April 28th, 2008
Well, I spent the last four days in St. Louis, at a NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) training. I trained to be a NAMI Connection facilitator at the state level. It was quite a good event, well run and very informative. I'm only a little overwhelmed. On the way back I got to see the arch, but we didn't have time to stop. That's the third time I've seen the arch, but not had time to stop!
While in St. Louis, we stayed at the Airport Hilton. Overall a good experience, with two major exceptions.
I need a refrigerator for my diabetes medicine, Byetta. It took several days of going to the front desk, both by me and the head trainer, asking for the refrigerator before I finally got one, late Saturday afternoon. Of course, check out was early Sunday morning, so I got one night's use out of it, the rest of the time, I had to use ice packs and someone else's refrigerator. Quite irritating.
The other problem was my diet. I had made a special dietary request on my training application saying that I could not eat uncooked fruits or vegetables. An unusual allergy, but not usually to hard to accommodate, as I can eat pretty much anything cooked, and many things that are not -just not raw or lightly steamed vegetables and fruits. One unusual exception is that I can eat raw onions.
In any case, most meals, no problem. Friday night however, was a disaster. We had about 55 minutes to eat from 6:00 to 6:55 PM, and then off to another session. Well, it took the people at the hotel four tries to make a meal without raw vegetables, and the final, almost successful, attempt was made at 6:45, giving me 10 minutes to eat it and the desert. It was only close too, as we were supposed to be having chicken and beef, the final attempt was chicken only, no beef. I'd have rather had the beef, if for some reason two meats were harder to make without vegetables than one...
Back to the shoulder saga.
This morning my doctor's office called. The MRI was denied again. This time they decided that I need four weeks of physical therapy before they will approve he MRI. Now that's one of the likely outcomes I expected, to have my doctor prescribe: physical therapy. But I'd rather have had him decide for medical reasons, not an insurance company for cost reasons. If they had done the MRI when he first requested it, I'd be 3/4 of the way through the therapy and likely feeling better now, assuming that physical therapy is what I need. If it's not what I need, we're wasting even more time with me in pain. I'm not happy here people!.
Next year, I'm likely to switch from Cigna POS back to Blue Cross insurance.
April 24th, 2008
Well, it's been a while since I've posted. The big news in that time is that we had an earthquake. Not big news in some parts of the world, but in Kokomo, Indiana, this is only the third I can remember in 46 years (actually I've only lived in central and north central Indiana for about 36 of those years).
It wasn't bad at all here, it was 5:40 in the morning, I was sound asleep, and was awakened by the windows rattling and a rumbling noise. I thought, "Wow, an earthquake", then I fell back asleep. :-)
When I got up, about two hours later, I convinced myself that it was probably just a low flying jet from the nearby military base. Until I went to my first appointment that day, a talk I was giving at a local class. Everyone was talking about the earthquake...
As far as I know, it didn't do any damage near my area, but in southern Indiana and Illinois, it was a lot worse, and did knock bricks loose from buildings, knock trailers off their foundations, etc.
The first earthquake I remember in this area was in either 1986 or 1987, I lived in a trailer then. It was at the end of a circular court. That earthquake was a bit more intense, but much briefer, at least if my memory is to be trusted (suspect at times!). I was in the back of the trailer, and though that someone had just driven straight down the court and hit the hitch on the front of the trailer.
I went outside, and there was no car, but people were pouring out of their homes, and peering into the sky. Why in the world would you do that after an earthquake? After a while, I peeked up too, just in case they were seeing something, but, as expected, it was just the sky.
Back to the rotator cuff.
The last I wrote, I was waiting on an X-Ray. It showed nothing, so my doctor asked me to wait and see if it got better. I did. It didn't.
I called last Monday (this is Thursday), and they set up an MRI this morning at 8:40 AM. At 7:15 this morning a call came from the imaging center, seconds after I woke up. Fortunately it was seconds after I woke up, rather than before, or I would have been very irritated. Oh wait, I am irritated, more than irritated. A lot more than irritated.
The MRI was turned down again, and at this late notice! They want to do a "Peer Review" with my doctor before certifying the MRI. Now the soonest they can get me in, assuming that it's approved, is next Tuesday. But no problem, they aren't the ones in pain here...
I have done virtually nothing interesting and/or creative since I hurt myself. I have stopped my attempts at learning the guitar (hurts too much), and haven't worked on any interesting programs. All I do is try to find comfortable positions to sit/lay in.
April 10th, 2008
I haven't written anything for a while. It turns out that that rotator cuff problem has been getting worse. It's pretty painful to type. But I'm irritated enough with my insurance company to write anyway.
When I last saw my doctor, he told me that if it got a lot worse to call for an MRI. Well, I called on Tuesday. They could get me in for an MRI on Friday.
Yesterday, Wednesday, they called to say that the insurance company would not approve it unless I had an X-Ray first. Pretty silly, as my doctor wants an MRI period, so this way they will pay for an X-Ray they could have gotten out of.
They got me right in for the X-Ray yesterday. It was a little entertaining when they saw the damage to my collar bone from the motorcycle accident 12 years ago. I broke my collar bone into 12 or 13 pieces. If I hadn't been wearing a helmet, I would have been killed, but as it was, the collar bone was the worst of it. Wear helmets when riding people! (For those wondering, of course, I still ride -when my shoulder doesn't hurt this much, which is cheating me out of some really nice spring weather)
In any case, it is now Thursday afternoon, and even after my doctor has looked at the X-Rays and still wants an MRI, they are dragging their feet about it. Meanwhile I'm in pain.
Last night my wife and best friend talked me into going to the ER to see what they could do. The most important thing they came up with was a sling. It doesn't sound like much, but it helps a lot. I had to take it off to type this, but it's going right back on in a few minutes!
I don't expect too many more updates until I feel better.
April 4th, 2008
Great news! Yesterday Karla and I found out that we were approved for foster/adoptive parenting in Indiana! We are hoping to adopt a sibling pair. When I adopted my son in my last marriage, he had already been separated from his sister, which I have always found to be sad. We hope to prevent this for another pair. We also hope to provide respite care, at least in the daytime, for other foster homes, but that is not a certain thing.
Today I did an "In Our Own Voice: Living With Mental Illness" presentation down in Indianapolis. It went very well. It always gives me a good feeling when a speech/presentation goes well.
April 1st, 2008
It's 12:20 in the morning, I'm about to go to bed, and I realized that I let April Fool's day sneak up on me without thinking of anything to pull on anyone. Too late now for anything really good. That sort of stuff was more fun in the office when I worked than it would be now in any case.
Speaking of that, some day I'm going to have to write about the time I almost got fired when I got blamed for a practical joke at work that someone else had pulled. In the end, we both kept our jobs, but I was always very careful after that.
I went to the doctor today about my shoulder/arm pain. He thinks it's tendinitis of a tendon involved with the rotator cuff. He suspects that the first injury (I hurt it three weeks ago,then again about a week ago, then again, carrying groceries, last Wednesday) involved using too much force with my arm reaching behind my back, like lifting something out of the back seat of the car.
He prescribed a mild pain killer and suggested Alieve, or a generic equivalent, before bed. He also gave me some simple light exercises to do twice a day. He wants to see me in a few weeks if it does not get better. Then he'll do an MRI. Here's hoping it gets better.
I'm going to have to totally rethink my Xlib project. I'm getting nowhere trying to wait on both X events and input from another process at the same time. My Xlib book is of no help, and oddly, extensive Googling hasn't helped either.
It looks like I'll either have to use the X toolkit, which I've never done (I've used raw Xlib and GTK before, not to mention Perl/Tk), or totally rethink the event loop. I feel sort of like I've hit a wall. Of course, that is often how one learns...
March 29th, 2008:
I saw "Superhero Movie" today. I did this so that you won't have to. Please don't. For your own good. This is a bad movie, there is no point to seeing it. Yes, there are a very few genuinely funny scenes in it, and the basic idea ought to yield a good movie, but this is not that movie. Enough said.
My should still hurts. I'd go to the doctor, but the last time I did that for a similar problem (neck), I waited for the doctor's appointment, then I waited for the specialist's appointment, and then I waited to get into physical therapy. Guess what? After all that waiting, my neck didn't hurt anymore! I'm going to skip the time-wasting trips to the medical professionals and the insurance co-pays this time. At least for now, I suppose there will be a point that I conceded that I need medical help.
March 28th, 2008 6:20 PM:
Well, I Googled the problem with the grayed out network settings in Kubuntu 7.10 It turns out that this is a known problem that other people have experienced, bug number 179496, as a matter of fact.
The workaround is to type "sudo systemsettings" at a command prompt and entering your password on the command line rather than starting it from the menu and then clicking "Administrator Mode" followed by entering your password in a dialog box.
The only problem was that it seemed to work at first, I had a static IP of 192.168.2.199 and a router set to 192.168.2.1 All worked, I could use Konqueror to surf the web.
Then I closed systemsettings. It said that there were unsaved changes, did I want to save them? I pondered what to do, and clicked on "yes". It froze for several minutes, and I had to terminate the process. All still seemed well on the networking front.
Then I rebooted. No networking. An "ifconfig" in a terminal window showed that no IP address was assigned to eth0. Starting systemsettings showed that the IP seemed to be assigned, but there was no default route assigned. I repeated the setup with the dialog box and all worked again. This time I told it not to save the unsaved settings, and it exited normally. Networking was still there.
I rebooted. No networking again.
A little investigation showed that the line "auto eth0" was missing from /etc/network/interfaces. I added it and rebooted again. All was well.
I started systemsettings again. I noticed that there was a radio button labeled "Activate when system starts". It was checked. Had I missed this the first time through and not checked it? I know I didn't click on it, but perhaps it defaults to not starting networking? That seems an odd default. We won't know soon, as I don't intend to reload Kubuntu and try from scratch. Perhaps I'll want another virtual machine with Kubuntu later and I'll try then.
My shoulder still hurts and I'm sleepy despite getting 7 1/2 hours sleep last night and taking a 1 1/2 hour nap in the afternoon.
I'm rather touched. Sadly, my mother died about three weeks ago, and my friends at NAMI Kokomo(National Alliance on Mental Illness) got me a nice card and a pewter cross with a nice memorial message engraved on it.
March 28th, 2008 12:30 AM:
Well, I tried something new today, or rather yesterday, as I write this at 12:30AM. I created a new virtual machine in vmware and loaded Kubuntu 7.10 on it. (I can't recommend vmware enough, it's a great product)
I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 on the physical machine that I'm writing this on, and running vmware on, and am quite pleased with it. Polished, well behaved, very pleasant to use.
I'm less impressed so far with Kubuntu. It appears less polished, and less professional. But most irritating is a serious bug, or what appears to be one, in the network setup dialog.
The install procedure set it up to use DHCP, just like plain Ubuntu did. Unlike plain Ubuntu, I found that I could not use the graphical interface to switch to a static IP. The options are all grayed out, the instructions say to click on the "Administrator" button to change them. I did so, and it asked for my password (the same one that works with sudo), and accepted it. But the settings were still grayed out. Irritating.
I have not yet changed the settings by editing the files, as I am a little too woozy from lack of sleep and pain in the shoulder -still. This has kept me from working as much as I'd like on my Xlib project, as while I've made good progress on parts, I'm having trouble with the XSendEvent() function. I found what appears to be some good advice on the web, but in my insomnia-impaired state, it doesn't make complete sense to me. Perhaps I'll sleep well tonight.
March 26th, 2008:
Arm still hurts.
I've been working on a project that I started before the switch to Ubuntu. I'm playing around with the idea of a simple "graphics server" that can be called from a library of Perl functions. It would be used to make it simple for people, especially kids, to draw pictures on the screen easily.
I remember all the fun I had back in the '70s with a friend's father's TRS-80 writing a program that made a twinkling star field appear on the screen. Or a few years later, with my own Commodore VIC-20, drawing Spirograph-like patterns on the screen using a turtle graphics program.
But try and write programs like that today, it's not so easy. Even "Hello World" programs written to use modern graphical toolkits are overwhelming to a beginner.
I'm thinking Perl as a language, as it's easy to learn, yet you don't grow out of it too easily. But the only toolkit worth using I can find for it is Perl/Tk, which is nice, but not something I'd expect a teenager to buckle down and learn just to have fun. I've written several programs using it, and they came out nicely, but they weren't quick and dirty fun.
So I'm thinking of an Xlib (of course, I'm only considering Linux here, it's what I do) based program that listens on a port for connections from a library of Perl functions and can turn pixels in a window on and off, draw lines, circles, etc. in multiple colors.
I've dug out my old O'Reilly "Xlib Programming Manual" and am re-learning what I used to know about the subject. After some study I'll decide if the project is feasible, and within my abilities.
March 24th, 2008:
Well, I'm in pain.
Last Saturday I went in to start a free week trial membership at a new gym. My old one closed, and I put off finding a new one for a few months. I hadn't done any cardio exercises in this time, and hadn't done any upper body exercises (other than the ones prescribed in occupational therapy) since my stroke on November of last year.
I've made a pretty good recovery from the (fortunately minor) stroke, and I thought I'd start some with some mild upper body exercises, more for toning than strength. I thought I'd start out really easy since it had been so long.
Well, I thought I had started out easy, but now two days later, my left arm hurts. I guess I wasn't as conservative as I thought...
I did ride the exercise bike for 20 minutes today, but nothing using the arms/shoulders!
Well, it just turned midnight and is now the morning of the 25th. I'm not going to change the heading in any case.
I got Samba to work on the Ubuntu machine. No big deal there, except that I enabled printer sharing and printed from a Windows (yuck) machine. I found that I could print black and actually use the black cartridge of my HP printer. Under Ubuntu 6.06 and all earlier versions of Linux that I have tried this on, it used the color cartridge for black, and this resulted in a murky looking brown. It also used up the color cartridge too rapidly. I'm quite happy that this problem has been solved, as I had Googled it in the past and found others having the same problem, bit no concrete solutions.
March 23rd, 2008 (Easter):
Well, I've been thinking about making the front page of my site blog-like for years, but was always afraid that I'd not have enough interesting information to keep it up to date.
I've decided, "Who cares"? I'll update it when I have something interesting, and feel like updating.
What is going on now:
As most people who know me well, and those who've perused the rest of this site know, I'm into Linux/Unix. Right now I'm in the final stages of updating my primary machine from Centos 4 (a free clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux 4, RHEL4) to Ubuntu.
I used Centos for years because, when I was employed (perhaps more on the past nature of the "employed" at a later date), we used RHEL. I wanted my home environment to be as similar to work as possible, so that I could improve my skills with the same OS whether I was at work or home.
Well, as you've guessed, I no longer work, and I've decided to switch to Ubuntu. Ubuntu 7.10 specifically.
I decided not to wait for 8.04 for the same reason that this move to a new OS was triggered at this time in the first place. Centos 4 was getting a little long in the tooth, and this was driven home for me when I got a new 22 inch monitor with 1680x1050 resolution.
Centos 4 could not handle it. I searched the web for solutions, but the ones that looked most viable involved re-compiling the kernel (no big deal, I did that frequently in the bad old days), and re-compiling X. A little bit bigger deal, but I've done it once before. On a SPARC 2 workstation with 32M of RAM. Also in the bad old days. It took over 24 hours to compile, and thank God it worked the first time! Of course, even on my dated 3GHz P3 with 2G of RAM, that would probably take less than 15 minutes. But I still didn't want to do it, when I was already leaning to a switch of distros.
Well, upon further thought, perhaps it would have been a big deal, as I'd likely have to recompile both every time there was a worthwhile upgrade rather than just updating with yum. I have to do that with my laptop wireless drivers every time a new kernel is downloaded, and it is irritating.
I downloaded 7.10, and ran from the live disk. Perfect, it detected the monitor and came up in beautiful 1680x1050 resolution.
So I backed everything up. Having formerly worked as a Unix sysadmin, and possessing the paranoia that comes with years of that sort of duty, I made three backups of everything important, and moved everything important to the partition that I did not intend to format during the install.
I made one backup to DVD and CD. The stack is about six inches high (including the jewel cases, of course). I made another backup on the local network's hacked-together NAS server. I made another backup to a removable USB drive that I then unplugged for the duration of the install.
When I felt safe, I installed. It went smoothly, and the first time it booted, I got 1680x1050. The second time I booted, I could not get full resolution. Attempting to change the resolution from the pull down menus had no effect whatsoever.
Irritated, I searched the web with Google. No joy. (bet you can't remember who said that all the time, years ago).
The next day, I got it to work, by selecting System->Administration->Screens and Graphics and telling it that I had a widescreen monitor of a model that was closest to the Samsung SyncMaster 2220WM that I had. It worked!
While writing this, I just looked, and it seems to have forgotten that, and thinks it has a "Custom 1" monitor. But it's working, and working well, so I'm not going to argue.
So then I had to restore my data and locate all my favorite apps, or find more modern replacements, using Synaptic. That's going pretty well, and I won't bore you with details, other than saying that VMware Server installed easily, and I'm setting up virtual machines on it right now.
Well, more at another date, when I feel like updating.
The old index page:
Some time around 1994 (maybe earlier?, I was still using Mosaic...) or so I put up my first web page. It was on Hollicom, the first real ISP available in Kokomo, IN. It was a pretty basic page, at first it was a single file, a huge stream of information, with just a few in-line images, and an index at the top.
It slowly evolved to what you see. The most recent incarnation (Started August 2005, still in use) uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). While I was at it, I cleaned up the HTML in the 100 or so .shtml files that make up this site. It took a while.
Most of the motorcycle articles were written in 1993 through 1996.
The woodworking articles started after that.
Then I had some marital problems and an illness, and didn't work on the page for a few years.
In 2005, I wrote some (non-fictional) stories, and updated the HTML.
In 2006, there were a few minor updates, now, in 2007/2008 I'm making a few minor layout changes, adding a few stories, etc.
