Got my arm worked on again. There were two pockets of infection that hadn't worked their way out. They drained them with a scalpel and a syringe, and now I get darvocet and augmentin. Good times.

240 posts back and I'm giving up. It's starting to look familiar so I'm sure I've caught almost everything. If you were expecting a comment from me somewhere, let me know where.

Let's see, what has happened the last few weeks?

+ Becky bought her mom's car. We're a two car household now!

– I got a bad infection in my arm. I thought it was a bug bite, but the kind folks in the ER told me it was an infection of my hair follicle, leading to cellulitis. Google that term if you want some gross photos. If you want ones that are more representative, I've been tracking the changes with my camera, so if you want 7mp of infected arm goodness, I has it.

I had to be admitted to the hospital, and i spent the night in observation getting IV antibiotics every 6 hours. I took my 10 days of antibiotics afterwards, every 6 hours, faithfully. I run out tomorrow and it's not totally gone yet. I bet they're going to jab me with more needles. 🙁

– Taking vicodin and keflex does bad things to your bowels. Nothing medically relevant, thank God (at least so far, anyway) but that combo has left me in a mild bit of misery in ways that you can imagine if you read the side effects on each one. (See how I'm saving you the really gruesome detail I'd usually make sure to throw in? Consider it your Thanksgiving present!)

+ I finally got a working printer in the house. It's a nice brother laser printer and networked scanner. It was an excellent deal (under $300) and includes native IPv6 support. Very excellent. It sends scanned stuff over FTP to a selectable list of places. It emails me if it runs out of paper. It's awesome.

+ I upgraded the webserver to dual 500GB SATA II drives with 16GB cache from it's 250GB raid with one failed drive. This is of course a huge upgrade and has been made of win. What made it more win was the drives were on sale at Microcenter for $60-70 apiece.

+ An old friend from highschool has caught up with me on facebook. This is also made of win. I lost his email address and contact info in the raid a few years ago.

+ My satellite tracking software I wrote to track the international space station, and adjust my radio to compensate for the doppler shift of an object that's got a ground speed of over 3km/sec. It works!

– The problem is that the ISS wasn't on the air when I tried to call them. Doh! Hope to manage to score a contact with the space station this weekend.
PS: ICom's CI-V serial protocol sucks balls but can be used for this if you tweak things just right. I need to make a version for my kenwood in the car. (My car's ham radio is the same model used on the ISS)

I'm sure I forgot things. I've been busy at work as always, and social events were had, and good times were had. I love you guys!

http://www.dominos.com/home/mobile.jsp

YOU CAN ORDER PIZZA FROM YOUR CELL PHONE NOW!!!! MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON!

What will technology bring next?

PictureMail
Originally uploaded by Paul Timmins.

PictureMail
Originally uploaded by Paul Timmins.

Our house has crazy ass antennas now. We have in the last few days picked up texas, and today we picked up a photo sent over ham radio (20m SSTV for those in the know) from both Madrid, Spain and somewere in England.

Seriously we have serious gear now.

Also we got a ICOM 706MKIIG for our radioing now. It's most excellent. I've wanted one of these for years. They're excellent ham radios. It's our mutual early Christmas present to each other. (Last years was a DVD changer and a surround sound receiver)

	My desk at work, as seen from a convex mirror
	Close ups of our antennas
	Our house, from the corner of Dequindre and Fontaine. You can sorta tell we have some antenna stuff going on

Things done since the last post:

* Bonfire at brad and laura's.

* Migrated our network to have its numbers directly through our own facilities rather than through an intermediate carrier. We're now fully provider independent on the phone side, relying on no 3rd party to port numbers or make or receive calls in MI. Woo. This involved porting several thousand telephone numbers. Good times.

* Watched the debates with friends.

* Went to the Obama rally downtown. Got a lot of great pictures of secret service agents on rooftops. I've got Guy that stands up completely, Two guys on the really tall building, peeking over the roofline, The "wow, those are huge fucking binoculars" guy. Here is a good picture of Joe Biden, and here's a picture of the TSA people who ran the metal detectors, protecting the candidate from any stray outside food or beverages (at first I thought it was a ploy to force you to use the local vendors, until I found there were no vendors in the sterile zone (!)). They also took my wire cutters I forgot I was carrying, not that I blame them for that one at least. I've also got pictures of a huge contingent of Detroit's finest, though they were far less amused with my photography * than you are now, probably. 🙂
* (Look at that officer's face. He's clearly Not Amused (TM) )

* Last night we all went to a local establishment and consumed alcohol. Good times were had.

Courtesy of W8TVI's temporarily stolen (by me) cameraphone, here's photographic evidence of my continued existence:

I could use my own cameraphone, or any of my many cameras or image taking devices, but what's the fun in that?

No progress on the 1+1=3 front, but the project has at last passed doctoral muster once again. Becky gave her endocrinologist the boot after long last (In my opinion, the last one was a totally unqualified fucker and probably should find a different specialty), and found a new one that was previously part of the last one's practice, until she was evidently fed up with his shit, and started her own (across the parking lot, amusingly). She seems to actually monitor her sugars and stuff, between appointments, rather than just asking for ballpark averages and adjusting her insulin every 3 months, should he schedule the appointments that often. So hooray for that!

Sleeptime.

I read livejournal everyday, I rarely miss an entry. Of course, I rarely comment too.

I need to post more than once a month. Really, I do.

Anyway, here's what's happened in the last 30 days. I'll do the bullet point thing:

* Sister's baby shower, got to hang out with my Aunt from Texas, and we took her back to Detroit Metro from Dad's house in Grand Haven so that was cool. Becky had never been in an airport before, so I showed her around. (we had gate passes because my aunt needs assistance boarding the aircraft, so after she departed we had free run of the terminal for a bit.)

* We went to Dan M's birthday party in West Branch. Becky took a number of great pictures here. I have a few too, but they're not as good so I didn't post them. I had the higher megapixels and the stronger image processor on the camera but her zoom lens is slightly stronger than mine and she was actively pursuing photos so hers easily outpace my own.

* Had dinner or hung out a varying number of times with ninadiel, hollywoodpanic, niteshad, slash616 and Brad and Laura.

* Lots of work stuff, mostly dealing with the completion of our facilities network, and the migration of customers therof. It's really cool to start see it taking load, realizing that a year ago this didn't exist in even the most minor form. And it wasn't even something I expected to do for a couple of years when I started at my employer. All my personal numbers get ported onto the new network tomorrow, so that will be pretty cool as well.

* With the help of niteshad, Brad, Ben, and ladymace's masterful trap setting, we caught one of the squirrels that have been living in my chimney. (we have since caught one more, with one to go). Then I can pay lots of money to fix whatever damage has been done by the infestation. Here's a video of the first one we caught, that we had to let go because it was caught after hours and the animal control people weren't around. Here's video of the angry squirrel in its cage:

Here's the squirrel again, running like a bat out of hell into his new home, about 3-5 miles north of our place.

niteshad has a more exhaustive post on the happenings here. Any further elaboration by myself would result in a duplication of effort, and he's done an great job explaining what was up.

And if anyone here needs me to scan the contents of this envelope, let me know. I'm sure you all have it on lockdown though.