Wired Sage

I went to the Doctor and he told me I had a cute bronchitis. Personally I found nothing ‘cute’ about my recent affliction with Bronchitis. The Doctor insisted however, it was a cute one. I told him that I personally felt it was particularly ugly. I did get a chuckle out of him. But then he also laughs when I throw my arms up in the air and say, “Doc it really hurts when I do this!” He’s probably just laughing at me, not with me.

I suffered for a week without visiting the doctor. Well, maybe not suffered, toughed it out is more like it. I coughed up something with the consistency of silly-putty and decided it was time to enlist the help of our modern medical establishment. I went to the Doctor for round one of antibiotics, the wimpy ones — a 5 day z-pack (azithyromycin). It was no help at all. When the z-pack ran out I went back to the Doctor for round 2 — a 10 day treatment of Omnicef. Which actually offered some relief. The whole time I was also taking other medications to help the symptoms, ibuprofen for the swelling in my lungs, Tylenol for pain and fever, and Advir inhaler which is a steroid used to open up the bronchi to help clear the crap out of there.

Now, imagine being sick enough to want to lay in bed all day, but well enough to sit at a desk and type. Then imagine a rotten economy, mergers, Internet operations, Internet security, production support, and all the stress that would go along with those. Yes. I worked through my sickness. And, as lousy as I sounded, with my barking cough, I really only got sympathy from a handful of individuals at work. That’s how stressed everyone is.

This is the beginning of week number five (#5) and I’m just starting to feel better. All of my hobbies and recreational activities have fallen by the way side. I’m behind on the myriad of video projects I’ve promised folks. I feel like I’ve just woken from a dream about a tornado and a strange world with flying monkeys.

I’m here. If you missed me, write to me.

This week was tumultuous.

James Aiken, a friend and the principal of my daughter’s school passed away this week at the age of 52. The funeral was Saturday in Cherryville, NC. It was about an hour and a half drive by car.

Work was having a Disaster Event this weekend. A Disaster Event is a planned event that we say, “OK, a giant sink hole opened up underneath our production facility. All systems are down and unreachable. Get our disaster site up and running immediately. Ready. Set. Go.” And of course I had a mistake that was brought to light during the exercise which I had to fix.

I got a hair up my butt, and decided to answer the question, “Who watches the watchmen?” The answer of course was “I did last night.” A friend of mine and I decided to catch the 9:30 p.m. showing. I knew it was a long movie, so I set up my playlist early. I recorded and queued some talkie bits. I even set up a multi-million-meat giveaway. But when I tried to connect to the CLAM Shoutcast server at 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time (Sunday morning, 01:30 UT) I received a password error. I didn’t have time to trouble shoot it.

When I got back home, still in good time for Intraweb Radios, there was a pit bull in my front yard. I had a hard time getting out of the car. But soon came to realize that this particular dog was friendly, thirsty, and cold. I got her some water and a blanket. She wanted to come in the house, but it was just after midnight, my kids were sleeping, and I have a dog. Imagine the ruckus that would have caused… “My dog and this dog wake up my kids. My wife goes for the butcher knife… not for the dogs but for me.” Just my imagination, but probably not far from the truth. So I wrapped this sweet little pit bull in a blanket and sat with her, out in the cold, waiting for animal control to come pick her up.

When I finally got online, I found the Shoutcast server accepting my login information, but no audience. So instead I watched the final episode of Battlestar Galactica — good ending.

I ran out at lunch today to pick up the Blue Djinni from Pre-School and grab a bite to eat. I asked her whether I should go to Jack in the Box and she said, “You need Chinese.” She was right. I had an unfulfilled craving for Chinese take-out the other day. So, I picked up some vegetable lo mein, an egg roll and a fortune cookie. This was my fortune. I had to share it with you.

You create your own stage and your audience is waiting!

Creepy, but fitting.

‘Great Uncle’ Dennis gave me some great inspiration for new video content. Speed Freak and Basketball Girls are inspired from our email correspondence. If he weren’t so manly I’d probably call him a muse; but, the flannel, bearded image of him in my mind’s eye won’t allow that. Sorry, G.U.D. you’re no Sharon Stone.

In this video clip, first Tweedle-A gets equal time to show off her other-worldly skills in her bid for the WNBA. Then while Tweedle-A works on her mad dribbling skills, Tweedle-L shows off her ability to make baskets on a regulation height goal.

Maybe they’ll be the “Williams Sisters” of Basketball? Or maybe it’ll just be a fun thing they like to do to stay in shape.

Tweedle-L has just finished her latest round of genetic enhancement treatments at the Yakamoto Laboratories in Japan. There they recently spliced in genes from the chetah. This video was taken just days after her treatment. You can see the noticeable improvements in her speed in this video.

Captured from my JVC HDD Everio Camera to iMovie 8.0. Edited and exported with Quicktime in DV format. Imported into Final Cut where the speed was increased 200%, rendered and exported using Quicktime again as a quicktime movie. Uploaded to my hosting service and modified from the 7.6MB .mov file to a 1MB .flv file.