Scarey

8:05 AM

Does anyone else find this story a little bit scarey?

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I Have Sleep Apnea

9:08 AM

Last night was night 2 of my post sleep apnea diagnosis. I had my follow appointment to my sleep study this week and I do have mild sleep apnea. According to the charts I stop breathing 11 times an hour. If that's mild, I'd hate to see severe. Anyway, I've now got a machine I have to sleep with. It's basically an air compressor that hooks up over my nose and keeps the air pressure in my throat high enough so my throat won't collapse. I'm not sure how effective it's going to be. I am happy to find out it's not impossible to sleep with though. I made it 4 hours with it night one, and nearly the whole night on night two.

In other news, you may have noticed I'm kind of a nerd. What I find odd is that all of a sudden hollywood is catering to nerds. I think this is kind of a new phenomenom. But look at all the recent movies: SW:ATOC, Blade 2, LOTR:FOTR, Spiderman, LOTR:TTT, Daredevil, and X-men 2. Plus we've got another SW film, two Matrix movies, The Incredebile Hulk, League of Extrodinary Gentlemen, and LOTR:ROTK all coming up shortly.

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I Hate the RIAA

9:24 AM

We won the war in Iraq. We're bringing them freedom. We're also letting the RIAA re-write their copyright laws. The RIAA is hardly impartial. Are Iraqi college students going to start getting sued for billions of dollars like the US students are?

We also wouldn't want any of the European firms to profit off the war. I mean the whole Middle East uses GSM, Europe uses GSM, so of course Iraq shouldn't use GSM. They should use CDMA because good old American Qualcom gets the royalties. Of course you can buy CDMA equipment form Ericson, Nokia, and Alcatel as well. Plus it's not like they have that many American employees. And the american companies like Nortel, Motorola, and Lucent make GSM equipment as well.

This is what happens when you let people who don't know what they're talking about make the decisions.

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Polyphonic Spree

10:19 AM

Busy weekend. Okay, not really busy; but I did actually do some stuff. Thursday I got sick which kept me home all of Friday. I had to take asprin to knock my fever down enough to go to our stretching class on Thursday. Not exactly fun.

Saturday we went to Carkeek Park, walked the trails and played around on the beach in the tide pools. We saw a purple starfish and alot of crabs, but I'm still waiting to see a sea lion, otter or orca!

Saturday night Kathrine and I went to see The Polyphonic Spree perform at a club. If you get a chance to see them you should at all costs. They're very interesting and one of the best shows I've seen in some time. They have about 26 members including: keyboards, viola, violin, bass, electric bass, guitar, choir, harp, theremin, trumpet, flute, trombone, drums, and pedal steel. Plus they all wear white choir robes. The best part of the show is that they understand the concept of performing.

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Softball Hurts

2:25 PM

Another day, another post. Actually not much has happened today. I have to go buy an exercise mat for my class tomorrow. And I have to hope that by tomorrow evening I'm not quite so sore (softball is a killer). Other than that not much is new.

I did find some interesting links today. This is a story about the way the government has fibbed in portraying the war. It's a bit one sided, but so are CNN, MSNBC, and FOX; so you sometimes have to read the other side just to get the truth which lies somewhere in the middle.

The second is opensecrets.org. It's very cool. It lets you track pretty much all the politicians in the country and who gave them the campaign funds. It also shows links between contributions and policies and gives the background information on the administration and the cabinet. Some of the stuff is downright scary! It is fun however to look at your representatives tax returns. :)

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SARS

12:44 PM

Does anyone else wonder what the big deal about SARS is? Why are people so scared of it? People are acting like it’s the plague or the new AIDS. In fact, it’s nothing more than a very nasty cold or a really bad case of the flu. It’s not even as contagious as the flu. Melbourne University professor of virology Ian Gust says:

"If SARS were an influenza pandemic and the mortality rate was similar to what it is now (about 3%), we would have tens of thousands of people dead, rather than less than 100. And that is not because the virus would be any more potent, but because it would be much more contagious."

Once every several decades a particularly violent strain of influenza rolls around. This could end up infecting half of all the populations of industrialized countries. The 1918-1919 so called Spanish flu, with a world population at the time of 1.8 billion, killed 20 million people as a low end estimate. The percentage of the population killed by the Spanish flu was at least 1 percent.

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Sleep Apnea

1:22 PM

Two days in a row. That's more like it. Actually, I'm only doing this because yesterday's post wasn't really much of a news update. So, what's new with me? Not as much as you might think. My doctor and I think that I may have sleep apnea, or possibly restless leg syndrome. So I had to go to a sleep study. Let me tell you sleeping while hooked up to 15 different electrodes is not the easiest thing in the world. Partly because of that, I've decided to actively work on getting healthier. I really am trying hard to cut back on calories (No more snacking), trying to cut out most processed foods (No more soda), limit my calories (only three meals a day), take my vitamins, and exercise. The eating part I've got down. And supprisingly it's been easier than I would have thought. The exercise has been a little more difficult, but I am slowly getting into the swing of things. I have been talking a long walk/hike on Saturdays and at least once a week playing basketball. Every so often I would substitute snowboarding for the walk.

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Overhaul

6:10 PM

I said I was going to post way back then. And I didn't. I guess that just proves that this isn't a blog. Part of the reason is that I was unsure of a direction to go with on this site. You see most of this site is dynamically created from an MS Access backend using ASP code. That's all fine and dandy, however that kind of stuff only flies on IIS which of course requires a Microsoft server. I've decided that it will soon be time to move this whole site to a dedicated server. Actually I'll get a new workstation and turn this computer into a dedicated server. But I wasn't sure whether I'd be running Linux, one of the BSD's, or Windows 2003 Server. If I decided to leave Windows, I'd be using Apache and I'd have to convert all the ASP to PHP and migrate the Access data into MySQL. Now that's not impossible, but it gets harder the more stuff there is on the site. Well, I decided that I'm just going to stick with Microsoft for the time being. So that's why there was a major update.

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It's Been So Long

12:16 PM

It's been a while since I posted. I've been busy with work, watching my little Mavericks desperately hold on to the #1 seed in the west, watching the news, seeing doctors, and doing alot of reading. I plan on posting some large news this weekend. This is just to let anyone who reads this know that I'm still alive.

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Interesting Reads

2:20 PM

I read a couple of interesting articles today. The first article is about how Moore's Law will last for at least the next 10 years. If you don't know about Moore's Law it states that the processing power will double every 18 months and that the cost of the same amount of processing power will be reduced by half every 18 months. I.E. in 18 months the new AMD Athlon 64 will be twice as powerful as the Barton Athlon 3000+ of today, but the 3000+ will cost half as much as it does now. This second article I found much more intersting. It discusses why following Moore's Law might not be such a good thing, stating that in 20 years at this rate Intel's anual R&D cost would have to hit $31 trillion, as big as the world's current GDP.

Another interesting article that I read today is about blogs and how the freedom of everyone posting their own information inherently leads to people only reading a fraction of it.

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