It was an unsuspecting afternoon. I had just got back to lunch with some coworkers. Sara IMed me and told me her stomach hurt, kind of like a stitch in her side. I gave her a sadface. A while later, she told me it really hurt. I asked if I should take her home but just then I got a call from her boss saying I should come get her. Sara was in so much pain she had to stand (*not* lay down) at an awkward angle to get some relief. We went on a painful ride to urgent care. There we waited 15 minutes or so to see a lady who had us wait 15 minutes or so to see a "doctor". The "doctor" came in and asked a few questions, then made Sara lay down (the most painful of positions for her) while he pressed directly on her torso and abdomen right where her pain was. "Does that hurt?" he asked her. I punched him. Of course it hurt. "Well, we don't have an ultrasound machine here to see what's happening so you'll have to go to the E.R." Awesome. On the way to the E.R., Sara was in so much obvious pain, I was honestly worried she was going to pass out in the back seat. We got to the E.R. at Rose Medical Center and despite what the news reports say, they were not over-crowded and the wait was only seconds-long. They took her back and within 20 minutes she had her first and second doses of morphine. That didn't help. She was still sitting on the edge of the gurnee with unbearable pain. Dilaudid helped somewhat. They did the ultrasound and found no gallstones or kidney stones or anything. They did a chest x-ray and found no problems with her lungs. Then the doctor told us they were going to do a cat scan which "is an expensive test" (his words). The cat scan came back with everything looking normal except a little swelling in the appendix. After consulting a surgeon, they decided she should have surgery in 30 minutes. Happy Wednesday! Sara hasn't ever had surgery before and neither of us have ever had any serious procedure like this so it was kinda scary. She did incredibly well and her parents were there with me to see her off to the operating table. She actually looked very cute in her little surgery hat and I took a picture that I'm not sure she knows about. About 2 minutes after she went in, my parents got to the hospital. After an hour or so, the very tired-looking surgeon came out and talked with us for a uncommonly long time which was very nice. He was able to do the procedure laparoscopically so she only has 3 less-than-an-inch scars on her belly. I stayed with her through the next evening when she was able to go home. She is doing relatively well now but still has a lot of pain and a stupid headache. Thanks for all the well wishings so far, I know she appreciates it.
I hate passwords. I'm pretty sure everyone does. You create one password that you use for everywhere so you don't forget but you know that it's not very secure. The other day I had to create a password on a site I will end up using once or twice a year. For this reason I wanted to use a common password of mine but the site only allowed passwords with a length of 6-10 characters and needed to include one number. Well my regular password did not fit this description so I have to make up a new one that I have never used. Now, I guarantee, the next time I go to log in, I won't remember this password because of it's restrictions. Then I will fail to log in and have to create a new password where it will tell me those restrictions again and I will remember what password I probably made for the site. This is why I hate password restrictions like that. The worst thing I've come across is a site where you have to enter your "pin" as a password. I always spend forever entering in all the number combination I can think of only having to reset my pin, only to find out that your personal identification number can include alpha *and* numeric characters. Awesome. I also came across this list of passwords twitter doesn't let you use because they are too common. My favorites: computer, hooters, marlboro, qwerty, thx1138, and the ever classy trustno1 Labels: web
When I first got an iPod in December 2003 I found a cool feature. You can actually rate your songs as your listening to them. I thought this would be fun to do as I listened to music and I would eventually have all my songs rated. Well, here we are, 6 years later and I finally finished. I have rated all 4,457 of my iTunes songs, one by one on my iPod. I thought I would share some info on my ratings. First, I should point out that I am a tough rater. You have to earn those stars. I find I rate lower than my friends and wife. Here is my scale:
For the bored and interested, I have compiled some statistics about my ratings. 4,457 Songs Total 5-Star: 213 songs (4%) (Made up of 100 Artists) 4-Star: 598 songs (13%) 3-Star: 1245 songs (28%) 2-Star: 1629 songs (37%) 1-Star: 787 songs (18%) Most Played (and Highest Rated) Song: Mike Doughty - The King of Carrot Flowers (Neutral Milk Hotel Cover) Albums With the Most 5-Star Ratings: 1) Mike Doughty - Haughty Melodic (7 tracks) 2) Neutral Milk Hotel - The Aeroplane Over the Sea (5 tracks) 3) Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness 3) Ben Folds - Rockin' the Suburbs 3) Ben Folds - Songs for Silverman Artists With the Most 5-star (and incidently, the most 4-star) Ratings: 1) Ben Folds (18 5-star tracks, 31 4-star tracks) 2) Mike Doughty (16 5-star tracks, 24 4-star tracks) Artists With the Most 3-star Ratings (thought this was interesting): 1) Ben Folds (59) 2) Green Day (54) 3) Mountain Goats (53) 4) Smashing Pumpkins (50) 5) Mike Doughty (41) 6) Decemberists (31) Most 1-Star Tracks on an Album: Beastie Boys - Check Your Head (19 of 20 are 1-star rated) [Disclaimer] Live - The Distance to Here (11 of 13 are 1-star rated) [Aaaand.. that's when I stopped buying Live's albums] Note: if you want to look at some more diverse music listening, check out my last.fm listening statistics page. Labels: music
No not really, probably it was just a good and somewhat obvious idea, but on Feb 20, 2008 I wrote a post entitled "I Want a New Google Reader Feature" and here we are a little over a year and a half later and today they implemented it! Just thought I'd share. Nice. Labels: google
The other day Sara was working from home. I stayed a little late at work and when I got home Sara had taken the dog for a walk. After a while she was walking back to the house and the neighbor invited her in for a chat. I saw her out the window so I walked over there. I was also invited in. I wanted to go close my door because there were about 5 landscapers hanging around on our front lawn near the street. They must have been working on a neighbors house. I didn't feel like leaving our house wide open (you can't see our house from the neighbors very well and there have been burglaries in our neighborhood over the last couple years). However, I didn't want to be rude and just walk over and lock the door in front of them. I decided to go back to the house, through the front door, and lock it. I then went out the back, closed it but picked up an extension cord. I took it with me around the side of the house and around front- visibly holding it as I walked by the landscapers so they would know my neighbor needed borrow it- and over to the neighbors. Of course when I got there I had to explain to my neighbor why I was holding an extension cord for no reason. Labels: life
My father in law finished 4th place in a free online poker tournament, beating out 9,996 people. One of the benefits of winning is being able to submit an "audition" tape to be on a poker show of Fox where he might be able to play with some big name poker players and win a million dollars. Here is the audition tape we made on Sunday (please help us out and rate it 5 stars): p.s., Tim is my cousin. He's cool. Labels: poker
We got XM Radio a few months ago with the Cube and Sara and I have fallen in love with the Serius XMU radio station which plays all sorts of amazing indie music. Despite the high quality service and great iPhone app, their online radio player leaves a lot to be desired. I decided to fix some things that I could with a greasemonkey script and bookmarklet. The short of it is you can launch XM Radio from your bookmarks toolbar and have it start playing on its own. Without this script, you have to go to XMRadio.com, click on listen online, click log in, log in, click launch player and click on your favorite station. This cuts the number of steps for this primary use case from 6 steps to 1 step. I created a combo bookmarklet/greasemonley script for launching XM. I saved the details for the script page on userscripts.org. You can see and install the script (and bookmarklet) here. P.S. A few weeks ago I updated my Filmwise Invisibles Answer Checker to actually work again after being dead for 2 years. Labels: coding greasemonkey
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