Very Long Weekend

Friday evening was the start of what was to become a very long weekend.  The Relay for Life started here Friday at 6:00 PM.  My wife had signed both of us the walk for the first 4 hours.  He dad is currently fighting cancer and she felt that she needed to do this for herself.  Why she thought it would be a good idea for me to walk for 4 hours, I will never know for sure.  After about 1 hour, I was experiencing the usual effects a person with neuropathy gets when walking for a long period of time.  Actually, me feet felt like they were on fire.  But, I kept on going.  After 4 hours of walking I felt like hell and I was tired.  The problem was that the pain in my body kept me for being able to go to sleep when we arrived home.  To top it all off, I had to work on Saturday morning.

When I work up, I was not in the greatest shape to say the least.  I drug myself around getting ready and finally to work.  It was a very long day, because pretty much everything hurt.  Moving around made it worse.  After work I went home to rest and ended up going to bed pretty early.  I didn’t sleep all that well and woke up hurting again.  Thank goodness it was Sunday.  I just vegged out all day.  Which was a little disappointing, as I would like to have at least accomplished something.

Analog Cell Phone Service Causing Problems

The days of analog cell service are pretty much gone.  Verizon turned their analog service off in February and Alltel says that they will be done with analog in September.  Of course, Verizon and Alltel are in the process of merging.  As a result we have had several pissed off customers wanting to know what is going on with their phones.  Evidently they missed the 40 separate pieces of mail telling them about the end of analog service.

One customer today was particularly shitty about the whole thing.  She has an Alltel bag-phone from many years ago that “just quit working”.  She initially wanted to purchase a new cable for the bag-phone, yagi antenna combination that she was using.  As expected, she had no idea what kind of connectors were on the phone or the antenna.  After asking a few questions and getting very nasty answers, I was able to determine that the problem was not with the cable, but the analog phone she was using.  She went on the explain that the neighbors had no problems getting service.  For some reason she can’t get service.  We all know that the powers that be in the world have conspired against her to block her ability to make a phone call.

At one point in the conversation, she was insisting that she bought the Alltel phone at out store.  I told her that no one had ever offered Alltel or their predecessors at our store, but of course I was wrong.  Well at any rate their was nothing I could do as far as replacing an Alltel phone and I was definitely not interested in selling her service with our current carrier, so I recommended that she visit the Alltel dealer to see about replacing the phone with a digital one.  Boy, was I glad to see her leave the store.  People should not abuse the people that they are seeking information from, as it certainly does not motivate us to help when we are being treated like shit.

USB Switchblade Made Easy

I was a little behind on my podcast/netcast listening, so I have been doing a little catch-up.  On episode 110 of the Pauldotcom Security Podcast, Larry mentioned a website that makes creating a USB Switchblade device redicolously easy.  The website is GonZor228.com.  By using this nice little tool you can create your very own USB Switchblade.

The USB Switchblade utilizes the U3 technology to do pretty much whatever you want to a computer system just by plugging a USB device into the system.  For example, you could download the contents of RAM.  You know, the place where encryption keys are kept.  This tool also allows you to put your own tools into the U3 image, so the posiblities are endless.

Thermostats

Why is it that people have a hard time understanding how thermostats work.  You set the temp that you want the house to be at, select a/c or heat depending on the season, and you are set.  If a/c is selected, the a/c will come on when and only when the temp in the home has risen above the selected temp.  If heat is selected, the heat will come in when and only when the temp has gone below the selected temp.  That is a basic description of home the simple home thermostats work.  I know that there are more complicated ones around, but they all operate on the same basic principles.  For some reason, many people can not grasp this concept.  Even people who have college degrees.

For example, my boss thinks that the a/c must be turned off at night, because it will run all night and freeze up.  It gets pretty chilly here at night and for the most part a/c’s rarely come on at night if you set the around 68-72 degrees.  But, the bosses prefered method of a/c control actually causes the thing to freeze up.  We will turn on the a/c and set it at 72 degrees.  He will turn it off.  Since we don’t know that he turned it off we don’t think to check it in the morning, because it is always nice and cool.  The temp outside will go up and as a result so will the temp in the store.  We no one will notice this for a while.  Then the boss will say man it hot in here.  It will be around 80 degrees.  He turns on the a/c and sets it at 60, because you know that this will make the a/c cool it off faster.  Then the a/c freezes up and quits working.  Had we set it and forget it, this tragic episode could have been avoided.

Father-in-Law Continues to Make Progess

Well, it certainly has been a busy few days.  The net result of which is that my father-in-law continues to make good progress towards recovery.  He is amazing all of his doctors who had no idea he would be this far along this quickly.  On Sunday morning, he decided to pull his NG tube out.  This caused them to do the leaktest a day early and the result was that he was able to start clear liquids.  Doesn’t sound like much, but he did have a large chunk of esophagus removed.  Its a good thing that it was not leaking, otherwise they would have had to put that tube back in.

He is also able to walk around the halls a bit.  He says that this breaks up to boring time in the hospital.  He may have to go to a rehab hospital to get back into shape before going home.  This shouldn’t be for an extended period of time.

Father-in-Law is doing Awesome

My father-in-law is doing much better that anyone thought that he would be doing.  He has been sitting up talking to everyone for the last couple of days.  He is in a lot of pain, but he is pretty tough.  When he starts coughing is when it is the absolute worst.  But, the coughing is good because it will keep him from getting an infection in his lungs.

He has been acting rather funny.  He was trying to escape the second night he was here.  I think the pain medication was messing with his brain.  Now he is on something a little less stout and is quite a bit more coherant.  The doctors are amazed by his progress so far.  The tubes that have been connected to him are slowly going away.  As of this moment he only has one chest tube left.

The pathology report came back negative.  Sounds backwards, but this is actually a good thing.  The cancer has not spread to the surrounding tissues.  The doctor says this is wonderful, because this type of cancer is normally caught too late and has spread before treatment starts.

Hospital Waiting Rooms

I would like for every person who is responsible for hospital design to know that the waiting rooms need to be separate areas for each family.  It has nothing to do with people being annoying or little kids crying.  It has everything to do with the news that family’s receive from medical personel.

Last night there were two other families sharing the waiting room with us.  One was the family of a young man involved in a car roll-over accident.  The other was the family of a gentleman who had a stroke.  Then there was us, the tumor removal family.

A nurse walks into the waiting room and tells us that the surgery part was done, they were closing up my father-in-law and everything went well.  She said that we would be able to see him when he gets out of recovery in an hour or so.  A different nurse walks in and tells the family of the stoke victim that the doctor would like to talk to the family.  This does not sound good and her body language said there was more.  They get ready to leave and we say that we will watch their stuff so they don’t have to leave the kid behind.  When we see a few of them again, they are crying.  I start feeling a little guilt.  I tell my wife that I feel guilty being happy when these people are in here with anquish like that.  She says that she does too and the room is pretty quiet.  Turns out the stroke family has to decide if the life support system get turned off.  The gentleman is brain dead according to his sister.  I feel horrible at this point and I can’t believe whats going on.

Success!!!

The surgery has been successful!  It was very complicated, but the whole thing went well with only a few minor difficulties.  At least the doctors said they were minor.  I always wonder if their definition of minor is the same as my definition of minor.  Oh well, that probably doesn’t matter now.

The surgeon says that he is pretty sure that all the cancer was removed.  The pathology report seemed to confirm that.  Of course, there is always the chance that it spread to areas that none of us know about.

Now the long road to recovery begins.  He will be in ICU for at least a week, possibly longer.  And that is assuming everything goes as planned.  He has all kinds of tubes and hoses running into him, which makes everyones anxiety level go up.  My sister-in-law passed out last night when she a saw him.  It will be a long road, but the doctors say he has a really good chance for recovery.  Lets hope it goes well.

Sidux Preview Release

One of my favorite Live CD Linux distros, SIDUX, is putting out a preview release.  Check out the details at this link.  Distrowatch.  If you like to run Live CDs this one is certainly worth checking out.  I have used it for a couple of years now.

Surgery Today!

My father-in-law will be having the surgery to remove that tumor in his esophagus in less than one hour.  The tension is getting pretty high.  On Monday, a CT scan was performed and the tumors showed no signs of having shrunk.  The surgery is very risky and is only complicated by the heart issues.  There is a good chance that he could die today.  I don’t normally pray, but I am making an exception for my wife today.

He is probably handeling this ordeal better that my wife, sister-in-law and mother-in-law right now.  He is just really anxious to get the show started.  I am not at the hospital with them, as they wanted some time alone, the whole family, before he goes into surgery.  I wasn’t very nervous about this before, but as the clock ticks further along I feel myself tensing up.  In fact, I woke up this morning with a horrible spasm in shoulder.

Well, I will post again soon.  Hopefully the news will be good.