Snappy the Clam

Well, the infection and its side effects have pretty much disappeared. The leg gets better every day. It was giving me trouble every day towards the evening, but as of yesterday there were merely twinges.

But it's always something. I seem to have developed a second arrythmia to go along with my long-suffering SVT. When I was in the hospital, I had a brief episode of atrial fibrillation, which was treated successfully with digoxin and got me put on a heart monitor for 24 hours. Now yesterday am I woke to another bout of it, necessitating a trip to the ER and a boost in my beta blocker dosage. My electro-physiologist is now wondering whether the SVT is related to the afib, and he hopes to be able to clear it all up when I undergo the second catheter ablation ("this time for sure!" - Bullwinkle J Moose) in September.

None of this, the SVT or the afib, is life-threatening in my case. They're more just annoyances. The afib could be dangerous if I had long (24 hour or more) episodes, because there would be the risk of clotting and stroke. I have relatively short attacks (I was in afib for about 4 hours yesterday, and apparently converted back to sinus rhythm on my own), am taking daily aspirin and am at very low risk for clotting anyway. So I'm not in danger. But I want this stuff gone. I am sick of it, I am sick of being sick, and I have to say that strep skin infections are a terrible way to lose 20 lbs, but I'll take the weight loss anyway.

Posted by John at 3:57 PM | Permalink

I'm doing some thinking and reading about weblogs and journalism. I'd like to write a somewhat longer essay about my take on the issue, and I hope to start writing something up very soon, like in the next day or so. I'm starting to think that the same sort of assimilation that happened to the Web will in time happen to blogs, especially given this article (link from Scripting News) where already journalists are starting to see blogs as sources of realtime feedback. DW adds parenthetically that "Uhhh Howard, we're not here for the corporations", but they may already be seeing non-journalist blogs as just another form of market research, not thinking of them as equals, or - even more unthinkable - potential competitors. This could be due to how journalists perceive their primary job - the distillation of diverse sources into a narrative - where the typical blog in their view is just another primary source which is not providing that same condensation of sources into The Story. Not that I necessarily believe this is true, but it's one possible surmise, based on this one article, how journalists are starting to see the value of what they would consider "amateur" weblogs. In any case, this is just off the top of my head, and I'm going to try to get something more coherent down soon.

Posted by John at 3:37 PM | Permalink

Via Metafilter, an interesting looking site on type as organism, but one I can't view in Mozilla on Linux, seeing as how it requires Flash 6. Macromedia doesn't have a Flash 6 for Linux. Sigh.

UPDATE: I've since checked it out in Mozilla on my Win laptop at work, and it's a pretty interesting site. Recommended.

Posted by John at 6:51 AM | Permalink

On the post-hospital front, I am coming along slowly but surely. The fever etc is gone, I am doing fine on the Augmentin and the leg is getting better. It is still sore, but it's peeling as though I'd had a sunburn and appears to be shrinking every day. I can walk a bit further each day. At this rate I expect to be back in the office probably next Tuesday.

And I'll likely shave tonight.

Posted by John at 5:26 PM | Permalink

I just went through my Amazon Gold Box offers for today. For the past couple days I've been getting offered hardware and power tools, stuff I never buy from Amazon (or very much at all, for that matter.) And I think that's the whole point - the purpose of the Gold Box promo is to get you to impulse buy something outside your normal buying profile and thus get even more of your business. The people who have been confused by this ("Why aren't they offering me DVDs?") don't get it. Why would amazon suddenly start offering you deep discounts on stuff they know you'll buy at the regular rates anyway? Makes no sense, unless you've fooled yourself into thinking that they're your fun stuff pals rather than retailers.

Posted by John at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, this is what 7 days in the hospital and a strep infection do to you. Make you take bad pictures, apparently.

Posted by John at 9:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

While I was in the hospital:

1. One doctor in the ER suggested to my wife that I was sick because I was a vegan;

2. My infectious diseases dr referred to my "crazy" diet and told me I could get salmonella from organic vegetables;

3. The dietician told me I needed to make sure I got enough protein; and

4. hospital kitchens should be forbidden to cook vegetables.

Posted by John at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Well. Discharged from the hospital this am, white cell count finally at a normal 10k. Worst week of my life. Sickest I've ever been; I somehow managed to get strep through my skin and it played havoc with me, as you prob know at least a bit of already if you've been reading this at all. Left with a very sore thigh and a antibiotics habit for a few days. Will prob write up a lot more of this but just so damn happy to be home and alive right now. Thanks to everyone of you who were so kind and supportive while I was in.

Posted by John at 3:05 PM | Permalink

Here's the latest:

The Cipro did a huge number on my stomach. It actually seemed to stimulate the diarrhea, and in addition made me puke like mad. Called the Dr (woke im up.) He advised me to stop taking the Cipro and get my fluid level back up as high as possible. I've been doing that since. I have also managed to get down a few crackers and some soup with noodles, mostly to try and counter the enormous heartburn I have been having. I feel a little human today. On the other hand, I've also lost 10 lbs.

Posted by John at 10:12 AM | Permalink

This afternoon my wife took my temp and it was 105. Off to the dr again, and now I am on Cipro. Also started having diarrhea so it's nothing but fluids for me for a while. Dr thinks it's some sort of bacterial stomach infection.

Posted by John at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ok, this am, in a slightly confused state, I open a drawer in my dresser looking for a t-shirt. I get one. Slide the drawer closed. Hear what sounds like the unmistakable sound of a cat or some equally feral animal spitting. eeeek. Utter panic. 10 mins to Dr's appt. Run over to co-op office. Get one of the supers to come take a look. We gingerly pull out each drawer and look behind. Nothing. Great, I think, it's moved somewhere else. As I am standing there wondering if I am going to make the Dr's appt in time, I notice that a large manila envelope has fallen behnind the dresser. Whoops. Sheepishness deluxe. Oy.

Posted by John at 2:58 PM | Permalink

Well, back from the doctor's. Nothing serious, not Lyme disease, just some garden-variety virus that needs to run its likely 24-hour course. Advil, fluids, miso soup if I can stand it.

So are my readers going to pool their funds and buy me an iPod? Oh wait, I HAVE one already. OK, get me a TiBook.

Posted by John at 10:55 AM | Permalink

Woke up this am with 102 degree fever. Might be why I felt so beat last night. Dr's appt at 10am. Hoping it's nothing serious, though I do feel a little better since eating a bit of ww toast w/soy cheese. Updates as they happen.

Posted by John at 9:13 AM | Permalink

Via Boing Boing, I checked out Gene Kan's blog, This Place Sucks (like that title), and was thinking "I should put this on my blo.gs list," and then, with a shock realized there wasn't much point, as Gene Kan died last week.

Very weird to think that that's it for him and for his blog. RIP.

Posted by John at 6:42 AM | Permalink

I am just beat. Dunno why, could be just that it's muggy here again, could be the strain of walking on my leg funny after slamming my toe good and hard into a chair Sat night, bruising and perhaps also spraining it. Yeah, it could be those. Couldn't be the frustration of trying to find a washer that will fit between my Brompton's folding pedal and the crankarm that still allows me to spin the damn pedal when it's screwed in tight. Though I could end up with a very impressive collection of 9/16" washers - maybe I should see if www.obsessivewashercollector.com is taken. But I am wiped. I should probably go to bed. Sigh.

Posted by John at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Related stories are back. I had mentioned (oy, self-link) that I had hand-edited files in MT version 2.21 to incorporate Sifry's Google hacks, but then I read on his site that Ben Trott had incorporated his patches into MT 2.21. So I backed my changes out and rebuilt my index template.

Or I tried to rebuild my index template. I kept getting errors regarding the MTGoogleSearch tag, and what it ended up boiling down to is that for me anyway, the rebuild craps out when the tag has a title attribute. Then I get an error dialog with a blank error string. All other attributes work. I will probably let the MT folks know about this, but I want to make sure it's not something on my end first.

Posted by John at 2:39 PM | Permalink

The Shifted Librarian

I would imagine it was because of the tech industry's usual breathless hype at the time about how eBooks meant the death of the printed book. Much like the breathless hype going on now about how blogs will utterly crush journalism as we know it. Hype, especially the tech industry's particular futurist brand of it, owes much to advertising in its absolutist, binary, black-and-white approach. It knows nothing of complementary, since that doesn't fit the frenetic upgrade cycle ("Jesus, the new speedbumped iBooks are out! Jaguar DEPENDS on them! Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" Not that I'm invulnerable to this myself, but it pisses me off that I'm not) that it depends on for survival. See most of WiReD's copy for the past, what, 5 years, almost anything by Kevin Kelly and the hippie farts at the Well, and everything by Doc "Joisey WiFi, fuckin' a" Searls.

Posted by John at 11:18 AM | Permalink

TrackBack Development

Just testing the feature...

Posted by John at 11:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Well, I have upgraded to the new version of MT. Planning on setting up the trackbacks feature sometime today. Also incorporated the latest version of Sifry's Google hacks; had to hand-edit the files this time though, as there's no patch for MT 2.21 yet.

The plugin stuff (link via MovableBlog) also looks really interesting; hoping to look into that soon too.

Posted by John at 9:04 AM | Permalink

Rob Flickenger: IE(eeeeeee)

Interesting article about the crappiness of the latest release of IE for OS X and how MS still doesn't get how Mac software should work.

I'm not using IE on OS X either, having developed a taste for Mozilla a few months back, and finding it more than sufficient. What I wish (maybe I should do some research) is that I could get it to stick as the default Web browser. I've been using nightly builds, and often what ends up happening (this is actually surmise, now that I think of it) is when I delete the old copy of Mozilla prior to installing the new, my Internet preferences revert to IE (which seems to be the "official" browser of OS X, yuck) and I gotta reset it to Mozilla. I've also been looking for a way to script this and as yet no joy. You could script the Internet prefs in OS 9 (Ah, InternetConfig! Brilliant fucking idea); can you do it in OS X? Though I am a bit scared about the idea of having to go anywhere remotely near something even resembling Applescript. Now there's an Ieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Posted by John at 1:20 PM | Permalink