Tag Archives: Rant

What the hell……..??

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§ Recent Changes §
I’ve written at least 3 or 4 posts since the Destiny one that I thought I had set to auto post on certain dates, as well as a handful of drafts with ideas, etc. that I wasn’t ready to post and it appears that none of that worked. They obviously didn’t post and the drafts have all disappeared. I know it wasn’t a hacker or someone trolling me… which means I either did something stupid, I don’t remember like deleting the posts or my memory is getting worse. My guess is that latter…

On any note, here’s only a little of what I had written since I can’t for the life of me remember 99% of it. First we’ll start with some of the medical cause it’s always on my mind.

§ Medical §
With the stigma of mental illness, we’ll start by ‘rehashing’ some old posts with new information. I’m too lazy to check the date, but I’ve occasionally talked about another person over the last year or so and have mentioned that they were diagnosed with schizophrenia… I still haven’t asked for permission to talk about ‘them’ specifically, but anyone that knows me personally may be able to venture a guess at who I’m talking about… (please don’t guess publicly). If you haven’t figured it out already, knowing that I’m not only related to him, but we’re close enough for me to be concerned as well since it can be hereditary. Well, the good news so far is that although it took a few months, his doctor’s managed to find the right mixture of medications and doses that not only does he not show many signs of the illness, but he’s actually changed and became more sociable then he had been prior in his life. It’s a struggle every day, not just for him, but for all of us involved, and it’s gotten to the point that most of my medical issues are ‘put on the back burner’ as they say. I don’t mean this is a “Hey, I’m sick too, pay attention to me…” or anything along those lines since I’m sure I could come up with better reasons for people to pay attention to me and trust me, I hate being sick and dealing with all the issues I have.

Keeping that in mind, this is my blog after all, so might as well update you on a bunch of my fucked up problems too… It’s been about 4 or 5 months since I started seeing a psychiatrist (again) and it seems to be helping although we haven’t really talked about anything specific really. For example after I originally got sick my doctor (oncologist) advised to me to go because of the inherent depression and/or denial most Cancer patients initially feel and that doctor (psychiatrist) said in our very first meeting something along the lines with: “Let me start by saying, I don’t have cancer so I can’t pretend to know what you’re going through and if it’s something you want to talk about, we can, however I suggest, at least for now, we focus on non-cancer related issues because it ‘may’ help in the long run.” And for some reason, that statement just clicked and although we didn’t ignore the cancer, instead we started out talking about my experiences in the Military and moved on to some other general topics, giving me a feeling of ‘normalcy’ instead of the typical ‘Why me?’ that a lot of people go through. Fast forward to the current doctor and none of the medical stuff has really come up… (yet). We did the typical start where they ask the basic questions about your past and shit (for paperwork, not really for ‘where do we start?’ kind of thing) so we talked about the military for like 20 minutes total, some other ‘big’ events in my life, yadda yadda yadda… and the main focus most of the time is about a 50/50 split between a girl or about the fact that over the years, I’ve pretty much stopped going out and socializing, never have any friends over… barely have any contact other than the occasional conversation online or going to/from different doctors. There’s been times where I was just like “Fuck it, I’ll just go to a bar and see who’s around” but either something comes up (no money, too much pain) or I get there and the fucking place is empty so there’s no one to talk to anyway and I’m not going to spend $2.50 – $4.00 per beer when I could buy some and drink alone at home drowning my sorrows… which defeats the purpose.

Not that anyone would care, the girl mentioned isn’t a potential girlfriend or anything remotely interesting… and I’m only clarifying that because I slipped up and just mentioned my blog to her so there’s a chance she may read this.

Enough of the ‘head shrink’ type of stuff and we’ll move on to the fact that I’m pretty sure my memory is getting even worse and I’ve started to notice other issues I hadn’t seen before. Thankfully I’m not hearing voices or anything along those lines, but I’ve noticed a few times while talking for example I would either slur my speech or outright screw up a word. I’m not talking about a simple Freudian slip, but saying something like I did on a recent phone call where I asked a friend “Can you come over and help me move a pen” when I meant a fucking couch. But the more common thing I’m noticing is my hand-eye coordination which doesn’t seem to be affected while I’m typing for example, but there’s a game on my iPad that I play a lot when I get bored but I’ve noticed that when I reach to touch a box I swear my eyes see my finger over the correct thing, but when I touch the screen I’ve either hit the box on the right or above the one I want… I’ve tested the sensors on the iPad and confirmed it’s not the device malfunctioning but it’s my sight. I can’t even play the game with my right hand anymore because my hand will shake too much that I can’t keep my finger steady (I’m left-handed) and it makes it so I can’t play while laying on my left side which most of the time is the more comfortable position for my back and leg. Thankfully at this stage it only appears to be an issue when I’ve been awake too long so it might just be as simple as that, but having insomnia for around 15 years now I’m unsure what is ‘sleep deprivation’ or potentially something scarier.

As I stated, thankfully I’m not at the point where I’m hearing voices, but I do hear some noises that I have no real proof if they’re real or not since most of the time when I ‘think’ I heard something, it’s usually something in the distance and never really gives me a ‘that could be someone talking’ type feel, it’s more like a tapping noise or other sound that can usually be explained away.

Enough depressing crap, let’s move on to something new that I’m doing to help keep my mind off the above…
§ Replacement to College §
I finished college years ago at this point, but while working on a new project last week I got stuck trying to deal with some database injection among other things. It turned out that the imports I had written worked fine but due to some PDO limitations I couldn’t do everything required via AJAX and had to rewrite parts of the database to accommodate the changes. While doing research on the problems I decided to check some of the tutorial sites I’ve used in the past like Udemy and although none of the free stuff they had would give me the required knowledge I had some coupon codes that allowed me to purchase over $2,000 worth of courses for a very sizable discount. Udemy isn’t just for programmers, the have all sorts of courses covering Photography, Learning languages, Health & Fitness, Music and more… some are even free. With full disclosure, Udemy has not sponsored or endorsed anything said here, but if you click this link, and sign up you can receive $5 in credit towards your first course.

§ Closing §
There’s a lot more that I had written and amazingly there’s still some that I remember, but it’s almost 5am so I’m going to post what I have so far and create some voice memos to remind me of the other topics and will hopefully remember to write again soon.

Category: Misc. | Tags: , ,

I just want to cry….

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As soon as I’m done writing this, I’ll be working on some college work until I pass out most likely. This post might be kind of a cluster of crap since I originally had a ‘game plan’ on how I wanted to organize the post, which I planned on using that layout for the first post each month, kind of an ‘all around’ update so it had kind of a similar feel each month. Well, between the last post and this one things went from bad to worse… shit has hit the fan and it’s spraying ALL over the place…

Hell, things change so fast… between when I started to write this post and what I’m writing now, I ended up going back to the hospital and to the police station… I’ll get to the ‘normal’ stuff in a bit, but I’ll start with a few of the big ones… With all this new shit, I wont bother going into the stuff I mentioned in the last post as this one will be long enough, so I’ll do that part later.

*Medical*
A little back story to the current situation:
Back in 2006 I had a normal ‘primary care’ doctor that sent me to a different hospital to get some scans. Long story short on that part was that I ended up going to an Oncologist and was diagnosed with Cancer. About a month into my cancer treatments my primary care doctor retired so I essentially went to my Oncologist for everything and after I finished Chemotherapy is when I damaged my spine. My Oncologist ended up prescribing me my pain medication that I’ve been on for over two years now, but my ‘normal’ Oncologist ended up having his own medical problems recently and is currently in the hospital waiting on a transplant list (I wont go into deeper details for his privacy). Anyway, with the main Oncologist not able to do his work they finally got around to bringing in a new ‘main’ Oncologist. This new guy changed some policies but none of the patients were notified until they went in and were like “Um, what?”. The main new policy change states that no prescriptions will be written for pain medication if it’s not 100% cancer related, as in the person has cancer that causes pain and can not be operated on, or the patient is actively going through Chemotherapy or Radiation and even then, the medications will be as low of a dose as possible.
This new policy change wouldn’t bother me and in fact makes perfect sense with all the rampant drug abuse in the area… hell, some druggies in this area have not only resorted to robbery/theft, but it’s led to violence in some cases. I’m all for this new policy to help cut down on availability of controlled substances that people abuse like crazy, but it would have been nice for them to give people a bit of a heads up so that what happened, shouldn’t have. Now, although my spinal issues were a result of having a weakened body from Chemotherapy, it’s not actually due to cancer. For those that don’t know much about the way it works for Controlled Substances, is that you get your prescription like normal, but they NEVER have refills available on the bottle, so you have to go back and see your doctor every month to continue receiving the medication, again, this wasn’t a problem for me since I have a valid reason for having it and have the pain to warrant it. Every month I would call early the week that I would run out to give them a reminder/heads up, and normally the day before I was out I would drive the 45 miles to pick up the prescription (again, being a controlled substance Doctors can NOT phone in this style medication to help cut down on druggies making fake phones calls or whatever other scam they plan on using).
Now here’s where the new policy screwed things up, since it wasn’t technically cancer related they could no longer renew my meds and told me (four days before I was going to run out) that I had to go through my primary care or have them refer me to a pain management program since my spinal issues are going to essentially be chronic (life long). I no longer had a primary care doctor since my original one retired/quit/whatever so I was able to get a new primary care about a month ago (after the last refill though) and they are the ones that prescribed the anti-depressants I mentioned. (Backtrack a little) On Wednesday I tried to call my Oncologist and kept getting a busy signal so I went to their office and that’s when I was informed about the new policy so I drove to where my new primary care doctor was and was informed that my doctor was currently out having surgery (having it, not performing it) and that the other doctor was doing double duty since he had to cover her patients as well and they said they couldn’t fit me in for at least a week and a half, but I’m going to be out of state pretty much all of next week. I drove back to the Oncologist as quick as I could with a hope that I could explain to them that my primary care was unavailable and essentially say “Look, if you could do it this one last time, it will give me roughly two weeks after I get back to town to get my primary care to see me and either decide they were going to help or send me to an official pain management place (my Oncologist can’t send me directly to a pain management group because a ‘specialist’ can not refer a patient to another ‘specialist’ without it going through primary care anyway). I managed to make it back to my Oncologists office roughly 5-10 minutes AFTER they all left for the day so I went to the receptionist and said something like “Um, here’s the situation …. have any advice?” and they called a Patient Advocate and handed me the phone. After explaining my situation for like the 4th or 5th time for the day she asked for my phone number and said if I didn’t hear anything by 10am Thursday to call her back. I also spoke to a family member that happens to work at the hospital and asked them for advice as well. Not sure which of the two did it, but someone managed to get the office where my primary care doctor was to call me and although a few hours earlier they said they were fully booked and had nothing I was asked “Can you make it here at 8:45am?” and I was like “Sure, I’ll see you first thing in the morning”. A few hours later I realized I had an appointment to have an oil change on my car at 9am and I accidentally missed the last appointment with them because of doctors, but I figured the oil change wouldn’t change much adding another 100 or so miles on the car before I see them and since I had to be at another doctor appointment (for my back) 45 miles away at 10:30am I just went to the first doctor in the morning and called the garage while sitting in the room waiting on the doctor. It’s kind of funny, I was told that this guy probably wouldn’t write the prescription for me anyway since he’d never seen me before (I normally saw the other doctor there), but we talked for a bit and I gave him my whole history and explained about my trip next week and that’s why I was in a rush to make sure I wasn’t without my meds for a couple weeks, one of which spent out of state where I’m going to be doing a lot of walking which will aggravate my back even more. This doctor was very nice, respectful, etc. and kind of surprised me kind the random things I heard kind of freaked me out. So, the doctor filled it and said when I get back in town to schedule an appointment with the other doctor (which I already had one with her for later in the month) and we’ll get it straight on if they’re going to be responsible for the pain management or if I’ll go to an actual facility or however they do it. Anyway, I took the paper to my normal pharmacy and they didn’t have enough to fill it so I went to two other places, each with the same story, not enough on hand, so I called the phone number of a pharmacy I was at earlier in the day (after the back treatment I stopped to buy new pads for my “Tens Unit”), still have no idea why I didn’t think to ask them the first time I was there, so I ended up wasting a lot of time and about 30 miles or so worth of gas. They had enough so I drove back down there again and gave them the info but they informed me my insurance wouldn’t cover it unless I picked it up the next day so I told them I’d be back in the morning (Friday morning). Friday comes around and I picked up my meds then went home to clean and pack for my trip. The cleaning/packing didn’t last too overly long before I ended up having other shit to deal with, all the while I had forgotten that I left my pill bottle in my car. I ended up leaving to visit a friend in an area that has no cell service and hung out there for awhile (more on that later). At one point I was asked to take two of the kids to go pick up some of her stuff from the place they used to live at and on the way there I drove by an area that had enough service for me to get a text message saying my friend was in the hospital so I hurried the kids up and when we got back and took the stuff inside (thankfully they didn’t make me carry anything) I mentioned the text and said I had to go see how my friend was doing, the same two kids asked if they could go with me and I allowed it. We all made it back to town and since he wasn’t home from the hospital yet we went to Wal-Mart and goofed off a little, but once he got back he txt’d me and I was able to catch up with him to find out he got jumped by a couple guys and he told me about all of his injuries. Once I knew he was relatively ok I took the kids back home and hung out for a bit when all of a sudden I heard over a police scanner that there was an assault near my house and I recognized the info. The guy that jumped my friend went to his house to find him and since he wasn’t there the guy punched his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach and she was in the hospital. I rushed back to town again to see if she was ok and I knew that they would have moved her from the emergency room to maternity on a different floor and having been awake that long my back was already hurting so I looked for my medication while on the way only to find out that my entire pill bottle and a pack of cigarettes were missing from my car (and yes I have proof that neither of the kids stole from me, therefore it was stolen earlier in the day while I was cleaning/packing) so I went to the police station to report the theft and was told by the cop that they were too busy and I should come back in the morning. After leaving the police station I went to the hospital to check on them and the pain was so bad that I stopped at the ER myself to see if they could help and ended up explaining the entire situation a few more times before they gave me something to last me until I can get an official police statement in the morning. *Small Update* Went back to the police station at 8am and talked to a cop that treated me like I was making the whole thing up, yet didn’t really ask any relevant questions and he said “Well we can look into it but I doubt there’s anything we can do” and was going to leave it at that, I had to ask him for something/anything to give my doctor and all he gave me was a post it note, at least it had a case number on it. So, next step is to call my doctor first thing Monday and pray.

*College*
With the crap from above and a few other things I’ve fallen a little behind in college and will be busting my ass off as much as I can up until the time I leave for my trip/vacation. I’m sorry Matt, I’m trying my best to catch up and make this up.

*Travel*
This upcoming trip is partly the cause of stress I’ve had since it put me in a time crunch for the medical stuff above and a few other things, but I think once the trip starts it will really give me a change to get some of the relaxation I need. I’m going to be spending pretty much a week out in Nevada just relaxing (and still trying to keep up or get ahead with my college work). I can’t wait until I get to leave and I just hope everything goes great (or ‘well’ at least) 🙂

*Gadgets*
Since I’ll be traveling this month and I was eligible for an upgrade with Verizon I ordered the new Droid X to replace my original Droid but they’re currently back ordered and if I remember correct they wont be shipping it until the 18th or 19th… that sucks, but still nice upgrade (although it’s not shipping for a couple weeks they already billed me the cost of the upgrade).
Got a new ‘toy’, the “Digital Entertainer Live” by Netgear, which essentially allows you to stream video and other media from the internet or a local computer directly to your TV… Sounds all well and good and after running the 2 separate 6-part updates it seemed to work great. Hell, it even played the copy of the South Park movie that the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 spaz on over the network. The only real problem(s) I found with it is that it’d be more useful in the living room to have a centralized device instead of having to jump back and forth on the game consoles to play some files that one system may not like, but since I’m not going to run that long of an Ethernet cable and the device can use a Wireless USB device I figured all is well, but the device is coded with a lock that will only allow one of three different Netgear wireless devices, none of which I have or willing to pay for since that’s bullshit to use that form of hardware lock. Anyway, after I finish writing the review I’ll probably send it back since I don’t have any good use for it in my room and like I said, not going to run that long of an Ethernet cable and no way I’m going to waste time looking online for one of the very specific Netgear Wireless device that would pretty much only be good when used with the Netgear DE-Live.
Sometime after I finish college I plan on adding a new page to the blog that’s dedicated to some of the random gadgets I own or would like to own, for example talking about some apps I really enjoy for my iPad or for use on my Android based Cell Phone (will be a Droid X by then). I also plan on adding a part to that page that is essentially hardware reviews and previews of things I either get or use for myself and/or my company.

*Birthdays*
Today (Aug. 7th) is Squirts special birthday and since she knows about how my luck has been the last couple days she understands why I did what I did. Anyway, Happy Birthday, I promise to make it up to you.

*Game Plan*
As you may have noticed lately I tend to keep the same format for the individual topic heads, well the original game plan mentioned in the last post was that the first post each month I would essentially do the same topics in the same order and just do updates about whatever I missed and the reason for it only sticking for the first post each month (although I’ll probably make it a habit) is so that I can include things like Birthdays which obviously will change often, but wont always include everyone, I’ll add them as friends/etc. remind me of their birthdays. I also plan on migrating some of the things into additional pages on the blog so that a few of the things are more organized, but that might have to wait until I’m done with college since I’m so swamped right now playing catch up because of all the crap.

*Quote of the Moment*
Quote 1: > When life gives you lemons… go fuck yourself.
Quote 2: > Why do people insist bad things come in threes? They should be more realistic and say twelve. (PQ)

*Updates/Upgrades*
I’ve sprinkled some of the intentions throughout this post but I’ll get to more later, especially the things I mentioned/hinted at in the last post.

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: , , , , , , ,