Rants and Revelations

I tried to take a picture of my gum stitches. I’ve taken better pictures in my life.
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I had peridontal surgery this morning. Evidently my bad habit of sticking sharp things into the gap between my upper front teeth has caused the bone to erode to dangerous levels. They cut away the gum down to the bone, scraped away accumulated crud on the bone, applied something to make the bone grow again, and stitched it back up. It wasn’t all that bad while it was going on, except the novocaine made my nose numb. But now it’s done and the novocaine has mostly worn off. And I’ve got the pain you’d expect from having your gums cut open and the bone scraped, plus the stitches are irritating the inside of my lip. The pain killer they gave me is making me feel bleary and very sensitive to movement, and doesn’t seem to be doing anything about my mouth. And I can’t eat anything that involves “incising” with the front teeth for two weeks.

This is less fun than I thought it would be.

Still muddling along on the project mentioned in Rants and Revelations » Stress, stress, and more stress. My boss wants my bit to be test-able and demo-able by the first of the month, and I’m not sure I can do it. I don’t think the other bits are going any better. The Chinese team have delivered something, but we can’t test it yet until my bit and Tony’s bit are finished. Kris is working on a bit that we were going to farm out to the Chinese team, but we decided it would be faster for him to do it than to try to explain it to them. It seems that in order specify the requirement in sufficent detail that you could just hand it over to a foreign team, you need a formal language. And the formal language we know best and can produce fastest is Java.

In added aggravation, just as I was turning into the parking lot at work this morning, my muffler started dragging on the ground. A quick examination seemed to indicate it was just the strap hangar broke, which is exactly what it turned out to be. Cheap, but time-consuming and annoying.

Meanwhile, the peridontist is going to be fixing my front teeth this Saturday. He says they have to make an incision in the front of my jaw, scrape out crud, and put in something to make the bone grow back. He says I won’t be able to “incise” for a couple of weeks.

Saturday is also the day when we have our MoveOn.org Call For Change party. I have a bit of a mental block against making phone calls to strangers thanks to an incident from my childhood, but maybe I can just play host.

On Monday, my 1U server goes off to the colo. I just got the network settings, so sometime on Sunday I have to take down the server and set up the networking.

I didn’t write a summary of the last couple of days of the Tour de France as I usually do because I didn’t actually get to watch them on TV until I got back from Oshkosh, and by that time the news was all about Landis’ failed drug test. I want to reserve judgement about Landis until we hear the full results of the investigation. But one thing I read in several discussions of this whole thing is “we should just allow the athletes to use whatever drugs they want”. This is a damn stupid idea for a couple of reasons, and I’d like to expand on this.

The first reason it’s a stupid idea is that athletes will do anything to get an edge on their competition. If everybody else is using drug X, then you have to use X or you’re going to be at a disadvantage, even if you’re a better athlete than them. The drugs would become just another arms-race situation. The various sports governing bodies have done what they can to reduce technological arms races - they want technology to evolve, but they don’t want it to decide competitions. Back in the days when fibreglas skis were new, the FIS had to step in and say that cross country skis had to be a minimum of 44 mm wide at the widest point, because people were trying narrower and narrow skis to get a speed advantage, to the point where a large number of competitors were breaking their skis in a race - if you didn’t break, you’d gain a few seconds over everybody else. The UCI does the same thing in bike racing with their weight limits on bikes. The limit is arbitrary, but you have to draw the line somewhere. If drugs got to be the next arms race, people would be doing major damage to themselves.

And that’s the second reason why it’s a stupid idea: athletes don’t care about the future. If you told an athlete that if they take this drug they’d win the Tour de France but they’d drop dead two weeks later, but their win would still stand, there would be a line-up around the block for the drug. How do I know this? Personal experience.

Most of my competitive life was in pain. I was pretty sure that continuing to compete would make the pain problems worse in the future, but I cheerfully accepted that trade-off. I’m not as cheerful about it now, but I stand by the decision. And I wasn’t competing for prize money, million dollar endorsements and world wide fame. The sports I was competing in were obscure to the point where most of my friends had never even heard of them. And I wasn’t even winning most of them - I never won a Canadian Championship in anything. In cross country skiing, I wasn’t even in the top 4 on our university team. But I loved the competition against myself, and the feeling of doing my best, and the knowledge that I’d tested my limits and come through them. I basically ruined my knees and condemmed myself to lifetime pain for nothing more than a feeling. Can you imagine what an athlete would do to himself if there was more at stake?

Ok, I didn’t think I’d be posting about the Tour today either. But today I have another reason to respect Floyd Landis.

Floyd has been doing great this year - he won 3 major races before the Tour, and now he’s a minute out of the yellow jersey after a great performance in the first individual time trial. He’s always had a reputation for hard work and for never making excuses or complaining. But now I find he’s a fellow chronic pain sufferer. He’s just admitted that for 4 years he’s been suffering from osteonecrosis in his hip, and he’s going for hip replacement surgery soon after the Tour (to maximize his recovery time for next year’s Tour). The New York Times has two stories, here and here. (Registration required, use BugMeNot.)

One of the interesting facts I learned from the articles: his extreme forward position on the seat on his time trial bike was chosen to create a wider angle between his trunk and his femur to help his hip work.

Some of the quotes from the articles:

He walks with a limp. He sits as often as possible and cannot cross his right leg over his left. He takes elevators instead of stairs, valet-parks at the shopping mall and sometimes has difficulty sleeping. Running is out of the question. Like many of the 216,000 Americans who will receive hip replacements this year, his life is defined by chronic, debilitating pain.

Yeah, I can relate.

Later, back at his house, Landis would finally open up a little about the pain. He would say: “Everybody thinks you can overcome pain if you want to enough, and let me tell you, you can’t. This isn’t some Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, where somebody can get shot in the leg and keep going. There’s pain that makes me stop, makes everybody stop.”

Here’s hoping you don’t have to stop, Floyd.

I am convinced that one of these days, my pain will just get to the point where I can’t stand it any more. Having to give up anything that requires mobility, like kayaking, is bad enough. But I worry that I’ll end up having to medicate beyond what is legal for flying, and lose even that outlet. Or worse, I’ll be unable to even think straight, either from the pain or the medication. I don’t know what I’ll do at that point, because my life as a relatively happy and productive member of society will be over. I’ve thought that day was just around the corner for 25 years now, but so far it has been gradual enough that I’ve been able to make adjustments.

But right now my elbows are killing me. On top of my usual knee and hip pain, my elbows have been so sore I haven’t been sleeping well, and I can barely concentrate when I’m awake. And it has been like this since Monday. If it had happened as a result of Friday’s kayaking, I could understand, but I didn’t do anything exceptional on Sunday or Monday that could have triggered this.

Of course, watching the recent episode of “House, M.D.” didn’t help, where the stuff happening in the guy’s brain was putting him in so much pain that even putting him in a coma wasn’t helping. I felt like I was watching my future.

I hope this isn’t it. I’m 45 years old, and I’ve been in near constant pain for 30 years. I just want it to stop.

- Dental surgery sucks. I got a temporary crown this morning. Between the numb mouth, the screeching of the drill and the feel of things being ground away inside you, or the two people with their hands in your mouth, one of whom is constantly telling you to open wider as your fight with all your mental might to not bite them and tell them to get the hell away from your mouth, there isn’t much to like. It’s four hours now, and I’m getting the feeling back in my mouth, but this temporary crown feels like a foriegn object in my mouth. At least it’s not cutting into my tongue the way the fragments of tooth were doing all weekend, but I probably bit my tongue a few times while it was numb.

- Canadian voters suck. It’s almost as if they’re afraid of insulting politicians they used to like, so they keep voting for the PM who gets more and more unpopular, but wait for him to retire and then vote his replacement out of office out of anger at the one who just retired. They did it to Trudeau/Turner, Mulrooney/Campbell, and now it looks like they’re going to vent their anger at Chretien’s arrogance and corruption on Paul Martin, who seemed like a pretty decent PM for a change. I’m just hoping and praying that Harper doesn’t get a majority, because he would be a giant step backwards for social liberalism in Canada. Plus, Canada is the only member of the G7 with a balanced budget, so why vote in a guy whose going to fuck with that to give giant tax breaks to the rich?

I applied for long term disability insurance. Not because I anticipate problems, but because I don’t want Vicki and I to end up broke and homeless if I can’t work.

After review of your application, we regret to inform you that we are unable to issue a policy to you because of your longstanding history of multiple joint problems.

Because if there is one thing that would prevent me from typing all day, it’s chronic knee pain.

(Gee, how many times have I used that title that Firefox actually showed it as the first completion option once I typed the “B”!)

I have this curious pain running around my head.  Sometimes it seems to manifest itself like a hard little ball that lodges either just under the bridge of my nose or about an inch up from the bottom of my skull in the back.  Most of the time it’s just pressure on the back of my eyes.  Sometimes my eyes just won’t focus for a second or two.  I’m not sure if this is some sinus thing coming on, or a migraine about to pop.

Oh well, I guess we’ll see.  After all, there’s no better way to get expert medical advice than to post about it to your blog, right?

TMIoTD:
Continue reading ‘Today’s WAY too much information discovery’ »

A few weeks ago my physiotherapist gave me some exercises for my wrist, which I damaged in a kayaking injury. I was supposed to do 15-30 reps of these three exercises with a 1-2 pound weight. Well, I couldn’t find a 1-2 pound weight, so I started off doing 10 reps with a 5 pound weight. That was going ok, so I went up to 15 reps, and that worked ok too. But last night I tried to do 20 reps. That was too much. My wrist hurts like hell today. I think I’m going to go back to 10 reps again, and step up more slowly.

I had an appointment with my physiotherapist today. She’s pretty pleased with the progress on my wrist - I’m getting more range of motion back every day, and my grip strength is increasing as well.

I got my KVM switch working again, by unplugging the monitor cable from it and plugging it back again. Not sure if that’s a KVM problem or a monitor problem - next time I’ll try power cycling the monitor instead.

And the network connector arrived for the upstairs TiVo. That means I can do a daily call using the network, instead of the phone. That’s not a huge win, although there wasn’t a convenient phone jack near the TiVo and formerly I’d been using this device that puts the telephone signal through the power lines. But far more importantly, this enables multi-room viewing. I just tried it, and it works ok, but not great. On one Tivo, you can browse the “Now Playing List” (ie the list of recorded programs) from the other TiVo. You can choose a show and “transfer it”. It doesn’t quite transfer in real time, so you have to wait a bit before you start watching, although you can go back to the menu and watch something else, or even choose more shows to transfer, while it’s transferring. And when it’s done transferring, it’s on both TiVos.

If I had any wishes, I’d want the transfer to happen fast enough that instead of transferring, you could watch it directly from the other machine’s hard drive, and therefore when you finished, you could delete it or otherwise manage it on the originating TiVo’s drive. Oh well.

I went to the doctor about my wrist. They took off my cast, and let me wash my arm. All the skin on my palm was flaking off, but when I went to the sink to try to wash it off, the technician who’d taken off my cast called from the other room to say “you can’t get all the flakes off”. She says everybody goes back to the sink when they discover all the flakes. While waiting for the doctor, I made the mistake of trying to look at the back of my hand to see if it was flaking too. OUCH!

The doctor examined my wrist a bit and said that since it’s doing so well, instead of a cast she’d give me a brace. She said to treat it like a cast and don’t twist my wrist around too much, although of course I can take it off to wash. She said if it’s too painful I could come back and get a cast.

I can almost type normally with this brace on, but only if I raise my elbow at a high angle. And my elbow is very stiff and sore. But it’s nice to be mobile again.

Saturday, I woke up to an email saying that my waypoint generator had a bunch of Canadian airports with US-style identifiers (instead of CYRP, Carp was KYRP). I fixed that first. Then Vicki and I replaced the outside front floodlight which had a wonky socket. And we replaced the floodlights over the garage, which supposedly had a light sensor (although it was more of a randomness generator) with one that had a motion detector. Since we can’t find a switch for these lights, I like the idea that they won’t be on all night. This involved hacksawing off a bit of iron pipe conduit that was sticking out too far to put the box where I wanted it and some simple wiring. Or at least it would probably be simple wiring for somebody who isn’t scared of ladders and electricity (gee, my brother used to shock me with electricity and throw me off barn beams - see a connection?). But we got it done - I’m so domestic it hurts.

Sunday, I got up bright and early to be a safety pilot for Paul P. He’s been my safety pilot in the past, so it was only fair, even if it did mean getting up ungodly early. I took some pictures while he was buzzing around, but most of them sucked. Here are a few that didn’t suck too bad.

Back at the airport, there was an ancient Dornier flying boat re-engined with modern turboprop engines. Cool!

After that, I went kayaking again. This time I went a little slower, and went up all the way to Blossom Road. The river was still quite shallow, and fast. I lost track of the number of times I had to put down my paddle and push down and forward or backward on the bottom of the river because I was bottomed out. (Try that with a canoe!)

On the way back I took one of the other branches because this canoe full of girls can careering across the river and rammed me without making the slightest effort to slow down or avoid me - after they saw they were on a collision course, they all stopped paddling - and when I got to the fork there was another one of these canoes full of girls sideways in the river. But it worked out well - there was a Great Blue Heron on the bank of the river that I got a couple of shots of, and then some “ducks in a row”, and then a Green Heron, which I ‘ve seen very few of over the years.

The best pictures from today’s paddling.

Unfortunately on the way home I noticed that I had a really badly sprained wrist. Unfortunately it’s my left one (I’m left handed), but I suppose the right would have been worse since it would be hard to shift my car like that. It was literally a big pain trying to put my kayak away afterwards.

This morning, because of the pain in my elbows caused from overzealous paddling yesterday, I took some asseto^Waceto^Wecset^Wtylenol with codiene. At first I just felt this weird feeling of disassociation from my body - except the pain in my elbows, that penetrated like a million candlepower spot light through fog. But 5 minutes ago I broke out in a sweat and now I feel like I’m going to throw up. It’s going to be a fun day at work.

Update: Around 10:30 I had to literally RUN to the bathroom because I was about to throw up. I got there, but I didn’t throw up. I stood over the toilet for 15 minutes until the urge passed. It’s now 2pm, and I finally feel like I can actually think and work again, but of course my elbows are quite painful - although no worse than they were a few days ago. I used to have a large jar of ibuprophen in my desk drawer, but I took it out for some reason. I think I need to bring it back.