Tag Archives: Medical

Rant(s)

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“Explain Later…”

In regards to the last post where I said I’d explain later… I planned on explaining it, but since I wrote that post around 3am Sunday morning and got a phone call BEFORE noon in reference to being suicidal you can piss off… it’s not worth expanding on since that fuckhead will probably call them on me again. Just for the record, I’m not suicidal, I have NEVER been suicidal, and NEVER will be suicidal… sure I have many issues with depression and have gotten to the point where I had thought about it before but would NEVER act on those thoughts as I know that no matter what shit I’m dealing with, things HAVE to get better at some point, some how.

College

Let’s kind of jump to the beginning for those that don’t read my blog or those unfamiliar with online based colleges in the United States. When I was diagnosed with Cancer in Jan. 2007 they pulled me out of work and left me with nothing to do, except of all the doctor appointments… Part of the cancer treatment caused an issue known as “Chemo Fog” that pretty much destroyed my short term memory so I can’t really remember a lot of what I did for the first year or so, other than doctors, but in Sep. 2008 I decided since I still can’t work I should try college to help with the boredom and since it was after I already suffered the spinal damage a traditional “Brick and Mortar” college was out and IADT was the second online college I looked at and decided it’d be the best for me. I started working on my Associates degree in Oct. 2008. I would have graduated already but I kind of fucked up 2 classes and took 3 months off last summer for medical leave, so instead my final two classes end Oct. 2nd this year so I assume my actual graduation would be sometime in Oct. (just before my 30th birthday on Oct. 28th).
A quick refresher on how classes work at this school is that they take the typical 11 to 13 week class and compress it into 5 weeks so in this environment you screw up or get behind you’re pretty much fucked. The plus side to this however is that they alternate where you have a single class (like now) and then two classes together, back and forth.
Now let’s jump to present day, I’m almost at the end of Unit 4 (week 4) of my current class; 3D Modeling & Animation; so that will end on the 5th of June, but although I did great the first two units/weeks of class, the Professor seems to have a ‘teaching style’ that doesn’t exactly match anything I remotely call useful and even after talking to a friend that knows his way around 3D Studio Max (the software we use for this class) and reading numerous tutorials online I still can’t get a certain ‘feature’ to work that the Professor says I need to have on my current project before I’m allowed to submit it… I’m going to give it one last try than fuck it, I’ll submit without it and if he docks my grade too much I’ll just bitch because it’s bullshit.
Anyway, the ‘icing’ on the cake, once I finish this damn class (as long as I don’t fail) I’ll have a weekend off and start two of my final five classes, then a 16 day break, another class, a weekend off, then the final two classes that I mentioned above that end the beginning of Oct.

Three parter… 1 Rant, 1 Not, Some Images

Conversation with a friend… (Not a rant)

I was talking to a friend of mine online late Monday night/early Tuesday morning and I talked about a local place called “The Face”. I haven’t been up there since last Aug. and told her that I would go by the end of the week to take some photos and maybe some video for her. I was supposed to have a class at 11am Tuesday and the Professor needed to cancel it 20 minutes before it was supposed to start, so I decided I’d pop a pain pill and take the long uphill hike to get her some photos.

My stupidity and my family (The Rant)

Well, for some damn reason, after going up there on and off for 20+ years I couldn’t seem to keep the trails straight so the roughly 30 minute hike took me over an hour to get up there and my legs, back, arm, and a few other places have hurt a SHIT load since. Now, where does the heading fall into this? The stupidity was going on this hike in 80-90º weather and taking way longer than it should… The family part… well, my Grandmother (on my Mom’s side) meant the world to me while she was alive (she passed in 2001) and has continued to change my life. When she passed, apparently her request was that her ashes be released at The Face, which my family honored and my Uncle took care of. Now the reason for mentioning these two things together is that I’ve been to The Face on average a few times a year and it wasn’t until the day AFTER my last visit up there that anyone bothered to tell me that my Grandmother’s ashes were up there. If I had known, it wouldn’t really change much, but I would have had a static place in mind where I could go when I just wanted to remember or be with her.
Rest In Peace Dorothy.

The Images

MySQL, PHP, IIS, AD, and a few others

So the server I talked about a few posts ago decided that although I had automatic “Windows Updates” turned off it would do them anyway and one of them managed to break the MySQL/PHP integration I had in IIS 7.5 so as I repaired that Active Directory decided to randomly lose information on two of my systems. Anyway, I’ll keep this short, since I was already running out of room on the server (it had about 4.5TB of hard drive space and 6GB of RAM) I ordered another 6TB of hard drive space and stuck another 2GB of RAM in and realized I needed a larger power supply to accommodate the extra hard drives which I picked up, but now that I have all the new hardware it no longer fits into the Server Tower Case I had everything else in, which leads me to the last rant of this post….

Best Buy

Best Buy offers two different forms of “Best Buy Cards” one with a MasterCard logo, one without. I have a card with them (the one without a MasterCard logo) and figured I might as well go to there website and order a new Case for the server… I found a really slick case I want that is mainly designed for ‘show’ but more importantly will fit ALL the hardware. I add the case to my cart and figured, what the hell, I’ll get some other random shit while I’m at it and added two other items to my cart… now here’s the reason to bitch. Out of the three items in my cart, one of them (the case) was marked internet only and the other two gave me the choice to pick them up in the store if I wanted. I decided I’d have all of it shipped to me and save me the 50+ mile drive to the closest Best Buy store, I continued through checkout and made it to the last step to find out that although they have BOTH cards listed as valid payments they do NOT except the card I have for any online purchases. I contacted the phone number on their site and asked what the suggestion was since they claim the card can only be used in store, but the case, which was my main objective, is only available online. The lady was nice although the ‘resolution’ was beyond crap.
They pretty much said to get the hardware I want/need using my Best Buy branded card I have to drive the 50+ miles to go to the store, use my card to purchase a gift card for a minimum of $5 above the total (with shipping) of the order and than ask if they will allow me to use their internet in store (which they are NOT required to do if they want to be dicks about it) to place the online order with the gift card. If they don’t allow me to use their internet in store I’d be stuck having to drive all the way home to order online since I don’t really know of any places with public internet in that area. Now, for those thinking “Why not just buy a Best Buy gift card at Walmart or some other location?” and the reason I can’t do that is because the whole point is to charge all of this hardware to the Best Buy card in the first place. Fuck it, if they don’t allow me to use their internet I guess I could just tether my iPad to my Android based cell phone in their parking lot and order it that way, but that’s not the point either… what a waste of gas… I think if I don’t find this case somewhere else, this may be the last time I buy anything from Best Buy… not that losing $5000+ a year in sales just from me would hurt their overall business, it should help one of their competitors.

Category: Misc. | Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Balls

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So, I’ve been meaning to write again for awhile, not that many read this, but for those that do, you know I’m kind of a lazy bastard when it comes to this. Boo Hoo.

The point behind this post is that after I had my last back treatment I talked with my doctor and they are going to be making a cast of my left foot/ankle (I think up to about mid-shin range) to create a new form fitting brace per-se to help my body compensate for the differences cause to my balance and ability to walk that was caused by all the spinal damage I’ve suffered in the last three years. Sadly since I didn’t write this stuff down when I got home I’ve forgotten most of the important details, but I guess I’ll find out a better overview while I’m sticking my leg into the gel/paste/whatever they’re going to use on Wed. morning. In other words, I’ll write more or at least try to explain it better later this week. (Maybe some photos if I get really bored)

Ok, it’s just after 2am my local time Tuesday morning and I have a class in just under 9 hours, but this is my first one for “Unit 2” (second week of five) and got my grades for last week. I knew I had a good feeling about this 3D class since I’m carrying a perfect grade. After I finish this class I only have 5 left until I get my degree, so I’m really happy about that and if everything goes well I’ll be finishing a couple weeks before my birthday so I’m trying to come up with a sweet ass idea to celebrate my 30th birthday since most of mine in the past have kind of sucked.

I guess for the last point of this post (for now anyway) is if I get any more ‘good comments’ on a few of the stories I wrote for school, I might try to get a hold of my previous English Professor for more inspiration on how to continue the story, since the one I’m thinking of expanding was originally going to be broke into about six parts and I’ll create a new page on the blog to use for the story as I add/edit it until it’s finished since my Professor said I should look into Copyrighting it and possibly trying to find a way to get it published in something. (I’ll obviously copyright it before I post any of it on the blog)

Later…

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How I feel?

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How my life feels...It’s after midnight and I wanted to get another quick post in before I get back to my school work. (Yes, I’m just taking a short break.) I have to finish watching the last Live Chat that I missed last week due to the transfer so that I can get working on writing the rest of an IP.

The real reason I’m writing another post this soon from the last one is as the title says: “How I feel?” Well, as I briefly mentioned in the last post about chest pains, it was stress induced so I agreed to talk to a psychiatrist and figured this is way freakin’ cheaper! 🙂 I’m not looking for comments, just venting. The image on the right kind of describes how I feel, but I’ll let you figure out if I’m talking about the window or the frame.

Nathan has been a great friend, letting me vent whenever I need it and he’s around, while it’s a pain in the ass to get a hold of anyone else. Even the people that were on vacation and didn’t do any traveling, they still managed to be too busy when we talked more than once about hanging out. I’m not mad, just a little disappointed.

So, let’s start off by describing what feelings a ‘normal’ person should have and compare that to what I think I may have:

Financial Security Disability doesn’t pay shit; College is expensive as hell; not allowed to work, you do the math
Loved by others Not that I know of…
In love with someone else Yes, but I could never tell her
Socially Accepted At a red light, heading home from my treatment, someone heard the music (in Yiddish) in my car and yelled “Terrorist”
Pressure to succeed College is stressful, the little I can do for my company is suffering
Love Life What’s a love life? I don’t remember…

I might add some more to that later, cause it’s depressing. Well, Robin Williams was just on TV and I actually laughed a bit, so I lost my train of thought.

Category: Misc. | Tags: , ,

A lot of shit…

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I've got my eye on you

So, 15 days ago on the 15th I wrote a post that got interrupted by taking my roommate to work and forgot what I was going to write about. A lot has happened since so I figured it’s after 4am and I can’t sleep, which is very typical, I’d write a mass pile of shit into one post. In the last two weeks, whenever I remembered what I wanted to write, I didn’t have the time and whenever I had the time I couldn’t remember anything. Man, I really hate my memory problems. I’ve collected a bunch of random crap I’ve wanted to toss into a post for awhile now, some to test new features, others just cause I’m THAT bored.

Um, let’s see… where to start. Earlier this month I finished the latest set of “pre-qual’s” for Microsoft and upgraded my Partnership status for myself and helped one of my technicians do the same. I’m loving some of the new benefits. I ended my last class for college on the 20th with an A and started two new classes on the 22nd and typical me; I’m fucking up left and right in one class and doing ok in the other. I think this is going to be the first class I’m in where I’ll actually be requesting the tutoring as opposed to tutoring everyone else.

On the 23rd I went to my normal back treatments and was having severe chest pains the entire drive down there. They were a little worried about hooking me up to all the equipment and I don’t blame them. Other than the pain in my chest I felt fine, but that shit just wouldn’t go away. Later that night I went to the hospital to get it checked out and they said it was stressed induced and gave me a shot of something to calm my ass down or relieve the stress, whatever… shit just made me loopy for like an hour but the pain went away shortly after, so that’s good.

I’ve finished installing and configuring the 2 new servers for my house and upgraded the rest of my computers to Windows 7 Professional (Win7 Ultimate on my main laptop). I still have some other ‘roles’ I want to add to the main server (like WDS and WSUS to name a few) but I’m going to wait until I can get my grades up in my one class without the other suffering so that it will help me overall with the stress.

Near the end of next month I’ll most likely be heading to New York City for a day or two for a couple conferences, I hope my college schedule works out so I don’t miss much there. It’ll be kind of nice and act like a mini vacation as well, so that’s good.

I have to attempt to take a power nap now since I have back treatments later today and have 2 classes tonight, so I’m going to start taking notes on one of the multiple devices I normally have with me so that I can keep my head straight since I’m stressed/preoccupied with thoughts of class and don’t remember the rest of the things I was going to put (yet again). There were a few things I do remember, but I don’t have the time to deal with writing those now, so I already took notes of those.

Wave Hello Later

Category: Misc. | Tags: , , , , , , ,

Server issues, Wiki, Akismet, and other random thoughts

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The weather here sucks so bad I’ve precanceled my back treatments for tomorrow cause there’s no way in hell I’m going to drive an hour in this shit. On the plus side to this weather, I’ve had time to work on some of my sites and servers. The web server that hosts this site, the wiki, etc. was having some stability issues over the last week and after some emails back and forth with the guys that run it, everything has been resolved (as far as we can tell) and all the sites/domains are back to 100%.

On the topic of the wiki, since the server was having stability and speed issues I decided to change the back-end software that runs it to something that utilizes a database to see if that helps. Sadly the new software uses a different form of Wiki Syntax so it’s taking a little longer than I originally planned. You can find out a little more info about that clicking the link in the last paragraph.

Akismet, a plugin, addon, whatever the hell you want to call it, works wonders. For those that don’t know, it takes all the comments sent it and checks them for Spam links and other things to detect and combat unwanted/useless shit. If you jump to the very bottom of the page (in the footer) you’ll notice a little box that states how much spam has been detected and avoided. Sadly the software isn’t 100% accurate and has caught a few comments that it shouldn’t have, but the best part of the software is that once you’re acknowledged the poster as valid it wont bother auto-blocking them (it will still check each post, but will allow them to show if they aren’t marked as spam). I’ve had friends comment about Akismet being crap software how it misses a lot of stuff etc. and they sent me a screen shot of their control panel, practically bragging how shit it was… I took one look and just responded “You moron”. The comments listed as spam WERE spam. Spammers have gotten smart to some of the software used against them and started writing canned responses that at first glance seem valid and you allow those through… this is when they have the chance to pretty much spam the hell out of you before you notice. When you’ve written a post for example like the “Happy Holidays” post I wrote a little while back and get a comment that says something along the lines of “Wow, great post, although I don’t agree with what you’ve said or done 100% I still bookmarked your blog and plan to keep reading it later” you’d think, that’s cool, allow the comment, but if you actually read the sender/poster’s information you’d realize that the comment came from “Free Viagra, blah blah blah, for more info visit this great online pharmacy…..”.

I swear, I don’t believe in “capital punishment” (fully anyway) but I think that every found spammer should have a finger, thumb, penis, etc. fucking cut off… the first time they get caught, they get to name the body part they lose, the second time they’re caught, they take a consensus of those targeted by the spammer to vote on what that asshole loses. I forgot the rest of the point I was going to make, so oh well.

I have less than 2 hours to complete my homework, so I’ll get around to doing that and add more to the blog later. My head hurts.

Category: Misc. | Tags: , , , , ,

Life… or whatever you wanna call it!!!

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Barely halfway into the second month of the year and it already sucks. I managed to prep some of the data for migration and one of the former external drives started throwing SMART status errors although the drive passes all diagnostics 100% so now I have to replace a 1TB internal SATA for pretty much no reason. Guess I’ll try to stick it back in it’s original enclosure and hope. (About a week after I originally tested the drive, it’s started tossing a bunch of bad sectors, that equal about 7% of the drive, so it’s a good thing I decided to replace it anyway. I have a new drive on order).

Thankfully, that waste of fucking time (a.k.a. Interface Design class) is over and I wont have to deal with that useless “Professor” anymore. She’ll never be in a spot to read this blog either, not that I’d care, but her ‘teaching’ methods are beyond fucking stupid. How can you ‘teach’ people to write/use a certain type of programming language by clicking around fucking context menus and not comprehend that the way the students view what’s going on is via the internet so that NO MATTER what kind of web conference software is used, there WILL be lag. It’s mainly because of this, that I tutored more students than any past classes.  I talked to one of the “Academics Advisers” since mine left for Medical School (Congrats Chivonne), and they’re having the “Chair of the Department” review all my work and correcting the grades that the useless bitch seemed so full of.

I love tutoring the students, it gives me some pride in the fact I have the knowledge that they look up to, but some of the students tend to just be like “Hey AJ, I don’t get this project, can you show me?” and have me do their work for them practically. I have talked with those people and told them I will no longer do their work (since one had the gall to brag they got a higher grade on the work I did for them than what I earned on my own project).

Another part about tutoring, and don’t get me wrong, I enjoy tutoring most of the students, but one of them (not the ‘cheater’) has to have the same shit explained 50 times and after they finally ‘get it’ it has to be explained again the next fucking night. Thankfully, they’re starting to understand I do this because I like doing it, I’m not paid, so if I get frustrated, piss off… I’m not going to deprive the rest of the students altogether cause they can’t fucking figure it out. I mean, I understand that people have different levels of learning, different mental capabilities, etc. but this is College, so I’m not going to treat students like little kids, we’re all adults here.

And speaking of all being adults, I do apologize to one of the students that I tutor with the fact I was having a very bad night (due to my depression, etc.) and while trying to explain a few things to her, I did tend to swear a lot that night, and although I didn’t say anything derogatory about religion, race, etc. I understand and acknowledge some people of religious beliefs do not like to hear vulgarity, even when it’s just typed.

On a different note, I picked up some new hardware last week after one of my back treatments. It’ll help out in the long run, but still need to get the replacement drive. With the prices at the store I was at, a 2TB is a shit load better deal and the obvious extra space is a plus, but those guys were out of stock. Since I don’t start my new classes until next Monday (the 15th) I should be able to finish re-arranging my setup (where my servers, desktops, etc. are setup with the TV and Home Theater) tomorrow after I get home from my next back treatment. (Speaking of which, Hi Chad)

Some good news for February is I got my College Stipend earlier this month and should have both my State and Federal taxes back by Friday so I’m not as broke as normal. Things are kind of looking up since I can afford to take care of some crap I’ve been putting off for months.

Last note (from stuff I remember), I’m going to create a special post/topic about the Student Wiki where people can post comments there for topics and ideas of what we should do or add to the Wiki since I have that locked to our contributors (to help stop vandalism). I’ll post more about that later when I figure out exactly how I want to go ahead with this idea.

I got side tracked and forgot the rest of the shit I was going to write… so fuck it. I’ll write another post after I get back from my trip to Verona on Friday with some of the guys…

Category: Misc. | Tags: , , , , , , ,

Long week….

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I pretty much finished my college work early which is a surprise, so I’ll upload when I get home. I also have a general write up at home of how I plan on redoing / changing the main network, but won’t have time to implement it for a few days. Granted it will probably take a couple days of writing new code and moving shit around to finish.

I have my normal back treatments on Tues. and Thurs. and will be traveling to Philadelphia for a day sometime soon.

I’ll be heading home sometime soon… back to another long week.

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Stress…

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I’ve been busting my ass off with college trying to play catch up and earlier last night I managed to get fully caught up so I have time to relax. Too bad that will only last a day or two. I decided to make a new post and write about a bunch of things that have happened recently and my damn memory problems made me forget most of it. (Damn Chemo Fog)

I guess the main part of this update is that I have current intentions of changing around some of the domains and sub-domains I run and migrating some more of the sites / info over to this site so that everything is more centralized. I hope by the end of the month I’ll figure out what I’m doing exactly with the Blog Hosting that I was running since those Chinese Spammers ruined it for everyone else.

Personal Side:

  • Started second ‘set’ of back treatments last week and will continue to do them twice a week for the next 10+ weeks (94 mile round trip each time).
  • As I’ve mentioned in the past with my medical problems, I went through Chemotherapy and lost all the hair on my body. Prior to Chemo I was a blond and afterward the hair on my head grew back dark. The point, I dyed my hair on Thursday and I’m blond again.

College Related:

  • Classes are a pain (like normal)
  • I should have my degree around Oct. of this year (unless I have to move classes around or take medical leave again).
  • We have a new contributor to our Student Wiki.

Projects and Gadget Related:

  • Verizon finally ‘helped’ me with the complaints I’ve had for months, so I’m getting a new Droid tomorrow.
  • Jen bought me a new 3rd Generation iPod Touch (64GB) for Chanukah and I’ve found some sweet apps to go with the 40GB of music on it already.
  • Started talking to Martomo (not sure if he wants me to put his real name in here) about getting the old “Black Market” project back up and running again. Sometime in the near future we may be looking for some extra help. (It’s an Open Source project, so don’t bother asking if you think you’ll get paid, it’s all volunteer). Once we take the new version out of beta it will be listed on the Projects Page.

Server / Domain Side:

  • As stated, will be migrating some of the other sites over to here soon.
  • I just noticed a small ‘typo’ from my last post that I over looked while moving everything over to this site, I’ll change that next.
  • After the sites are merged, I’ll post more info on the Server Status Page here.
  • Adobe Contribute is Awesome for doing these updates, makes everything so much easier.

Since this is kind of long at this point, I’ll hold off on writing more until I can organize my thoughts more or have some updates to anything listed here.

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