Thursday, February 28, 2008

Windows Live SkyDrive

I’ve been writing online love letters to Google, lately, so I guess it’s Microsoft’s turn. And, as usual, this product may have been available for a long time, but I just found out about it today.

Microsoft has introduced Windows Live SkyDrive, which is a document storage service. They’re currently providing up to 5GB of space for free, which is pretty good, but I believe you can pay for additional space, too, if you need it. If I’d known about this a while ago, I could have put it to use, although there isn’t currently anything that I need to store online. (Except for the documents I have in Google Docs, for which storage is a non-issue.)

There are rumours that Google will be introducing a similar service, called Google Drive or something, but I don’t think they have yet done so. (Or they might have introduced it to a select number of GMail users.)

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

RUTR 2008

Roll Up The Rim season is upon us again, and, as is my wont, I’ve started a spreadsheet, to tally my winnings.

My spreadsheets are getting cooler and cooler with every passing year: the first year I used Excel to build it, with a nice pie chart; the second year, because I was in love with OpenOffice—not that I’m out of love with OpenOffice now—I used Calc to create my spreadsheet; this year, I’m using Google Docs to create my spreadsheet. (Actually, Google Docs allowed me to import the Calc spreadsheet from last year, so all I had to do was modify it for 2008, instead of creating it from scratch.)

At the end of the year, instead of posting my chart here—or maybe in addition to posting it here—I can simply link to the spreadsheet online, and you can go and check the math yourself. (Because, again, I know my readers—they love checking my math…)

I’m on training this week

Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
So how's that training thing going?

sernaferna says:
Bah.

sernaferna says:
It's so s.l.o.w.

Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
What's the subject?

sernaferna says:
ALBPM

sernaferna says:


Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
Is that dyslexic-talk for pablum? are you having a training session on baby food?

sernaferna says:
Yep. That's why it's so boring.

Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
You should just smear baby food on your face during the session

sernaferna says:
I already have. The instructor had to take a couple of hours to explain that, no, the food goes into that hole on the front of your face.

(It's called a "mouth" - that will be on the exam.)


Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
As opposed to the hole at the other end. Which is called a hoop.

Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
Or a sphincter.

sernaferna says:
a hoop?

Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
Y'know... the brown hoop of happiness?



sernaferna says:
lol

I hadn't heard that phrase before. I've learned something new.


sernaferna says:
BTW, do you mind if i post this conversation?

Monday, February 25, 2008

Charcoal

I tried to make beef stew on Saturday. It’s a very easy recipe, that my parents gave me years ago; two pounds of stewing beef, carrots, celery, potatoes, two cups of V8 juice, three tablespoons of tapioca (to make it a bit thicker), a bit of sugar and some salt—throw it all into a roasting pan, and put it in the oven at 250° for 4–6 hours.

Unfortunately, I misread the instructions, and I put the oven at 450° instead of 250°. The smell of smoke was very gradual, so I didn’t notice anything was wrong for three hours. By that time, when I pulled the pan out of the oven, the food was just charcoal. And that’s not an exaggeration; there was nothing left but carbon.

I think the pan is useless now.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

U.S. Shooting Down a Spy Satellite

As you may already have heard, the U.S. has a malfunctioning spy satellite, and they’ve decided to shoot it down. They’re afraid that it’s going to come crashing down on its own, and perhaps release some toxic gas in the process.

Unfortunately, I just found out today where the debris will be coming down, when they shoot that satellite down: Canada. The Great White North. My F’ing country. The U.S. is going to shoot down a spy satellite, and the pieces are going to land on me and my countrymen.

Monday, February 18, 2008

NBC clamps down on SNL videos

I haven’t posted a rant in a while, so I should remedy that. This is way, way behind the times—in fact, it’s almost the one year anniversary of the article I’m linking to—but I didn’t read about it until today.

I was on YouTube, looking for Saturday Night Live videos, and I was only able to find one—and a very old one, at that. (Favourite line from the clip: “My husband, thank God, was killed instantly.”) There might have been more, buried in there somewhere, but I couldn’t find them. While I was there, I was reminded about the “I Need More Cowbell” skit, and ashamed that I haven’t posted it to my blog yet. I figured I might have more luck with a more detailed search, but that skit wasn’t on YouTube either.

This started to make me suspicious; has NBC clamped down on their videos? And yes, in fact, that’s exactly what they’ve done. (See? The article was from February 20th, 2006. I told you I was behind the times.) I can’t believe how amazingly short-sighted they would be, to do this. Especially since— well, let me quote the article:

Several online commentators noted that NBC’s response to YouTube, while legally justified, may have been short-sighted. The online popularity of “Lazy Sunday” has been credited with reviving interest in “Saturday Night Live” at a time when it is in need of some buzz.
To say the least! SNL had been pretty lousy, for a long time, and the Digital Shorts were bringing it new life, and a new audience. Think how many new viewers they would have had the Saturday after Lazy Sunday was posted, from people who’d seen it on YouTube, and were looking for more of the same.

Unfortunately, when faced with the unknown, the lawyers did what lawyers do. Not only did they have the videos removed from YouTube and Google Video, but, according to a complaint I read from someone (in the comments of NBC’s SNL site), they also removed them from iTunes. Yes, that’s right, you can’t even buy SNL clips anymore.

“Okay,” I’m thinking to myself, “that probably means they want to drive more traffic to their website. I know they have videos there.” So I go to the NBC website for SNL, and they add insult to injury; the site is terrible.
  • The site is tortoiselike.
  • When you go to their videos section, there is a default video, which starts to play automatically. (After the wait—did I mention how slow the site is?) Unfortunately, the default video doesn’t exist—it plays a commercial, and then puts up a message, saying that the clip I’ve “selected” isn’t available in my “location”. Wherever my location might be. (Maybe they detected that I’m in Canada, and they don’t show their videos to Canadians?)
  • There is no search feature. Looking for a particular video? Too bad. You’ll have to laboriously go through their archives. (And don’t forget the word of the day: tortoiselike. Click a link, and go get a coffee while you wait for the page to reload.) And if you go through the videos, and find one that you want? Watch another commercial, and then find out that the video is not available in your area.
  • After going through all of the videos for the 2000’s, and then all of the videos for Christopher Walken, they don’t have the cowbell video anyway. Such a popular SNL skit that it spawned a pop culture catch phrase, but they don’t have the video. They have one hundred and ninety-nine videos from the 2000’s, including a whole bunch that aren’t worth wasting your time on, but they don’t have that one. (You can find it online, on some sites—do a search—although maybe not for long.)
Maybe I should stay off the internet today, in case I find something else to make me angry. Then again, it’s “Family Day”, and half the people I work with are off today, so I don’t have as much to do as usual—so I’ll probably be online for a good portion of the day.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I found a trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie, coming out in May.


Wait… no, sorry. That wasn’t it. This is it:

If serna loves the internet so much, why doesn’t he marry it?

Actually, I’m already married. If I were to marry the internet, it would be polygamy, and I’d have to move to Utah. But I don’t want to live in the States. And, frankly, by the time Andrea gets tired of me, and boots me out of the house, the internet will probably have found some other lucky guy to marry.

I recently wrote two sappy “I love Google” posts (here and here). Well, I was doing some random surfing today, and I came across a whole bunch of cool things to write about. So here I go again. But I promise: These aren’t Google technologies. Well… actually, yeah, some of them are.

I’ve previously mentioned an instant messaging client called Pidgin. It’s a single client that can connect you to many different IM services; MSN Messenger (now called Windows Live Messenger), AIM, IRC, etc. (I wanted to write about the name changes to the Pidgin software, but I talked myself out of it, because of irrelevancy. You can read about it on Wikipedia, if you care.) I came across Pidgin because it came installed with Ubuntu, and I’ve found it very useful, even on Windows.

Well, a website called meebo.com has been introduced, which builds on the Pidgin libraries, and provides instant messaging from the web. (I don’t actually know how recent it is; I’m always behind the curve on new internet fads and tools. According to the “about” page, they launched in 2005—although that doesn’t mean they had any users.) Can’t install an instant messaging client on your computer? (Or you’re on someone else’s computer, and need to have a quick IM session, but don’t want to—or don’t have time to—install Pidgin on their computer?) Log onto meebo.com, and away you go. I haven’t actually used it, yet, but I’m sure I will, just to try it out.

I encountered meebo.com when I was reading about gOS. The gOS operating system—which is based on Ubuntu—doesn’t include many applications on the hard disk; instead, it uses Web 2.0 and AJAX for its applications. Where Ubuntu includes OpenOffice.org as an office suite, gOS uses Google Docs; where Ubuntu comes with Pidgin, gOS uses meebo.com; where Ubuntu comes with Evolution, gOS uses Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google News. This means that gOS takes up a lot less hard disk space than Ubuntu, since there’s not only less software installed, there’s also less need of storing documents—they’re all stored on the web.

That being said, there is also promise that applications will be able to use Google Gears technology, to make web applications available offline, so if you installed gOS on a laptop, you’d still be able to do some things without an internet connection. I don’t think this is 100% ready yet; you probably can’t yet edit a spreadsheet on Google Docs without an internet connection. But it’s coming; Google Reader uses Gears, and they’re working on it for Google Docs.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Blogs

If I have any regular readers left—I don’t make the assumption that I do—they probably grit their teeth and swear silently every time I wrote a blog post about blogs, or blogging, or bloggers. Luckily, when I write this blog, I only write it for my own benefit, not my readers’, so I don’t have to suffer any unnecessary feelings of guilt for posting this. (Also, I’m including a pie chart, and experience has proven that my blog readers love pie charts. So that should shut ’em up.)

There are currently six blogs that I follow actively, in my Live Bookmarks. (I haven’t yet started using services like del.icio.us. I’m always behind the curve on stuff like that.) Unfortunately, all six of those blogs seem to be in a slump lately; nobody’s posting. (To be fair, one of those bloggers specifically mentioned that she wouldn’t be posting for a while, so I’m not expecting anything from her.) So I decided it was time, once again, to start using Blogger’s Next Blog feature, and go through random blogs, in search of something interesting. Here’s what I found:

blogs

Sometimes I get lucky, but this time I didn’t. (Maybe I should start using del.icio.us, to find interesting new blogs…) I’m starting to wish that there was a way to tell the Next Blog feature that I only want English blogs, so that my graphs wouldn’t get so skewed—there are way more non-English-speaking people in the world than English-speaking people, so it shouldn’t surprise me that there are more non-English blogs than English blogs.

You can’t tell the numbers from the chart above—I forgot to include them, and closed the spreadsheet before I thought of it—but there was just one blog that I “just couldn’t explain”, and it was a blog called Microsoft Outlook 2007. (I probably shouldn’t be driving traffic to it, but oh well. Since I’m assuming I don’t have any regular readers, it means I won’t drive much traffic to it.)

Learn French!

Since I’ve decided to learn Spanish, and am meaning to brush up my French skills, a coworker sent me this:

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

I might learn to speak Spanish / Podría aprender a hablar español

I did something which has the potential to be very interesting, but also has the potential to be a big waste of my money: I bought a course which is supposed to teach the basics of Spanish. Only time will tell if it’ll be good.

Incidentally, I used Google Translate to get the Spanish version of this post’s title—there’s a good chance that it’s just gibberish, and not proper Spanish grammar.

Monday, February 11, 2008

“Jumbo”?!?

I went to the cafeteria for lunch today, and saw that the lunch special was a “jumbo hot dog”, with fries and a pop. And this is what I got:

Jumbo

And I ask you: Does this piddly little dog qualify as “jumbo”, or did I get ripped off?

Friday, February 08, 2008

“I love Google” addendum: Google Translate

There was another Google tool that I forgot to mention in my last post, which I just recently discovered: Google Translate. The way that it works is very similar to Babel Fish, which I’ve been using for years. You can paste in a chunk of text, or give it a URL, tell it what language the original text is in and what language you want it translated to, and it will translate it for you.

In both cases, Google Translate and Babel Fish, the results are pretty good. I’ve been told that some translations work better than others; I typically just translate from French to English, and it works pretty well, from what I’ve seen.

But of course, Google wouldn’t introduce a new service unless they could improve on the old one, would they? There is one very cool addition, that Google Translate offers: If you don’t like the way that it translates something, you can offer your own suggestions! Translation is a notoriously difficult thing to automate, so I’m guessing that this will contribute to vast improvements in the translation engine, with time.

When you translate a block of text, there is a little link at the bottom, where you can offer your own suggestions:

translate text

And when you translate a URL, Google brings up the website, with its translated text, and if you hover your mouse over any sentence, Google will show a pop-up with the original text, and again, you can offer your own suggestions:

translate URL

(You’ll see those screenshots better if you click them to go to my Flickr site, and look at the big versions.)

The text in the screenshots above is from a site that talks about prostate conditions, that was only available in French. Not that I’ve had prostate issues on my mind lately or anything…

Thursday, February 07, 2008

I love Google. Just love ’em.

This post is just one big, long, nerdy love letter to Google.

When Google introduced their search engine, it revolutionized the internet. I have to say, I wasn’t very prescient, when they launched it. “Big deal,” I thought, “it’s just a search engine.” But it was a big deal; a search engine that actually made an effort to return relevant results, and was quick? At the time, that was revolutionary. Finding information on the internet became not easier, but possible. (The most common example that people use is a search for something like “breast cancer”—if you’d done a search like that, before Google came along, you’d get a million porn sites before you’d ever get to a relevant search result. And the search would take literally minutes to return, instead of coming back instantly, like Google does.) All search engines have gotten better, since Google was released, but they’ve been playing catch-up ever since. They may, some day, become as good as Google, but at the moment, that’s all they’re striving for.

If that’s all they’d done, create a great search engine, Google would have done a great service to the internet. But they didn’t stop there; you can do a lot of custom searches, too. For example:

And that’s just the regular Google search engine. But then they blew me away by creating a special site just for searching for images. And then, to make it even smarter, they combined image search results into the default search engine; search for a famous person, for example, and the first thing Google will show is image results. (I was going to put up a screenshot of a search for Lucy Liu, as an example, but one of the photos shown was kind of… racy.) And then they did the same thing for video. (e.g. you could do a search for videos on the internet with Lucy Liu.) I don’t think this took off that much, but still, it’s nice to have.

But the next product they released that really blew me away was Google Maps. At first, I didn’t realize how revolutionary it was—I was already a regular user of MapQuest, at the time, which I thought was great—except for the fact that you could link to a map, using a URL. (Other sites didn’t realize how useful that would be.) But then someone pointed out to me that you could actually click the maps, with your mouse, and drag them around. I couldn’t believe it. Being someone who worked with internet technologies for a living, including HTML and JavaScript, it never would have even occurred to me that you’d be able to do that. (It took people who didn’t know the technology to try it, and show me what you could do.) That was a defining moment, for me, when I realized just how smart the people at Google were. And since that time, they’ve continued to add improvement upon improvement to the map site: you can search for businesses or places that are close to your search destination; you can use the satellite view, to actually see satellite images of the area; you can use the terrain view, if you’re really interested in the geography of the area; you can actually overlay weather information, on top of the map; when you do trips, and Google picks out a route for you, you can actually drag the route line around, if you don’t quite like the way Google decided to do the trip for you; they have an API, that you can use to add your own places to the map (such as the map that the city of Guelph put on their website, for restaurants). Almost every time I use Google Maps, they’ve got a new feature, and it’s always a useful feature, and always easy to use.

They then came out with their video service, Google Video, which I thought was very cool, but in this instance, someone actually did a better job than Google: YouTube. So, of course, Google bought YouTube. (If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.) And, to their credit, Google doesn’t seem to have messed with YouTube, since they bought it; they saw that it was working, and they didn’t tinker with it.

And I’ve mentioned before the Google Books search engine. (Including a link to my own book.)

And then there is Google Docs. A search engine for documents on the internet? Oh no! A web-based tool for creating documents! Text documents, or spreadsheets, or even presentations. Not only can you create these documents, you can even collaborate on them—you can have two people working on the same document, at the same time. Plus, you can upload Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations. (You can also upload OpenOffice documents or spreadsheets, although not OpenOffice presentation, at the time I wrote this.) At the time I wrote this, you couldn’t yet save these documents to your computer as Word docs or Excel spreadsheets—at least, not that I could see—but I’m sure that’s coming, too. Then again, they’re much more interested in online collaboration, as illustrated in the video Google created to explain why it’s such a cool tool.

I’ve also heard—although I haven’t really used it—that the Gmail service is pretty cool, too. It may not be as pretty as the new versions of Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, but it’s apparently very good at filtering out spam, and very easy to use.

So everything Google does seems to be very cool, very useful, and very open. If you want to use Google’s services from your website, in many cases you can with a simple link. And, if you’re a developer, you can do even more using their APIs. (Such as the city of Guelph did, in the example I mentioned above, or such as BibleMap.org did.)

In terms of technologies, Google has been careful to use very open and simple technologies—most of their pages are just good ol’ fashioned HTML—but they were also one of the first companies to really make good use of AJAX. People didn’t realize what a powerful technology that could be, until they started to see things that Google was doing with it, like in the maps site or in Gmail. It’s such a simple idea, and yet so powerful, that you can use Gmail and the browser can get additional data from the server, without having to reload the whole page.

I’ve heard, from numerous people, that Google only hires the best and the brightest. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be tempted to apply for a job with them, and move to the States, because almost everything they do is brilliant. As a former geek, and current nerd, it’s the type of thing I’d love to be involved with.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared—but I don’t recommend it.

So I had the cystoscopy.

Warning: This post will talk about the cystosopy. Most people will probably not want to read these graphic details about serna’s insides. Therefore, I will put a few paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum first; those of you who really want to read about this can skip the italicized paragraphs, and those of you who don’t want to read about this won’t have to accidentally see any of the details. (If you have a really big screen, and can see the non-italicized paragraphs even without scrolling, then just try to avert your gaze.)

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, ligula in ut leo non. Elit ipsum, sem lobortis sit malesuada id dignissim a, vulputate at bibendum ultricies in. Maecenas sollicitudin praesent et et, leo egestas eget vitae neque lacus iaculis, vel ipsum turpis erat nec etiam donec. Vestibulum penatibus nulla quisque, dolor nunc dolor vel diam mattis, primis vestibulum dui commodo, conubia varius dolor eu, sodales mauris. Reprehenderit erat ultricies habitasse habitant vel et, non eu fringilla. Et lectus. Urna vestibulum nunc nonummy quis fames dictumst, mauris conubia mauris luctus nulla praesent massa.

Felis vel eget risus dui sed, aliquet eget molestie dictumst sit ipsum sed. Aliquam tellus mi condimentum orci eu, wisi tellus egestas wisi augue quam, id turpis ante semper sagittis, ut diam dui justo, tempor in amet tempus semper. Aptent in. Diam egestas eget in, semper dignissim, ac ultricies lorem, feugiat turpis, officia rutrum tempor nulla ac orci nisl. Eget donec porta risus viverra tellus, dolor pulvinar nunc arcu pharetra, id magna fermentum. Vestibulum vitae in non mi leo, vitae amet justo dapibus sed sodales praesent, nec wisi in elit augue imperdiet mollis, dolor vel scelerisque non magna dignissim. Accumsan hymenaeos metus vestibulum felis per et. Vel nulla augue eleifend vivamus purus, sodales mollis erat viverra, a sagittis sodales quam in atque in, maecenas at a ut non. Amet at id vel, sit lectus tempus maecenas fermentum euismod. Ligula pellentesque lacus laoreet. Cursus pharetra, eget ullamcorper est posuere gravida.

Non malesuada magna ut vel tristique consectetuer, ullamcorper tortor viverra aliquam lacus pretium. Accumsan adipiscing velit ut pharetra placerat pellentesque, pulvinar eros quis in tortor sed aliquam. Dapibus non diam quam, in nonummy interdum. Scelerisque sodales aenean, sodales consectetuer mus, a gravida erat pede consectetuer. Pulvinar vulputate dui lacus hymenaeos. Lobortis id aliquet justo suscipit odio, sagittis molestie nec proin nec libero, orci cum mi elit, magnis arcu erat in proin rutrum, adipiscing orci nec massa fermentum ut. A dignissim vitae dolor tristique, scelerisque tempor natoque dolor, et officia leo semper est sed odio, libero duis nullam sapien ac nulla. Cras ut imperdiet morbi pede, in ac donec vestibulum a cras, nulla nam inventore nec, commodo cursus sit. Odio aliquam felis arcu sit arcu, ac mi id nullam vivamus maecenas placerat, wisi nibh placerat, accumsan dolor donec sit est, sunt metus a consectetuer aliquam mauris. Vivamus netus ullamcorper a maecenas arcu, id mauris viverra curabitur cras non pellentesque. Velit pede integer. At interdum sed, posuere sed in ipsum purus, aliquam nulla.

Diam quis vivamus sollicitudin. Unde ultricies porta porttitor, fermentum mauris nulla vel, neque sollicitudin ac mauris, lorem cum eu, nunc lobortis sed in condimentum. Eget dolor quam euismod malesuada, diam et duis fusce, ipsum odio orci euismod, aenean libero nisl conubia praesent, praesent pede donec. Molestie dignissim auctor laoreet, rutrum aliquam porttitor ut, metus tortor, ullamcorper hendrerit aliquam conubia, vestibulum vivamus in id nec orci scelerisque. Scelerisque tempus sodales nunc, vehicula placerat ligula. Erat alias duis, massa platea maecenas enim. Facilisis ut non tempus commodo eros diam, non nullam penatibus. Aenean augue quis eleifend tincidunt, mi ut commodo vel, consectetuer ultrices pulvinar, harum a arcu aute et praesent sed. Consectetuer arcu ut eget pharetra, sem nostra quam nulla at. Commodo in orci, tincidunt imperdiet adipiscing eu nec pellentesque, fermentum vel mauris nec urna erat in, egestas nulla donec sit. In mus ultrices ut erat, varius id, adipiscing amet eu felis nostra porttitor id, fames eu a magna, lacus mauris sem accumsan et etiam molestie. Aliquam sagittis curabitur rutrum, eu hac nec in quis.


There. Now let’s get to the good stuff!

After disrobing, and putting on the usual hospital gown, I was lain on a table, while a female nurse laid out all of the implements. When I saw the actual scope, I did my best not to think about it.

She then left the room, and a male nurse entered, and pulled up the gown, to clean me. I don’t know what kind of liquid he was using, but it wasn’t alcohol, luckily, because it didn’t burn. After he’d cleaned me, he got out a special piece of material that covered my body, with a hole in the middle, for my groin. He then picked up something that looked like a very small turkey baster. “Hmm,” I thought, “I wonder what he’s going to do with th— Yelp!” Without warning, he stuck it into the end of my penis, and filled it up with some kind of liquid. This was the freezing, so that I wouldn’t feel the scope so much. In terms of pain, this was the worst part of the procedure, because, of course, I wasn’t frozen yet. He then left the room, and left me alone with my thoughts for a few minutes.

While I was there alone, I was hoping that there would be some noticeable difference, so that I’d be able to tell that the anaesthetic was working, but there wasn’t any noticeable difference. I had a secret fear that it wouldn’t work, and the doctor would jam the scope in and I’d cry like a little girl. (Actually, I feared that I’d cry even if the freezing did work.)

The doctor came in, and I asked him a question that I should have thought to ask when he scheduled this procedure in the first place: The main thing he was going to look for in my bladder was scar tissue. What if he found some? What would happen? He gave me an answer that I didn’t like, which is that he’d have to put me under, and go in there and cut it out. If I heard him correctly—I may not have, because I wasn’t really at the top of my game—he had a special scope he could use, that had a knife on it, to go in there and get it. I sort of wish I hadn’t asked. (Spoiler alert: There was no scar tissue. Or at least, none worth worrying about.)

And with that, he got to work, and started feeding the scope in. It’s a very strange sensation; because of the freezing, there isn’t really any pain—or not much pain, anyway—but it is very, very uncomfortable. He asked me to relax, and I think I made a superhuman effort to do so, but the fact is, the scope is going the wrong way up that tube, and your body’s reaction is to try and push it back out from whence it came. A couple of times, when it would get to certain junctures, my body would seize up, and I’d have to force myself to relax again. The monitor was beside me, so I could watch the camera’s progress, but I didn’t want to; I just wanted to force myself to relax.

Once the camera got into my bladder—which, really, didn’t take that long at all—it was much easier to handle. I was able to look at the monitor, to see the inside of my bladder, which was interesting. (How many people get to see inside their own bladders? Not many, I bet.) But as he was moving the camera around, I could feel the scope moving around, and occasionally, it would get very uncomfortable again, and I would seize up again.

He showed me the places where the two tubes from my kidneys enter, and he said that they looked a little strange, but that would be a result of the bilateral re-implant I’d had, when I was younger. Nothing to worry about. As mentioned, there was a bit of scar tissue, but again, nothing to worry about, and nothing that he needed to take care of.

When he pulled the tube out, I almost didn’t even notice it. It still felt like it was in there. (In fact, for the rest of the day, and into the night, I occasionally got ghost feelings, of the thing being in there.) He decided that the issues I have with my bladder not emptying properly are probably a result of my prostate. I’m too young to be having these prostate issues, but apparently I do. (Then again, every step along the way seems to be trial and error, so maybe it till turn out to have nothing to do with my prostate.) He prescribed me some medication, which, as I say, is usually only prescribed to older men, which is supposed to help my prostate. There are some strange side effects that the medication can cause, but nothing serious.

And that’s where things lie right now. The pills aren’t supposed to take effect for a couple of days, but in a few weeks or so, I’ll get another appointment with the urologist, so that he can see if it’s making a difference, and my bladder is emptying properly.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Emmy Clip

For no reason whatsoever (except that I happened to come across it on YouTube), I thought I’d post this. This is Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert presenting at the Emmy Awards. (I don’t know what year this was.)

Enjoy.