January 2005 Archives

Well I'm back from the Weekend in OK. Not much to say really. I felt like crap most of the weekend. I was a major party animal and was in bed before midnight on Friday and Saturday. Tigger and I did go out and have a nice dinner Friday and Satuday. I highly recommend the Epanema Grill, downtown. Excellent Brazillian Style Steakhouse. I'm back at work now. Looks like I'll be doing some travelling coming up. Heading to Florida next week and then Chicago around the 1st of March. (BRRRRRRR)

And CRAP! I missed the first three episodes of the New BattleStar Galactica. Why don't people tell me these things!

Headed out to Tulsa today for a visit. I hear it's snowing there. Yeesh snow. We really don't get that here. The nausea is finally abating somewhat. Though today was my last day on the steroids so that's means it'll be back with a vengeance tomorrow. Along with all those other great "coming off the steroids" side effects. What are those you ask? YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW. Trust Me. They aren't that bad to get through really but they aren't pretty to talk about.

I had my fourth Chemo treatment on Monday. Everything went well with that. The side effects are getting slightly worse but that was too be expected. The REALLY good news was the results of my latest PETscan. It showed no cancer cells whatsoever. The Doctor said that was very exceptional news, in that, after 3 treatments usually you see at least a few residual cancer cells especially with a Tumor as large as mine. He considered scaling me back to just one more chemo treatment but said that he would recommend we stick with 6. I tend to agree. Lymphoma has a high chance of recurrence and I want my chance to be as low as possible.

It's odd now. When I first started the Chemo I was so sick from the Cancer that the Chemo side effects seemed like a minor annoyance. Now it's the Chemo that makes me sick. April 22nd is the target Date. That will be the last day of the Radiation Therapy. I can't wait.

Here's the trailer. It looks pretty good except the "Thing" looks like crap, and Dr. Doom wasn't on the spaceship with them. The IMDB cast listing though leaves me saying HUH? Well except of course for Jessica Alba. =:D

Was this commercial actually on TV?

Link Shamelessly Stolen from Rev Layle.

My fishtank is up and going nicely now. It currently houses 1 gourami, 9 Zebra Danios, and 1 golden Chinese alage eater. 4 guppies and 1 Danio were lost during the process of the normalizing the tank. I'm planning on getting 3 or 4 more fish sometime soon.

Here are some pictures of the tank. You can click on them for full sized pictures.

In other news, I think it might be time cut down.

Yes, we all hate it. Well Google has announced a new way to prevent comment spam. The Movable Type people are all about this so here is how to do it in MT.

Today is my first day back at work since October 29th 2004. I'm glad to be back. Back to having some form normal schedule rather than planning my week around my multitudes of Doctor appointments and errands. I've been fairly busy all day getting caught up and seeing what needs to be done next. The mouth sores are back this week with a vengenace. Other than that I'm doing well. I wasn't able to extract any of the CT Scan pictures from that software but I haven't put much effort into it yet. I'll see what I can do.

I found a new RSS reader that plugs right into IE. It's got some other nice features too. I'm still undecided if I like it better than Sharpreader.

My friend Reptile was here all weekend. I think we fit pretty much everything we could into one weekend. Golf, Poker, 2 Marathon multiplayer 40k games, with X-Box Golf and Racing shoved in between. I had a lot of fun. Tomorrow is my first offcial day back at work since October. With the Holidays, home repairs, and Doctors appointments, it doesn't really feel like I've been "off-work." It's not like I've had much time to relax. And, of course, with all that fun cramed into one weekend, I didn't have much time for school so now I need to finish my readings and do the review questions.

Looks like everyone got thier RSS feeds lined out. I can get everyone in the Blogosphere list thrugh an RSS feed now.

Well the pool is completely fixed now, pump, multiport, and thermostat are all happily working together. The plumbers are FINALLY done as well. What they said would take 2 days, has taken 5 days.

I went for a blood test this morning and then a PETscan. The blood test showed me to have extremly low white blood cell counts but thats exactly what it should be right now. Probably won't get the PetScan results till sometime next week. They gave me a CD Rom today with my CT Scans on it. I thought it was the ones that I did a few weeks back. Turns out it was the ones from way back in October, that show the cantaloupe sized tumor. They look to be in some kind of proprietary medical format but I'll see if I can extract them so y'all can have a look.

Blogger automatically generates an RSS feed as well. The defualt address for a blogger feed is the blog web address/atom.xml So for example if you want to view the RSS feed for Halo's blog you would use the address http://halo55.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

Okay so it looks like everyone's RSS feed works but Hag and Demi. Get on it you two or uhm.... at least let us know what the link is. Oh and Bunny your feed seems to have stopped sometime last year. The last entry in the RSS feed is 1/26/2004.

Oh and I haven't figured out yet how to get a feed from Live Journal but I'm sure there's a way. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

Okay to get the feed from a Live Journal User use this URL
http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/rss

Do any of you use RSS Feeds to read blogs? I hadn't really looked into them but they are kinda neat. Bascialy, you download an RSS Reader, like SharpReader, and then Subscribe the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs. The reader then tells you whenever there is a new post on the blog and you can click on the link to read it. I'm haven't looked into to it too much yet but I would bet that there is an MT plug-in for automatically creating the RSS feed for your blog.

Well how cool is that. MT automaticlly makes an RSS Feed for you, the index.rdf file. So you can subscribe to the RSS feed of anyone that uses MT. Here is my RSS feed.

Here's the latest on my home-repair saga. The pool pump was definitely broken, the "impeller" which is pretty much the "propeller" part that spins to suck the water into the pump broke off inside the pump. Hopefully it will be fixed on Monday and then wenesday I'm getting a thermostat installed on the pump so it will automatically kick on whenever it's cold.

The plumbers were here all day yesterday, 4 of them, with 3 trucks and a backhoe. I now have 3 NEW large pits in the yard,one of which is right in the middle of the driveway,that's in addition to the 2 they had to dig last time they were here. They decided to wait to do all the actual plmubing work till Monday so I would be able to USE my water this weekend.

The garage door still rests in it's non-functioning dented state, and now I have to get someone to repair the pit in the driveway once the plumbers are done. Ah the fun never stops.

I'm doing well health-wise, and when I say well I mean that the Prednisone is making me Nauseous, moody, sleepless, and hungry all the time, but I'm managing.

I also started my first class for my Masters Degree today. It's a overview course on Information Security. Only 1 paper! Whew! I'll probably post it after I write it and it will bore you to tears but thems the breaks.

Well the fun never stops here at Shady Manor. I used some of my gambling winnings from last weekend to buy a nice set of gas logs to keep the game room warm this winter. Only to discover that the gas line for the fireplace appears to be not hooked up. So now of course a simple home improvement project becomes more expensive and takes more time as always.

Next, It turned really cold here yesterday so I went to turn on the pool pump so it wouldn't freeze only to have it go belly up. So Phlome and I spent some cold minutes outside yesterday evening wrapping the exposed pipes in a heating element. And then to top it all off the garage door wouldn't close last night and when I went to close it this morning it got bound up and the whole swing arm assembly ripped off and dented the door pretty good. Sheesh.....

On the upside the fish tank is progressing nicely, probably won't have any nice pics of fish for a week or so though. I want to make sure everything is working okay before I get some fish.

Oh and in other news Mira realy likes her Christmas present.

Well it�s been a while since my last entry. I had my 3rd chemo treatment yesterday. All went well. I had no bad reactions last time so the nurse started the pump out at a higher setting. The infusion itself only took 4 hours this time, which is the quickest it will ever be, according to the nurses. I was at the Doctors office for about 6 hours though, since I have to do a pre-Chemo blood test and meet with the Doctor before they can start the infusion.

I went last Thursday and had an MRI and CTSCAN done. The doctor gave me the results of those yesterday. They showed that I have no signs of Lymphoma in my brain and the Tumor has shrunk from Cantaloupe size to slightly smaller than a tennis ball. That was really great news. That means that not only is the Chemo working but the Tumor is no longer putting intense pressure on my heart and lungs. The Doctor said that was more reduction that he expected and that it might not change in size anymore until we do the radiation. He wants me to go have another PET scan next week. In the first PET Scan, the couldn�t really see anything as the tumor was so large that it was blocking the lymph nodes. Hopefully, now that it has shrunk significantly, they can see exactly which lymph node(s) have the cancer in them.

In some other good news, some of he Blogosphere (Ninis, Phlome, Halo, Zero, and a few other friends) headed up to Shreveport this weekend to celebrate News Years. We hung out at �Chicago�s� Friday night for New Years Eve, which is apparently the only decent club in Shreveport. They were playing pretty cool 80�s music till the club got full then they switched to Hip-Hop, which was not so cool. I didn�t make it much pas midnight myself.

Saturday we hit the Casino�s. I walked around Hollywood for awhile checking out all the gaming tables, and saw an area that said �high roller slots.� I really don�t like slot machines but I thought what the hell. I�ll put $20 in a $5 machine and even if I hit something little the payout will be worthwhile. My first four pulls netted me $25 profit, so I let that ride. My very last pull the machine went nuts beeping and I looked down to see I had won 120 credits. My first thought was WOW I just won $120, then I remembered it was a $5 machine. I had just won $600! Well I immediately cashed that out and walked away. Then we decided to go next door to the Sam�s town casino, in search of cheap blackjack. There was no cheap blackjack to be found but I put another $20 into a $1 machine and won $100! Of course, I immediately went and sat down at a blackjack table and lost it in about an hour. No big wins the rest of the weekend won a little at blackjack, lost a little at roulette. I really wanted to play Texas Holdem poker but there was a 5 HOUR wait. By the time my name came up it was 9:30 at night and I wasn�t up to playing poker for 4-5 hours. Probably for the best, Overall I walked away with about $500 in winnings. I bought gas logs for my fireplace with some of it and I�m going to spend the rest of it today on a fishtank!