Categories
medical MS

Turns out I’m pretty healthy

I’ll always remember my grandmother’s next door neighbor. Mike was a nice guy, a great cook (in the neighborhood grilling kind of way) and as far as I could tell practically a saint when it came to dealing with his abusive mother-in-law. He had a whole variety of health issues. He was a long time diabetic, and the last decade of his life he suffered through a series of heart issues as well. He ended up dying of cancer…

Moral of the story is that just because you have one physical issue doesn’t mean you can’t have others. Most of my worrying involves MS of course, but in the back of my mind is the worry about my heart and cancer. I don’t exercise as much as I should, and I’ve had more than a few suspicious moles cut off of me.

Had my physical today and it looks like I’m the picture of health. All of the cholesterol, blood pressure, etc. numbers are right where they are supposed to be. I don’t really have any other complaints (other than the regular ones) and there aren’t any sign of worrying moles.

 

So I’m feeling pretty good. I’ll have my neuro exam on thursday. I’m expecting bad news from the MRIs lesion-wise, but I’m also pretty sure that I’ll start a treatment program too. With any luck that will lead to an improvement in my motor skills and maybe even some healing in my neurological health. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you up to date on what goes on. On second thought, worry cause I will keep you up to date:-)

Categories
music

The real value of LastFM

A little while ago I mentioned that I subscribed to Slacker. I’ve been using them pretty extensively, and the caching of the stations has been awesome. I can load up my custom stations on my iPod and listen to them in the car. I have not had the actual radio on in the car for quite a while.

I still listen to LastFM too. Until now, I had mostly been using them to get my library in a good mix and to hear their recommendations based on my library. Now that I have a few “friends” on LastFM, I have figured out another great thing about that service. I can essentially borrow my friends’ music collections any time I want to. Some of them (Mary, Adam, I’m looking at you) have very similar tastes in music. A couple others aren’t so close, but I’ve heard some amazing things on those stations too. Have I mentioned how much I love internet radio?

Categories
economics politics

Putting things into perspective (military spending)

CATO’s Christopher Preeble makes a lot of sense in his post about Gates’s proposels for trimming down the military.

 

“Gates claims that the U.S. military needs to grow because the world is becoming “more dangerous.” More dangerous than what? The notion that a few hundred al Qaeda ragamuffins and their Taliban allies poses a greater threat to Americans than a nuclear-armed Soviet Union is absurd on its face, and yet we spend more on our military today than at the height of the Cold War.”


The plan to cut down on waste by shutting down the Joint Forces Command in Hampton has gotten the predictable responses from the local politicians. The senators, house members, the governor, and the local politicos are unanimous in declaring that the closing of that command will be disastrous to the national security of the nation… oh, and it will adversely affect the local economy too. If military spending is going to be cut, things will have to go away. And guess what Virginia, states that have a heavy military presence are going to get things cut. Trying to make the case that everyone else in the country needs to support this base because Hampton will suffer is absurd. The fact that no one mentions the unfairness of this arrangement galls me. It’s one thing if the base actually does protect us in some way, but when the military itself considers it expendable, that should tell us something.

I suppose that this base actually did something at least. There are several senators and congressmen pursuing projects that the military has explicitly stated that they do not want and will not use. This doesn’t stop politicians from trying to waste our money for their voters. The building of an alternate engine for the joint strike fighter and the C-17 airplane are conspicuous in their egregious waste of money. These are projects that will not be used, but politicians are pushing them to create jobs in their districts. It’s akin to paying people to dig holes and then fill them in again.


I need to stop reading the news, all of this makes me sick.

Categories
odds and ends

Awkward dream #5425454

Last night I dreamed that the Who performed at the school I was attending. Things were going along pretty well until a piano player going to the school screwed up a solo during “Baba O’reilly”  and the whole thing came to a screeching halt. Everyone was kind of pissed at how everything turned out and I was hanging out with John Entwisle, the bass player from The Who. I couldn’t stop putting my foot in my mouth..

Me: So you must have trouble going to bars and stuff since you’re so famous.  I mean, not as much of a problem as Roger (Daltry, the lead singer) and Pete (Townsend, the guitarist) cause their really famous.

JE:

Me: Crap, I mean.. you know what I mean… I mean in bass guitar circles, you’re huge, but everyone knows who Roger Daltry is… err….

JE:

At this moment, I had the same realization as I’ve had in many other dreams, he’s dead. What is he doing here? How can I casually bring this up in a conversation without being rude? I’ve already made an ass out of myself, how is this going to go over?

I woke up while trying to come up with a good approach to this. I’ve had this same situation come up a fair number of times and I’ve never handled it gracefully. I’m scared witless that one time the person I’ll be speaking to will ask me, “What are you doing here? I’m dead!”

Categories
odds and ends

Newest coin

Got these in last night.

 

canadian-silver-maple-leaf-coin-pic.jpg

Unlike the other coins I’ve ordered, these are actual, official coins. They have a face value of 5 Canadian dollars but are worth around $18 US dollars just in the silver weight. These are the types of coins I’m going to try to keep as a way saving cash. If nothing else, they sure are a lot prettier than pices of paper or bank statements:-)

Categories
medical MS

MRI round 2

Had my second round of MRIs this week. I had my first one early in 2009 when they were trying to diagnose me. The experiences were quite different. I was a little apprehensive about the first one since I had never had an MRI before, it turned out to be no big deal. The machine resembled an industrial press (think of the machine that killed the Terminator in the first film). I laid there, staring at the top plate and listened to the best of the 70s radio station they were playing.

I should have known this was going to be a little different as soon as they told me to put my earplugs in. I did so without thinking. They then strapped my head into a brace to prevent it from moving. It was quite a bit  more sophisticated and tighter than the first one. They then fed me into the tube and started the scanning.

Man, even with the plugs in, it was loud. It was loud but interesting.  Anything that is regular has a rhythm and therefore reminds us of music. the first sounds resembled an electronic digerdoo with a mechanical, industrial rhythm section behind it. That then morphed into various sounds that kept me entertained for a little bit. Recordings of noise are never the same as experiencing the sounds directly and I was genuinely captivated for a while.

But only for a while. The trouble with MRIs is that you can’t move. You have to stay absolutely still in order to get the clearest results. The brace helps, you would really have to try to make a  big movement with it. The thing is that there is nothing to distract you, there is nothing really to look at, there is nothing to hear except the clanging and gyrations of the machine. You end up dividing your time between the merest physical sensations and your thoughts.

My main physical sensations were the myriad itches you get when you can’t move. Little itches on your nose become incredibly annoying once you can’t touch them. those were nothing as compared to the other one though. About 20 minutes in (out of an hour or so) I really had to pee. That started to become an issue fairly quickly but there wasn’t anything to do but gut it out and hope I didn’t wet myself. Let me tell you, once they rolled me out of the tube and undid the harness I was on my way to the bathroom. The nurse said I had to sign something before I left. I still have no idea what I signed…

The other thing you can’t escape is your thoughts. I can tell you that hour was spent thinking more about MS than the combined year before. I mainly go about my day ignoring, or trying to ignore the effects that MS has on me. There’s no running away from it when they are scanning your brain for damage and you can’t move a bit. Time drags on and you get so wrapped up in why you are there that you get a little nuts. I can understand why some people would flip out. If you’re predisposed to thinking the process is going to be awful, there are plenty of things that can reinforce that. I didn’t flip out, but I was left with a real morbid aftertaste to the experience.

I’ll talk with my doctor next week about the MRIs. We’ll discuss treatment options then. I might need a vacation to lighten my mood…

Categories
politics technology

Net neutrality paranoia

Once again, the specter of government regulation of the internet rears its head under the banner of net neutrality. Once again, people seem to have their stories confused as to why this is an important topic. We are told that corporations are plotting to give priority to certain types of information speed-wise over others. The networking companies claim this is the only way they can efficiently use their networks, by separating VOIP, streaming video, and email from each other and then charging people for the bandwidth they actually use. Somehow, this is supposed to lead to them filtering information so that people only get what the corporations want them to get.

Tell me that doesn’t sound paranoid, go ahead. It also doesn’t make any sense. It actually does make sense from the networking end of things to give different types of traffic different priorities, but let’s ignore that for a second. Are the companies greedy or not? Do they try to make as much money as possible, do they try to outdo their competition for subscribers?

My question is this, who would subscribe to a service that blocks content? Or to put a different spin on it, how long would it take for a company to advertise that they do not block content or restrict speeds regardless of content? Do you think that would give them a competitive advantage?

See, that’s the thing, net neutrality laws are totally unnecessary assuming that there are at least a couple of companies actually competing for subscribers. As long as one company offers non-discriminatory speeds, all of them have to. As long as one of them does not restrict content, none of them can. I say go ahead Comcast, try to implement some content filtering and see what happens. Verizon/cox/everyone else will be licking their chops waiting for your ex-customers.

On the other side of things, allowing congress to get a foothold in the workings of the internet is a very dangerous precedent. Would you want Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, or Jesse Helms mucking around with the internet? No? Then you can’t allow Pelosi, Franken, and Frank mess with it either. Leave the internet alone. We will be taken care of, not because the companies want to, but because they have to in order to survive and beat the competition.

Categories
economics

Financial cognitive dissonance

I am buying silver bullion with my Amazon credit card rewards. Put another way, I am using the rewards I get for indebtedness to save long term.

 

Actually, this could make a lot of sense as long as bad inflation were a certainty. If you knew that the dollar would be devalued, it would make a lot of sense to wrack up debt in dollars to buy commodities (especially gold and silver) that will rise in value with a worthless dollar. It would be the best of both worlds, your debt would be reduced as inflation climbed, and your assets would climb as well. What could go wrong?

Well, the inflation might not happen, that’s what could happen. So for now I will still pay off the credit cards every month but use my rewards to sock money away…

Categories
music

25 albums I could listen to all day, any day, all the time…

Got this from my friend John Carson off of Facebook, here’s my list, in no particular order…

 

1) Trinity Sessions by the Cowboy Junkies

2) Help by the Beatles

3) Cookin’ by the Miles Davis Quintet

4) The Shape of Punk to Come by Refused

5) Waitin’ for the Night by the Runaways

6) Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen

7) Goldburg Variations (1981) by Glenn Gould

8) Let it Bleed by the Rolling Stones

9) Sarah Vaughn with Clifford Brown by… well, you can guess

10) The Lion and the Cobra by Sinead O’Connor

11) Chapter Two by Roberta Flack

12) Live in London ’69 by the Beach Boys (my very first album!)

13) Surfer Rosa by the Pixies

14) 20 All TIme Greatest Hits by James Brown

15) Fear of a Black Planet by Public Enemy

16) Three Feet and Rising by De La Soul

17) Bach the Sonatas and Partitas by Paul Galbraith

18) The Best of Bill Haley and the Comets

19) Live at Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash

20) Elephant by the White Stripes

21) Burnin by Bob Marley and the Wailers

22) Retrospective by KRS 1

23) Sounds of India by Ravi Shankar

24) The Lexicon of Love by ABC

25) RIO by Duran Duran

 

There’s plenty more of course, these are the first ones off the top of my head. I haven’t bought any albums in a long time, mostly just singles. I’d like to see some of your lists!

Categories
music technology

An experiment

So I figured out the caching feature in Slacker radio. Essentially, I pick the station I want to listen to on my iPod and then tap a button to tell it to cache that station. I’ve read that it saves about 100 songs per station. I’ve set up 12 to do that, classics (as in Beatles and Stones), New York Dolls, Potishead, Modern Punk, UK Indie, Silversun Pickups, Pixies and stuff, Buddy Holly Radio, ’80s alternative, Indie hits, Classic Jazz, and Indie.

I have decided to go with an all “picked for me playlist” approach for a while. So I’ve got the Slacker stuff on there, and I’ve also put some genius playlists on there as well, Punk Mix, New Wave mix, mainstream rock mix, jazz mix, Indie rock mix, Brit-pop and rock mix, alternative pop/rock mix, and Alt. singer/songwriter mix.

What I like about this approach is that I still get the music I like, but it is a surprise for me, and I spend zero effort getting it on my iPod. You laugh, but when you have 34,000+ songs in your library, it’s a pain to go through and actually make playlists. Even if I did, I would then face the monotony of knowing exactly what was in them. This approach keeps things fresh. As strange as it may sound, even with 34,000+ songs, you can get into ruts. That’s where Slacker comes in. I can once again have the thrill of finding the song on the radio, but I get to skip the songs I don’t like.

 

Ahhh, life is good! Who needs cellular service to enjoy internet radio?