Tuesday June 10, 2008
Tuesday June 10, 2008 So as I wrote in my last entry I had surgery number four on my right eye in attempt to re-attach my retina. I guess the good news is that after a month (as of last Wed.) the retina is still attached. I'd never made it past 10 days before so that's good. Unfortunately something is wrong although we don't know what. My vision never improved after this surgery. In fact it was better the day after the surgery than it has been since. The Dr. is quite surprised.
After last week's visit my wife had noticed something about my eye that we'd never noticed before which is the real subject of this entry.
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Now I do have to wonder if at least part of my poor vision is related to how distorted the pupil is. It surely isn't helping. If you look really close at the photo (not that I'm recommending it because I'll admit it's making me ill) you can see three places were they made incisions in the eye two on the right side, upper and lower and one on the upper left. I've been on dilating drops on and off for four months now (mostly on) and my guess is that the muscles controlling the iris are pretty confused at this point. I've been on these drops so long that its normal to expect it to be weeks before the iris is back to normal. At the moment I've been off the drops for 4 days and I can't tell a bit of difference.
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Tuesday May 13, 2008 Last Thursday I had retina surgery number four. This time I had it at Duke in an attempt to change my luck which so far has been pretty poor.
The surgery was the most interesting of the bunch as I remember almost all of it. At the very beginning of the surgery they have to install a "block" which apparently involves sticking this needle into the back of the eye. They knock you out for that part but then let you regain some degree of consciousness for the remainder of the surgery. On number three I only remember the last 15 minutes or so. On this one I can remember from the point where the Dr. Postel told me "Now we're going to remove the (silicone) oil. We just let it drain out on its own rather than draw it out". I could see the shadow of various instruments as they worked in my eye. I could pick out three different instruments. The coolest part was the laser. I could hear when Dr. Postel ordered that the laser be turned on at 400mw. Then whenever they fired it I could see the shadow of ejecta debris rise up from where the laser was doing its work. All of this was just shadows so it was in black in white like I was watching shadow puppets. Very neat.
The next morning I went back to Duke for the post-op check. I was concerened about what my vision would be like since on every other surgery where they could actually do the reattachment (i.e. all but the first) my vision was pretty poor, I could just detect hand motion, no fingers no letters on the chart. I was afraid I might lose all the healing I'd done since the end of March. I was a pleasant experience to see that my vision was the best 1 day post-op that it has been, I could count fingers and read the top line of the chart. Maybe this was going to do the trick.
Over the weekend though I could see that my vision was not improving, at best it was staying the same or maybe a little worse. This was a bit disconcerting since previously this early on I could see improvement as the day went on. Well maybe since it was so good to start it isn't so apparent this time?
On Monday though it was clear that the vision was worse. I probably could no longer count fingers although it was close. Aghh not another detachment already! I called Duke and made an appointment for the next morning.
Driving to the appointment this morning I could tell there was a bit of an improvement from yesterday but still not back to last Friday. The vision was like the worst pool chlorine eye you can imagine. Definitely different than what I'd expect from a detachment. What was up?
The technician that checks your vision and puts the dilation drop in your eye said an odd thing when he looked thru the scope they normally use to examine the cornea, "Have you had cataract surgery?". (I haven't really although my lens has been removed). Then he took my pressure, twice. It was 5, pretty low. Last Friday it was 10 (also a bit on the low side). I was pretty disappointed at that news since in the past a pressure drop had meant a new detachment. I went back to the waiting area very anxious.
I finally saw Dr. Dayani who had assisted on the surgery on Thursday. He did the whole retina scan thing with the stationary microscope and the head lamp. Finally he said "I have good news for you the retina is all well attached". Whew! Apparently my eye has decided on a new way to stress me out. I'm forming a layer of haze or film on the surface of the oil just at the iris and that is making it hard to see. (I think this explains the technician's cataract remark.) They expect that by increasing the prednisolone drops that the inflammation will go down and the haze will go away. If not they'd have to remove it, but normally it just goes away on its own. At this point I'm just happy that the retina is staying in place, maybe the fourth will be the fix.
Monday April 14, 2008 So this is a little story in anticipation of tax day tomorrow.
Last Thursday I came home to find a rather thick letter from the IRS. Umm this does not look good. I opened the letter to find that the IRS was claiming that I owed $22,820 in back taxes for 2006. I was immediately relieved since this was clearly a mistake. Now if it was something like one or two thousand I might have been worried, but $22k, can't be.
On further reading it turned out that the dispute was the result of a 1099b that I apparently failed to report for a sale of $48,295 in a Fidelity mutual fund. I thought "well maybe I did miss that". I wasn't worried since I knew that that money was a result of selling Sun ESPP shares in anticipation of paying for my Velocity kit. I sold those shares a few months before I needed to pay Velocity and I parked result in a mutual fund for 3 months while I waited for the kit to be delivered. I figured at worst I might owe $100, much better than the $22.8k they wanted. The IRS's calculation was based on a cost basis for the mutual fund of $0 which results in taxes of $17k, penalty of $3.5k and interest of $1.7k. Now if I only could figure out how to get shares for zero dollars...
So I went and dug up the 2006 return. No sign of the 1099 which explains why I left it off. Looking further I found the records of the sale and discovered that I in fact lost $71 on that sale (no wonder I forgot about it). So instead of owing ther IRS almost $23k they owed me. I drafted a letter explaining all the numbers along with a copy of the documentation of the proper cost basis. At the bottom of the letter I wrote:
Based on this the IRS owes me a refund of $18. I'm sure that the President will be sorry to see the windfall of $22,820 he expected from me to help pay for the war evaporate, but he must be used to disappointments by now.
I thought about telling them that they couldn't pay me on the installment plan but figured I better not push my luck.
Friday April 11, 2008 Back in November I wrote about my experience with retinal tears. I was hoping that was pretty much the end of the story. Unfortunately it wasn't since that entry I've had more issues. At first it wasn't too bad. Originally I had three tears, one big one and two little ones. In December the big tear and the nearby small tear joined forces to make one large tear. This wasn't too bad since I noticed it quickly and it was lasered and things were fine.
Things seemed to proceed ok until early February with only biweekly visits to the doctor for checks. It looked like I was pretty much out of the woods. On Feb. 2 I noticed a little bit of flashing in my eye that lasted for a couple of minutes. It was barely visible, had the lighting situation been any different I never would have noticed it. I debated calling the doctor about it but since it was so shrt lived I decide I'd just try and pay close attention and see if there was any change in the floater situation. In hindsight that was a bad idea since I had so many floaters (tens if not hundred of thousands) that detecting any change was probably unlikely.
The next Saturday (the 9th) when I went to bed there was a bright light in the upper right of my eye. Not good. Why does this stuff always happen on the weekend? On Monday I made an appt. with the doctor to get it checked out on Tues. As far as I could tell there was nothing different in my vision, in fact I passed my 3rd class FAA medical that day.
Tuesday came and with the testing the technician did before I even saw the doctor, it was clear I had lost a bunch of peripheral vision. The doctor then confirmed the worst. I had a new tear in a completely different place and the retina had detached. I would need surgery Wed. morning. The good new, if there was any, was that they'd do a vitrectomy so all my floaters would be gone and I could expect my normal vision. The bad news was I'd get a gas bubble inserted in the eye and I'd have to maintain a certain head position for 10 days. Also I could expect to have cataract surgery in 6 months to a year.
I went to the hospital early Wed. and they surgery was performed. Well not really. Shortly after the surgery had started I suffered a suprachoroidal hemorrhage in my eye. This is the bane of eye surgery. It is pretty rare something like .02-.05% of any eye surgery where the eyeball is opened up. Since cataract surgery is the most common surgery of this type it is seen there most frequently if you can call .02% frequent. This basically stopped the operation since this lifts the retina up and if that wasn't bad enough the surgeon can't see for the blood. This complication is pretty devastating as far as final visual outcome. Any chance for 20/20 was now gone. The next day when the patch came off the eye I found I was now blind in that eye. Well I could detect light. I called it my one pixel eye.
Now we'd have to wait for me to recover from the hemorrhage before we could operate again. We'd also have to hope that it wouldn't just happen again. If the probabilities were independent I'd have nothing to worry about. Unfortunately they aren't though it is pretty common for subsequent surgery to go fine.
Two weeks later it looked as if I was at the point where a 2nd surgery could be done. It was hard to tell for sure because the retina wasn't really all that visible. They had to use ultrasound to make the decision. The second surgery lasted 3 hours and went well. At least in the sense I didn't hemorrhage. They were able to do the virectomy, remove my lens, reattach the retina and fill the eye with silicone oil. The next day when the patch came off I could see, after a fashion again. Unfortunately they weren't able to get all the blood ought from under the retina so there was concern that when the blood there dissipated that the oil wouldn't make a good seal. The hope was that by the time that happened the retina would be fairly well attached and not detach again.
No such luck. The blood dissipated and two weeks later my retina detached again, all the way to the macula. Now the plan was to wait until all the blood was completely gone and try yet again. Two more weeks of waiting. The 3rd surgery was March 26. I was hoping that the third time would be the charm. I was brave enough this time that we did the surgery under local anethesia. I actually have a memory of seeing the instrument working inside my eye. This surgery seemed to go well. The blood was all gone. The retina went down nice an flat and there was a good fill with the silicone oil. The doctor and I were very hopeful.
I was really sweating out the first two weeks since after the second surgery I wasn't able to make it two weeks before the retina detached again. Although it wasn't like I'd be out of the woods at two weeks it would be some kind of milestone. After this operation I paid close attention to the vision in that eye and it was clearly getting better every day. It was great because of distortions but it clearly improved daily. I was also aware that it was better than it was at similar days after the 2nd operation. I was very hopeful.
Last Tuesday was my scheduled follow-up visit for 2 weeks post-op. I definitely like going on the scheduled visits because the unplanned ones are always bad. The bad news was that Monday evening I became concerned that I could detect signs of detachment again. They were very subtle so I wasn't sure. Tuesday came and I go to the doctor. I could read the line (well read is too strong a term) under the big E. Unfortunately the doctor confirmed that I had a new very small detachment. Damn!
Now I had to decide what to do. Try again or just give up on the eye. My doctor suggested that I might want to have another doctor try the surgery. I had been to the Duke Eye Clinic after the hemorrhage and my doctor who interned at Duke suggested that the doctor I consulted with there would be a good choice. My initial instinct was to give up and just let the eye fail and get on with my life. I was just tired of the surgeries and the restrictions they imposed and it just wasn't clear that even if things were successful that I'd get reasonable vision out of that eye.
So one of the things I'd been wondering about was how much of the distortion I was seeing was caused by the silicone oil and how much was damage to the retina. I had noticed four different distortions. One if you looked at the lines painted on the road. The lines in my right (bad) eye were at about a 20 degree angle to the lines in my left eye. Also thing were very slightly different sizes. Also I noticed that if I looked at a picture frame it was not rectangular but was a parallelogram. Finally there was the fact that there were no straight lines. Any horizontal or vertical lines had two little bums in them.
I suspected that the angle and tilted vision thing was caused by the oil in the eye (probably by an index of refraction difference compared to the vitreous) and my doctor agreed. I was surprised at how little I could find on the internet about this though. It's one of the reasons I'm writing this so the next person my at least find this entry. I did finally manage to find a document that was for a different surgery but still used the same oil that mentioned the angle/tilt distortion. So now I could at least believe that after the oil is removed (6 month to a year after successful surgery) that this distortion would go away. From what I could find it seemed likely that the little bends in straight line are caused by the retina not being quite flat. In theory the oil will tend to smotth these out over a few months. I sure hope so.
So now I've decided to try operation number four and this time to do it at Duke. Since "third time is the charm" didn't work out, I'm counting on "fourth time is the fix". We'll see. :-)
Apr 11 2008, 11:27:45 AM EDT Permalink
Tuesday November 27, 2007 So one of the things about getting older is that since this is the first and olny time you get to do it there are always surprises. I just had an unpleasant reminder of that the last couple of weeks.
Three Sunday's ago I was working on the wings of my Velocity when I suddenly noticed what seemed to be a eyelash in my eye. I tried to brush it away but it stayed there. After I finished what I was doing I went back to the house and asked my wife Gretchen if she could see anything but she couldn't. I wasn't in any pain so I decided I would be sure to see my eye doctor (optometrist) on Monday.
When I woke up on Monday my vision was definitely worse but not terrible. Sort of like looking thru a window that had lots (thousands) of very tiny water drops on it. Now I'm definitely getting worried. I got an opeing to see the doctor first thing in the morning. He took a photo of my retina with a device call an OptiMap and proceeded to tell me I had posterior vitreous detachment. It wasn't a big deal since my retina was not torn but I should watch out for any flashing lights or shadows. I went back to work greatly relieved.
That night I decided that maybe I didn't really explain how messed up my vision was to the doctor and that maybe I should call him back on Tues.
Tues. my vision was about the same and I called the doctor. He set up an appointment with a retina specialist for Wed. It was about a block away form out offices. I felt better again. Later that afternoon I noticed that my vision seemed different. I covered my left eye only to discover that I couldn't see out of my right eye! I could see light and dark but it was like looking thru very dirty water. I ran out of the office and immediately went to the retina doctor's office. They weren't open. I was pretty paniced at this point. Since I was right next to the emergency room of a hospital I went there. Not surprisingly they couldn't do much but they did find out that the retina doctor was at a different office a few miles away. Off I went to the retina specialist.
The retina doctor examined my eye and found that I had three tears in my retina. Two little ones and one big one. One of the little ones was very near the big one and it was very nearly a "super" tear. They judge the size of the tears but the number of clock hours they span in the eye. A "super" tear is 3 or more hours. The big tear I had was two hours and the others were just a single hour. Because there was so much blood in my eye and there were signs of fluid entering under the tear the treatment that was done that night was cryo therapy. It involved freezing you ey from the outside-in in order to cause scar tissue that would prevent the retina from detaching. It was basically painless. I was sent home with instructions of what to watch for and what to do. Reading and computer was out, watching tv was ok. Also I was to try and lay on my side as much as possible since the tear was on the top of my eye and that way gravity would help try and peel the retinal of the eye wall.
On Wed. I could see vision improving in my eye by the hour. On Thursday I had a followup visit and I could read the 20/25 line. The blood in my eye was greatly reduced and there was evidence that the fluid that was seeping under the retina was gone. Because of this the doctor did laser treatment on the tears. This seemed to take quite a while (15 minutes?) and was surprisingly painful. I was sent home with basically the same instruction and a date for a followup on Tues.
By Tues. I was pretty darn bored. I did manage to watch about half the episodes of Sky King but mostly I tried to sleep. I was really tired of laying on my side. The visit to the doctor went well. I was able to read the 20/20 line on the chart. [Considering how messed up my vision is with the thousands of floaters it is pretty clear how poorly 20/20 stacks up as a measurment]. I was given the clearance to read an use the computer. I was to avoid anything that vibrate or shake my head. Since there was only one more day before the Thanksgiving holiday I decided to stay at home and take it easy. At least I could sit up again.
This week I'm back to work. Tomorrow I have another followup visit, hopefully everything is still ok. I feel like I'm down from say 500,000 floaters to maybe 200,000. Still pretty annoying. I realized driving home last night that driving at night wasn't so bad as I felt sort of normal since I couldn't see all the crap in my eye.
By now I've learned that as everyone ages the vitreous shrinks and eventually detaches from the retina. In most people it's a non-event. In people with myopia detachment happens earlier in life and with a higher risk of retinal tears. Bad eyes gets you coming and going. I was only a moderate myope at -5.25 before I had lasik back in '98. I had always thought I had pretty bad eyes until I had lasik and found that I was only considered moderate. It is hard for me to understand what my friends with -9 or -12 see like. Now I know they may be in for what I've just been thru.
The other bad thing is that since one eye has done this the likelihood of the other eye doing it is increased. At least I'll know what the heck is going on if it happens again. In the meantime I'm just hoping everything continues to heal properly.
Nov 27 2007, 01:55:42 PM EST Permalink
Thursday June 07, 2007 This past Saturday was our big annual party. The theme this years was Pirates. As usual it was hectic getting everything ready for the party. At least this year I didn't have some big project, like building the gazillion, to complete (although I did stain the gazillion). Mostly it was a getting the hangar in shape after a year of increasing entropy. My wife thinks that I should just always keep the hangar neat then it would be so bad ... right!
The props this year were pretty simple, a few fake cannons and turning the 10 foot john boat we keep on our pond into a pirate ship. Oh and the usual palm tree grove. I'm going to glad when those fronds are finally retired.
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Here's a shot of the various pirates having a good time. |
| There was an impromptu costume contest with a category for the women and the men. My wife Gretchen (2nd from the right) doing her best a pirate wench. Our neigbor Diane (3rd from right) was the people's choice winner. |
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Here was the guys auditioning for best costume. Much to Diane's chagrin her husband Pat (rightmost) did not win. He surely would have won but who would know that we'd get a professional pirate (not shown) who really wowed the crowd. |
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Here I am in the only correct Pirate costume. I'm wearing a Roberto Clemente jersey (the greatest Pirate). I don't understand how everyone got the wrong pirate idea from the invitation? I borrowed the grill I'm standing next to from one of my neighbors. This grill almost got my in trouble at the party. This grill (actually there are two on the trailer) is normally used for pig picking. Cooking a pig for 8-10 hours. |
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Well the first thing to know is how large and heavy this grill is. It takes two people to open the lid! It is in serious need of a big counterweight. When I borrowed this I was told not to mess with the gas regulator so I didn't. Well after I had the first round of jerk chicken on the grill (30 lbs of boneless breasts) for 20 minutes I got someone to help me open the grill onyl to find that the chicken was pretty much in the same state as when it went on the grill. Yikes! So we had to mess with the regulator. I adjusted it to the point where it almost would blow the flame out to get the max heat. That helped a bunch but it was still pretty slow. It probably took almost 1.5 hours to do the first batch of chicken. I don't know how many times I had people asking "is the chicken done yet". The second batch went much quicker and in actuality the fact that it went slow made it much easier to deal with once I got past that first hiccup.
The weather turned out almost perfect after giving us a bit of a worry. We hadn't had rain in several weeks but on Friday afternoon tropical storm Barry popped up in the Gulf of Mexico and the remnants were expect to reach NC by late Sat. and to rain all Sunday. On Saturday morning the sky was looking like maybe Barry was going to arrive early. That would have been no fun. As it turned out it was mostly cloudy and relatively cool for June in NC and only a few small bits of rain. Whew!
As usual everything went much too fast and before we knew it the party was over. Now we have to think about what to do for next year's party (SciFi). We have a couple of interesting ideas we'll see how practical they turn out.
For another view of the party you can check out the blog of my friend "Big Lee" who has a good write up on it (and had a great costume too).
Monday April 02, 2007 My earliest memory of realizing I was left handed and that it was somehow different came when I was 4 or 5 and I tried to use a pair of scissors and I couldn't make them work. I was mystified as to why they refused to cut. My mother then told me I had to use my other hand to get them to work. I was pretty clumsy using them with the "wrong" hand. I tried turning the scissors upside down which would have sort-of worked if the finger holes weren't so annoying. Eventually I got over it.
When I was looking to buy good scissors for cutting the fiberglass cloth for building my airplane I noticed a pair of left handed scissors. I decided that after all this time I was going to finally have scissors that were made for me. Truth is in cutting the fiberglass cloth I mostly use a "pizza cutter" since it is much faster and doesn't disturb the cloth. The annoying thing was that I found that I couldn't really cut well with the left handed scissors. There was just something wrong about them them I couldn't place. I found that I could cut about as well with either hand using these scissors. That was disappointing.
Sometime later I gave the scissors to my wife and asked her to cut something. I figured it was about time for turn-about on the right handers of the world. She could cut with them ok but she had trouble cutting where she wanted and remarked that they "cut on the wrong side". That's when I realized why they didn't seem normal to me. I'm right eye dominant and even though the scissors felt more natural in my hand I couldn't see what I was doing unless I twisted my hand to get the blade out of the way. So I was still screwed.
I figure I'm resigned to using right handed scissors forever. A few years ago a friend of mine remarked how he had a left handed circular saw and how much better it was for him being left handed. I had never had a problem using a circular saw with either hand and just figured it was another one of those things I was trained out of though by no means as annoying as my first experience with scissors. I had always wondered about special ordering a left handed circular saw (although since mostly I use a table saw it wasn't high on the tool list). Now I'm thinking that it would be a total waste since it probably cuts on the wrong side for my eye dominance.
Apr 02 2007, 10:10:53 AM EDT Permalink
Wednesday March 21, 2007 I read today that John Backus died. As a compiler writer he was of course one of my heroes. I'd met him twice, once at Carnegie Mellon as an EE undergrad and once at UNC Chapel Hill when I was in grad school. The occasion in Chapel Hill was quite memorable.
He was invited to do a colloqium talk about FP. It was quite well attended. He was introduced by Fred Brooks who gives John a very glowing intro. Mr. Backus then gets up to give his talk but first he launches into a rant about how he is embarrassed to be in a state that hasn't ratified the Equal Rights Amendment and that the NC legislature should ratify it and that he wasn't going to come back to NC until the ERA was ratified by NC. He got a lot of applause from the audience over this stance. What made it so memorable was the fact the Fred Brooks had testified against the ERA in the NC legislature so this was quite a slap in the face to him.
I'm guessing that John never returned to NC...
Friday January 05, 2007 People who know me know I'm a big Miami Dolphins fan so it would come as little surprise to know how disappointing the season was and to add insult to injury to have Nick Saban desert the team after his "I'm not going to be the Alabama coach" declaration.
As you might guess Nick got quite a lot of bad press in Miami but I can say I've never read anything in a "real" newspaper like Dan Le Batard piece here. Whew, good thing he held back on what he really thinks! It'd been clear for quite a while that the sports press in Miami really disliked Saban and now they have no reason to hide it.
Nick did quite a good job at creating a lot of instant Auburn fans...
Jan 05 2007, 09:48:37 AM EST Permalink
Tuesday January 02, 2007 So I had a very unusual dream the other night. I was back in the neighborhood I grew up in Pittsburgh (current time) in the living room of a boyhood friend Denny. There were two women there and one of them says to me "Hi Steve". I said I was sorry but I didn't know who she was and she responded "I can't believe you don't remember me. I even went to Fla. with your family one summer!". I said that I didn't know what she was talking about. At that point I woke up and immediately thought "Donna" and went back to sleep.
Next morning I woke and was annoyed that I couldn't remember Denny and Donna's last name. Now I hadn't lived in that neighborhood since 1966 when my family moved to Fla. so it wasn't like it was some recent memory. Still I can point at probably 20-30 houses in that google map and tell you who lived there then so it was annoying. After a day of trying to remember with no luck I called my mother in Fla.
I asked what was the last name of Donna that went with us to Fla. that summer? She said wow that was a long time ago she wasn't sure if she could remember but after a few minutes she did. As near as we can place it that summer trip was probably 1964.
So then I was curious to see if I could find out where Denny was so I googled him. The top few hits were all the same person in Akron which seemed promising. I checked the links hoping to find a photo since several were newspaper articles. No luck but there was an email address. So I figured I send a blind email and see.
I got back a message like "Hi Steve, It's been a long time". He wondered how I found him and I told the story above. Now comes the strange part. Denny told me that his sister has 3 grown-up kids and the she and her husband are living in that same house in Pgh. that I dreamed about.
I'm sure I haven't thought of Denny or Donna in nearly 40 years. It'd be interesting to know what triggered that dream!
Thursday September 28, 2006
Password Hell
I had a frustrating password day yesterday. Like everyone I have way too many passwords to remember. Here at Sun we get a reminder every 6 months (?) to change the password on our main login. I got one a week or so ago and had been putting it off. Last Friday I finally changed passwords. Since I was going on vacation for a few days I left myself a postit to remind that I changed my password (but NOT the password or even a hint for it).
So I came in yesterday morning to my postit and the screen being locked and for the life of me I can't begin to remember what my new password is. I tried password for probably 15 minutes before I gave up and used a trick to defeat my screen lock. That only got me access to my workstation though. I couldn't send email but I could read it. It gave me time to think about the password.
I was sure that the password had something to do with aviation but I couldn't come up with it. The odd thing is I had this word in my mind, a name really and I couldn't begin to connect it with aviation or anything password related. After about an hour or two I was getting close to having to ask IT to reset my password. I said to myself "I sure wish I knew the password". Instantly I remembered it. Now here's the weird thing. The actual password had the same initial 3 letters as the word I couldn't get out of my head. Now that's not too weird except that the word my password is derived from and the word in my head the pronunciation is very different so it seems clear that my memory had filed it away alphabetically and not phonetically. In any case I was glad to finally remember the dang thing.
That is almost the end of the story. When I got home I was working on my Solaris server at home as I'm finally close to shutting down my ancient linux server. For some reason pyzor wasn't working with spamassassin. After a bit of debugging I realized that the pyzor client wasn't able to talk to the pyzor server but it was only blocked from the Solaris box. My linux box is normally my firewall so I checked that and no it wasn't blocking it. So it had to be the wireless router (which is actually wired in this case) between the two. So I went to login to the router. You can see where this is going now. I probably haven't logged into that router in 2 years. I have no idea wtf the password is. Worse I don't even know if I used as the account name. Normally I send myself some piece of email to use as a vague reminder in cases like this. No sign of any email in this case. I tried account/password combinations for probably an hour. I'd have hard reset it by now except I remember I had some strange problem in getting the router setup the first time and didn't want to do it again. After trying to think of possible passwords most of today I see a hard reset in my future...
Sep 28 2006, 02:22:56 PM EDT Permalink
Wednesday September 27, 2006 So my wife and I went to NYC for a long weekend this past weekend. This was actually a Christmas present I gave her last year, a three day weekend in New York and tickets to The Daily Show. We were supposed to go last April but things got screwed up with the tickets.
Getting the tickets is kind of strange. You request tickets by sending an email and then eventually you get an email saying that you have tickets. You don't really have tickets though what you get at first is a note saying that they will send you ticket confirmation 2 weeks prior to the show. When you get that confirmation then you immediately have to reply to that email and if you are fast enough you get the tickets. Not that you are then assures of getting in anyway.
Well back when we were going in April the second email they sent 2 weeks prior to the show was determined to be spam by spamassassin running on my home server and thrown out. By the time I realized that it was too late and we couldn't go. So we had to ask for tickets again and start the whole process over. We asked for Sept. 25 as our 1st choice and Sept. 18 as our second choice. Bill Clinton was the guest on the 18th and Pat Buchanan was the guest on the 25th so it was unfortunate we didn't get our second choice!
They tell you to line up 1-1.5 hours before the doors open at 4:45pm and that you may not get out until 7:30pm. We got there about 75 minutes before hand and were 175th in line. The studio holds somewhere around 250 so it was good we weren't much later.
Security seemed to be more than I'd have expected for going to a TV show and once we were inside and the taping was about to begin Jon Stewart let us know the the guest on Tues. was Pres. Musharraf and that security had been checking out the place all day.
It was surprising to see how low rent the set appears in person. Considering this is the new improved set it hard to imagine what the old one looked like. The other surprising thing was how fast the whole show seemed. Seemed much faster than when you see it at home even though at the commercial breaks everytthing stops for about the same time as the real commercials. Sort of like TV timeouts when you are at a football game. All in all we enjoyed it immensely.
Sep 27 2006, 11:30:59 AM EDT Permalink
Wednesday June 14, 2006
That's annoying
So I had a strange thing happen today. I came back from lunch to see I
had a voicemail message. I wondered if it was the guy who was bringing
my Velocity. I was hoping it wasn't because Alberto is dumping a lot of
rain on us today. Well it turned out to be a guy from the local EAA
chapter that was telling me about a picnic the chapter was having this
weekend and whether I would want to do a presentation about my Velocity
later this year.
That was pretty amazing since I don't even have the kit yet and I'm not
a member of the local EAA chapter (though I ought to be). I wondered
how he found me but suspected one of my friends that are members had
passed on the info.
Well I called him and found that no one had ratted me out. He had been
a recent flyin down in Laurinburg and Velocity was there showing the
plane. He'd never seen one and when he got home he went to their web
site and found the frappr map which showed me. From there he Googled me
and found me. I'm not exactly sure how he got my office number but
anyway.
So curious about how my office number was located so I Googled myself and the first hit was this submission
I did to rec.humor.funny in '95. Here's where it gets annoying. When I
submitted this story to r.h.f it had a lame subject like "Phone Company
Humor". Well apparently this wasn't good enough for the moderator (it
wasn't Brad Templeton) and when it got posted the subject got changed
to what is now immortalized "Phone Lines aren't Transitive".
So what is annoying is after that posting went out to r.h.f I got lots
of email telling me that I didn't know what transitive meant. Arggh!
I'm a compiler writer for god's sake, I certainly know what it means. I
hadn't thought about that for years and now I see I'm stuck with it
forever.
Now the funny part about this posting is that in addition to
getting numerous emails explaining transitivity to me I got a few that
said they didn't think it was funny at all because it did make a
difference which end of the line the service originated at. I suspect
they were phone company employees...
Jun 14 2006, 04:37:30 PM EDT
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Tuesday June 13, 2006
On the way, almost.
Well I got a call last night from Travis the guy who will be delivering my Velocity
kit from Sebastian Fl to here in NC. He's supposed to go and load it up
this morning. Normally he'd then immediately hit the road. Only problem
is TS Alberto is between Sebastian and here. Talk about bad timing.
I've been patiently waiting since January and now that its ready the
storm will delay it.
I guess after this long another day or two won't hurt me. You do have
to wonder about this year's hurricane season when the first named storm
hits land...
Jun 13 2006, 10:07:29 AM EDT
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Wednesday May 31, 2006
JavaOne rev. 2
So I went to JavaOne for the second time. Last year was my first trip
and I was much better about blogging about it. This year I was pretty
slack about it. Probably mostly because I didn't get to go to many
sessions. Last year I was a "pretend" speaker but this year I was
actually speaking. I was part of a session where three of us from the
(jit) compiler group talked about new compiler optimizations in the
Hotspot JVM. So I got my literal 15 minutes of fame.
It was actually more fame than I expected since I was anticipating we
were going to get assigned a small room of to the side somewhere. I was
pretty surprised when we got Gateway 102/103 which I think except for
the General Sesssions is the biggest room in the place. Someone like
Josh Bloch can fill the place (and overflow) we only managed to get it
maybe 1/3 full. I thought it went well but we'll see what the audience
thought when we get access to the results of the evaluations.
I got to talk a little bit about tiered compilation and where we stand
on it. I alos volunteered that if people were brave they could download
mustang source and build a tiered system and try it. No one took me up
on it but coming up afterward and asking how to do it. So either no one
is that brave or maybe they were just being sensible?
I spent a good bit of time at the SunSPOT
booth doing 3 shifts of demos and such. It was really sort of funny.
Months ago when the call went out for booth duty sign up when I went to
look for a spot all of the times for booths that were related to my job
were already taken. So I looked for something interesting to do. I had
blogged about SunSPOT before so I figured I'd sign up so I could learn
more about it and maybe make of with one. :-)
A week before JavaOne I got an email from Roger Meike who is the
director in Sun Labs that is doing this work asking who I was and why
did I sign up for booth duty on his project. I explained the situation
and as luck would have it another person in his group
used to work here in Cary and he vouched for me. So I got a little
training on it before JavaOne and by the end of my shifts I was almost
an expert. They are really cool I wish I had the time (and money) to
actually put some to use but I see my plane building as likely to soak
up most of my free time.
May 31 2006, 05:13:40 PM EDT
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