Not Necessarily Interesting News

We were sitting around the day after Christmas and I decided to do something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I decided to cut my hair. My hair had gotten past shoulder length and since I have very curly hair it was getting to be a lot of work. I figured I take it a bit shorter. Things got a bit out of hand.

I went from long-haired hippie to bald. I’d always told my wife and myself that if I ever noticed myself starting to lose hair I’d shave it all off. At Christmas I noticed just the slightest thinning near my temples. True to my word, I nuked my hair. I had to go out and buy a few hats to keep my head warm as now I feel every draft and breeze. My wife loves it and won’t keep her hands off my skull.
It’s been a bit over a month and even though it’s a whole lot more work than long hair was I think I’ll keep it.

Starting last October I noticed some tingling and weakness in my left hand. It gradually got worse so I saw my doctor about it. He said it appeared to be Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and referred my to an orthopedic surgeon. I decided to file it under Worker’s Comp since I had been doing a bunch of overtime since they laid off a bunch of people at work it seemed to be work related. If I had known then what I know now about the Worker’s Comp system I might not have. Talk about a pain in the ass. It took three months to get authorization to see the Ortho. The Worker’s Comp lady implied I was faking it. Sure, yeah, I’m faking it. Watch how I can jab a knife into my completely without feeling fingers and tell me that.

I saw the Ortho just after New Year’s. She said it looked like classic CTS and wanted to do a Nerve Conduction Study. She couldn’t do it right then as she wasn’t authorized to do so and had to get approval from the insurance company.

I finally got the Nerve Conduction Study done today by a specialist. It was pretty cool and interesting seeing my nerves respond to the poking and prodding. Place a receiver on a finger, shock a nerve in my forearm and watch my fingers dance. Well, it was cool until he broke out the needles. He started on my triceps and biceps. Stick a needle in and have me flex the muscle. You get to hear the sounds of your muscles working over the speaker which was cool. The digging the needle around under the skin looking to hit a specific nerve didn’t hurt so much as it was irritating.

Everything was cool until he got to sticking them in my hand. The one in the palm hurt. A lot. As he was doing it I noticed my vision getting a bit blurry then switch to tunnel vision. I fought what I knew was coming. He finished that test and I asked if he was done. After he said yes I told him I’d need to lie down. Bam! I fell over on the table. I’ve never fainted and didn’t quite this time either but things went dark and my hearing went out. Weird. After a minute I sat up and all was fine. Not a fun feeling

Once I was up he gave me the results. He said I have ‘significant severe’ Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in my left hand. I said ‘So it’s not all in my head?’ He said definitely not. From what I saw on his screen I’m running at less than half capacity of what my nerves should be. He also said I have damage to the ulnar nerve running through my elbow. He said that could be caused by resting my elbow on a table which makes sense since I do that a lot to rest my hurting wrist. Next week I see my doctor again to see what the course of treatment will be. I’m pretty sure it’ll be surgery as that’s what the nerve specialist seemed to think too. Oh boy.

Yesterday was a cold and miserable in Austin. High of 34 at our house and rainy. We decided it was time to do something we’ve always talked about and were saving for a day just like this. We woke up, I headed to the store while the wife did her marathon training. I picked up snacks and stuff for a nice dinner. We arrived home by 10AM and started our preparations. I got a raging fire started to keep us warm while Shannon made a big vat of hot chocolate. Suitably supplied and bundled up against the cold the 3 of us sat down and started our task.

We pulled out our 3 extended edition versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That’s 11.5 hours of movies. Each one averages just under 4 hours each. We finished watching around 9:35. Every last minute of the trilogy in one sitting. We only took breaks when disks needed to be switched every two hours. And then we kept the breaks under 3 minutes each. It got rough around 3pm. All of us wanted a break to take a nap but we fought through the yawns. At the next break I made everyone do a bit of a workout to get the blood flowing which seemed to help. The last hour was also tough as we knew we were near the end. The last big battle was over and we wanted sleep.

Was it worth it? I suppose. I can now say I’ve done it. Would I do it again? Probably not. Ok, maybe in another 10 years or so or when I’ve got them on HD-DVD or something.

Christmas was good. Not many presents all around but nice ones. We gave my son a Lego Mindstorms NXT. This is an awesome piece of kit. I’ve been working with him on building some advanced things. The programming language is very robust and very capable of advanced logic. We’ve only scratched the surface.

My wife got an iPod Nano and the Nike+ attachment for it. She’s training for her second marathon in February and the Nike attachment makes things even better. It’s basically a very advanced pedometer. It tells you your pace, how far you’ve covered, and how far you have left to go right into your headphones while your workout music plays. After your run you can upload your workout data and shows detailed info on your runs. It’s an amazing little piece of technology.

I got a safari rack and basket for my Defender. It’s still at the buddy’s house I bought it from. I’ll upload pics of it when I get it. I’m in no hurry because once installed I can no longer fit my truck in the garage. From my parents I got a very, very nice scanner that does slides and film. I’ve got boxes of slides from the family going back 40+ years that I’m going to start scanning in before they totally degrade. This pic is a scan of a slide of me around age 9. Look at those pimping collars! The scanner will do true 4800×9600 DPI and can do 4 at once breaking them into separate files for me to edit later if need be.

This weekend I was awakened by my wife and son saying he had a tooth almost out. It had to be pulled before he could eat because it was hurting so bad. So, in my bleary-eyed semi-conscious state I wandered into the bathroom with them and got out the string.
“Ok, I’m going to count to three. One.” Pop! Out it came. Ok, out came most of it. It broke in half. A bit later I got a hold of the rest with the string and removed it too. Lots of blood but no whining about pain. Damn, I’m good.
This was all on Sunday morning. This morning my wife goes in to wake him up and he says, “Good morning, Tooth Fairy Mom.” She looked at him puzzled. He then explained that after we tucked him in he got up and finally, 3 days later, put his tooth under his pillow and it was still there this morning. My wife was caught off guard and didn’t know what to say.
He figured out a way to set a trap for us and executed it flawlessly. Clever kid. I think he’s pretty much figured out the guy in the red suit too. I didn’t think we’d make it through this Christmas but we hoped it’d last one more year.

Today was my birthday. I’m officially legal. Twice over. It’s scary to think that people born when I graduated high school are now graduating high school. Makes you feel old.

My birthday is never an exciting affair, we did about the same thing we do every year.

We go get a Christmas Tree. I look forward to this. My birthday means the real start of Christmas around our place. It means the decorations come out. The house starts smelling like pine and presents start appearing. I think of my birthday as ‘our’ day.
Dinner was potstickers and my wife’s famous fried rice. She only makes it for special occasions so I badgered her into cooking some up. 🙂
We then went down to our favorite little hole in the wall game store and picked up a new card game. We are suckers for little off-the-wall games from small game companies. Someday I’ll have to post a pic of our game closet.

I’ll keep it short because typing hurts too much.

Awesome. Ok, it was cold, cold, cold. The first cold front of winter rolled through the morning of the concert and temps were somewhere in the upper 40s/lower 50s during the show. The Backyard is a great venue but completely open to the weather. That fact has made BNL concerts hit and miss over the years. Of 4 appearances 2 have been cancelled for rain. Even with the cold the show was a blast. Lots of new stuff of course. Their rap about the The Backyard broke down into They Paved Paradise(and Put Up a Parking Lot). It was spot on and everyone broke down into laughter. I’ve seen many concerts there but it was the first since they built that monument to consumerism around it. It’s lost its appeal, its soul. It’s no longer a little stage in the middle of nowhere in the Hill Country but an afterthought attached to a mall. Steve put it best when he said they drove up and all of them at once cried “What the Christ!?”.

My son has been taking classical guitar lessons for a couple of years and was absolutely entranced by Ed’s playing and the fact that he switched guitars for every song. Ed seemed to break a lot of strings during the concert. I suppose it had to do with the cold, who knows. Now my son is thinking of wanting to take up electric guitar also. We’ll see.

Ok, it’s been while(ok, two months) and I figured I should post the about our trip to Arkansas. I wrote this when we got back but never posted it. I’m going to back date it to when it should have been published. I’ll explain reasons for the lateness later.

We decided to take an early fall houseboat trip on Lake Ouachita, AR this October. Rental rates are lower, lake traffic is lower, temps are mild. Fishing is supposed to be great on the lake too. We were renting a houseboat but decided to bring along our 22′ jetboat to use as a run-about on the lake for fishing trips and such.

We pulled out Saturday afternoon after my son finished his Young Marine drills and drove to Texarkana. We stopped at the Czech Stop in West, TX. I think there’s some sort of law that says you need to stop there if you’re ever traveling up IH-35. We stocked up on some smoking jalapeno kolaches that made us literally cry. Next time we’ll get the ‘plain’ spicy. 🙂 I was beat after driving 6 hours towing a boat and collapsed into bed. People just love to crowd your trailer when you’re towing and it makes for a stressful drive.

After a night in Texarkana we headed across the border into Arkansas after breakfast at Waffle House. Yum. One of my favorites. My wife had never been to one and she wasn’t impressed. Heathen. We drove straight to the marina where we were to pick up our houseboat the next day and dropped the trailer so we could manouever in Hot Springs. We got into Hot Springs around noon and found our hotel. It was right in the middle of ‘Old’ Hot Springs, right near bathhouse row. After getting settled in we went to see the town. Right at the main intersection is a spring that flows down a cliff. The water in the pool at the bottom is almost too hot to stand. I soaked my hands and wrists in the hot water and it really helped with my carpal tunnel symptoms. We visited a large rock shop and my son bought some nice quartz crystals. We toured an old bathhouse from the 1920’s and got to see how they were run back then. After dinner we went to bed early because we had a long day the next day.

Monday morning we woke early and had a few hours to waste. My wife suggested going to one of the bathhouses. I’d never been to one and after the way the hot spring water made my wrists feel the night before I figured that it would feel even better over my whole body. So my father and I decided to go to Buchstaff Bath House, the only still operating of the original bath houses in Hot Springs. It has been in continual operation since 1912. A 20minute soak in the hot water felt amazing. Showers, hot wraps, a massage, and a parrafin dip later I was feeling pretty damn mellow. I could get used to this.

We picked up the boat around 3pm and hit the lake. The lake was beautiful. I’ve never seen clearer water in a lake. You could easily see the bottom in 20′ of water. We found a nice protected cove and setup camp for the night. We dropped our lines in the water and got to fishing/drinking. 🙂 We got ttally skunked on our first night as far as fish. Not a one. This would be the theme for our entire trip. We seem to have arrived right as the lake turned and the fish wouldn’t bite.

The rest of our trip consisted of lots of fishing, lots of games, some very brief swimming as the lake was around 70degrees, and a bit of rum for me. I did get a bit of work done while we were there. The accompanying pic is of my office for the week. Amazing and sad is the fact that you can go miles from nowhere and still get a 115K Internet connection. The lake is empty at this time of year and we seemed to have the whole place to ourselves.

By the last morning we’d caught a grand total of 4 fish between 4 people fishing. Not the best time of year to fish in the lake apparently. The sad part was the fish finder was always packed with fish returns but we couldn’t get the to eat a thing. Very frustrating. Also, as we were getting ready to pull anchor to head back to civilization I managed to fall in the lake. Fully clothed and ready for a 7 hour drive home. I had saved my most comfortable jeans and shirt for the trip home and I soaked them. I felt like such a moron.

It was a fun trip and I’d love to go back again soon. Assuming the fish are actually biting, of course.

After much trials and tribulations I got my laptop with a bluetooth dongle talking to my cell phone which connects to Cingular and gives mobile Net access. I knew it was possible and Cingular’s site even makes it sound easy. It took me 3 days and 2 hours on the phone with Cingular’s 2nd level support to get it working.
I’m heading on vacation soon and while I’m gone I’ll still need to log in and do some work from the boat. Instead of heading in to a marina and trying to find a phone jack I thought I’d try to get my bluetooth phone to do what it’s supposed to be capable of. I attached my D-Link DBT-120 dongle and got it to tether to the phone, a Motorola v551, without problem. After playing with init strings I even got Dialup Networking to dial the phone. It kept hanging at ‘Registering you computer with the network’ and then throwing ‘Error 31’ whatever that means. I played with it for a while and finally called Cingular.
After wading through the front line support I got to someone who seemed to know what he was doing. He found that the data access part of my plan was provisioned wrong. It took him an hour with the provisioning folks to get things set and *bam* I was online.
Details:
The modem init string their site and support guys told me to use

at+cgdcont=1,”IP”,”isp.cingular”

did not work. I used

&f&d2&c1+cgdcont=1,”IP”,”isp.cingular”

as suggested on other sites and it worked.
The number their page says to use is also not what their phone guys said. The page say

*99#

and phone support said

*99***1#

. The phone guy was right.
There’s conflicting info on the net about the login name. I used

ISP@CINGULARGPRS.COM

with password

CINGULAR1

I did some tests this morning on the way to work. It’s not blazing speed but for email and light websurfing it’s fine. I hit a couple speed test sites and was averaging around 130kbps/down and 32kbps/up. Not bad while moving down the freeway at 60mph.

I’ve been having some issues with my iPod for the last few months. It’s been randomly rebooting several times a day. I’ll be listening to a song or watching a show and *boom* reboot. I tried all the usual fixes. I updated the firmware. Restored from scratch(a pain in the ass). Everything. I finally got fed up with it and decided to send it in.
I went to Apple’s website to get an RMA and started browsing around. I found out that there was an Apple store here in Austin. That shows how much of a mall-hopper I am. Apparently we’ve had an Apple store in Austin for like 2 years. I never knew. I decided to pop on by to have one of their ‘Geniuses’ look at it.
I made an appointment online and went to the store tonite. I walked in and my name was on the board as next in line. Sweet. The guy asked me what was up and I explained my problem. He took my iPod and poked at it a bit then started to take it out of the case. He asked if I still wanted my screen protector. I kind of looked at him funny for a second then realized what he was doing. He turned around and opened the case behind him and brought out a new 60GB iPod Video just like mine, punched the serial number into the computer and said ‘Here ya go. Have a nice day.’
I’d heard about them doing this but didn’t believe it. I was amazed. No real paperwork other than signing a sheet saying I received the iPod. No hassle. ‘Here’s your replacement iPod.’
I received mine as a gift for my birthday last December. I decided while I was there I’d buy the AppleCare warranty extention. I figured it would be worth it to get another year of service should I have other problems. I got home and tried to add the extention to my warranty and got a message saying it couldn’t process the extention and to please call up Apple. I called them up and explained what was up. The guy asked when I got the iPod and I told him last December. He said, ‘No, when did you get the replacement?’ I told him like 2 hours ago. He took the extention info and processed it right then. I asked when the warranty would expire expecting to hear 2 years from my original purchase/gift date. He said ‘2 years from today.’
How’s that for customer service? I’ve now got a new iPod with a 2 year warranty starting today and not from the day of purchase of the original iPod as I expected.