Posted by enrico | Under Computers
Wednesday Oct 31, 2007
I have had a complete and total computer meltdown today. I finally got my hands on the new version of MacOS X 10.5, “Leopard.” Since I’m overly-cautious, I decided to put it on my MacBook Pro since it has very little “unique” data that was easy to back up first. The update hosed it. My usernames were gone and other esoteric problems had myself spending way too much time in single-user mode. I doubt I would have had any semblance of a system left if it weren’t for my existing UNIX-y skillz.
To make this part of the long story short, I got it working…sort-of. It’s the same in medicine–you know something is wrong, but all the labs say things are fine–except in medicine you can’t say, “OK, we’re going to just erase you and start from scratch.” LOL! I was reading articles online on my desktop to help w/the laptop situation, and then–after the laptop is pretty much behaving oddly enough to say “screw it, I’m wiping it,”–my desktop started chunking. There was no noise, but the fan started revving and the CPU seemed pegged. It took seconds just to switch windows, probably a minute to switch to a different app, and just general badness. When I looked at the system logs, all I saw was “I/O error” over and over, and it corresponded to my boot disk–you know, the one that has a bunch of important stuff on it.
Booting from install CDs to run disk utilities was an exercise in futility. 2 out of 3 times, I couldn’t get the disk to even be recognized. It was then that I had my “Oh shit!” moment: thanks to the laptop fiasco I realized I had no working computer to fall back on. The cruel irony that sadistically played out in my head over and over was that I intentionally left my G5 alone, pristine because information on it was too important until Leopard proved its spots. My karmic fortune makes me wonder if I clubbed harbor seals in a former life.
Besides sharing my woe (and on the 31st, no less), the other important update is that I had no less than 5 blog drafts >90% completed to post. One of them was on MRSA, another was on emergency medicine….it sucks that I lost all that work, but that’s still not even the worst of it. I am still trying some voodoo to see if I can at least salvage some recent data, if I can even get the sucker to mount. (don’t mind the goat skull on my CPU and the salt circle on the floor) I do have backups, but my iTunes library alone is >40G, so it gets kinda hard sometimes. I might have lost everything in the last 7-10 days in terms of documents, collected data, bits and pieces, etc., but I have a 2nd internal drive which stores most of my multimedia (Aperture for digital photos, some video movie projects, etc.).
So as to not lie on the bed crying like a girl, I remind myself that I’m not a graphic designer that lost his entire portfolio and will affect his financial future; this was not a case where my groundbreaking research into blah-blah went up in digital smoke. I have a reasonable collection of backups across different external drives, but it’s going to be a major pain in the ass to figure out how to put Humpty Dumpty together again (and where to get another sATA drive of any decent size down here w/o paying practically double price).
One step at a time….more soon… BACK UP YOUR IMPORTANT DATA!
I was reading this article about a PHP developer’s love affair with Ruby, an increasingly popular scripting language. Like “love affair” implies, it was intense, passionate, difficult, but ultimately ended. Ruby’s greatest asset is that it was developed from the ground up to be strictly object-oriented (that’s way too huge a topic to go into here) in the face of “bastard” scripting languages like Perl and PHP that borrow from several “standard” languages (making them more flexible, IMO). Ruby has received the most exposure via a Ruby-based web-creation framework called Rails, and people swear it’s the best thing since man invented fire. Whatever–I know better and I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid.
Ok, background done–I mentioned all the above so you can make complete sense of what follows. My main point is that the author listed several lessons learned in his torrid language love affair, and this one really stuck out:
#7 - PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE YOU ARE BETTER
Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it’s “do exactly as I say” paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines.
I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP [object-oriented programming]. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby.
But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now! You look back at your old ugly PHP code, compared to your new beautiful Ruby code, and think, “God that PHP is ugly!” But don’t forget you wrote that PHP years ago and are unfairly discriminating against it now.
It’s not the language (entirely). It’s you, dude. You’re better now. Give yourself some credit.
Programming and geekiness aside, I thought that point was very insightful. How many things in our lives do we come back to something, full-circle, and have a vastly different view? By definition, when this happens we have a greater experience base to draw from, and the “time-out” we took allowed us a perspective that would have been otherwise impossible. I think of my impending return back to school and bet that this will factor in somehow.
We all need to experience something different, something that jars us from our current point of view. I’m not suggesting a real torrid love affair (at least not for the married/committed people) to gain perspective or do anything irresponsible, but there is something special in losing oneself in a different activity or interest, pushing boundaries, challenging one’s views, and coming back “home” a better person for it.
So after I type my last entry about lack of feedback, etc., I received an overwhelmingly positive response from you, my dear readers. As would be my luck, the day after posting it, feeling genuinely appreciative and inspired to be more consistent with writing, I got sick. And I mean sick.
I woke up with, uh, let’s be kind and say GI distress. No biggie, yet I hadn’t eaten anything out-of-the-ordinary, food from a different place, etc. Moreover, Claudia had no sx whatsoever, so I wasn’t concerned. By early afternoon, I knew something was amiss because I had been awake probably <1.5h since I woke up. Going back to sleep was such an involuntary response, I don’t even remember going back to bed from my room.
That’s when I noticed I was freezing. Anybody who knows me knows that I have a low tolerance for warm, stuffy environments and usually “run warm,” so for me to be cold when it’s clearly not cold outside was yet another WTF moment. By this time, Claudia knew something was up for sure, seeing me under two layers of covers in the afternoon perpetually asleep and shivering. I took my temperature around that time and it registered 102.5. Holy shit. It’s been years since I’ve had a fever. Even when I’ve had major surgery, my temp didn’t go higher than 101, and that was just during the few days post-op. And I was FREEZING.
Fast forward to late afternoon, and I guess in a daze I put on some warm-ups (which in retrospect wasn’t all that smart) and I’d probably downed >2g of Tylenol by then. Re-take temp: 103.5. Now I have one of those fancy-schmancy arterial IR thermometers we bought for baby, and right about then I was thinking it was a POS–there was no way it was that high. I went to my closet, realized that the room should not be spinning, and fetched my trusty mercury thermometer from my “doctor bag” (which is really a $15 shaving/toiletry bag with handles that looks the part, and which has been gathering dust since the Spring when I last used it in community medicine), and did a real, honest-to-God oral temp. I got the thermometer locally, so it’s Celsius, but it read 39.5–just under what the fancy-ass one read and close enough to know this was for real.
I called a doctor friend, and he just flatly said, “You have an infection.” No shit, Sherlock. Thanks for wasting my first cell minute. “Go and get [GI-localized antibiotic combo only here in Mexico which has neomycin].” I made a joke about my kidneys, but he said it wasn’t an issue for the dose and the few days’ duration of tx. I asked why he suspected a bacterial infection and not a virus. He didn’t have an “evidence-based” rationale, but then again, we were talking on the phone and it’s not like he had any data. Basically, if it was bacterial, at least the medicine he recommended would get something going; if it was viral, I was SOL, but since the abx isn’t really absorbed, no harm no foul. I could live with that. Claudia, a super-trooper with my man-cold, whiny ass, fetched said med from the pharmacy down the street.
I had already switched to ibuprofen for fever reduction, but something changed by night-time as I was feeling hot as hell. It was about damn time something makes sense! Checked temp again: 104.2. Again, I thought, “No way,” and swiped it the other direction (as if the left temporal artery was going to read differently from the right one). 104.3. F*CK! Now I’m in full panic. I didn’t want to go to the local ER because 1) I’m not insured, and 2) I didn’t want to burden Claudia with me AND deal with a toddler who should be asleep while at the hospital. Besides, although I felt like death warmed over, it’s not like I was delirious or anything. I was able to keep down all fluids, was eating fruit, crackers, and other “easy” foods, so there was plenty of reasons not to jump the gun.
Thankfully, before I could start entertaining REALLY crazy things, the fever started coming down. I had already started cooling myself off externally, and I think between that and the ibuprofen, it started making a dent in my core temperature. By midnight, my temp was down to a respectable 101, and–strangely enough–I was sweating bullets like at no time prior. I’ll trade sweating for ER-bound fever anyday, and so the night began to finally wind down.
The next day (which seemed like days later, esp. since my time was so off w/all the sleeping), I felt absolutely craptacular. In spite of a lower fever (which never again went over 100), I seemed to be just as lethargic but now had myalgia as icing on the cake. “I have a geezervirus,” I joked to myself.
So this whole, near-pointless tale of woe is being shared to say that it took until this weekend for me to feel normal. I was WAY behind on work hours, so I’ve been busy catching up with those too. I felt horrible guilty about the timing of my last post and this little mini-absence, but I promise the above is true. There’s quite a bit queued up in drafts from bits of time I felt decent, so I’ll clean those up and get them posted. Thanks again for all those who commented and especially those that delurked.
Posted by enrico | Under Blogs/Blogging
Tuesday Oct 16, 2007
This is the new shirt from DespairWear, and I thought it was apropos:
That’s how I feel about this site right now. Of the handful of regular readers I have, a small percentage actually comment. Both the comment % and total traffic here is steadily diminishing, and there’s no really good reason why. I don’t submit to Grand Rounds weekly like so many other bloggers do, because I actually have a personal standard that I maintain before I’d think someone else should feature my writing, but that’s another topic. Because of this, I don’t have that near-weekly resurgence in traffic and exposure that many other medbloggers take for granted.
Med blogs are popping up left and right, but there are also many that are dying on the vine, their authors obviously too busy or uninterested to keep up. I know I’ve been guilty of blogrot several times, but never for more than a month and not without at least an “update” post letting readers know I’m just in the weeds.
As I scan other sites, with a few notable exceptions, many are suffering diminished activity. Tiny Shrink voiced her complaint about this last week, and I replied in the comment section about my theory: Facebook. The last 2-3 weeks has seen an explosion of medbloggers on Facebook, and I think that whatever time that was left for blogging is being channeled there instead. After all, it’s a lot more fun to get and receive virtual tequila shots, have sheep thrown at you, or finding out if you’re the hottest in your circle of friends (survey says that I am not HOT, but I am smart :P) than sitting down to the solitary activity of writing something. Compound this with getting hardly any comment feedback, and the incentive to write when you can just have fun/waste time dwindles.
Facebook is fun, but it doesn’t impact my blogging one way or the other because each satisfies a different purpose for me. Blogging isn’t as fun without the feedback, though.
The video below was excerpted from the ABC News Video Podcast, so for those of you who subscribe to it (or watch ABC News in the States), you may have seen this:
Now, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m a complete foodie, so at first glance, this would seem to strike me as “Oh, cool!” Except my brain interrupts .5 seconds later and says, “Wait a minute…this is a hosptial!. Even casual visitors and occupants of hospitals can tell you right off the bat that hospitals have a certain…smell. And they have that smell for a reason, namely because the hospital is a place of sickness and disease, which in turn can create unpredictable outgushings of bodily fluids and other nasty things best left untyped.
Picture this as a nurse tends to a random patient:
“Ok, Mr. Smith, we’re here to repack the excavated tunnel created by your necrotic, purulent butt abscess. Oooh, yeah, that’s gonna hurt a bit as we take this gauze out…yeah, we have to let this heal from the inside out, but that pain you feel as the gauze scrapes your butt tunnel is a good sign–it means that you’re healing and making new tissue. Almost done…*knock knock*…and just in time! Your ‘Beef Tips in Mushroom Ragout with Saffron Rice’ just arrived! I’ll hurry up and take these wet, bloody gauze bits out of the way so you can eat while it’s still hot.”
Save the maternity ward and perhaps and some ortho, etc. patients not yet ready to go home for PT or some such non-ambulatory reasons, are there really people in the hospital who could really appreciate the gourmet meals? Because if there are, one should question why they’re still there.
I just upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.3 from 2.2.1 (yes, I skipped 2.2.2). I kinda like things not to be broken, so I don’t run the “bleeding edge” builds (betas, RCs, etc.) but I did start using Subversion to manage the source tree so that I could do updates way easier. I am a dyed-in-the-wool user of CVS (no, that’s not the pharmacy chain) and using Subversion took a lot less getting used to than I thought, certainly from a client-only POV. The main thing I’m looking forward to in this release is native tagging. Yes, I know there have been plugins to do this, but I am glad I procrastinated, because now it’s something I don’t have to worry about converting. (who says procrastination doesn’t pay?!)
So, if things don’t work for whatever reason, let me know. Otherwise, things should be exactly how they were. I will be changing themes soon, mainly to take advantage of the new tagging and sidebar widget features. I’ve had this one for over a year and a half, and the reason you’ve seen it nowhere else but here is because it’s a horribly hacked copy of another theme. I’m a techno-geek, not a designer, so when I start blindly experimenting with CSS, black clouds loom overhead, birds fly out of the treetops, and that ominous foreboding of what visual havoc I may wreak fills the ether.
Luckily for all, I do all my tinkering on a dummy instance of Wordpress on my own computer. The disfigured alignments, twisted typefaces and ghastly graphics of my CSS carnage never leave my workstation. (Halloween is coming up–I’m just getting in the mood…heh.)
Here are some recent, helpful Wordpress links until my next post:
One of my recent projects was coming up with some audio/music to use for my daughter’s sleep. White noise is ideal to block out unwanted din, especially living here in Mexico in a closed off gated community (coto) where everybody insists on living their lives outside. You can’t really tell the neighborhood to “shut up,” when it’s 8:00pm. In addition, most houses have no insulation of any kind, so just general noise from the outside such as cars driving by, a short honk, a delivery truck, etc. all have the potential to rouse our little Energizer bunny from the sleep that she naturally fights.
“No problem,” I thought to myself. I just needed a tool to “normalize” the audio so that the mostly classical music doesn’t have the all the dynamic range of the natural louds and softs. Right now, a median volume would mean that soft passages would be unhearable and louder passages (though musically appropriate) would potentially wake her up. Then, I thought, “Wait–I can’t be the only person to have needed this. Let me Google this…”
I could have sworn what I was going to use was a tool/plugin that does “normalization.” After beating my head against that wall for a few days with no good results, I found that what I was looking for is what’s called dynamic compression. “Compression” seemed totally the wrong word to me, because to compress is to remove redundant data to fit a smaller space (and “decompression” would fill it back in). But NOOOO–some crazy group of audio engineers decided to call a limiting of dynamic range–that narrowing the gap between the difference of louds and the softs–”compression.” That’s what radio stations have been doing for years so you can hear everything in car w/o having to ride the volume control, as well as giving extra “punch” to certain audio frequencies so you think one station sounds better even though they play the same recordings.
Jacking with the dynamic range of the latest “Arcade Fire” track is one thing, doing it to a symphony or a string quartet is something different. Classical music is the domain of serious audiophile engineers analyzing acoustics in concert halls, obsessing over the minutiae of different polymer tiles, their placement, etc. all to provide the best aural experience for a live performance. When recording, mics are placed strategically to capture the ambience of the hall, but also throughout the stage. You want to hear the crispness of a freshly rosined bow on a string, the collective breath before a horn section’s opening, the higher frequencies in the “blat” of a low-brass instrument. Trying to dampen these subtleties is blasphemy.
“Baby Einstien” sells 22 minutes of toybox-synthesized classical lullaby crap for $10 on iTunes Music Store. That’s a serious cash-cow; even pop CDs are at least 50 minutes or so. Even if I bought both volumes, that’s not even 45 minutes of non-repetitive music. It is, however, homogenous in terms of timbre and volume, which, along with clever marketing, is why it sells. I’d rather have my daughter listen to the real thing, but I also have a practical need here as well. So imagine my own self-loathing when I subjected many wonderful pieces to a transmogrifying audio laboratory like a Maestro Mengele, removing the artistry, audio quality, and individuality to make a homogenous, similar, and ultimately inferior final product.
I’ll give an example: the “Adagietto” movement from Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. People in the know will gasp, “You’re putting her to sleep with Mahler!??” because Mahler is known for wide variations in dynamic expression, extremely long symphonies (>100 minutes), very busy and thick scoring (over 120 members in the orchestra, plus a choir at times), and did I mention long symphonies? Relax–this is a slow movement that is scored simply for strings and harp. I even have the relevant excerpt from the score here to follow along for those that want to for the musical sections below:
Note all the instructions Gus has provided above; the score is full of details, all about to be lost. This is the final 18 or so measures of the movement before heading into the buckle-your-seatbelts finale that comes immediately after. In this excerpt, 8 minutes into the movement, we go from quiet yearning to a final gushing emotional outpouring, to a complete fade to nothing. Gorgeous, heart-tugging, and although sublime, completely unworkable to put a child to sleep. Here is a picture of the original waveform in the audio editor (Apple Soundtrack Pro) and the playable excerpt below it:
Now, the bastardized, compressed audio. Note that there is a lot of artifact bringing up the volume from the low-amplitude sections, which you can visually see in the following graphic. This is the price one pays:
Upon finishing compressing 2h of music selections, they were transferred to a minidisc set on “Repeat,” and applied that night. I happy to report it was an unqualified success. I met the dual objective of both blocking out more external noise and giving daughter something to listen to that she can carry with her, even if only subconsciously, as she grows older to appreciate it more. Part of me feels bad for blasphemy I’ve wrought (ok, I’m being a bit facetious here), but Claudia and I certainly get more quality time as daughter gets more sleep, so too bad.
P.S. Once unleashed, the compression monster can level anything in its path, rendering even unthinkably inappropriate selections even and unwavering. I’ve always joked to everyone I was going to inflict Soviet composers, such as Shostakovich, on her as soon as possible. I may do some personality damage if I start too early with things like this. LOL!
WebMD Medical Reference [?!!?] Reviewed by Michael W. Smith, MD
Just how important is washing your hands? Well, imagine this scenario: Your younger sister uses the bathroom and does not wash her hands carefully. E. coli (a deadly bacterium) hitches a ride with her into the kitchen. She introduces E. coli to everything she touches - the countertop, some cookies your mom left out, the refrigerator handle, the wet sink.
Aiieeeee! Because of little sister’s laziness, “deadly” E. coli will render the house a gruesome fecal bloodbath the likes of which no medical examiner could ever dare dream of. Better they had gotten infected with Ebola; at least they would have had a fighting chance.
Last I checked, WebMD actually had some real money to have legitimate medical story writers. I’d not have batted an eye if it was “Yahoo,” “Ask.com” or something generic. Dr. Smith, while you’re scaring the hell out of the public, you just might want to mention that E. coli is a naturally occurring bacterial resident in both cattle and human intestines. Yes, enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) with the famous strain O157:H7 (the “Jack-In-the-Box” strain) can be deadly, mainly for children and the elderly because they are more susceptible to develop a complication called hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS). There are also other classes of pathogenic E. coli, each with specific characteristics that go by names like EAEC, EIEC, ETEC, and AFLAC. Ok, maybe not that last one… But not only are these types of E. coli the bad apples of an otherwise huge bunch, but E. coli itself is a minor player in human digestive tracts; anaerobic bacteria such as Bacteroides fragilis outnumber E. coli 1000:1 at least. I’d expect WebMD to do better.
I also appreciated this gem later in the article:
Some experts believe the hand sanitizers may be more effective at killing bacteria and viruses than soap and water.
WebMD, where do you find these trailblazers of science?! I mean really! Soap solubilizes oils, allowing them to come off the skin with water, but itself kills nothing. Handwashing with soap and water removes pathogens mainly from rubbing/friction removal action, trapping in soapy film, then rinsing the bugs down the drain. I’ll keep washing my hands to remove dirt and grime, but I put my money on the direct killing action >60% ethanol, chlorhexidine and Triclosantm over saponificated fat any day, thankyouverymuch. Perhaps I’m silly that way.
Here are other headline gems I find in WebMD News’ Feed, just in the last two weeks:
Women’s Cancer Prevention Falls Short (screening? genetic markers? NO! Not enough veggies!)
Chronic Disease Costs Staggering (we don’t have a health care crisis from car accidents, ya know)
Too Much TV Causes Behavior Problems (”What was that? I wasn’t listening…”)
Modest Weight Loss Cuts Hypertension (Nobel material here)
Many Shoppers Favor Organic Food (yeah, 20-23%. That’s “many.” Idiots.)
Job Stress May Be Depressing (tell me about it)
Diabetes Treatment a Burden to Many (Although some say “It’s no big deal; I kinda like it, actually.”)
Bird Flu May Pass to Fetus via Womb (So the one growing on the side of my neck is safe? Whew!)
Magnets Don’t Fight Pain, Study Shows (As everyone who comes out of a cramped MRI tube can tell you)
Cancer Affects Patients’ Spouses, Too (Really?!)
Stimulants Help Students With ADHD (This is 2007, right? I thought we knew this 30+ years ago…)
Seasonal Depression Tied to Serotonin (Are you sure it’s 2007, ’cause I’m getting worried now)
I never expected anything more than general, public-oriented news on WebMD’s feed, but this is unbearable. Any recommendations for good, general health news sources that 1) preferably can be available via RSS, and 2) are free? I’m too poor to afford the fancy journal watch subscription services. Poo.
I’m too poor to afford the fancy journal watch subscription services. Poo.