Archigos' Life

*What I’m Watching or Listening to Now*
Was watching “Salt” (2010) (sadly, my subtitles for the Russian didn’t work), followed by “Due Date” (2010).

*Random Question*
If the movie “Due Date” was real, since Zach’s character caused most of the ‘issues’, how much, if any, legal trouble would Robert’s character be in when everything was all said and done?

I’ve slowly been migrating to a centralized format for my blog posts and I kind of like doing it via the headings like the one above. However, as you noticed, I’m just writing this time and there’s a semi-good reason for that.

We’re almost done with the third month of the year and I have little to show for it… no ‘real’ New Year’s resolutions to speak of and even if I had them, I’d probably broken most, if not all of them by now anyway, that’s why I gave up on that tradition years ago. Hell, I’m a 30-year-old guy that has been essentially sitting on my ass for the last four years, not because of being lazy (although I am in a lot of aspects) but due to a genetic crap shoot that almost ruined my life.

It’s weird that people diagnosed with cancer tend to tell time in a different way, some count days or weeks since diagnosis, others count from official day of remission… well, as of today (2011/03/22) it was 1,513^days or 216^weeks 1^day since I was originally diagnosed and although I’m getting healthier again, my life has changed so much that to a certain point, some aspects are over and there’s no getting any of it back.

Throughout my life I’ve only done a small handful of things I’m proud of, serving in the Navy being the largest… but there’s many things in my life that saying I’m not proud of would be a vast understatement. If you know me, even if you pretend to know me, you probably can think of a pile of things in that list, but do me a favor, don’t remind me, don’t bring any of it up with others… I want to attempt to leave the past where it should be. The largest thing screwing with me about all these thoughts I’ve had is that my memory over the last four years is spotty at best, partly from “Chemo Fog“/”Chemo Brain” and apparently some genetic things I should have had to contend with for many more years (Alzheimer’s). Over the last week couple weeks, things have been hard hitting about my life, my choices, my friends, my family… it’s getting to the point I may have to seek help again.

I just hope that if I seek out a new pyschiatrist, it will work this time, although the last time I talked with one I didn’t have as much ‘baggage’ to talk to them about and it didn’t help that the supposedly unbiased ‘doctor’ turned out to be a lacky that took one semester at a community college and was someone from the past of one of my parents. I would normally justify a comment like that with “not saying they said/did anything wrong” however there were times while talking to them they brought my parent into it when it obviously had nothing to do with them. For example, I remember one week entering their office with my left hand wrapped up in an ACE bandage or something from punching a guy that essentially attacked a female friend of mine. Instead of asking something about “How’d you hurt your hand?” they asked when the last time I saw my parents. {Before anyone gets any ideas, I’m not being specific on this idiot for a reason, and NO it has nothing to do with any form of abuse from/against anyone, last I heard that ‘psychiatrist’ was fired anyway, so whatever}

To keep the rest of this post on some form of rational flow I figured I’d go through the posts I’ve made so far this year and just do updates to crap I’ve already brought up instead of bringing up a new pile of shit that is my life.

*College*
I ‘finished’ the two classes I was in (which I have to repeat again) and I’m not exactly sure what’s going on or how I’m going to proceed since there was a break last week and when I logged in yesterday for my class it says I’m not in any classes right now and if I check on my Academics Schedule where it normally lists the classes start and end date just says “Future” for start date. The last few months of college have been very stressful, with a mix of stress, lack of time from doctor appointments and other random crap going on, even to a small amount of “Van Wilder Syndrome”. The Medical section may give you a little insight to some of this.

*Work*
See new “Dates” area for a few details of office closings.
We’ve added a few more ways to donate to our team for Relay for Life before this summer’s event, but sadly the different ways we utilize don’t communicate with each other, so you’d have to add all the funds between services to get the total and none of them will be accurate (for the overall total). This is yet another reason I didn’t want to split it up, but some people seem to have issues with certain types of donations, maybe for tax reasons, personal privacy, or whatever. In any case, we will annouce the overall total sometime closer to the actual Relay which will be held July 15^th.

*Medical*
I brought up a few things last post (Feb. 16) and figured I’d expand on them a bit more. At this point, I’m positive I managed to piss off at least one of the doctors as shit has gone downhill even more. Let’s run a quick timeline of the last month…

• Feb. 13^th – My regular Jan-Feb script for pain meds ran out.
• Feb. 15^th – Had appointment with the pain management clinic I mentioned in the boonies.
• Feb. 15^th – Saw my primary care to request different PM setup, promised a call in 24hr.
• Feb. 16^th – Got a call with a promise for different arrangments… they never followed through.
• I have never taken any drugs that were not perscription and have never abused those that were…
  however, when you stop any drug this abruptly… Withdrawl is a BITCH…
• Mar. 4^th – Around this day is when I stopped popping Ibeprofun like Tic-Tacs… not because of decrease in pain, but worries for my internal orgin.

*Birthdays* – Will be replaced with with “Dates” section.
Mainly due to a few jackasses bitching at me, I’m going to give up this section and only post birthdays in which there are other relevant reasons for it… a party, important age, whatever. P.S. You’re a douche Donny.

*Dates* – B = Birthday; E = Event; W = Weekend; X = Closed

*Gadgets*
Instead of repeating what I’ve already mentioned in previous posts about the phone, iOS, etc. I’ll just point out that as I figured, I’m blowing most of my iTunes cash on apps instead of music. As of the last check I did, according to iTunes I have 19GB of apps installed on the iPad and 7.9GB installed on the ViPhone… less than 5GB of free space left on the ViPhone as well, which may make me rethink some of the memory hog apps and even removing images from the phone since I have those on the iPad as well, but I’ve had times where I’ve been out and about and wanted to show something off to realize that my iPad is home and my phone is in my pocket.

Back in January I mentioned Gelaskins and not that long ago I managed to score some sweet ones for a few of my devices. I was going to showcase them kind of like how I did the three in that post, but instead figured I’d like to their product pages to send them the traffic. For my ViPhone, iPad, Playstation 3, Xbox 360 S, and my laptop.

The new eSATA Tower is working out great and with the extra storage capacity has actually helped with some of my automation routines since it gives me a larger ‘scratch‘ area while processing. I’d cringe to think how it would have been if it was USB 2.0 or almost cry if it was still the USB 1.1 days.

*Travel*
Due to recent financial set backs, I’ve had to pretty much abaondon any hopes of travel, personal, business, pleasure, etc. for the forseeable future. 🙁 Stupid car, stupid bills, stupid me…..

*Updates/Upgrades*
For people that use WordPress for their blogs (Third Party/Private Server, not on WordPress.com) and use the Stats Plugin (version 1.8.1 or lower) and have noticed their stats are now broken on some, if not all, of their blogs, this is a known issue. If you dig around their support forums you’ll probably find posts telling you to email their support or use the contact page, which in my case, like others was kind of useless as it appears either a bot catches the message or the responder just doesn’t seem to ‘get’ what is being said and asking for more information when you’ve already given enough. Anyway, to fix this issue (at least it worked for me and was reported as working by others) is to grab the new “Jetpack” plugin by WordPress which gives you a newer version of the stats plugin (in turn fixing the issue) and many other cool features, additions. Do yourself a favor and at least check the site out if you host your own… Since I don’t host any blogs with WordPress.com directly I’m not sure what, if any, help this plugin will do for those people as it’s promoted for those that host elsewhere, so if you use their direct service and install this, bitch/praise them if it borks/fixes something. I’m going to look into it more later, but it appears if I configure all the stuff that comes with Jetpack I can probably dump some of the other plugins used and give it more of a unified feel.