analyse!
Dammit, IMAP is deleting messages off the server… possibly just the ones I move on the client using a rule, but that’s a lot of my messages. I guess I need to go back to POP and just deal with marking the same message as read repeatedly.
Ah, well. Learning experience.
Brief updates
- 09:31 @meiran Awesome! Very well done! Are you going to shoot for “Elder” in the last couple days you have left? #
- 09:44 A 32-degree morning seems much balmier compared to the 12-degree ones last week. #
- 10:05 Dangit, I have just accidentally spammed Starr’s work address with the invite to the Shadowrun tonight. Hurr, me use computer good. #
- 11:47 @meiran I picked up the coins for all of Kalimdor yesterday (not counting capital cities). The Horde outposts were a bit exciting 🙂 #
- 12:01 I think the guy two people ahead of me in the lunch line was trying to pay in Euros or something. #
- 13:15 Wish I could leave early. I still have dishes and laundry to put away before gaming. And the Xmas tree should come down someday too. #
Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter
Brief updates
- 07:55 Spent the last two evening battling a virus and trojan on Starr’s Windows laptop. final score: Michael 2, Malware 0. #
- 10:06 Why is attempting to focus my brain into serious writing causing me panic attacks? Wondering if an incense and yoga investment would help. #
Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter
Evil wares
I had plans for last night. Not especially ambitious ones, but I knew how I wanted to spend the evening. Unfortunately, it turns out that Starr’s computer picked up a couple of viruses from somewhere, causing WoW to crash on launch as well as blocking most malware removal sites and large swaths of microsoft.com. I spent about three hours fighting them, getting one virus off the machine and restoring her WoW function, but the “Backdoor” trojan is resisting all attempts to remove it. Grrr.
Slept pretty good last night, but traffic was heck this morning. We had a little light rain, which apparently caused everyone to panic, so I got in a little late. I have no desire to be grumpy all day, though, so I’m looking for some music to cheer me up a bit.
Along those lines, I enjoyed MarsCon’s Friday night performance by The Cassettes, so I picked up their latest album – on cassette, of course – which included a card for free digital download. No DRM, either. It’s pretty good stuff, and any band that includes a home-made theremin is worth some attention.
I just needed to look up a high voltage traveling arc for another reference. For some reason, this in itself has cheered me up a bit.
Brief updates
- 10:43 @lisbet Actually, I found that reading books from the Baen Free Library on an Apple Newton was fairly pleasant. Don’t know about the Kindle. #
Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter
Geek magic
Harry Potter and the Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack
Hermione: Hey, I was thinking…
Ron: Not again!
Hermione: (ignoring him) None of us want to say You-Know-Who’s name because he knows when you do it, right?
Harry: Yes, he’s magically linked to the sound, it automatically draws his attention to you so he knows what you’re saying about him. Why?
Hermione: Well, back home this summer I was reading about a website called Slashdot…
Ron: What’s a ‘web site’? Not more spiders, ugh!!
Harry & Hermione: (Ignoring him)
One week later…
“Daily Prophet” barker: EXTRA! EXTRA! Harry Potter gets entire wizarding world to say Voldemort’s name at once! Dark Wizard found dead in lair with brain cells leaking out of his ears! Read All About It!
(inspired in part by the Luna-C performance at MarsCon of all seven books in 45 minutes, and by Starr)
Late celebration
Freaky: We have, on the downstairs TV: the satellite box, the DVD player, a PS2, and now a Wii. I have been thinking all week about getting a switch box so as not to keep yanking cables from the TV’s two RCA left-right-video connections. Yesterday morning, I mentioned this casually to Starr. Yesterday night, Starr’s sister gave me for Xmas an RCA input switching box that she’d purchased days ago, thinking maybe I might find a use for it.
Whoa. Telepathy.
Awesome: Starr is in the dining room playing “Hey Jude” from a Beatles piano book I’d given her for Christmas. This is one of the best “sit down, take a deep breath, and stop fretting about stuff because fretting’s the best way to blow it completely” songs ever written. There’s a lot going on in my life right now, much more than I’m used to trying to keep track of, but I just can’t get too messed up about it all when “Hey Jude” is drifting in from the other room.
Gonna make my award-winning mashed potatoes this afternoon to go with the pot roast Starr started last night at 1am. Should be an excellent Fauxmas dinner.
