One New Thing

I am in a world of firsts. Last November, I found out how to be okay with being single for the first time. I mean really okay, like, healthily so. I was in a great place.

About a month and a half after that I met a girl. On facebook. We had sex for the first time. It was my first time too. I fell for her. Not the first time I fell for a girl, but it was the first time one fell for me too. She moved in right away, because she needed someplace to go and I needed a roommate. Not the first time I've had a girl for a roommate, but the first time we've shared a room. I told her I loved her for the first time, and I meant it, and she said it back, and she meant it. That was a first for me.

We moved out. And in. To a new place. With a lease. I signed it and I thought, I REALLY believed, that for a full year I could live with her. It seemed doable.

There was trouble in paradise though. I think the both of us saw it coming and started preparing ourselves for it. The other too. So that was kind of a first too. The first beginning of the first end.

And now here I am. At what I hope is near the end of the end. The first end. My first end. Probably not my last either.

But I didn't want to buzz over it that fast in this post. There is so much more to this story than that. I instigated the end, you see. We went to lunch and all was fine. We were both going to go away to a lake with friends tomorrow in the morning. We were meeting with those friends and laughing and joking and planning and hoping. We came home and she wanted to have what she anticipated to be a difficult talk about our sex life, about a recent occurrence that troubled us both greatly. I snapped though.

I talked about the event itself. I can't post it here, to protect the guilty. I accused, and was very very honest about how I had felt for quite some time, long before this event. And one hour later, the relationship was over.

Seven months, instigated by a few hours of passion, undone by only one. It seems almost unfair, what I did to her, what she did to me, all the good and all the bad, all mixed up and hellish and just...gone...all gone...

It's striking me just now that she's gone. That I made her leave. That now, again, I'm alone. I have my first new ex.

I'm not sure that I will be okay as a single person right away.

TRH

Judaism

So today I went to a Chabbat Dinner. It's pronounced with a definitive rolling in the throat, a very hebrew word. It is, after all, a Hebrew dinner officially starting the Sabbath, and it was for me very much a learning experience.

I have never been exposed to jewish ritual, or even culture. I spent the majority of my educative years in suburban Minnesota, filled with scandinavian folks brought up as Protestants, and occaisionally Catholics (like I used to be). I haven't been exposed to judaism really at all and so this was the immersion.

It was quite fun, really. They sang lots of songs in hebrew and we had DELICIOUS food (all of it Kosher, naturally), and after there were a WHOLE lot of songs. I found out the hard way it's tradition not to talk in between washing hands and eating (In our house, growing up, dinner was the only time the whole family got together, so we did a lot of talking about everything no matter what).

It was a great opportunity to ask lots of questions (and yes, to those of you who know me, I did my very best to be respectful and keep the jewish jokes to a minimum) and work to understand the jewish faith. It was interesting to be there when people were performing a religious ritual that likely meant something to them (I would say about as much as church meant to me as a catholic) when I was a complete outsider to their belief structure. It was clear they meant what they did and it was important to me, but to me it was all words. Religions are funny that way. Their god is no longer (was, but is no longer) my god.

Religion is weird that way sometimes. I have a hard time reconciling the hope and solidity it brings people with the despicable acts it can inspire people to perform. As such, I'm really having a hard time knowing just how to feel about such an event. I want to revel in their solemn and private faith and feel perfectly fine about observing such a thing, in fact being part of it. I don't want to feel bad, like an imposter or an intruder to such an event. I don't really agree with religion, condemning it on account of it's worse parts. One bad apple spoils the barrel, of sorts. Or perhaps more like nukes - everybody in the world has one, but it only takes one use of one to ruin everybody's day.

Some days I just don't know. Being fencish SUCKS.

TRH

The Fallacy Of Hope

Dour, ain't it? Hope is in the air this election season, almost as much as bullshit. It creates an interesting mix, this concept of how things may change along with how shitty they are now.

Now, I usually leave politics out of work, contenting myself to visit harm upon their egos at the expense of their mothers and housing situations with both efficiency and cruelty. Of recent, even politics has crept into the mix as we chat Obama/McCain occaisionally. Pretty much everybody there seems Obama-y, so no concerns. Interesting thing my boss mentioned, though.

See, the economy has been rough on her. She mentioned the store's just barely been getting by this year due to the harsh economy, and then said with a hint of sarcasm, "But we'll elect a new president into office and then everything will get better!"

It interested me because I think people have been thinking that he's the political "Easy Button."Here's How it is, folks: he's not. I certainly believe he's better than McCain, but he's not going to fix anything right away. Nobody ever could. It's the nature of the American system, how the bureaucracy works.

I'm not saying this to dissaude anybody from anything now. It's cynical, yes, and that's who I am. I'm putting this out there to prevent cynicism one year into President Obama's first term, when little to nothing has gotten done, the world has progressed as though nothing had happened and everything seems like McCain may have been the quickfix we passed up. I'm sure things will get better, but likely by the time I retire. Oh, and did I mention? I'm 22.

Maybe I should just cryogenically freeze myself until then.

TRH

Dillematime, GO!

So I have this roommate. She's not so bad, I guess, in her own way. A fair bit OCD, kind of uptight, but she pays half the rent and half the utilities and I haven't woken up with a knife in my chest yet, so there you go. Thing is, she's moving to a dorm again next month, right when they open.

I liked living on my own. I could wander around butt naked all I liked, I had the TV completely to myself (although she doesn't occupy it too much), I didn't need to worry about keeping the other couch cleared off, the dishes got done when I decided they needed to and I never got yelled at for not doing enough to keep the place clean.

At the same time, though, it's actually clean now, at least by my definition. Plus, all of my utilities and rent (which, notably, I once managed on my own) are cut in half, freeing up a good bit of funding each month.

And so my dillema - do I get a roommate? Do I live on my own? Ugh. At any rate, the ad is up and four hours after going up I had an email already. A room close to campus for $150 does not stay empty long in this town...

TRH

First Amendment Responsibilities

Hello fellow foolish humans,

It seems the world is in the proverbial shitter. I say proverbial because really most of this "shitter" stuff going on is trivial and/or somebody else's problem. ANYTHING going on in sports - the answer is "all of you morons shut the hell up and sit the fuck down". Problem solved. Rivers flooding in the midwest - tragic, yes. Donate money to the Red Cross, or if you really feel a need to help I'm sure they could use sandbaggers and volunteers for rebuilding. Join the Red Cross and volunteer for that disaster area.

More problems exist than this, and all of them are forcibly inserted into your brain by various news media. Wouldn't it be nice if people actually thought through these problems with a pragmatist viewpoint? The solution to every worry is to simply look at the problem in the mindset of "what can I do to help?" Frankly, the solution is very very often "practically speaking, Nothing". Myself, I have no money to give and no time to volunteer without VERY seriously subverting my college plans which I need to keep up a bit for financial reasons.

So, the question is, what can YOU do about Gas prices? The Iraq War? Controversy surrounding the Beijing Olympics? The answer is practically speaking, not much. Write a letter to your representatives and senators if you really care that much. Vote in November. And then, once you've got that done, STOP WORRYING. Turn off CNN. Shut off your computer. Grab a frisbee, or a book, or something else. The news media has turned sour, and while they still give factual information, they rather unfortunately give it over and over and over and over and over again until it is beat into your brain and they have nothing else they could fill the time with but their own gut feelings and opinions regarding news presented as facts.

In short, televisual news is full of fail and text is better.

TRH

Personal Beliefs, or lack thereof

I have a friend who lists herself as Agnostic. I myself list myself as such as well. Funny thing about Agnosticism though. See, to call yourself Christian means you believe in the Jewish God, that your soul was saved two thousand years before your parents even met, that random Holy Spirit thing (Honestly, Brahma/The Force makes more sense than that one). To say that you are a buddhist means that you believe in the Noble Eightfold Path as a solution to the Four Noble Truths, all that. To say that you are an Atheist is the other end of the spectrum, to believe explicitly that there is no deity, higher power, great and all knowing intelligence, anything. Effectively, it is to believe that there is nothing to the universe beyond what we have noticed (and a few things we haven't quite noticed yet, but may mildly suspect, like Dark Energy, which is a whole other blogpost in itself.)

There is a wide area in between believing in one faith and dogmatic set, and believing in absolutely nothing. That spectrum, to me, is all agnosticism. Some call it spirituality without belief, some call it unknowingness. I call it apathy: I really don't give a crap whether or not there is a god. It doesn't concern me. If I die and there is nothing at all, then nothing happens, obviously. If I die and there is something there, then I'll simply argue that I lived my life as I wanted to and that while there may not be things I'm proud of, I don't believe I need to defend my lifestyle to anybody. I am a sentient thing capable of making choices for myself so far as I know, so if there does turn out to be a god then he/she/it is not better than me.

As a psychologist once told me, Agnosticism is a very humble choice because it's about admitting that you DON'T know. It's the idea of giving up any specific beliefs, accepting that it's as-yet unmeasurable whether or not there is a god (scientifically speaking), and that you don't need a religious institution to tell you how to live or save this "soul" thing. It's effectively saying that you don't know who's wrong or right and that you don't need to know.

So that's Agnosticism to me. Apathy. Don't know, don't care.

TRH

Crap.

As of five PM last friday, the spring 2008 semester at the University of North Dakota ended. Given as how I entered in the Fall of 2004, I have now completed four calendar years at this particular institution. Being as how I'm not done with the program (probably another year to go) I am now officially a Super Senior.

It's not really someplace I want to be. I'm financially independent, live in my own apartment, have a car that you wouldn't expect to see Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers cruising around in. I maintain a job that pays the bills, I even have a resume and coverletter that I could, if necessary, modify for use for another company. I'm pretty much ready to enter the real world as a productive (albeit lazy and eccentric) adult.

But I can't. Even if I want to move somewhere else, meet new people, do far more interesting things, I can't. I almost have a college degree, which means I don't have a college degree. Granted I should be finished with my commercial pilot's certificate, so I'll have a marketable skill, but the degree lends it even more credence. Also, a degree is required for my plans after college.

I really don't want to be here though.

TRH

Tactical Error Detected

Or: And a Stopover in Reykjavik!

So I've been pondering going to Europe for a couple weeks this summer. Planning it out, financially and otherwise, and I was all but decided that I wanted to go. Just needed some kind of catalyst to tell me that it really needed to happen.

So I bought a round trip ticket from Minneapolis to Paris for the time I was considering going. And I'll be stopping in Reykjavik International for about an hour each way. I almost sort of wish I had a day or so in that city, Iceland would be really cool to see in the summertime.

Anyways, I'm going to Paris! I've still got to buy my Eurail Pass, as I want to go to a number of other places: Rome, Venice, Marseilles, Geneva, and this little town called Courchevel up in the French Alps. The last one for the Airport, more than anything else, although I think I'd like to go mountain biking.

In France.

Mountain Biking in France.

I'm going Mountain Biking. In. France.

Wow.

TRH

Epic Fail is Epic

On "The Daily Show" last night they covered the epic failure of Bear Stearns, an investment bank, as well as the monstrous bad advice from some financial talking head on TV, telling somebody who wrote in that the company was fine and that a pullout from them was ill-advised. Anybody who happened to short-sell Bear Stearns over the weekend just about doubled their money, as it fell well over $50 from $60, crashing horrifically.

I didn't short-sell them. I don't do much with the market. However, I did get thinking a bit, and I do have an e-trade account. I hopped on, threw a few dollars in it this morning, and I've already made about $20 in the hour that the market has been open. I figure if it's high-risk, as they could crash completely, but even if they go from five dollars per share (my buying price, approx.) to one per share, I'm holding fifty shares and lost $200, and they've nowhere to go but up or complete failure. Also, at fifty shares, every penny upwards if $0.50 for me. What's more, they are going to do everything they can to try to get their stock up higher.

There is always the risk of the company dissolving, at which point I lose my $250, but that's why the market is a risk. Furthermore, I got in the morning after Jon Stewart told my generation that Bear Stearns is at a historic low - with any amount of luck, lots of people will be buying in later today, pushing up the price. If I'm very lucky, I could double my money in a month, maybe even more. Imagine if the stock ever recovers, back up to say, 50 - that's multiplying my money by 10! That could be within a year or so.

Basically, their failure is my bread and butter.

TRH

Two Laws and a Coefficient

T = G * H * S * B

where...

T :: Time to becoming Myspace
G :: Growth rate in hundreds of people per month
H :: Henderson's Constant, an as yet unknown number (likely an expression of months squared)
S :: whether or not high schoolers are allowed, 1/4 if they are not, 2 if they are
B :: whether or not there is a blog function, 1/4 if there is not, 2 if there is

I said that earlier. Now I've actually done Research though!

I estimate that Facebook became Myspace when applications were first added, making it more about duping your friends into littering their profile page with crap than other stuff. This was May 24, 2007, a mere 38 months after facebooks inception and only 7 months after it allowed high-schoolers to join. Given this information, and some critical thinking about the above formula, I need to fix it a bit.

For one thing, I was wildly wrong about the growth rate. It appears that facebook now gains about 1 million new users per month, at least according to this chart:


That number off to the left is users IN MILLIONS. As of March '07 (one month before I estimate they went Myspace) they were at 15 million users, and you can clearly see the upwards jolt once they allowed the high schoolers in. I'm not sure blogging has anything to do with it now, I think it may just be about how many users, because the more people you have using an online service or utility, the more idiotic something tends to become (Henderson's First Law of The Internet). Of course, everything will eventually become idiotic (Henderson's Second Law of The Internet).

Regarding the chart, we clearly see users per month approximately double immediately after they're allowed in, from about 250,000 - 500,000 per month to better than 1 million per month (it took four months to climb from 10 million to 15 million). So high schoolers are clearly part of the equation, but really only insomuch as they influence the growth rate. At this point, It's about the growth rate simply multiplied by my constant, which is obviously no longer a constant.

In aerodynamics, every three-dimensional object moving through the air has what is called a coefficient of lift and a coefficient of drag. They are multipliers thrown into the lift and drag equations (respectively) that shape the equation for that particular object. Other factors apply, such as speed and air density, but these ones particularize it and can only be found in a wind tunnel through trial and error by actually charting the lift and reducing all the variables. In other words, it's EXTREMELY difficult to know the coefficient of lift of a wing you've only drawn or build small models of.

I postulate that it is not Henderson's Constant, but in fact Henderson's Coefficient, or the Coefficient of Myspace, which would innately factor in high schoolers, applications, music sharing, and all the quirks that social networking sites offer. This number, only calculable after the fact, indicates time to becoming Myspace. Notably, Myspace themselves hit 15 million users approximately one year after it's inception, growing intermittently up to 1 million new users per month up to and persistently at that rate after 18 months.

This is what I have so far.

T = (G * CM)

T :: Time to becoming Myspace
G :: Average growth rate of the past six months, expressing hundreds of thousands (ie: 100,000 per month is 1/1 month)
CM :: Coefficient of Myspace, an as yet unknown number, likely an expression of months squared thus matching out all the units.

Given that myspace rose up that quickly, I'll estimate that CM is somewhere around .1 for most sites, so that when growth rate consistently achieves 1 million per month time to becoming myspace is extremely short.

I have not yet studied growth rates for many other social networking sites or growth rates after idiocy is established.

TRH

For Your Reading Pleasure

Simon of Space, a novel originally posted on a blog by (somewhat famous) internet author Cheeseburger Brown, is now being sold in stores! If you were there from day one, read it through and see what the editing processing has changed, and if you weren't, I cannot recommend this story highly enough. It's worth reading for CBB's rich language alone, and the well-woven story and wonderful characters only add to the whole feel.

More of Mr. Brown's work may be found at his story blog, and a complete list of his stories may be found at his website, cheeseburgerbrown.com. There's also a donation box, as he is a struggling new author with a family to feed, as well as links to other self-published works of his and merchandise. It's really quite the quintessential internet experience.

TRH

An Exercize in Futility

I have tried this before. I am trying it again. Nothing I can do works.

I'm trying to get a car loan on my own in college.

I don't talk to my father for personal reasons, and my mother flat-out refuses to cosign because it "wouldn't do any good". It would, but she just doesn't want to drag her post-divorce credit score through any more dirt. I do wish she'd be honest with me and just say that though. That's a rant for another post.

It is impossible. I tried once before, with a car about three or four thousand dollars, to get a loan. Nothing worked. This time, I'm putting a $3000 down payment on a $7000 car (before tax, title, registration, f*cking warranty sold to me by a guy who was to nice for me to say no to, etc). Nothing will grease the wheels of commerce enough for me to get a loan, however small, through the dealership's banks. I'll try my own bank, of course, but I don't expect much.

If nothing else, I'll do the same thing I did to pay for my first semester of college - scrounge every drop of savings and credit I have anywhere. I've tallied, and it should come up to just enough if I scratch the warranty, which I kind of want to do anyways. I might need a bit of cash, but with any luck I can scrounge a few hundred dollars up here or there.

The biggest thing is, though, it's impossible for me to get even a modest car loan. My credit score is in the bottom end of 700, so it's not abysmal, and I've got a pretty good history of paying everything off, maybe one or two missed payments here and there on my credit cards. Other than that, I try to have them as close to completely square by the end of the month.

I just can't get a loan for a decent car, which is something I need to be able to do my job as a pizza deliverer. I don't know why the system is set up like this, but it seems that the world is financially against me just because I'm in college. Yes, it is a financially turbulent time in my life, and yes, I don't have much of a history other than a credit card with my bank and a series of student loans not yet in repayment, but that doesn't mean I'm automatically bad news. The banks assume that because I don't have much experience, I don't know what I'm doing, which means that I can't get a strong credit history.

The system is, like so many other systems, inherently flawed and useful only in educating ourselves not to be. It is also the best system we've come up with yet. A Nobel Prize in Economics (which, interestingly, is not a real Nobel Prize) to the person who comes up with a better judge of who will repay loans. Maybe we just need to institute Microloans here and have them count towards our credit history.

TRH

Huh...

Have you ever gotten the feeling that whenever IMDB reports that "this plot synopsis is empty", they're being slightly more truthful than you expect?

On a completely unrelated note, Facebook has become the new Myspace. I theorize there exists a constant which approximates how much time any social networking site will take from initial popularity to when it becomes effectively Myspace.

T = G * H * S * B

where...

T :: Time to becoming Myspace
G :: Growth rate in hundreds of people per month
H :: Henderson's Constant, an as yet unknown number (likely an expression of months squared)
S :: whether or not high schoolers are allowed, 1/4 if they are not, 2 if they are
B :: whether or not there is a blog function, 1/4 if there is not, 2 if there is

This time is measured as soon as an appreciable growth rate of more than 100 people per month is measured consistently (across three months). I suspect that the Henderson Constant is based on other features available in the site as well, and as such could be subject to chaos theory, applicable only as a rough estimator rather than a precise measurement, similar to coefficient of lift in non-simulated environments.

TRH

Machine World

I have a new computer. Have for a while. Commissioned a buddy of mine to build it, and it's pretty sweet. Pentium Quad-Core, 2.4Ghz processor, good motherboard, 2 gig of RAM (I'll be expanding that to 8 when I have the money, naturally), NVidia GeForce 8600 Graphics card (which is sweet). So, with a fair amount of power available to my disposal, The first thing I did was kick some alien booty as Gordon Freeman in Half-Life 2: Episode 2. After crowbarring half of another universe into oblivion, I looked at my computer through the plexiglas door on the case and thought to myself, "What Now?"

All that processing power, all that memory, 500gb of storage space...it's really quite excessive. All I'm going to do with it is download movies and music, an honest waste of such a nice system. So I searched.

SETI@home is a simple program. Download the host program, called BOINC, and then run SETI@home and your computer will start downloading packages of numbers to be crunched, numbers SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) collected in one of their looks at the sky. They need to process MASSIVE amounts of data looking for patterns that could be indicative of an intelligent society. Basically, my computer is looking for an alien society's version of "I Love Lucy". Turns out a lot of overclockers do this too, or other programs you can run through BOINC because it maxes out their system and is a good way of assuring that they can run their processor at such an insane speed.

Wonderful. I'm looking into space, working to solve one of the oldest questions mankind has. Thing is, I'm not much for the philanthropic, more of the misanthropic really. So, how can this benefit me? I searched, and it turns out I could potentially get PAID for those CPU cycles I'm wasting. CPUShare is a project where I register, open a sell order, and eventually somebody connects to it and decides to pay me the amount I decided on when I opened the order per hour for a chunk of my computers. It took a little bit more know-how than simply downloading and installing the BOINC program, but it actually gives you an ISO file and you either burn that to CD and restart your machine with that as the OS or you can create a virtual machine using easily available and free software that will run the program. Problem is, there are more sell orders than there are buy orders, and even though my machine frankly rocks, nobody has connected to me yet.

Eventually, though, somebody will, and while I'll only be paid .02 euros per hour, it's more than nothing, and while I may not know what I'm computing, I'll be getting paid for it and they won't actually have access to my computer itself, only a portion of the CPU and RAM allotted to them.

So all you people who want to render a digital movie and may not have the coolest processor or the most memory? Try CPUShare! They need more buyers!

TRH

End Run

I re-evaluated my overall class schedule for my college career. I no longer intend to graduate with multiple majors, rather I will graduate as Commercial Aviation. Because of this I am no longer graduation after the spring of 2009 - Should all go well, I will graduate six weeks into the fall semester of next year. I will be done within a year, and this is my LAST WINTER IN GRAND FORKS.

Of course, this isn't easy. I have 35 credits of classes to complete between now and then. I'll be doing 16 credits plus a one-credit Billiards class next semester, including the incredible workload involved with Certified Flights Instructor, followed by 8 credits for each of the two six-week sessions of Summer.

It'll be fun, right?

TRH

Candide

The Airlines have complained at length to the John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences (read: pilot factory I attend) that the finished product (my peers) are excellent at tactical skills, but severely lack Business Communication and Business Writing skills. To that end, I am sitting in ISBE 320: Business Communication and Writing. The professor is going over Negative News Letters and how we should be spinning them so as to highlight the good of the situation, using Voltaire's Candide as a talking point - best of all possible worlds.

Of course, my Misanthropy screams bloody murder as she says this, but my sense of ethics fire off as well. She's talking about not telling a hypothetical person the real reason you won't write them a letter of recommendation to Harvard Law and we vehemently disagree that she should not be so "Candide" and perhaps be a bit more candid.

It occurs to me that perhaps a lack of education is not the reason we fail at business writing.

A sense of ethics and the midwest bluntness are clearly what do us in here, which disturbs me to no small end, that the nice guy cannot succeed in business by being nice. Or maybe I'm just mad at capitalism for overwhelming me with the massive choice of video cards on the market.

TRH

Coriolis

Suppose that you were on a massive sphere (hint: you are) and that that sphere were rotating about a singular axis (hint: it is) and that you could in fact get aboard some strange variety of vehicular device which could move above the surface and seperate to it at a rate equal to the linear velocity of that particular patch of surface given the rotation speed (hint: you can). If you were to point in the direction that the patch of land directly underneath you is going and hold that vehicle in the same position, moving at the same speed as the patch of land underneath you, that patch of land would in fact MOVE.

Because the shortest distance between two points on a sphere is not in fact a straight line but a curve (hint: use string and a globe) you will by holding the attitude of the craft travel in that curved line. If going eastward in the northern hemisphere, you would curve towards the southwards, or more simply, you will always curve away from the pole who dominates your hemisphere. Meaning, you will approach the equator and given limitless fuel for your vehicular device, make a darn big sinusoidal wave of sorts.

Which means of course, that being as how you have moved, that land hasn't actually moved. It continued on it's circular path and your circular path took on new incredible dimensions - particularly, the third dimension!

All this has been made possible by the sick breeding of vector calculus, conic sections and geometric algebra. Woo math!

TRH

My Disability

I can barely walk in the wake of my recent surgery. I have improved speedwise, but I'm still bent over, as slow as an old man, and quickly tired. My sister took me to Target today and recommended I utilize one of the power-chairs.

As useful as it was, I did not enjoy the experience. I'm only in my twenties, so being in a power-chair I imagine I looked extremely out of place. I felt like everybody was looking at me. "What is he doing in a power-chair?" "Does he really need that?" "I wonder what's wrong with him?" I felt so public, and the most humiliating part was the beep-beep noise I made whenever I backed up. I had to go into the wider main aisles to be able to make a U-turn just so I didn't make that noise.

Also, I can't laugh. Laughter hurts - a lot. I keep wandering across hilarious videos on youtube and I can't appreciate them, or have a good laugh. I can't bend down to play with the family dog, or get up out of bed without serious effort. Life avoiding abdominals exertion is hell.

TRH

My Scary Day

It is 10:43 PM. 48 hours ago I was complaining to my friend Aly about a stomachache and that I was hungry. Really hungry. Like, starving empty oh-my-god hungry. I first noticed the stomachache at about 7 or 8ish. I didn’t eat that night

Next morning I woke up with a stomachache. Funny thing was, I woke up at 5 in the morning. Aching. Rolling around pressure on my gut ache. I went to the 24-hour subway and got a foot-long. Nothing. I took a hot shower, nothing. I thought it was probably the worst gas I’d ever had, a superfart that refused to travel further down my intestines. I don’t really know why, but I decided to go to the doctor at Student Health. I usually don’t go to doctors, especially not for something as simple as a stomachache.

With an hour to go before my first class, I went to the doctor hoping for a laxative or something, maybe a good punch to the gut to get the gas loose. An hour later they drew blood to run in the lab and a half-hour after that (half-hour late for Space Studies, notably) the bloodwork came back. The doctor sat me down and explained that I had a slightly high white blood cell count, as well as some excess bacteria.

This, he said, is usually a strong indicator of appendicitis. My mind skipped a beat. Appendicitis, my little head-voice said, is an inflammation of the appendix, a useless little vestige in our anatomy that nature has rendered useless but not quite done away with. The most effective treatment is an immediate removal of the organ. This means surgery.

The doctor explained that he wanted me to go over to the main hospital for imaging and other tests. I took his photocopy of the lab results and drove the few blocks to Altru. He had already called over, I just had to show up and walk in. I was booked in, checked out, poked and prodded by first a medical doctor and then a surgical resident. The general consensus was that it was indeed appendicitis. I spoke with my mom on the phone a couple times, and my friend Cass called. She asked if I needed anything, and if she should bring me over a Teddy Bear. I smiled inside, because I knew I wanted her too but I didn’t want to ask, in case somebody else overheard. Stupid as it is, I didn’t want to come across as too pitiful.

The nurse came in and put in an IV. I hate needles, and now a plastic straw went into my hand. I hate IVs. Finally, they prepped me for surgery and took me into the room. It was just like most other surgical rooms, white and clean and sterile. They put two armboards on the surgical table and tied me down with towels. It was JUST LIKE the end of Braveheart, actually. I went under and some while later, I woke up in a hospital room. I sat around for an hour or so, groggy and feeling a horrible ache in my stomach where they had made incisions, but maybe not quite as bad as the stomachache before it. I had spoken with mom before the surgery and she wanted to know if she should come up. I went for broke and said yeah, it’d be nice if she could. It’s a five hour drive, and the surgery was less than three hours, so I had some time to kill.

My friends Cass and Eric and Dave all came in around 5ish. And visited. They joked and it hurt to laugh, but it was good to laugh with friends. The best part? Cass (who is the big sister I never had) brought exactly the Teddy Bear that I wanted, without my even saying which one.

Thanks, to all.

TRH

The Algorithm

Viral Marketing

This is the concept of creating curiosity in people about an ad so that they talk about it to their friends, as with superbowl commercials. A lot of the "Modernist" (read: Abstract {read: Stupid}) ads are viral. XKCD recently pointed me at another, about "The Algorithm". Their suspicion was that it was for Ask.com. Seen on bilboards in New York City:

The algorithm consistently finds Jesus.
The algorithm killed Jeeves.
The algorithm is banned in China.
The algorithm is from Jersey.

One reply to that particular blogpost noted a number of other things that "The Algorithm" Could do. "The algorithm makes me a sandwich", "The algorithm constantly finds velociraptors". A few of mine: "The algorithm fights kittens and wins most of the time", "The algorithm can find it's way out of an empty paper bag", "The algorithm does not fear Chuck Norris". What have you got?

Terms of Endearment

Thanks greatly to a couple of recent occurrences, I’ve come up with a new term – DLO. It stands for Date-Like Occurrence. The term refers to hanging out with a person of the opposite gender (or not, depending on the user) in a situation that could be considered a date, but the term-user and partner are not per-se dating. Related Terms:

HDLO – Heavy Date-Like Object. Ends VERY well
EDLO – Expensive Date-Like Object. A concert, or similar expensive effort.

Feel free to submit more as they become relevant or upon discovery, whichever is less applicable.

Mission Statement

We, the colonies, estates, farms and panstellar imperial regencies under the jurisdiction of Ted, do hereby state our mission in this strange place to be…

- To experiment in high-velocity solid, liquid and gel-type explosives so as to further our own collective knowledge and entertainment;

- To eradicate the threat of legal language in this nation, and anywhere else it may prevail so as to decrease confusion and put smiles back on children’s faces;

- To travel at speeds equal to or greater than C (3.0 x 10^8 meters per second) so that, while infinitely luminescent, I am also of infinite mass and can claim at that time to be (and at later times to have been) the ultimate lardass;

- To provide a general danger to the sanity of those I interact with, for their general betterment, or possibly not.

TRH