Alin's Site

Solar Geomagnetic Storm

Shown above are STEREO images from the NASA STEREO satellite. These images are not brand new but they show what was going on since the 24th or so. The worst peak of the storm was apparently last night or the 26th-27th bridge. My computer was acting up, acting like it’s hard drive had faults, the file system was a mess! My humidifier on my ventilator was randomly alarming even though all of the things to do to make sure it does not go off were there, meaning have it filled with water have a clean sensor set on it and all. My ventilator was throwing some wicked weird alarms, some I have never ever seen outside of the manual “HW Fault” was one and no I didn’t touch the little fan in the top. What a wicked weird night. One of my friends reported to me that their power voltage measurements went from 120 V/AC to 145V/AC and resulted in him needing to shut down power to his house on an emergency basis. His name is rcm442 and no further identity will be given per his request. Heres a quotation from him.

“rcm442: Found this

rcm442: Day two (28 November) is expected to be quiet with a slight chance for isolated unsettled periods due to the CME observed on 24 November becoming geo-effective. Conditions are expected to return to quiet levels on day three (29 November).”

Well I sure look forward to the 29th when it quiets down and there is no more geomagnetic disruption, it’s disrupting my sleep severely! However tonight and bridging into the 28th its supposed to quiet down too so hopefully I shall sleep relatively better today!

Listening to the Hard Drive...

With this disruption came a “Mac Attack” I went off to work on the other computer, came back to my mac 20 minutes later and noticed the clock was STOPPED at 1:05 AM when I came back at 1:20 AM. I was like crap.. I rebooted and it wouldn’t start up so I booted up with the restore disks and ran disk repair, for some reason the file system went crazy due to the geomagnetic storm or something! it’s all fixed now but I was sitting like above with my Littmann on the hard drive listening to it. My anxiety went through the ROOF for several hours because I thought the CD drive spinning down and respinning repeatedly was the hard drive, but upon examining the hard disks SMART status there were no re-spin attempts which there should be if the drive did re-spin its self. Either way I HATE CDS because they generate NOISE when your trying to listen, so I copied the restore image to a hard disk that is external so that I can restore and have silence and listen to the hard drive to see if there is a hardware problem when I don’t have access to smartmontools (SMART Monitoring Tools) So feel free to laugh at me in the few photos I took. Medically this is no laughing matter as the anxiety it generated sent me into a good episode of high end tachycardia around 140 bpm for about 1 hour, that is borderline inappropriate sinus tachycardia (IST) for me. Thankfully it terminated on its own. Anxiety does NOT do good for me!

A world of swirling light. and me and AJ are in it!

Well looks like Mike Patnode went a bit crazy with the camera last night but I like the 10 pictures he snapped off so I decided to throw them up on my Flickr account. He has one over here me and AJ as always had a lot of fun last night doing our usual photostimulation thing. I slept so good as a result! I was up really late but I woke up on time! Reason is the more stimulation I get the better I sleep or something like that. Go ask a Neurologist about it. I ain’t no Neurologist. Anyway hit the picture to view more.

Fixing my twitchy eye

Last night and several nights before I think. I was having for like several nights to a week this weird problem with my left eyelid twitching so I decided to take a rubber hairband to it and put it on my eyelid muscle TIGHTLY, according to my theory pressure depolarizes the nerves thusly depolarizing the muscle in the eyelid thusly restoring normal sensation and movement. In simple words it worked but left a temporary mark from how tight it was. I also like sucking on them and rubbing them on my head overall… They feel so good haha. A few photos are up.

INVENTORY! INVENTORY! INVENTORY! Yep that’s one big thing that comes with being a trach-ee and a G-Tube dependent person. Lot’s of supplies to track so I use RomiSys Inventory Droid to keep track of all my stuff. If you have ANYTHING you need to inventory be it Medical supplies, your household pantry, anything, you can use Inventory Droid on an Android device. What I like about it best is the ability to “scan in / scan out” items, so you don’t have to manually do everything. Mind you it does not recognize some barcodes so those you still have to manually do, but isn’t it nice to have ONE program for ALL of your inventory? This thing does it all, check it out. it even has “Accounts” with passwords for more professional places. For your house you probably only need one account with multiple categories like “Pantry”  ”Fridge” and whatnot. So back to talking about ME, I have been using Inventory Droid over the course of last night doing all the scannable items and now today I will be punching in the manual items and then it will all be a convenient CSV file I can import into Excel, edit a few lines, add my order quantity and E-Mail my order over to Walgreens respiratory and call to confirm. STREAMLINE THAT! Oh wait, you cant streamline it any further… well you could if it was all built into the program. But hey the desktop program Inventory Desk BETA is well just as it says on the tin, BETA.

First thing you might notice is this post is made at three twenty fricken three in the morning!!! Someone give me some Sevoflurane. I need an anesthesia machine, hey Doctor L, you reading this? Can you fax me a script for an anesthesia machine and 30 bottles of Abbott Ultane (Sevoflurane) for me to pick up at the local uhhhh Walgreens, yeah that anesthesia machine will come from Walgreens respiratory, where I get my ventilator, the Ultane the pharmacy can special order just like they do my Tobi nebs and my Dornase Alfa nebs. Then all I need is a heavy duty nitrous oxide concentrator, a heavy duty oxygen concentrator both capable of high flows and I am all set. I can lose my regular ventilator in my room since I will have the anesthesia ventilator… Hey B with Walgreens, I’m sure you will still be happy to be my RT servicing an ANESTHESIA VENTILATOR. AHAHHAHA.

Ok jokes and funny business aside, I can’t sleep, my sleep has been perpetually screwed for god only knows how long. ugh.

In other news I have introduced a new cache system that hopefully should work for everyone and freaking behave! Not bug up and stuff. Apparently the fault with the old one was double GZIP compression of GZIPPED pages. GZIP Helps get pages faster to you but if you GZIP a GZIP you get garbled code cause well browsers only know how to unGZIP a GZIP not a GZIPPED GZIP. Also this one does not create the HOLY CRAPOLA CACHEOLA thing like the other module

Remember bug reports always go through the Contact Me system or direct to my E-Mail (if you have it)

Ugh, don’t ask me about how last night went. Anyone who does will simply get forwarded to this post. Last night was not good at all, I slept for crap and I was puking. And I am bushed from all the stuff I had to do today, I slept from 9 AM to 3PM and yet I am still trashed! Hit the “Gross Part” button if you don’t mind discussion about puke. If you do then don’t click the gross part button! You have the basics from the above two lines.

Holding it up for all to see

Now lets move on to better news. In better news I was published in AJ’s newsletter that goes out to an unknown amount of people by regular postal mail, I got the Pre-Release edition before it went live to all people, awesome!!! Anyways theres a short flickr gallery, me holding it up for all to see and some scanned images. Parts blanked out for reason’s of security! I am family to them… you readers are not In the photo above you can barely make me out so make sure to click through to flickr to see the thing in full size! And if you want to make a donation to help AJ like you guys donate to help me soon they will have it set up on his blog for web donation through PayPal. Until then you can donate through me simply write in the Memo field of the PayPal Donation AJ FUND. no memo = the money gets routed to ondemand which just means it gets placed where it is needed most. If you forget to do the memo you can E-Mail me within 24 hours of the donation via the Contact Me form. once 24 hours elapses I cannot guarantee that donated funds have not been unlocked and transferred to the ondemand area. Neither I or AJ are 501 (c) 3 as far as I know so don’t go trying to deduct it on your taxes, mmmmkay? ok. over and out.

Goodnight all

Two nights ago I was using a utility to find a less crowded wifi channel I found the channel 14 has absolutely no one on it. I quickly got “channel greed” and set my router to channel 14 and began pumping high power radio at that frequency that the FCC don’t like which I later found out with my iPod Touch which is “region independent” and yet both of our mac computers wouldn’t work. Then my interest kicked in last night and I decided tonight to tinker around with things since I am putting my iPod Touch on eBay. Oddly none of my devices would work on this Channel 14 on the router, only the iPod Touch which is all packed up and ready to go to whoever buys it… WTF!? Someone is crippling our equipment!!!

Whatevea, here’s a short video of me totally violating the law!

The breast surgery has been CANCELED and rescheduled for January 27th due to issues not otherwise specified.

Oh and end note, don’t bother trying to hack my network as I changed the Wireless MAC address.

We ran late getting to the hospital because of some banking issues however we arrived around 12:45 pm and I was taken into The OR at around 1:20ish Doctor Walner tried to talk me out of the anesthesia but my sensitivity autism and sensory integration disorder were quickly overloading me and they noticed it so they quickly started the anesthesia and did it under sevoflurane. I woke up around 3 and we just got in the driveway as i post this from my DROID X

Thanks doctor Walner. Hopefully we don’t keep having shiley issues! I AM SO SICK OF THESE TRACH TUBES GIVING ME PROBLEMS! the sevo is nice but the problems aren’t

A little update of info, I am staying with a cuffed trach tube until after winter.

CODE SEVOFLURANE COUNTDOWN TO TRACHEOSTOMY CHANGE TO CUFFLESS (YAY) BELOW

Again we cannot confirm nor deny it will be cuffless. We may stay cuffed during the winter and go cuffless during spring-fall and then cuff up for winter.

Me and my droid!

I got my DROID X yesterday, for those of you who don’t know thats the Motorola smartphone that runs Google Android OS and is WICKED awesome 1.0 GHZ processor great battery life 8.0MP camera with HD video the list goes on.

The video is below click above for photos.

I am switching to a cuffless tracheostomy tube on friday. the countdown time is subject to change, it’s currently set for 7 AM but we don’t have a definitive time yet for the trach change due to the fact that this is something that a definitive time is given day before, oh well.. YAY ANOTHER HIT OF SEVOFLURANE.

Oh and cool thing yesterday my doctor had a rep from Storz, the bronchoscope/endoscope/anythingscope company and I got to see and play with a Storz electronic scope system. Way cool!

Oh and funny enough, cuff blown! Again! I tested the cuff today and it is blown! Just like in the youtube video below!

Yay BlackBerry = GoneBerry

Shown above is my phone set to Apple Care. I shipped it set to Verizon Customer Service

DROID X

My BlackBerry decided to do some really wicked stuff to me and I did some serious stuff with technical support and it seems the camera just does not want to Geotag photos properly for me, so I decided I am going to sell it on eBay to anyone for $300 Dollars. I am going to be getting a DROID X on Wednesday, and thank you Verizon and April in Verizon Customer Services for making the DROID X so affordable for me! What was a $600 dollar phone is now sub $200 and something that I was able to afford with a bit of a stretching. Keep the DVD orders coming and they will go towards my Assistive Technology (Communication) Purchase of the DROID X. the eBaying of my old phone will go right into the Assistive Technology fund too.

Anywho, I can’t wait to get it and you bet there will be unboxing photo and video!