All posts by Richard S. Crawford

The Earth Moved, but We Rolled Out Anyway

You may have heard that there was an earthquake up in Seattle yesterday. It registered 6.8 on the Richter scale, caused so much damage that the governor of Washington declared a state of emergency, and was felt even down here in Portland.

This wasn’t the first quake I’ve been in. I come from central California, after all, where earthquakes were pretty much a fact of daily life. But many of my co-workers here had never experienced an earthquake ever before, and there was much confusion and puzzlement on their parts. While my cube mate sat at his desk and looked around with a befuddled look on his face, I sat and blithely coded away, barely noticing that things were shaking. My cubemate said, "What’s going on? Is this an earthquake?" I said, "Yep," and pointed out that it probably felt a lot worse than it was, since we’re on the seventh floor of a nine-story building. When the Loma Prieta quake hit northern California in 1989, I was working on the second floor of an old building on the UC Davis campus; I remember how much the building swayed and rolled even then. I also remember looking up at the other programmer and saying, "I really hope that quake was pretty close by."

Later that day, of course, we saw the images of the Marina District of San Francisco engulfed in flames, the collapsed of I-880, the broken Bay Bridge, and so on. I am glad that yesterday’s quake — the strongest that this area has experienced in over fifty years — caused so little damage. Every time that something like this happens, of course, people start worrying about the upcoming "Big One" that will plunge the entire west coast of the United States into the Pacific Ocean, turning Nevada into beach front property. I’ve been hearing about the "Big One" for my entire life; I suppose that someday it might happen, but it’s been imminent for over thirty years at least. It’s kind of hard to maintain a state of terrified contingency for that long a period of time.

Aside from the quake, this week has been relatively free of disaster. Somewhat surprising, in light of the fact that we released our new platform last night, and, aside from some configuration issues on our QA server that prevented Netscape from being able to see half of our product for two or three hours, it went quite smoothly. The product was released in just under ninety minutes; certification took until 3:30 in the morning, but at the end of it the product was fully certified, with no outstanding critical or high priority defects.

There’s no rest for the wicked in this handbasket, though. Next week we begin the process of porting one of our features from MySQL to Oracle. This will be quite a challenge; it’s a feature that we pulled off the web and implemented on our servers without really fully understanding the full schema behind it, so part one of the process will be a series of meetings — online, on the phone, and in person — to explore the schema in MySQL and rebuild it in Oracle. Then migrating the data. Then going into the PHP code and reconfiguring the connections to work with Oracle (which has been one of my own specialties in this company). This means at least one, possibly two, more weeks up here in Portland. Fortunately, this project promises to be a lot of fun — as opposed to this past release which really left a bad taste in my mouth.

And the plans for the Europe trip are moving along. I’ve made my flight reservations now; I’ll be leaving in early May and flying into Dublin, then flying back home from Amsterdam in early June. My itinerary — rough though it is at this point — includes Ireland, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Amsterdam. Okay, it needs work, I know, but things are slowly coming together.

The house is proceeding quickly as well. I’m told that they’re going to start putting up the sheetrock soon; we’ve chosen the color of Corian for the kitchen countertops; and we’re soon going to reach the stage where we realize how bad an idea it was to put all of the outlets where we did.

I miss being at home during the week and being able to drive out to the lot in the evenings to look at the progress of the house. Perhaps there will be another quake in Portland…

On the Road with the Bard

There is a point to this entry, I promise. But you’ll have to read through to the very end to get it.

Despite the fact that he is an anti-Stratfordian, Bob remains one of my closest friends. We had a long conversation a year or so ago in which we talked about whether it is indeed possible that Shakespeare was written by Shakespeare (or, as Bob put it, "That guy from Stratford"), or some other guy. I haven’t followed the authorship debate very closely, since there’s never really been any doubt in my mind, but it was an intriguing discussion. There are times when I am convinced that the anti-Stratfordian position is based more on jealousy than anything else; many of those who favor it seem to think that it’s impossible that someone like Shakespeare – a poor actor, not even a noble – could have written the plays that he did. Could someone who never traveled, for example, have written such a great description of the Italy of Romeo and Juliet? In my own not too humble opinion, some people figure that if they can’t do it, then no one else could ever have done so, either.

Personally, I think that there are always more geniuses than we realize, and that we frequently don’t recognize or appreciate the ones that we know.

I’m pretentious enough to say that I love Shakespeare. I don’t always understand the language, and sometimes I skim through the longer soliloquies, but I think that Shakespeare is a lot of fun. One of the funniest plays I’ve ever seen is A Comedy of Errors (done by a high school troupe in downtown Davis, and set in 1967 San Francisco); I’m always enchanted by A Midsummer Night’s Dream; frustrated by Hamlet; haunted by King Lear; and disturbingly amused by Romeo and Juliet (probably something to do with Shakespeare’s very accurate portrayal of teen angst and the too-vivid memories of my own teen angst). When I worked at the Renaissance Faire, I enjoyed acting out scenes from Shakespeare; and I loved watching scenes performed by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, who spoofed Shakespeare’s plays brilliantly. And I recently downloaded the complete Sonnets of Shakespeare onto my Palm Pilot and I browse through them when I find myself in situations where I need something to read (here’s a helpful hint, by the way: if you have downloaded good e-texts onto your Palm Pilot, you can move the stylus on the screen and look like your taking notes during a dull meeting when you’re really just re-reading a favorite story by Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft – not that I would condone such behavior, of course).

Now, the only thing which really makes the hour-long commute to work bearable is the CD player in my new car, and the fantastic invention of audio books on CD. When I was asked what I wanted for my birthday, I said the I wanted books on CD, and that Shakespeare paraphernalia was also good. So my parents purchased for me a copy of A Winter’s Tale on CD. It’s not that easy to listen to; it’s easiest for me to understand and appreciate Shakespeare when I actually watching them performed (or watching a movie version); reading is a close second; hearing it performed without seeing what’s happening, or at least being able to read along to see what the stage directions are, is very difficult. I’ve found myself hitting the "back" button on the CD player several times to listen to a scene over again in order to understand it. I’m enjoying it, though; I’ve been working on this play on and off four a few weeks now (when I’m actually commuting to the office here in California, and not flying up to Portland) and I’m almost on the second CD.

Shakespeare inspires me. Really. I have found that reading Shakespeare – or watching a Shakespearean play or movie or even listening to one on tape or CD – helps me center and re-focus. It’s kind of like meditation. Maybe it’s because I’m concentrating on understanding the story and the language; or perhaps there really is something inspirational about the Bard.

I promised you a point, and here it is. I’ve written before about looking around the world to see what’s fascinating and interesting and even magical, like the bearded dragon in the pharmacy. One of the ways that Shakespeare excelled, I think, was in showing us what can be fascinating, interesting, and magical about humanity. Many of Shakespeare’s plays remind us that while human beings can be base and cruel, they can frequently be noble and heroic. Between that and the bearded dragon, there is a lot in this world to get excited about. Keep your eyes open, and be willing to learn instead of trying to control the world; most misery, I think, comes from frustration that the world is not meeting your expectations. But if you are willing to see what the world has to offer, things which you might never have even dreamed of, instead of narrowing your focus on what you think the world owes you, you’ll probably find yourself much better off.

It’s a lesson that I desperately need to learn.

Does this have anything at all to do with Shakespeare, or my friend Bob and his anti-Stratfordian views? Probably not. But that’s one of the great things about an on-line journal: the only person you really have to make sense to is yourself.

Sick

I am sick of having asthma.

I am sick of getting migraines.

I am sick of hypertension.

I am sick of being allergic to everything.

I am sick of having a body which manages to have some serious pain or attack of something at least once a month.

I am sick of being incompetent.

I am sick of making the same mistakes over and over again.

I am sick of explaining myself.

I am sick of saying the wrong things to the wrong people.

I am sick of walking on the razor’s edge.

I am sick of doing what I think is appropriate and finding that it is another mistake.

I am sick of being lazy.

I am sick of being thirty-three and still having no direction.

I am sick of not having accomplished anything with my life.

I am sick of screwing up.

I am sick of stress.

I am sick of responding to stress with asthma or migraines or high blood pressure.

I am sick of being unable to fulfill the commitments that I make.

I am sick of having to break promises.

I am sick of not having the time to take care of what’s important.

I am sick of procrastinating.

I am sick of being sick.

Hive Mind

"I tried to join the Borg hive-mind, but all I got were hives."

This past weekend, Jennifer and I went to DunDraCon, a role-playing game convention in the Bay Area. It had been a full year since I’d been to any sort of convention, and something like a dozen years before that. While I maintain that I am not any sort of nerd, I admit that I really enjoy these things. Even though I didn’t get to play in any games (both of the Call of Cthulhu games that Jennifer and I had signed up for were canceled, and the Fading Suns LARP that I joined didn’t work out very well for me), it was fun to see friends that I hadn’t seen for awhile and participate in seminars about the future of on-line role-playing games. One seminar that I was around for part of concerned the ways in which narrative structures are forced to change in response to "huge multi-player spaces". That is, on-line game systems which involve hundreds or even thousands of players. I had read a book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, a year or two ago which concerns exactly this subject; and even though I didn’t get to participate much in the discussion, I was fascinated by the subject.

It was a nostalgic weekend. Last year, some of my friends and I came to this same convention to playtest and begin marketing a role-playing game that we’ve been developing on our own. Unfortunately, we haven’t made much progress in developing the game, although when we play-tested it last year, it was quite a hit. And so this year I enjoyed seeing these same friends, looking around at all of the different games for sale, including Call of Cthulhu (one of my favorites), Dungeons and Dragons (now in its third edition), and more. Jennifer was less than impressed with the dealers’ room; the kind of weaponry that was on sale there was not necessarily of the quality that we would want to see on the groomsmen at our wedding. It made us glad that they’ll be able to provide their own swords.

Years ago, my friends and I used to play role-playing games frequently; in fact, there have been times when gaming was a constant activity in my apartment. At least three nights a week, for six or more hours each night, we would delve into our own imaginations and live schizophrenic lives involving paper, pencils, junk food, and dice. Lots and lots of dice. Lots and lots and lots of dice.

I miss those days.

The convention was also a nice break from work. In a way, in spite of the bronchitis and the hospital visit, these past two weeks have been rather nice. I’ve been able to avoid traveling up to Portland for work and just stay in one place. In fact, I spent more time working from home than from the office over the past two weeks. The stress level hasn’t dropped all that much, but it’s easier for me to cope with at home, surrounded by cats and even with Jennifer from time to time. But this week, things are closer to normal again. My doctor had told me last week that in light of my skyrocketing blood pressure, it might be a good idea to get a new job, with less stress. I’ve considered it, but it will probably be awhile before I think that’s really necessary.

The only really bad part of this past weekend was the hives that I broke out into. For three days, I was covered in itchy, red welts (I’m sure that I was a lovely sight). I’ve been combating it with antihistamines and cortisone, and that seems to be working. I spoke to my doctor yesterday, who took, I thought, a certain unprofessional glee in pointing out to me that among the many other causes and exacerbations of such hives, stress – particularly job-related stress – is high among them. He reiterated his suggestion about finding a new job, which does and doesn’t appeal to me.

One of the most exciting things I saw at the gaming convention was a demonstration of an on-line roleplaying environment hosted by a company called Skotos. I spent some time talking to some of the engineers and managers who worked for this company, and I found myself getting really excited by the fact that they’re using some of the same technologies that I’m using at my job and that I’ve been learning – PHP, XML, Oracle, Java, and so on. I had a long conversation with the CEO of another company which develops engines for such games, and learned that he knows the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck personally. I’ve taken some time and played in Castle Marrach, the current offering from Skotos, and while I was frustrated by the limited range of role-playing that their parser offers, I’m also excited about the potential of that company. They (as well as the other company I talked to) are essentially internet startups, and they’ve sought out funding from large entertainment companies, based on business models designed around revolutionizing entertainment and bringing on-line gaming venues to popular markets.

We’ll see if it works out for them. And I certainly hope that it does.
Jennifer has, on many occasions, told me that I’m a nerd. While I deny these false accusations firmly, I will admit that if I decided to leave the company I’m working for now to take a job with an Internet role-playing game company… Well, then, I suppose I would indeed be a nerd.

A Loss for Words

Yesterday in our office, our help desk manager announced to the developers at large that he felt he was lucky because his fiancee had told him flat out that she didn’t expect anything special for Valentine’s Day. He felt he was off the hook. The other developers, who are all married, nodded at his innocence and looked sadly at each other. I felt I had to say something, so I peered over the cubicle wall and looked him straight in the eye. "Based on past experience," I told him, "if your girlfriend or lover or fiancee or wife tells you, ‘I don’t want anything special for Valentine’s Day’, what she really means is this: ‘If you don’t do something special for Valentine’s Day, you’re going to be emasculated.’"

Having said that, I have to confess that I have been, on the whole, very fortunate. Most of my life, I haven’t had anyone to celebrate Valentine’s Day with. Sometimes I was okay with that, sometimes it depressed the heck out of me. For those years when there was someone with me on Valentine’s Day, I was usually quite fortunate to have someone who meant it when she said that she didn’t want a big deal made out of the holiday. In fact, I’ve only ever had one girlfriend who said to me, "Let’s not do anything special, Valentine’s Day makes me sick", and who subsequently gave me no end of grief when I took her word for it. (Actually, I didn’t; we went to dinner that night, but because we were both very poor she suggested that we split the tab. We did, and that was what I got the grief for: taking her at her word when she said she wanted to split the tab. Go figure.)

On the whole, Valentine’s Day has never really meant all that much to me. The first time I had a girlfriend on Valentine’s Day, I wrote her a short story and she gave me a big box of chocolates; and I think that was the last time I really did anything all that special on a Valentine’s Day (two days later, that girlfriend and I broke up; maybe it just wasn’t a very good short story). In subsequent years, I’d gone out to dinner and a movie with friends, or with myself. I remember one year I went to a vegetarian restaurant with a housemate that I had a big crush on; naturally, she didn’t quite feel the same way about me, and The English Patient is not necessarily a great date movie, but I suppose we both still had a good time.

Of course, there was also that year when, in an attempt to break myself out of a "it’s-Valentine’s-Day-and-I’m-alone" depression, I decided to take myself out to dinner and a movie… and fell down the stairs from my apartment, breaking a toe. But we won’t go into that one.

It is important, though, to do something special on Valentine’s Day. Not that there is anything special or magical about February 14; but it’s important to take some time and make it special with the people that you love. In the past, I’ve always thought that doing something special meant going out to dinner at a nice restaurant, maybe seeing a movie, going out of my way to be incredibly "romantic" and charming and so on. To be honest, just the idea always kind of wore me out.

But this year was different. Because we both have such hectic work schedules (even when we’re both in the same state), it’s frequently much easier for us to meet at a restaurant for dinner on the way home from our respective jobs, or grab something at a drive through, or go out for dinner after we’ve both been at home for half an hour or so and are both too exhausted to do anything about cooking. So, going out for dinner is not really a special event for us. But my boss had given me a bonus to do something nice for Jennifer for Valentine’s Day (the job may be insane and the working hours outrageous, but my boss is terrific), so we celebrated in our own way: by having dinner at home. We had sliced cheese, fruit, and home made pretzels that Jennifer had baked. We ate at the dining room table — an unusual situation in itself, since when we do get to eat at home we’re usually eating in the computer room or at the coffee table in the living room! — with candles for lighting and her cats to serenade us. Jennifer had put more planning into our Valentine’s Day dinner than I had, and I really appreciated it. Jennifer has a way of letting me know how she feels for me without saying a word, and I’ve never doubted her feelings.

In some ways, being with Jennifer is very unusual for me. Jennifer comes with no ambiguity. I’ve always known where I stand with her; there have been times when I wasn’t sure if she was upset with me or just tired after a long day, but if I ask her and she tells me, "I’m just tired," I know that’s what it is. I’ve always appreciated that sort of honesty and openness (though I was once told that my appreciation of such honesty was really just a cover-up for my own laziness and unwillingness to put forth any effort in a relationship — not, thankfully, by Jennifer, of course).

Jennifer enhances everything in my life. I tend to be a bit of a loner, and I value my privacy and my solitude. But I have never preferred solitude to having Jennifer in the same room with me. When other girlfriends have left for a few days, I’ve always breathed a sigh of relief to have some time with myself. But Jennifer is almost like a part of myself; I breathe a sigh of relief when she comes home.

Frequently, I find that I just don’t have the words to express the way I feel for Jennifer. When I try, my tongue gets crowded up in my mouth or my fingers stumble over my keyboard.
Fortunately, though, sometimes Jennifer is able to say just the right things for me. And when she writes like this, how can I possibly doubt how she feels about me?

The Post-Cyanotic Blues

As far as life-long, high-maintenance medical conditions are concerned, I suppose that asthma isn’t the worst possible one to have. Jennifer and I watched ER last night and we both felt very sorry for the young boy who had had two heart transplants already and was facing a third, and who had been taking so many drugs throughout his life to treat his condition that his body was permanently altered by the side effects. He was essentially trapped within his own body, and I personally didn’t blame him at all for not wanting yet another heart transplant.

When I was younger, I was told that I was growing to grow out of my asthma. Most kids do. Adult-onset asthma is relatively rare in and of itself, and the number of people who don’t grow out of their asthma is relatively small. Obviously, I did not grow out of my asthma; throughout high school and college and into real life, asthma has been part of my existence. I suppose that even until recently, I had harbored the hope that my asthma would eventually go away, that I’d be able to live without the daily medications or the monthly visits to my pulmonologist or the occasional hospital stay. I had figured that a decent diet, along with some exercise, would help put it behind me.

But this week in the hospital, I realized that it simply isn’t going to be the case.

Sure, over time, my asthma may get better. But I will never be free of the medication. I will probably be taking something for my asthma every single day for the rest of my life, and probably more than once per day. There will always be pills, inhalers, nebulizers. At one point during the week, the respiratory therapist who delivered my breathing treatments told me that they may decide to send me home with portable oxygen.

It was that last part that really scared me, and really drove it home for me. I have nightmares about becoming one of those really old men who has to carry an oxygen tank wherever he goes… and apparently there is a possibility that it might come true. Even though my blood O2 levels never fell below 95%, which is excellent, I suppose there is always the possibility that my lungs — already scarred and damaged by over thirty years of asthmatic behavior — will someday lose their efficiency as oxygen derivers, and I’ll be forced to that step.

Asthma is kind of a scary disease. When you’re very young, and you don’t really understand what’s happening, it’s easy to panic and get scared when all you know is that you can’t breathe. And when you’re 33, it’s still easy to get scared when you’re trying hard to breathe but just can’t get the air to move. A really bad attack can be like breathing through one of those tiny straws that you use to stir coffee; one of those tiny straws that’s been bent so there’s even less flow. The tiny airways in your lungs get clogged; mucous builds up, tiny muscles contract, tissue swells. When you breathe, if you can, you hear wheezing, rasping, possibly gurgling. If you’re having a really bad attack, you turn cyanotic — you get so little oxygen flowing through your blood that your extremities, like your lips and your fingernails, turn blue. That’s only happened to me once that I can recall, and I was very young at the time. But it’s one of the questions that I am regularly asked when I go to a doctor with an asthma attack: are you cyanotic, are you turning blue?

So the medicines which they give you to control asthma if you’re a severe asthmatic basically treat the three effects of an asthma attack: beta-antagonist adrenalin derivatives (such as Albuterol) to control the muscle spasms (this makes sense; with more adrenalin in your body, your smooth muscles, like the ones which line your lungs, relax, allowing you to get more air into your body so that you can run faster from that lion); corticosteroids such as Pulmi-Cort or Azma-Cort to control the tissue swelling (mostly inhaled, sometimes orally administered, such as Prednisone — sometimes injected, like Salumedrol); and a host of other medications to control the mucous. Atrovent, I think, is supposed to help with that. And then there are a whole bunch of drugs that work, without any real good reason: Theophylline, for some reason, is a very effective medication for long-term treatment of asthma. The last time I asked my doctor how it works, he said something about adeno-triphosphate and how Theophylline seems to improve its efficacy in respiratory processes. I knew more or less what he was talking about; on the other hand, I also got the sense that he didn’t know much more than I did.

So now I’m on a whole new host of medications: more Prednisone than I’ve taken in nearly fifteen years, and heavy antibiotics — since an asthmatic’s lungs are prone to getting worse infections if one happens to settle in. What bothers me the most are, of course, the side effects: Prednisone has some well documented emotional side effects, and I’m finding myself irritable, cranky, and short-tempered. Combine that with the light-headedness that one of the antibiotics is causing, and you have yourself a Richard who’s pretty much useless right now (though I suppose some would argue that there really isn’t much of a difference). The only thing that’s good is that I know why it is I’m feeling cranky and irritable right now and so I can keep it in check.
And so here I am. With asthma. For the rest of my life. Asthma is on the rise, and the number of deaths due to asthma is increasing year by year (although I think that it ironically has to do with the increasing efficiency of the short-term medications that some asthmatics come to rely on instead of the long-term care that they really need). While my asthma isn’t nearly as bad as it was twenty years ago, it’s certainly not good. I would like it to be gone, of course. But it’s not going to. Like it or not, I’m stuck with it.

Showering with One Hand Wrapped in Plastic

My apologies to any of my readers who work in hospitals. Nothing personal, but I hate them. Hospitals, that is, not the people who work in them.

Around 8:00 last night, I wound up having to go to the emergency room again. I was still having trouble breathing… lots of trouble. It had been going on all day, but at 8:00 I finally admitted that I was pretty sick and should go back to the ER, and Jennifer said, "Good." After another 4 hour visit, the physician on call decided to admit me on the grounds that after 4 hours on the nebulizer I was still having labored breathing. And, so, here I am.

This newest asthma adventure of mine is apparently more than a mere flare up. This is some sort of lung infection caused by chlamydia or something like that. My peak flow — the measure of how much air you expel from your lungs, measured in liters per minute — is fine, and the doctors can detect very little wheezing or other odd lung sounds, but I’m still short of breath and I get winded easily — walking, say, from my hospital bed to the bathroom. I had hoped to leave this hospital today, but when the doctor listened to my lungs, the first thing he said was, "Yep, he’s going to be here for another day." I groaned inwardly; I have a lot of work to do that I can’t do from the hospital, and I miss being at home. At least, though, I could avoid going to Portland this week (my apologies to my regular readers from Portland; it’s a beautiful city, but I’ve spent enough time there).

One of the things that I dislike about hospital stays is the smell. When you sit in one bed for more than a day, you acquire… well… an odor. The last time I was here, I wanted to do something about it, but was told that showers were not an option unless I wanted a nurse’s assistance — and for some reason I allowed my modesty to overcome my desire for cleanliness. So this time, you can imagine how excited I get when the Nursing Assistant came in to my hospital room this morning and said, "Would you like to have a shower?" Naturally, I said yes. The downside, though, was that there is no shampoo available here so I had to wash my hair with hand soap; and the protect the shunt in my hand where they’ve been sticking IV medications (a clever practice, and a nice way to avoid getting repeated IV’s; they just stick a plastic catheter in and leave it there and inject new medications through that), my hand would have to be wrapped in cellophane and a latex glove. So I wound up there in the shower with one hand wrapped up completely in plastic and trying to wash myself down with the removable shower hose and trying to wash hair with hand soap and trying not to splash water all over the bathroom.

Hm. Perhaps the shortness of breath I had at the end of the shower wasn’t due so much to the asthma as to the mere gymnastics involved in taking a shower.

Jennifer and I had originally planned, last night, to go over the floor plans for the house and decide once and for all where the computer room is going to be. We had thought that we should put it in the south side of the house, on the argument that the room there is larger; but now we’re thinking that the front of the house might be better, since the room there is cooler during the day. Well, our plans for that were spoiled by my errant lungs, of course… but at least Jennifer is going to be able to come over to my hospital room tonight; she’ll be bringing the floor plans and we’ll be able to make a decision tonight, in the hospital. Naturally, my preference is for the two of us to go home and do this planning together there, but this is good enough, I suppose. While I may not get to spend the night at home yet, at least it’s the middle of the week and we’re both in the same state.

Until next time….

Club Albuterol Now Accepting New Members

Jennifer’s mother is a hospital chaplain, and she tells me that she has seen several people with minor cases of asthma who use their asthma to get attention; it’s sort of like those people, I suppose, who claim that every headache that they have is a migraine headache, when, in fact, all they have are simple vascular or tension headaches.

I guess I can see it. I admit that I’m not above using my asthma as a convenient excuse to play hooky from work every now and then (though I haven’t since I left the Labor Relations department at the University six months ago); and when I was in school, I even (and this will come as a shock to many readers, I know) used it as an excuse to play hooky then as well.

But apparently there are people who take it to an extreme of some sort. Some people feel lonely and use their asthma as an excuse to go to the hospital and get some extra attention. I personally have never done that; I hate going to the hospital and getting the breathing treatments and the shots and the new medications. The other night at the emergency room, I was given an injection of cortisone through a needle that I’m sure was designed by the Defense Department; nothing with a bore that large is meant to be inserted into the human body, not even into the hip (my apologies to every single woman out there who has undergone an amniocentesis examination; I know that the needle used for that exam has a bore wide enough to drive a truck through, and I know that men are wimps when it comes to pain compared to women who always have the "natural childbirth" ace to hold over us). And cortisone itself is not a pretty drug; sure it helps with the asthma but the side effects of long use — osteoporosis, liver and kidney damage, and so on — are just not pretty. In high school, I was on daily maintenance doses of Prednisone, and the acne that it gave me was bad enough to get me the nickname, "Oil Face". Even now, when I take Prednisone, I still get pretty bad acne.

I had my very first asthma attack when I was less than a year old, my mother tells me; all I know is that asthma has been a part of my life for as far back as I can remember. I spent a lot of time at the hospital when I was young, including six weeks at Stanford Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto; even though I was four or five years old at the time, I still have vivid memories of that stay.

The first doctor I remember seeing regularly for my asthma was a Japanese man who looked about thirty even though he was pushing fifty at the time (I think). He frequently encouraged me, when I was a kid, to take up yoga or meditation, his idea being that relaxation, discipline, and overall goood health were probably the best approaches to asthma control, much more so than medication. I wish now that I had taken him up on his advice and suggestions when I was much younger. I’m sure my asthma would be under much better control now than it is. When this doctor passed away a few years ago, I confess that I nearly cried.

When I was in college, dealing with asthma was easy; there were lots of doctors on the campus in the Student Health Center, and the student insurance covered everything. Right after I got out of college I wound up without a job and no way of paying for my medical expenses. For years I dealt with my asthma by using over-the-counter inhalers and no maintenance medications whatsoever. I’m pretty sure that I did my lungs a good deal of damage during that period of time. I was very fortunate to find a physician who was willing to treat me at greatly reduced rates and give me free samples of the medication I needed to treat my asthma. When I finally got a job which had medical insurance, I continued going to the same doctor, though I paid full rates of course.

Anyway, the point is this: I really hate having asthma.

Asthma — especially the degree of asthma that I have — is a pretty high-maintenance disease. Between my new antibiotics and steroids, in addition to my regular maintenance medications, I counted a total of eleven pills that I have to take twice a day.

That sucks.

My biggest worry right now is how I’m going to take care of my asthma while I’m on the road in Europe in May. I’ve posted my concerns to a couple of different on-line forums, and talked to my doctor’s head nurse. I think it will be okay, but so much for traveling light. With all of my pills and inhalers, my backpack is going to be full of lots of stuff.

With asthma, my lungs take every opportunity available to turn any illness into bronchitis. A cold turns into bronchitis. So does the flu. Or a mild respiratory infection of any sort. Stomach flu. Athlete’s foot. All of them turn into bronchitis, I swear.

So here I sit, working from home today, having convinced my boss that I don’t need to go to Portland this week, with bronchitis and feeling very whiney.

So. Are there really people in the world who use their asthma for attention, or who even fake it to get attention? Seems like there are. And I confess that I just don’t understand it. All in all, I much prefer people paying attention to me because I’m a fun, interesting, charming person (how could I possibly be otherwise?) than because I happen to be unable to breathe from time to time.

Ah, well. Breathing is overrated anyway.

Until the next time I have a chance to play with the new "save entry as draft" feature of the on-line journal maintenance program I’ve written, I remain…

Addendum, three hours later: I have added the ability to add "widgets" to each of these journal entries. The "Jabberwock Inn" image and the car images to the right are examples of widgets, snippets of HTML code which are associated with this journal entry in the same database which tracks all of the entries. The next step is a web-based interface for creating widgets and associating them with journal entries.

Electricity

In the grand scheme of things — compared, I suppose, to what a lot of other people are working on — this little software of mine that I can use to update my journal dynamically is just not a big deal. Not compared to what we’re working on at my company, where dozens of developers work on big chunks of programming and a massive database in Oracle; no, this is just a few lines of code, probably less than two hundred, with a little MySQL database running in the background to keep track of my journal entries and make sure they get properly inserted into the pages as they’re built when the user calls them up. So it’s kind of comforting, in a way, to work on this thing which I control all by myself, where I make the database and I write the program and the web pages that it works with, and where all of the mistakes are mine and I’m not really accountable to anyone. I’ve got the ability now to update and edit and delete entries all on-line, and it’s made everything easier already. And, in accordance to a request from Jennifer, my home page now updates dynamically as well; normally I go in and hard code the titles of my last three journal entries onto my main page; now that happens automatically. Next, I need to add some functions that will let me add images and extra links to the sidebar to the right of this text. Shouldn’t be too hard.

And now on to something completely different.

Progress on the house has gone pretty quickly, and the builder says that the house should be completed by "Marchy-April". Hopefully, it will be done before May so that Jennifer won’t have to worry about packing, moving, and cleaning on her own while I’m off in Europe that month. We’ve been maintaining a website dedicated to our house’s progress, and you can see it at www.stonegoose.com/house. They’ve started putting on the composite roofing, and the siding is supposed to be done by the end of next week. Which means, of course, that we’ve now reached the stage where our contractor — with whom we’ve been very pleased so far — gets this grin on his face when we come up with some ideas that we think sound Really Cool but which just won’t work anymore.

For example: when we visited Jennifer’s sister and brother-in-law over New Year’s Eve, we saw that they had an electrical outlet recessed into the floor in their living room. That, we thought, was very clever and a good idea; it would save having to drag electrical cords for lamps all over the living room, and we could put furniture on top of it to hide it. We suggested this to our contractor, who got The Grin and said: "Well, what would have once been a $50 job is now a $500 job…" But one of the reasons why we like this contractor so much is that he also went on to explain why such a feature would have been a bad idea anyway… you always have to worry about hiding the outlet, and it gets filled with dirt and has to therefore be replaced every year or so, and so on.

But it is now time to start thinking about wiring. Jennifer and I went to the house today, dragging her mother along, and went through each of the rooms and came up with ideas for where to put outlets and lamps and switches. And, of course, being the book and computer nerds that we are, our highest priorities were making sure that the house would have adequate reading light and adequate power supply in the computer room. We just happened to see the A/C sub-contractor at the house while we were there, and he suggested that we might also put an outlet fan in the computer room to help keep it cooler; and we thought it would be a grand idea. Along with the idea of putting in an extra exhaust fan in the closet where the cats’ litter boxes are going to be.

This is all still very overwhelming for me at times. It’s now stretching the point where I can say, "Six months ago, I was still a secretary at a public University with few prospects yada yada yada". But it’s still been less than a year; and now, here I am, in a programming job, engaged to be married to my best friend and soulmate, and building a home. How things change.

Of course, some things remain comfortingly familiar. Late last night, after three days of fighting off a case of bronchitis, I finally, at Jennifer’s urging, went to the emergency room with seriously clogged lungs and a fever. Nothing major, not like I had when I had pneumonia last year, but still serious enough for me to lie in bed shivering and complaining about how cold it was under the three or four blankets that Jennifer had piled on top of me. While wandering around the house today with Jennifer and her mother, I started coughing and feeling short of breath. I’m familiar with this feeling, having lived with asthma all of my life, and while I was light-headed from coughing a couple of times, I felt okay wandering around the outside of the house on the beams of the porch looking at outlet possibilities. It was only when Jennifer’s mother said, "Richard, I know you’re a grown man but I’m starting to get worried about you," that I finally agreed to go home. I’m not the kind of guy who breaks an arm and says, "I’ll just walk it off," but I have lived with asthma all my life and I’m pretty familiar with my limits. Still, though, it was nice to get home and lie down for a bit.

I moved away from my parents’ house almost fifteen years ago, and since then I’ve gotten pretty used to coping with asthma attacks on my own. And while my asthma has definitely improved over that time, it was still nice to have someone looking out for me. I’m not saying that my own parents never did, it’s just that I live over 100 miles away from them now and it’s not really convenient for them to keep a watchful eye over me at all times.

Well, I think that this long entry will be a sufficient test of my new online posting system. Now to see if I can convince my boss that bronchitis is a sufficient reason to let me avoid going up to Portland again this week…

Until next time…

Brand New Style, Brand New Habits

It’s not perfect yet, but I’m coming close to a point where this journal is going to be very, very easy to maintain. Whereas before I had to update several HTML files in order to post a new entry (the current entry, the one before it, and the main index page), I now only have to write up a journal entry in plain text with HTML markup, upload it, and update a database. I haven’t gotten to the point where I can do it all with a single on-line form (password-protected, of course), but it’s getting much closer. The PHP program that I’ve written takes care of updating the journal index page and building the individual entry pages on the fly. All new entries from this point on will be built dynamically and the URL will have a .php extension. The bad thing is that until I get a bit more clever, I won’t be able to link the first PHP page to the last HTML page. So bear with me; there are earlier entries than this one. Some of the other problems that I can think of already are the lack of ability to add supplemental information to the sidebar, and a difficulty in placing images. But those will be pretty easy to fix, I think… just a few clever tweaks to my PHP code and the database, and I’ll be golden.

This has really been the first time in several weeks that I’ve had a chance to sit down and practice with something new. My job has been insane lately, with longs hours spent out of the state, and a workload which borders on the impossible. While working on our new release, I’ve been neglecting other projects that have been on my plate for some time and which now have looming deadlines. Last night I received a nasty e-mail from our sales manager demanding to know what progress I had made on a tool I had promised her which would report on all new accounts registered at the trade shows we visit. I have yet to reply to her, because I’m worried about coming across as defensive and offended, but the truth is that I simply haven’t had time to work on her project since the development of our new release was announced. Fortunately, now that we’ve managed to stage this release in the QA environment, things are going to be a bit easier for me. Initial development is over; catching bugs is the QA team’s responsibility, squashing them is a responsibility that I share with about a dozen other developers. That’s going to be much easier, I think, than initial development… unless something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

On a more positive note, I received my first performance evaluation from my boss last Thursday, and it was a good one. My boss pretty told me that my greatest strength is my eagerness to learn and my willingness to take on new responsibility; and that my biggest problem is my eagerness to learn and my willingness to take on new responsibility. It’s true. I’ve been excited about new technologies that I get exposed to, and I’m interested in taking on a whole host of projects to prove my worth to the company… and, I suppose, to myself. But for me it’s unusual to be in an environment where I can take on new projects without being seen as a threat to someone else; when at the University, if I volunteered to take on a new project which would require a new skill, I was frequently voted down by people who wanted to do that same project on their own — not because it was something challenging, but because it was something different. Nothing wrong with that, but it frustrated me frequently. I’m still not used to a new mode of operation here: now, when I volunteer for a new project, it’s given to me. But it’s still far too easy for me to take on more anyway. I think I’m getting better though; at one point last week, our product manager came up to me and said, "I’m very proud of you, Richard. You didn’t volunteer for a single new task during today’s development meeting."

Lots more has been going on in the time since I’ve been able to write regularly in this journal. But for now, I’ll close, since this entry is more a test to see if my new system is working than anything else.