As pretentious as having a set of your own laws is

Alex's first law of marriage is, "never marry someone who cannot make killer fried rice."

edit: yes, this means I'm eating again. I think we're going to be vegetarian for a while to keep it easy on my stomach, but I can actually eat. This is progress.

More year-of-the-project stuff

I purchased a replacement fairing for the bike to replace one with a little road rash on it. Unfortunately, I accidentally purchased the fairing for the opposite side of the bike. Now this isn't all bad; the "wrong" fairing had a crack on it, and I intended to replace it anyways. But these fairings are $350 apiece, and I pay a 20% "restocking" fee to swap this one for the other one, plus shipping this one there, a new one back here. It doesn't make any sense to spend a third or more of the cost on the part to get rid of it, when I was going to replace it eventually.

So for the moment, I have a naked ZX7-R. I'll have some pictures tomorrow. Weird stuff has come up, like, "do I need heat shielding and fire-retardant foam on the fairings"? The new fairings are NOS, but don't have the insulation and grommets of the OEM ones.

Will be pestering SBN, I guess.

Finally, calories

With a prescription for phenergan, I am now able to keep gatorade, saltines, and mild soup down. I had some rice and potatoes in a light muttar curry for dinner after the diagnostic imaging. No idea whether it will stay down after the phenergan wears off. Presumably we now have a sort of "race" between my digestive system (in trying to get food turned into, uh, whatever it is food gets turned into), and my endocrine and hepatic systems which are trying to flush out the Rx. Such strange lives we primates lead.

sync

I have a pretty serious concussion, but no hematomas, bleeds or anything requiring surgery. I received my usual diagnosis from the hospital – there's nothing wrong with you. It's always very frustrating for me, and frustrating for the doctor, when this sort of diagnosis comes up. Clearly, there's a problem. I have tremendous pain, am visibly dehydrated, have reduced cognitive abilities and speech issues, but they can't prove there's anything wrong with me. So, when given test results, I usually reply, "well, but both of us can clearly see there's a problem." To which the doctor replies, uncomfortably, "yeeeeees. It does seem that way."

Why can't doctors just cop to it? Say, yeah, you've got a problem, and my instruments here aren't doing anything for me. Let's work in a different direction.

At any rate, I'm disabled. Pretty gosh darn, even. It's not safe for me to leave the house, so I will be sticking home, trying to read, but mostly watching documentaries and corresponding with friends. It's terribly lonely being locked in the house. I have some motorcycle-related projects which should provide a little bit of zen for me, and since I can't ride, I don't mind taking substantial parts of the bike(s) apart.

If we're friends, and you read this, write me.

Oh my. There are plenty of people worrying complaining about the "upcoming" generation (I'd say, those in the fifteen to twenty-five age range), but sometimes it's really hard to blame the complainers. I have a really hard time finding redeeming values in a lot of people in this age range.

This, from 43things. I may be misinterpreting or missing out on things (like this "revolution" is at a high school, not a "regime change at home"). And it may be the owner of these things (please don't go yell at them, he seems like a nice a guy) actually understands the precedence these things have to happen in.

But if not, holy cow... somebody who realizes they are unenlightened and lacking in understanding of things philosophical who wants to start a revolution? What would that actually entail? A sort of neo-secular-luddite movement? Eek.

exercises in failure

cutting the patches didn't result in reduced nausea. if anything, it's increased. i think at this point, we have to start looking seriously at the possibility i've sustained a pretty ugly concussion. i've been living on popsicles and corn muffins. i can't even bring myself to eat paneer and rice. i'm dehydrated to the point my lips are cracking because drinking water makes me sick. going to the neurologist now.

i'm officially unemployed as cannot work; i can't concentrate enough to read more than a page or two.

Hilarity ensues

precious liquids!!

i can keep down flat soda (which usually doesn't come up, but is relatively benign if it does), and that's about it. ugh. think i'm to start cutting the patches and see if i can find some point between pain and emesis that's acceptable.

Is it can be Snow Leopard Time Now?

Pls?? Can I has a ZFS? Or maybe I should just buy their SCSI cards and disks so I can use megaraid(8)? Or FC and XSan?

I am a sad panda.

More broken rib treatments

(note: I began composing this on 2/1. I am somewhat, but nowhere near fully, recovered, and none of has anything to do with the motorycle, other than I can't ride it right now, and it will probably be the best "therapy" for getting back in to shape)

IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR ADVICE ON DEALING WITH BROKEN RIBS, IT'S AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST.

I have four broken ribs. To find which ribs on your person, take one arm, reach it up and over your head, and reach for the ear lobe on the opposite side of your head. You'll notice your rib cage sticks out. Down at the bottom, you have two tiny little ribs. They're mostly cartilage, I think, and they're pretty fragile. However, since, compared to the rest of your body, they're pretty recessed, they're not real subject to getting bashed by things. Well, I broke the lowest two ribs on both sides of my rib cage.

This does amazing things to one's mood. The pain is exquisite, and it's hard for me to sit up, lie down, reach for anything, twist, even sit on the toilet. Basically, a body at rest is more or less comfortable, but if I were to, e.g., turn over on the couch, ... well, it hurts a lot like I've got a claw tugging at my soft tissue there.

Doctors, for whatever reason, are not real good at prescribing analgesics, especially when they think of something as a subjective, soft-tissue injury. If you look at those bottom ribs, you can see they're pretty tenuous to begin with, and they don't show up so good on x-ray. Basically, you can palpate them and say "yeah, them's broken," but as I've been through numerous times here, trauma doctors just don't care about broken ribs ... or at least don't find them important enough to treat with strong palliative (I'm not saying unmonitored!) care, despite documented, successful use of morphine sulphate p.o. There are at least two good reasons for this.

The first is the morale of the patient. Broken ribs suck. A lot. I mean, there's nothing you can do. you lean in any direction, you can't cough, cleaning and cooking are out, too. You're stuck, being a vegetable, unless somebody treats your pain. With the ribs that I have broken, I find it hard to even sit up and type this (which is why it's taken almost two weeks to write this!), let alone get any work done and support myself (hah!) or my family.

So, as in the past, I've been using a (mylan, not Sandoz; the Sandoz product sucks. Avoid at all costs) fentanyl patch. Instead of one busted rib this time, though, I've got four. This time I'm on the 100-μg (microgram; ug; mcg) patch. Well, instead of pain, I have lots of vomiting. Normally such strong opiates are prescribed with iv/im smooth muscle relaxants, such as phenergan or vistaril. No such luck here; the whole point of "the patch" is that it's outpatient. Since they're not going to give me a supply of phenergan with syringes, and I can't keep the pills down, I'm left with suppositories, which people are less willing to prescribe than the damn F-patches anyways.

This is why I've been mostly a slug this last week, largely incoherent in email when you've heard from me at all, and I've "fallen asleep IM" on at least one of you (literally, fall asleep in mid-sentence with a letter being repeated until Oscar's poor little SNAC buffer gets full and spewed across the web).

One good thing has come of this, though. 5.11 Tactical, makers of  the worlds least-safe tactical knifes, produces a great shirt. They call it a "muscle mapping" shirt. Basically think of it as twice as much material as your average underarmour shirt:

 

If you notice, it's sculpted around the ribcage and shoulders. For a guy who just dislocated both his shoulders and broke his bottom two pairs of ribs, it provides incredible support for my torso. Unfortunately, the support is elasticized, so I can wear it for a few hours, kind of like a corset, and it feels great. At least, it feels a lot better than not having the support.

Anyways, it's really amazing how many hits this website gets from people looking for help with broken ribs. So these are the things you really should be doing:

1. Broken ribs create a huge incidence of depression. You must treat broken ribs aggressively including with narcotic analgesics. There are exotic treatments, such as calcium injections, and so on, but the fact that there are no simple treatments is not an excuse to not treat the symptoms: pain, lethargy, and depression.
2. Get a high-compression shirt like the above. You could go to the trouble of wrapping it with an ace bandage if you don't wan to spend the money and you don't want a washable garment (the ace bandages really aren't).
3. Be prepared for weeks of pain. If your doctor is not willing to treat you for weeks, find another doctor. 
4. A long-acting medicine, like a patch, or Oxycontin, is a much better way of treating the pain than treating it reactively (like with a percocet or vicodin). The other thing is, even with forty vicodin or percocet, you won't have enough to treat the pain for the time it takes for your ribs to heal. However, be prepared to go through detox'ing (this can be a lot worse for some people than others – just think of Trainspotting) with multi-week-long use of opiates that are "on" 24x7 (again, your physician is crucial here; the ER docs you will run into are worthless unless you have a sucking chest wound or show up with a double tall soy chai green tea latte max).
5. An anti-inflammatory, in addition to a traditional narcotic analgesic, like Relafin is also important because you have inflammation around the damaged areas. Needless to say, with anti-inflammatories, narcotics, and depression, it's probably a good idea to lay off the booze for a while.

I'm not a doctor. I just happen to break ribs frequently enough to actually, you know, have advice.  Your mileage will vary. But don't let doctors treat you like the chauvinist assholes they tend to be. This time around, the shirt was the most important thing. Seriously. I had no idea.

Heated grips have arrived

So the heated grips for the ZX7-R have arrived. It bears mentioning that it is snowing out, but I can't install said grips until this epoxy stuff arrives (would you believe I could pay $170 to have it shipped to me by 10am this morning when ordered at 1am last night? we're talking about $8 in epoxy!).

Step one, find a nice electrical lead. Step two, cut off the grips on the bike (and unbolt the bar-ends). I think I am going to try to mount the switch on the plastic air intake runners, but I'm not sure there will be enough room there. I've been thinking, you know, it's easy enough to install, maybe I could install a BMW hot plug, but then I think to myself, it's a goddamn Kawasaki, and if it was meant to be driven in the snow, it would have this stuff already.

That having been said, I did take the bike out for an hour jaunt in summer gear last night and was reminded just how cold 30F is. So, grip warmers it is.

Why is Apple the darling of the media industry?

I was theone of the first adopters. The day His Holiness said, "and there shall be a thousand songs in your pocket," I was one of the first to purchase. In fact, I purchased every single video and audio track that was remotely palatable to me because it was so goddamned cool that I could have said songs, you know, in my pocket.

Yet this morning, I have spent sixty dollars simply paying to remove the DRM from said tracks, to increase the resolution of those videos I purchased back when five gigs was, you know, a thousand songs, and I still have $580 more to spend before my library is DRM free.

I am seriously inclined to just fucking steal music from now on. Cancer of the soul Steve. You have earned cancer of the soul for bringing this foul DRM to the world and oh-so-deftly blaming Bill for it. Did I mention Bill has a sixty fucking billion dollar endowment to fight malaria in countries you're using to produce "unibody" (hint: "billet") laptops?

Go fuck a goat.

Congratulations are in order

The Electric Sistahood – and, no, I don't have ovaries, and no, I am not any more than a token – hah! see what I did there – contributor – has reached its one-thousandth post. And she is to be congratulated. That, folks, is dedication.

Mac Pro noise

Just for the record, a MacPro with four drives is substantially louder than one with just two (or one).

injuries

seriously, seriously injured my back on 1 Feb. i can hardly move. what bothers me most is that i could make an appt with any one of a number of doctors, but it's a subjective tissue injury. so, while we could alleviate the pain with a fentanyl patch for a week or two, they won't. instead, they'll be a bunch of chauvinist fucks.

here's to pain.

Bike update

Refurbishing the triple tree on the 250, adding flushed turn signals. The ZX7 is getting new body panels due to some road rash, and I might just order a set of flushed signals for it, too. I'm not really interested in "pimping my bike," but those stick-out turn signals are so easy to whack that I'm just waiting for one of them to break, again.

On the ZX7 the turns are rubber and just rest inside the fairings. When I bought it, one of these was broken, apparently as a result of careless handling of a stroller. Not one week after replacing it, $wife and I were sharing a parking space, and when we went to leave, and when she threw a leg over, her right foot smacked the signal, knocking it out of the fitting. Luckily, it just popped back in, and wasn't damaged.

The 250 is a different story. The 250's turns are harder plastic. They don't break away like the ones on the ZX7. So when I bonked the turn signal, it acted like a lever and actually cracked the fairing. The crack is about seven inches long. This was particularly shitty, as when it cracked, it revealed that the previous owner had painted over the Kawasaki green OEM paint with this black and maroon job. Only they didn't sand and primer it or anything, they just sprayed over the paint. It's really kind of a miracle the paint is still on the bike. At any rate, the flushed signals are going to be much more difficult to break off the bike. I don't think I'm going to bother replacing the fairing, as the fairing is over $500 (my guess is this is because it's a newer bike – but only by five years , and I certainly wouldn't be able to recoup that costs. Furthermore, I can't replace it with the same paint job due to the idiot painting over the OEM color. I'd really have to replace all the body panels, which would run me more than I paid for the bike.

Dangit.

So that's what you call it!

What do novels about a journey across post-apocalyptic America, a clone waitress rebelling against a future society, a world-girdling pipe of special gas keeping mutant creatures at bay, a plan to rid a colonisable new world of dinosaurs, and genetic engineering in a collapsed civilisation have in common?

They are all most definitely not science fiction.

Literary readers will probably recognise The Road by Cormac McCarthy, one of the sections of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood from their descriptions above. All of these novels use the tropes of what most people recognise as science fiction, but their authors or publishers have taken great pains to ensure that they are not categorised as such.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway has just had its paperback release, and is a tour-de-force of ninjas, truckers, Dr Strangelove-type military men, awe-inspiring imagery and very clever writing. It's also undeniably science fiction. Harkaway is an unrepentant fan of the genre, but his publishers William Heinemann have taken a lot of care not to market the book as such. Harkaway himself said in a recent interview: "I suppose the book does take place in the future, but not the ray-guns-and-silver-suits future. It's more like tomorrow if today was a really, really bad day."

That last line is particularly nice. I'm not going to criticize Harkaway because frankly, I haven't read the work. I just think the line is particularly misleading. Would we consider Total Recall to be Science Fiction? How about Blade Runner? It's bridging on the silly, but what about Idiocracy?

The only reason the piece irks me is it seems that they're trying ever so hard to distance themselves from Science Fiction, that plague on literature. What exactly is so horrid? (that is to say, that makes it more horrid than any other genre)

excavations

digging out from under email; been sick for a few days. sorry.

It probably makes me a communist.

And once the contract has been negotiated, the serfdom of the workers is doubly increased; or to put it better, before the contract has been negotiated, goaded by hunger, he is only potentially a serf; after it is negotiated he becomes a serf in fact. Because what merchandise has he sold to his employer? It is his labor, his personal services, the productive forces of his body, mind, and spirit that are found in him and are inseparable from his person - it is therefore himself. From then on, the employer will watch over him, either directly or by means of overseers; everyday during working hour and under controlled conditions, the employer will be the owner of his actions and movements. When he is told: "Do this," the worker is obligated to do it; or he is told: "Go there," he must go. Is this not what is called a serf?

Actually, I suppose it would make me more of an anarchist, but I'm not really a true anarchist. I'm also not an antitheist, and not even really agnostic. From my past I might consider the term "panentheist" or "enentheist," but hongwanji buddhist works equally well and doesn't disagree with either term (yes, en-en-theist). At any rate, the quote is Mikhail Bakunin. Kind of a shady character as philosophers go, but the above quote has pretty well nailed the particular stone in my sandals of late: you're fucked.

Those two words sum it up even better than Mr. Bakunin, but he of course puts it more eloquently. How am I to do anything else in my life but what I do, if I must pay to do something else, and in order to pay for it, I must do what I do? If I wish to become a painter or cement-layer, I must stop what I am doing ("computer stuffs"), learn the trade of the cement-layer or painter, and then proceed from the lowermost-ranks of either trade to the point where I've achieved income parity with where I am today. Of course, it's taken me more than a decade to get to my current income level, and I think there's room for improvement there, anyways (really, I'd rather stuff cost less than my income increase, but I know I can affect one thing and not the other).

I can't interview for positions that the square-pegs-square-holes people think I'm not capable of because I'm clearly already a Unix dweeb. What do I do? Throw the résumé out, show up at a school, cash in hand, to learn either trade? How do I finance that? Do I expect my wife to be able to sustain both of us as I transition from "being mostly fucked" to "being less fucked"? Is that reasonable?

Frankly, all those things I was taught as a child, except for very vague generalizations, have been shown wrong, one by one. Every single thing. From "college degrees mean more money" to "drugs are bad" or even "geeks are de facto not cool," they're all patently false. Those very vague generalizations – basically grouped into: don't get hurt, don't get caught, and do what makes you happy – are pretty hard to go wrong by. But if people had told me when I was fourteen that the world was basically the worst-case scenario, that I was a pessimist and hated everyone, but in reality the world was far worse than even I thought back then, I'd have corrected a number of idiotic pursuits.

Why do people persist in telling these lies to eachother, to the next generation? Stay in school, or save X% of your income, or get a good job, these are all pretty stupid. On contemplation, I have to believe that the only reason people perpetuate these lies – there, I've said it – is their abject fear that the world is not what they wish to see; the world is in fact as bad as they fear; the next generation is aided whatsoever by your attempt at procreation; telling children lies fills the empty space between their ears, as John Locke tells us, but it does not make them fitter, better, happier people. It does not build character, and the notion of "building character" itself is a fucking sham. "Character" is what other people perceive you to be, not what you are. What you are is subjective and only quantifiable from your point of view, and that point of view is exactly the opposite of relevant to anyone else. So, let's just throw the notion that one can change the way other people perceive them right the fuck out the window.

Can we move along now?

Wait, what??

thunder% ls -la

total 1092880

drwxrwx---+ 5 media staff 374 Jan 24 00:43 .

drwxr-xr-x 4 media staff 170 Nov 27 09:56 ..

-rw-rw----@ 1 media staff 6148 Sep 28 18:27 .DS_Store

drwxrwx---+ 4 media staff 136 Sep 20 17:55 Album Artwork

drwxrwx---+ 2 media staff 102 Oct 3 02:38 Previous iTunes Libraries

-rw-rw----@ 1 media staff 69782643 Jan 24 00:43 iTunes Library

-rw-rw----+ 1 media staff 2289664 Jan 22 01:14 iTunes Library Extras.itdb

-rw-rw----+ 1 media staff 433008640 Jan 22 01:32 iTunes Library Genius.itdb

-rw-rw----@ 1 media staff 54457482 Jan 24 00:43 iTunes Library.xml

drwxrwx---+ 1761 media staff 59908 Jan 23 20:06 iTunes Music

-rw-rw----@ 1 media staff 8 Jan 17 20:09 sentinel

thunder% file sentinel

sentinel: data

thunder% xxd sentinel

0000000: 0000 0000 0000 0000 ........

thunder%

Okay, color me confused. Apple? What the hell is this sentinel thingy? It corresponds, I suppose to my last software update. It also happens to be eight by eight bits, which is to say, sixty-four, but that's a stupid way of annotating that I've got sixty-four bit words. And since it's full of nulls, unless there's a rootkit hanging around I don't know about, it's not exactly doing anything. I know I wasn't ever drunk enough in the last week to have named something "sentinel" and filled it with nulls.

Which one of you bastards thought this was a good idea?

I couldn't have (and didn't) put it better myself.

Let's stop coddling Internet censorship as if it were an etiquette or a "children's" issue. The people suffering from being firewalled and banned aren't commercial porn-makers designed with hardcore prurient appeal — they're educators, healthcare professionals, midwives, nurses, doctors, researchers, artists, writers, filmmakers, political activists, critics and analysts— all of whom find their interest in women's lives to be shrouded in the great Internet burqa of "safeness."

Via Susie Bright, via Seth Finkelstein.

Internet burqa of "safeness." Yep, I suspect Asimov's, Analog, and friends are trying to preserve the modesty of SF/F readers with, sadly, a burqa of safeness. A Hijab of blissful ignorance. Wish I'd seen it as clearly as Susie and Seth do, rather than griping aimlessly.