Author: Paul Tomblin

Progress on the pain front?

My doctor says I’m incredibly low on vitamin D, probably because of Rochester’s perpetual gloom and my own vampire-like avoidance of direct sunshine. (In spite of the lack of direct evidence, I *am* a red-head and I get sunburn way too easily). He says that anything between 40 and 100 is normal, and anything below 30 is seriously deficient, and I’m at 17. I’ve got a prescription for mega-dose vitamin D tablets. I’m supposed to take one a week for 4 weeks, then one a month, and start taking fish oil as well.

He recommends this lemon flavoured Norwegian cod liver oil that he says tastes nothing like the cod liver oil of my youth. I don’t believe him – instead of tasting like vomit, it will taste like lemon-tinged vomit, I’m sure.

Wiki currently shut down

My “DAFIF Replacement” Wiki is currently shut down because of a bug that was causing my computer to hit load averages up over 10 every time Google indexed it. My log files were full of lines like:

[Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] [error] [client 66.249.72.194] [Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] view: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at /var/www/twiki/lib/TWiki/Plugins/TablePlugin/Core.pm line 457.
[Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] [error] [client 66.249.72.194] [Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] view: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at /var/www/twiki/lib/TWiki/Plugins/TablePlugin/Core.pm line 462.

I hope to have time to upgrade to a newer version of TWiki Wiki one of these days and then I’ll re-open it. Or possibly I’ll just let it die since it wasn’t getting any use anyway.

Side effect, or my imagination?

For two or three weeks I’ve been trying a different pain medication, a NSAID called “relafen”. I’m not sure if I’m imagining it, but it seemed to me that last weekend when I went flying I was more susceptable to motion sickness than I have been in the past. And yesterday while I was concentrating on something on my screen (ok, it was the live updates from the Giro D’Italia, not work), I suddenly felt like I was going to lose my balance and fall over, which is kind of odd to happen while you’re sitting still. I also seemed to have to remind myself to breathe when I was concentrating – but hey, it was a exciting mountain stage, what can I say? The “hey, I’m losing my balance” feeling just happened again today, even though the Giro stage I was watching work I was doing was pretty unexciting.

One web site listed vertigo as a very rare side effect of relafen. But why now after 3 weeks, and not back when I started?

Oh well, I’m seeing my doctor tomorrow. Maybe he’s got a different medication to try.

Note to self

If you want to find a picture you saw yesterday, and now the picture has been removed from the web site that you saw it on for copyright reasons, *and* you haven’t exited Firefox in many weeks, *and* you have had a web page open on one page that is constantly showing you different parts of the world in Google Maps in hybrid mode, DO NOT try to find the picture by going to your .mozilla/firefox/*/Cache directory and typing “kuickshow *”.

After my screen filled with several hundred images, mostly Google Map tiles, it started getting really slow. My CPU was pegged, I was swapping heavily, and still images were appearing. The mouse was moving, but nothing was responding to clicks or keyboard presses. I went to another machine, ssh’ed in and did a “killall kuickshow”, but the load average was still over 8. I waited a while for it to drop down to under 1.0, but my display was still unresponsive. Eventually I gave up waiting for it to recover and rebooted.

Of course, my Cache directory is now nearly empty and I’ll never find that picture again.

Splashy fun

There is a member of my flying club who owns a Cessna 172 on straight floats, and a half share of a light sport Legend Cub which spends its winters on skis and its summers on straight floats. Yeah, some people have it tough, right? I’ve been begging him for a ride for over a year now, and yesterday he asked on the club mailing list if anybody wanted to be his safety pilot while he tried out the new Garmin 430 in his Cessna. I think I set a record for speedy replies to that mailing list with my “PICK ME! PICK ME!” response.
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