The Top 5 things about being a non-smoker that suck

I’ve had a few ideas for posts that ran along the lines of top 10 lists, however, I couldn’t come up with 10 for all of them, so we’ll go with 5.

The Top 5 things about being a non-smoker that suck

Oh, that’s right. I may have forgotten to mention that to you guys, I used to smoke. In fact, I smoked for a very long time. As I moved to Minnesota, decided that it seemed as good a time as any to quit. That was fuckin’ brilliant. On the other hand, I’ve made it some 10 weeks now with only a few cheats. Oh, and by the way

I WANT TO FUCKIN’ KILL SOMEBODY!!!!

Perhaps I should start with Tobacco Executives.

It’s not easy. However, as my body goes through the rather painful detoxification process from some twenty odd years of injecting myself with some of the worst poisons known to man, I’ve noticed a what the surgeon general should be putting on cigarettes few side effects that suck.

1. Everything stinks. When I was smoking, I had a diminished sense of smell. Before I started smoking I had a rather strong sense of smell. Now that I’ve quit, the sense of smell is starting to return, and it sucks. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING stinks. Especially my apartment building. And it’s not just one stink, oh no. That would be too easy, I could get used to it. No there’s one bad smell in the garage, another bad smell in the lobby (made worse by the fact that they’re painting this week), yet another god awful smell in the elevator that smells a lot like people that don’t bathe, and just for good measure, a horrid death-like stench in the hallway outside my apartment. Probably from the guy hanging leaves over his fucking door.

2. I’m hungry all the damn time. And I’m gaining weight like crazy. Last night I ate an entire box of Honey Nut Cheerios. Not one of them ever saw milk. Nicotine is an appetite suppressant. Guess what happens when you go off your appetite suppressant you’ve been on for twenty years?

3. I’m sleepy all the damn time. I suppose spending 20 years on a stimulant might tend to cause you to develop a certain tolerance to it. During the day I can’t stay awake, and at night I can’t sleep (note the time this was posted).

4. Stress. Cigarettes are a coping mechanism, and Nicotine reduces stress. Today is my first day off the patch, and I’m feeling some heightened stress.

5. I’ve got nothing to do after meals. I have to say, that There are certain health risks... was my favorite cigarette, the one that came after meals. When I’ve just eaten, that’s when it’s the hardest.

I don’t know how tobacco companies managed to come up with such an insidious product. Even more surprising is how they seem quite sincere when stating that it isn’t addictive or dangerous. I’ve heard cigarette addiction compared to heroin addiction. I can’t attest to how hard it is to quit heroin, but this is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Now I’ve got struggling with this for the rest of my life to deal with, because you never get over it. I’m still waiting for that magic payoff when I magically feel better and enjoy the smell of everything around me. Still waiting….

Army of Dude: Enemies With Benefits

The side of the story you didn’t hear from the politicians or the media.

Army of Dude: Enemies With Benefits

Georgia on my mind

I’m separated from my family. My health and sanity are failing. I’m running out of money and I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to pay my bills. The economy downturn is seriously kicking my ass (thanks, Dubya). I need money.

On the other hand, there’s nobody dropping bombs on my home and my family.

If you haven’t heard about the conflict in Georgia yet, it’s time to turn on the news. Russia has invaded the sovereign country that was once a fellow member of the Soviet Union. From what I’ve learned, this country has worked it’s ass off over the years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union to go from one of the most corrupt countries to a bastion of Democracy. And now they’re being systematically conquered. They’re getting bombed right now.

Georgia is one of the few countries that have sent troops to Iraq to support us there. They had to pull their troops out last week in order to attempt to defend their own country. I think it’s been obvious that I’m not a fan of the Iraq war, but it’s worth mentioning that they sent their soldiers to die with ours as a demonstration of loyalty to our country in what is a distinctly American “war”.

Yesterday Russia called a cease fire, then continued rolling tanks into the country and dropping bombs. Today Condoleeza Rice is being sent to France and to Georgia. She’s intentionally not going to Russia, which seems like exactly where she needs to be going. I’m not sure how she’s going to convince Russia to withdraw their troops from Georgia… from Georgia.

We can’t help militarily. Even if America was willing to we’re so overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan that we would have difficulty defending our own borders at the moment. Apparently all Bush is going to do is throw Rice at them (pun intended).

I wish her luck, but even though I’m broke I’m going to do what I can to help the people getting bombed, because I’m still luckier than they are right now. I’m not sure if this is the charity I’m going to use, but it seems like a good choice based on an initial google search.

Save the Children Assists Families in Russia-Georgia Conflict

Numbers

Sometimes we see numbers, and don’t really think about what they mean. I’m not intending this post to be for or against John McCain or Barack Obama.

I don’t think there are many Americans who would deny that the attack on 9/11/2001 was horrific, or that the death toll was catastrophic, or that the scope of it all traumatized our nation and changed us in a profound way.

I looked up these numbers on the Internet, therefore they may not be entirely accurate, but I believe they’re close.

The number of American lives lost as a result of the terrorist attack on 9/11/2001:

2,740

The number of American lives lost in Iraq as a result of the American invasion:

4,124

Interestingly, I also found this number. I have no idea of it’s validity.

The number of Iraqi lives lost as a result of the American invasion:

1,245,538

I suspect this number might be inflated in order to serve the anti-war movement’s point of view, however, according to an article I found on CNN, 5,800 Iraqis died in June 2006. I’m sure many, if not most of these deaths were caused by insurgents, not by the American Military, but they happened because we were there.

At this point, I feel the need to clarify that I am not disparaging the American Military. Like any other cross section of society, the military will be made up of those who are good and those who are bad, if there really is any such thing. I support the soldiers in Iraq. They’re Americans, and they’re going through a kind of Hell I can’t imagine. And they’re following orders. I only question the orders, something they aren’t allowed to do. And over 4,000 of them are dead.

I got to wondering, this is a lot of death. How many people did Hitler murder? I looked it up. Six million. That number, by the way, does not include military deaths.

What’s hard to imagine, is exactly what these numbers mean. We hear these numbers: 2900, 4000, 1.2 million, 6 million, and we think that’s horrible, but do you really think about what that means? Imagine you come home and find a dead body in your kitchen. Imagine the horror of finding a body shot to death violently in your kitchen. Hollywood has made us a little desensitized to this kind of violence, but try to imagine what it would be like in real life?

Now imagine it’s two bodies. That adds a whole new dimension to the horror.

Imagine ten. This gets harder for a sane person to imagine. Ten murdered bodies in your kitchen. Given an average of 150 pounds per person, that 1500 pounds of dead human in your kitchen.

We’re only up to 10, folks. If you can imagine 10, try to imagine that 10 more times. It takes a few minutes to really digest the horror there, doesn’t it. That’s only 100 people, and yet we can barely fathom it. 100 people would not fit in your kitchen, we’ll have to move them to the back yard. That’s 15,000 pounds of dead human. The mind really can barely grasp this kind of horror anymore, and we’re only up to 100.

Following our average of 150 pounds per person, the death toll in Iraq has resulted in 600,000 pounds of dead American bodies.

At 600,000 pounds of dead American, I want a good explanation of why we’re there.

“We believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of Mass Destruction”

We’ve [the American public] since found out that the only evidence to that effect known before invading a sovereign country in another part of the world was a single report that was out of date by years. The Soviet Union had weapons of Mass Destruction for decades, and the remnants of the Soviet Union, to the best of my knowledge, still has them. We’ve never invaded the Soviet Union, and they really didn’t like us. Nor have we invaded North Korea, and I think we be pretty sure they have them too, and probably more likely to use them on us than Saddam ever was.

Saddam Hussein didn’t like or trust Osama Bin Laden (or so I heard on CNN).

We basically had no evidence whatsoever that Iraq was linked with Al Queda and the terrorists that attacked us seven years ago. Afghanistan, on the other hand, admitted they had him and wouldn’t give him up.

Saddam Hussein defied the U.N. weapons inspectors, but he had been doing that for over a decade since the original invasion of Kuwait. Suddenly in 2003 it became a crisis that couldn’t wait for diplomacy.

We’ve lost over 4,000 American Soldiers in a war that, as far as I can tell, had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack which resulted in 2,900 American casualties.

“We have to finish the job in Iraq.”

What job? What is it we have to finish there? We declared hostilities ceased in 2005. I watched it on the news. Why are we still there? What do we have to do in Iraq which is more important than finding the man who was responsible for killing 2,900 American Citizens? Seriously, I want to know, this isn’t rhetoric.

Think about this when deciding who to vote for this November. And think about this too. Watch these, then watch anything from John McCain and/or Barack Obama, and ask yourself, who would you rather have running our country?

Henry ’08.

… and the horse you rode in on!

I’ve taken a little flack lately for the fact that I was in a cult and tend to be frank about it. It’s amazing how many people consider themselves an expert on the topic, despite having never been in a cult or even so much as read a book on it. I suppose they saw some documentary on Jim Jones or David Koresh, which was all the education on the topic they really needed. A friend of mine jokingly told me once that this video was all he needed to know about being a Mormon. The context made it quite funny, but I’m not going to go into that. What’s sad is that many people probably think that it’s true.

Joining a cult is not an indication that you’re stupid or disturbed. That’s like saying being raped makes you a slut, it’s idiotic. A cult is something that happens to you, like a car accident, being mugged, or getting a disease. Nobody joins a cult intentionally, nobody joining a cult knows they’re joining a cult. Most don’t know they’ve joined a cult when they leave.

Maybe people think I’m honest about it because I think it’s cool. I don’t. Would you brag about being raped? That’s how stupid the idea is.

Maybe people think I’m honest about it for attention. Would you want that kind of attention? If you do, you’re a moron. Imagine how much fun it is to go back to all of the people you were an asshole to and say “I’m sorry I was an asshole to you for the past few years, I was brainwashed in a cult.” Woohoo, now that’s some real fuckin’ fun!

I’m honest about it because it happened to me. It’s part of who I am now, and that can’t be changed. Believe me, I would love it if I could erase that from ever having happened. I was a different person before, and that person is gone now. I miss him, because he was a great guy.

Maybe you would like to have somebody fuck with your brain for years, then have to recover on your own. No empathy, no resources, nobody you can talk to about it. Jack shit. You’re on your own to figure out what happened to you and make sense of it, and try to rebuild some sense of self and self-esteem. How’s that sound for fun? Wanna try it? I hear the Scientologists are still recruiting.

And here’s the best part, in all the years since, all the people I’ve told this experience to, not one person has EVER said to me “Gee, I’m sorry that happened to you.” or anything even remotely empathetic. Instead, I get jokes, off color comments, and strange looks. I went through hell, and my reward is people looking at me like I’ve got a nose growing out of my eyeball. What lovely people. Let’s be honest, I don’t really expect anybody to give a crap, and I never have. That’s not why I’m honest about it either. I’m honest about it because it’s liberating. If I can tell people what happened, the cult has no hold over me any more. Believe me, my first instinct was to hide it and never tell anybody. I’m glad I didn’t go that route. I will, however, never refer to them any other way than “the cult.”

Next time somebody tells you they were in a cult, perhaps you should ask them about it, instead of mocking them for it. You might learn something. At the very least you’ll look less like an asshole.

http://www.ex-cult.org/General/lifton-criteria

Battlestar Galactica 1980… Huh?

There was a key element missing from my childhood. When I was little, I took an immediate dislike to Jimmy Carter, because he interrupted the Battlestar Galactica pilot for some stupid speech, probably State of the Union or some stupid crap like that. Dude, get off the TV, I’m watching a monkey dressed up like a robotic dog!

Battlestar Galactica ended abruptly, but lived on in reruns for the better part of my childhood, and can still be found today. It was an amazing show for it’s time. Unfortunately, the effects were just as expensive back then, and BG was one of the most expensive shows of it’s time, leading to it’s cancellation. Network execs can be real bungholes…

The backlash caused by the cancellation of BG led the execs to reconsider their decision, and eventually the reinstated the show, in a manner of speaking. Enter Battlestar Galactica 1980.

I completely missed this show. It apparently wasn’t well received even when it was new. It was canceled after a handful of episodes. I recall the commercials for it, but either I never got around to actually watching it, or my brain was so traumatized by the event that I’ve suppressed all memory of it.

I decided to catch up. Thanks to Netflix, I was able to watch all of the episodes of BG1980 and see what I had been missing.

The first three episodes started fairly well. It helped that I was expecting utter crap, so it would have been hard to disappoint. So the plot is they’ve found earth. Apollo is gone (no explanation), and so is Starbuck (no explanation, at first anyway). Now, even though they still refer to the Quorum of 12 from time to time, they never really make an appearance and the whole fleet is being led by this mutant uber-geek called Dr. Zee. In the first few episodes, they applied some strange effect to his voice, I suppose to make him sound other-worldly. Apparently that got too expensive for later episodes.

The first three episodes formed a three part story arc, which was rare in those days, and tended to lend the show a little bit of credibility. The super-scaled-back budget was pretty apparent, from the title credits which showed exclusively clips from the original series, to the battle scenes which were also exclusively clips from the original series.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

I can get past bad, cheap special effects. I understand that not every show will have a multi-billion-dollar-an-episode budget, and don’t expect hollywood quality effects from 80s sci-fi. BUT… there’s no excuse for bad writing. After starting well (I gave them some extra leeway for the fact that it was the first episodes, which are never all that great), the show quickly devolved into standard 80s type television. Any one of the plots could have easily been transplanted into Knight Rider, the A-Team, or any other number of similar 80s TV shows with minimal rewriting. Very few were had anything unique to BG that was central to the plot. The show had almost nothing redeeming about it until the last episode The Return of Starbuck.

This is where we finally find out what happened to our favorite womanizing hot-shot pilot. The plot apparently borrowed heavily from Enemy Mine, or maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, the similarities were unnerving. In a flashback, Starbuck crash lands on an abandoned planet that he immediately names Planet Starbuck. He finds the cylons he was fighting crashed not too far away, and in a fit of loneliness, fixes one.

They of course become friends, even though the cylon vehemently denies it. At one point, after a nasty lovers quarrel, the cylon says he’s going to find Starbuck a woman. Surprisingly, he does. While nobody shows any normal level of interest in exactly where she came from, she soon becomes part of the group. Oh, and she’s pregnant with Starbuck’s psychic love child. I dont know

The lover’s spats between Starbuck and the cylon get worse as the cylon gets jealous of Starbuck and the mysterious woman. Finally the baby is born, and Starbuck is suddenly able to figure out how to build a small spaceship from the left over parts of his crashed viper and the cylon raider. He puts the woman and the baby on the ship and they take off, leaving Starbuck alone with the cylon again. A few new cylons show up, and the friendly cylon (Cy, was his name, BTW) is killed defending Starbuck while killing his fellow cylons. Starbuck is all alone again, except the mystery woman shows up on a cliff and announces to the cosmos that she “judges this man good”. Okay, we could’ve done that for you, we saw the original series, lady.

The spaceship shows up at Galactica with only the baby on board, who grows up to be (like it could’ve turned out any other way) Dr. Zee.

With the exception of those four episodes, there was nothing else worth saving about this show. It’s a typical maltreatment of a good show by money-centric corporate executives, convinced that the cattle they call viewers will watch any piece of crap they put in front of them, so they focus on cutting costs, crank out yet another cookie cutter TV show, and sit back and wait for the money to roll in.

It’s no wonder Richard Hatch’s Galactica 2.0 starts with the premise that ’80 never happened. I kindof wish it hadn’t either. Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of potential there, but nobody put in the effort to try to make this show something special.

Interesting facts: The star of the show, Kent McCord, whose character, despite being called Troy was actually Boxey grown up, also played John Crichton’s father on Farscape, Jack Crichton. Jerry Van Dyke, the other main character, was Dick Van Dyke’s son. Also Robyn Douglas who played the hottie reporter, apparently did a Playboy Cover in 1974 (according to IMDB). It’s kindof interesting she did it before landing the part on BG1980. She also doesn’t seem to have been heard from since the ’80s. Too bad….

My rules

I have a few rules. Not many, but the ones I have don’t get violated. The rules that pertain to making sure I don’t quit on your sorry ass and go work somewhere else go something like this:

1) Don’t fuck with my money. Let’s be honest, I work there because I get paid. It has nothing to do with company loyalty (would your company be loyal to me if it wasn’t in it’s best interest? Neither would I). It has nothing to do with needing something to do. I have plenty of things I want to work on, going to work everyday gets in the way of that. I’m there because you pay me. When you stop paying me, I stop coming to work. Period.

2) Let me do my damn job. Even though I only come to work because you pay me, It doesn’t mean I don’t have a little pride. I do a good job, because It’s important to me to do a good job. I’ll bitch until you fix the processes that are killing the project, I’ll take the extra time to fix the stupid ass code I just found, and I’ll take the extra time to make sure my code isn’t just as bad or worse than the stupid ass code I just found. When you get pissed off at me because I’m not being a good little code monkey and shutting up, letting all the bad crap happen, I no longer have any use for you. If you’re not going to let me do a good job, why the hell would I stay? So you can blame me when it all goes to shit? No thanks.

3) If you’ve got a problem with me, tell me. Don’t hold on to it and throw it out as ammo in a meeting in front of God’s naked ass and the rest of the country.

I’ve worked for a lot of people since I started my professional career as a coder. Some of them were unethical. Well, one was anyway. And when he asked me to do things that were unethical, I asked him to kindly stuff it in his oversized, cancerous ass. Figuratively speaking, of course. He carefully considered what I had to say, then decided that maybe he should choose the ethical route. That was a good day.

Some were not very bright. Somehow I survived all that.

Most were pretty good. I enjoy working for somebody that wants to do things right, and is willing to listen to another’s ideas about what that might be. So far I think my track record has been pretty good.

My previous job fucked with my money. Now I work at my current job.

My current job, despite all, has been pretty good so far. They did a lot of really stupid shit when I started, and now they do far less stupid shit. I’d like to think that’s largely in part because of me, but I work with a lot of smart people. I’m pretty sure I contributed quite a bit though.

Since January, I’ve been on another team that’s more or less doomed to failure. I took it on as my personal mission to save this project. I had a lot of work ahead of me. My team lead was based in New York, so there was the remote aspect of the team. That was difficult, but not insurmountable. In addition, he’s Serbian, which makes for some cultural differences. Many of my jokes are lost on him, because English is a second language for him. That’s not really a problem, just an observation. As the last couple of months passed, I realized that the business unit and the leads were getting pissed and annoyed with me because I wasn’t just being a good little code monkey. I don’t do the good little code monkey part very well. If they wanted somebody to shut the fuck up and just write the damn code, they should have hired a junior developer, not me. I’m too expensive for that shit.

Last Friday, something happened which I’m not sure I can get past. We had a sprint retrospective. It helps if you know a little about Agile methods and Scrum, even though we don’t really do it right. A sprint is a chunk of time in a development project. A sprint retrospective is basically what everybody thought went well and not so well for that particular sprint. I made a nice long list of things I thought needed to change. I don’t make this shit up, 90% came from things that worked well on other projects. I do my homework.

The danger of a sprint retrospective is people taking things personally. I’ve been though many, and I try to never take things personally, even if I think somebody might be referring to me. One of the biggest rules in agile is not to personally attack the other team members. You can attack an idea, but not the person presenting it. “Your idea won’t work because blah blah blah” instead of “Your idea sucks because you’re a flatulating butthead!” Common sense, one would think.

It’s hard, though, to not take comments personally when they keep using your name. It’s harder when that person is your team lead. It’s even harder when the first indication you had that they might be not completely satisfied with the work you’re doing is their list of grievances aired about you during the sprint retrospective. It’s even harder when the response to the thoughtful, carefully considered suggestions you provided is “well, X didn’t do this and X did that.” Um, how about responding to what I just said instead of a personal attack there, home boy?

Perhaps the suggestions I listed were misconstrued as a personal attack on him. Perhaps it’s another cultural difference clash. Perhaps my team lead hasn’t read the Agile book yet.

Or maybe he’s the kind of guy that will throw me under the bus when the project fails. That’s pretty much what I think happened on Friday. That entire business unit is big on finger pointing. It’s not important what’s fucked up, only who fucked up.

I think my resume is good enough I can get another job without too much effort, so I’m not too worried about getting fired and/or quitting. I wish I could quit and just not work anywhere for a while like Rory, but I just ain’t that cool.

I need to talk to my boss’s boss about this, but I put it off today. Basically, when I dragged my sorry ass into the office this morning, I was still to pissed off about it to be rational about it, so I figured the meeting wouldn’t go too well. The request will go something like “I need off of his team now. This can happen one of two ways, one of which includes my continuing to work here.” I’m looking for a less ultimatumish way of saying this.

I don’t know how many techie readers I have, but I would appreciate some comments here. Have you experienced something like this? How did you handle it? Am I just being pissy here, or is professional pride enough to merit an employment change?

Dammit!

Dammit! Dammit!

Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

Damn Damn Dammit Dammit Dammit!

Dammit! Dammit! Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

Dammit!

Damn Damn Damn Damn Damn! …. Dammit!

Double Dammit!

Triple Dammit!

Dammit!

This has been one of those days that I’m glad is over.

Dammit!

Exactly how "Scientific" is Medical Science anyway?

Update to the XBox post: With the recent addition of the Messenger Kit and the 120 GB hard drive

XBox Grand total: $962.50

In addition Jeff Atwood, apparently in much the same boat as me, recently upgraded from the Playstation 2 to the XBox 360. He discovered something I haven’t yet about the DRM built into the XBox: downloaded content is not tranferrable. That’s a little creepy since I’ve already bought a few games online, and was planning to buy more when they came available. Microsoft’s official answer is to get a memory card and store your XBox Live Id on it, allowing you to take it to another console and download the same content there, as long as it’s still available. This approach will probably work fine for me considering I don’t have the kind of job that allows me to have an XBox 360 at work as his apparently does. The fact that your downloaded content becomes unusable if your XBox crashes sounds exceptionally annoying, but I’ll save that for an angry blog post when it happens.

Anyway, back to what I’m here to talk about today. I’ve spent the last week sicker than I’ve been since I was a kid. I caught “something”, and now my 7 year old seems to have caught it as well, just as I’m getting over it. I was more or less out from work for nearly the entire week. I had a severe sore throat and a fever of over 101 for days. And a bunch of other crap too. On Monday I went to the Urgent Care center, hoping to try to head it off. I was pretty sure it was strep throat. My wife knew somebody having nearly identical symptoms and was diagnosed with the flu. I haven’t had strep throat since high school, and as I understand, it can re-occur. I also hadn’t had a flu shot this year, and even getting the flu shot doesn’t guarantee a flu-free winter, so either theory sounded plausible. The urgent care doctor did a strep test and passed on the flu test since it didn’t seem to match the flu at that point. The strep test came back negative, but she gave me some anti-biotic anyway since it appeared to be definitely “something.”

On Wednesday, I had actually gotten worse. In fact Wednesday night was the absolute peak of the whole ordeal. For a few moments, death seemed a preferable alternative than this kind of suffering. So I called my regular doctor and managed to get in on Thursday morning. Again, they weren’t really sure what it was, but prescribed some more medicine to help out with recovery. Okay, they’re the doctor, I have to trust their opinion because I have no idea about this stuff.

I learned early on in my life that while I may be pretty good at a fairly wide range of things, the medical profession was completely closed to me. I simply am not cut out to be a doctor. I once saw a public television program documenting an open heart surgery and just about puked on myself. I never even considered applying to medical school. It just wasn’t happening.

Yesterday my seven year old started showing symptoms of the same thing. At my insistence my wife finally agreed that taking him to the doctor would be a good thing to do. Actually it was more like “You can if you want to, but you’re taking him.” Whatever. Apparently she grew up in a family with disdain for the medical profession. Maybe they were on to something.

About three hours later I’m finally leaving the pediatrician’s with my son, with the following diagnosis. Both the strep test and the flu test came back negative for him. So the doctor said “this falls into the ‘other’ category” and recommended lots of rest and fluids. This seemed like sound advice, but later on, as I contemplated my lost morning, I though: “I accomplished absolutely jack with that.” It’ contagious, it’s working it’s way through my family, and nobody knows what the hell it is. I really could have given that diagnosis myself.

How exactly do they not know what it is? I know there’s a lot about medical science that’s still unknown, but if this is as common as it sounds, how is it nobody seems to know what it is? Working in IT, we often have to diagnose problems, and while comparing computers to people doesn’t hold a lot of water, the “I don’t know what the hell that was” explanation doesn’t come up all that often. If something is going on and it’s widespread and we don’t know what it is, dammit we’re going to find out!

This is not a condemnation of any of the doctors I’ve worked with this week. I respect all of them, I’m just confused as to how I can lose a week to an illness, visit three doctors, and still not have an answer for “what did you have” when I get back to work. Comments appreciated Open-mouthed

Reflections on DevConnections Part II — All that damn walking

Las Vegas is big. Rather, everything in it is big. Rather, the hotels are big. We’ve been touring around checking things out, and you have to literally walk for miles. It’s that or a cab, and cabs are frikkin expensive here. There’s a few trams, but even that’s a little flawed. I was limping by Tuesday. I’m not as young as I used to be.

My sister lives in Las Vegas. I went to meet her at the Bellagio one evening. On foot, it went about like this: Walked about ¼ mile within the hotel to the tram. Took the tram to Excalibur. The free tram stops there. Walked to MGM Grand, where the not-free tram starts. There’s a big sign over the walkway that says “Monorail Entrance”. That’s a little misleading because you have to walk what must have literally been a mile to the back of the hotel (it winds around) to get to the monorail. I bought my $9 ticket thinking “the walking is finally over.” Not. “Access to the Bellagio” was the very next stop, the Bally. Walked through the Bally, and walked, and walked. The monorail goes to the back of the hotel. Did I mention they’re big? Finally thought I found a shortcut and went out of the Bally. That exit took me to a rather unused side street. Walking along that was interesting. Chalk up another ¼ mile. Walked past the crazy looking dude getting arrested, finally got back to the strip. At this point I could’ve just walked the street and it would have been faster. But it still would have been couple of miles, I’m sure. Across the street to the Bellagio and another ½ mile through the hotel. I damn near can’t walk.

A friend of mine who came with our group hurt his foot on Monday, and all the walking aggravated it till he couldn’t walk. He got a scooter. At least I haven’t gotten that bad.

Today’s Wednesday, and we leave tomorrow. My brain is full. I’ll blog some of the cool stuff I learned there later, but today I met Carl Franklin of Dot Net Rocks. Well, I shook his hand and said “love the show” anyway. I’ll bet he’s never heard that before. Way to make an impression, man! The career at Microsoft is in the bag for sure, now. I overheard Richard Campbell talking about how weird it was to have people following him into the bathroom. I decided not to ask for autographs.

I have gotten to hear many of the well known speakers that I’ve read and/or listened to on Dot Net Rocks. It’s been pretty cool. The only thing missing? Rory Blyth. He’s left Microsoft and apparently technology in general. Bummer. But I still read his blog. He’s a fascinating guy with great taste in television. And I certainly can’t fault him for his minor obsession with Jolene Blalock and Gigi Edgly. I’d lick her too, man. Rory, if you read this, two things:

1) Milla Jovovich

2) Kristanna Lokan

Take a drink, you’re gonna need it.