So it’s been a few months since my Mom’s stroke and subsequent diagnosis of Stage IV Renal Cancer. She’s been through a bunch of chemotherapy, ups and downs, but generally is in great spirits and kicking butt. A few weeks ago she was out with my Dad and the rest of my family to San Diego. She was fine, except for some thrush on her tongue making it uncomfortable for her to eat and talk. That cleared up a week or so later, so, great.
Meanwhile, she was off chemo for a few weeks and had a CT scan that gave a bigger view of what’s up with the cancer. Sounds like the cancer in her lungs is less, while the kidney cancer is slightly larger and we can see it impinging on the renal vein. So… the timing is right and my Mom has been scheduled for surgery for October 6th to remove the kidney that has the tumor.
I iChatted with her and my Dad and his Army buddy Ray, plus my Sister and her Fianceé (I’m capitalizing Everybody today).
I think that covers it. Your thoughts and prayers have meant a great deal to me, and by proxy my family.
Here’s the update via my sister:
My mom is scheduled to have surgery to remove her kidney on Saturday, October 6th at 10am. We expect her to be in the hospital for approximately 4-5 days. My father is taking a week off to be with her after surgery. Daniel and I are planning on being in Roanoke at least through the holiday.
Overall, mom is doing good. She has been off chemotherapy for several weeks, recovering from side effects. The cancer in her brain is slowly diminishing since her cyberknife treatments in June and the lesions in her lungs have gotten smaller since her last treatment of Torisel in August.
The big new addition is tags, though I will need to update my themes to view those. I’ve never been quite comfortable with the Categories system in WordPress, perhaps the tagging in 2.3 is a good answer, I certainly enjoy tags in flickr and del.icio.us.
Ha, spoke too soon. It looks like Google Sitemaps 2.7.1 is using an archaic construction (table ‘*_post2cat’ doesn’t exist) so I had to upgrade that plugin. Here’s some conversation on this change.
But all is not rosy, I tried to delete a new test post and got the message “You are not allowed to delete this post.”—not cool. So I set it to “draft” and will wait.
Reality is telling us to shift from avoidance behavior and denial to engaging with reality in order to lead lives that are consistent with reality.
Sometime the truth hurts or stings. Jim Kunstler is talking about many things to do with the US economy there.
One of the great things about listening to the Dave Ramsey podcast is his emphasis that life is hard, the fundamentals matter, and you’ve got to face what’s right in front of you or you’ll end up drowning in it. Dave talks about debt, but facing up to reality matters in all matters.
But damn if it’s not hard to face reality. But reality doesn’t go away just because we want things to be a certain way.
The good thing is that reality can be shaped and pushed at, it’s possible to make changes in this world. There’s always hope. There’s always another thing to try.
Several million years ago I used to work alongside a fellow Respiratory Therapist named Dave. We worked alongside each other and he’d say wise and smartassed things on the night shift at California Hospital. Good work and good talk. Now, it turns out the dude blogs about things Los Angeles, but especially what he calls newsvixens, plus aerospace, politics, military, aerospace, poetry, and music. He’s kind of out there, but it’s good to reconnect with a voice I thought I’d never hear again.
His kid was a kid when he worked with me, now, Vincent is in college and takes photos like the above.
Anyone with the time and inclination to do broad studies of all the web, or at least as wide a portion as you can get your arms around, is fine by me.
It’s impressive enough when someone like Google does it, as in 2005’s Web Authoring Statistics, but when an individual does it, that’s some compelling stuff.
The uncov boys are doing something pretty interesting with Persai, but haven’t showed anything public yet.
This is in no way safe for work. But it’s a fascinating look into the world of Frank Zappa from the Flo & Eddy era. There’s bad language, drugs (only cigarettes for frank), sexuality, and more. Worth it for Zappa Fans.
This video, in which Google spokesman Brad tells Japanese netizens about how they can customize their Google Homepage with iGoogle, has been featured on the main page of YouTube Japan:
I have to say though, before the month is out I want to improve the interface for viewing these photos, it’s hacked up from, like, years ago now, and needs some serious love to get it so that people want to actually explore the photos there. Talk about an uninspiring interface!
I mentioned yesterday in a comment in response to a comment my old friend Erin made, wherein she mentions she heard Christina Aguilera and thought of me. Yes, I was so into Christina several years ago that a certain number of people now associate me with her. I’m not listening to that much Christina Aguilera these days.
In my reply I mentioned a band called “Tree Wave,” whose website is located at http://www.treewave.com/ . They stimulate my brain cells and heart in a way that is rather hard to describe.
I first heard them in the BBS Documentary, where their music is part of the opening credits of some of the pieces. You can read about all the music on that excellent documentary on the BBS Documentary Production: The Music page. You can also download the “Cigarettes and Coffee Introduction” and “Morning Coffee Hymm” on that site.
I never really blogged about the documentary, though I did mention it when Leah interviewed Jason Scott (who directed the documentary). In my email, I did post to the Web405 mailing list this:
I have no idea whether this has been talked about here, but I just got in the mail “BBS: The Documentary” – a 3 DVD set documentary about the
history of BBS’s.
I am filled with nostalgia and wonder. I’ve had it on while working for maybe 20 minutes and I love it. Highest possible recommendation.
I wrote that after having watched 20 minutes of the thing. And it only got better. Part of that was the pitch-perfect music that matched the tone and content of the documentaries perfectly. Tree Wave (or is it Treewave?) makes music using antiquated electronic computers. Now, I didn’t know this at the time, and I had no idea there was more than just a few soundtrack pieces from this band.
No, it was while listening to a SXSW recording of a great panel called “Game Perverts”—about people hacking games to do things their creators did not intend. Here’s the description of Paul Slocum’s contribution to the panel by the game website Joystiq:
Paul Slocum took an old Epson LQ500 dot-matrix printer and reversed engineered a box that lets him program and play music through it by changing the speeds and strengths that the pins strike the paper. It really has to be heard to be believed (it’s part of the song – former dot-matrix users will hear it right away). He also uses an Atari 2600 with a modified cartridge to generate drums and “bleep” sounds. Pretty impressive stuff.
You read that right, Tree Wave makes music using things like Dot Matrix printers. On treewave.com there’s even more detail:
We’re a Dallas based band that makes shoegazy pop music and video using obsolete 70’d and 80’s computer and videogame gear, accompanied by female vocals The code to drive the music and video is our own, and it’s all dirty assembly language. Music comes from Commodore 64s, an old PC FM sound card (OPL3), and a dot matrix printer, and video is all Atari 2600.
Our music is noisy pop, often with unusual song structure, and the video ranges from abstract color noise to actual hacked and deconstructed Atari 2600 games
We perform regularly at festivals and new media venues in New York and Europe, and our cd that we released last year has received a flood of positive reviews Our videos have been screened at galleries and festivals in New York, Canada, and Europe.
It was really a funny moment as I was driving along listening to the panel, because suddenly I was hearing the theme to BBS Documentary and for a split-second thought this guy might be ripping it off! Then I realized this guy was a “good guy” and that he was calling his band “Tree Wave” and I had to seek it out. I still have not bought their CD officially, just listening to publiclyavailable mp3 files, but it’ll be my next music purchase. If you download the SXSW podcast Paul Slocum and his descriptions of reprogramming the firmware by plugging into the font expansion port of a dot matrix printer, and his other descriptions of messing with 1980s hardware starts at about 11:05. Again, for a certain subset of folks out there, I give the highest possible recommendation.
Also during the SXSW presentation he plays a song using the game Combat and in playing the song it’s laying information over the top of the game’s data area, deconstructing the game. This is wonderful stuff, I wish this YouTube video were better, I think the compression of the Flash video can’t keep up with the 8-bit graphics.
You’re looking at artlung.com, the personal website of Joe Crawford. I make websites professionally and as a hobby. I’m married to Leah, I’m a stepdad, I blog. I live in Moorpark, California, USA. I work in Los Angeles.
As of September, I’m on a short-term contract. I’ll be available nearer to November/December.
Phone: 805-857-3951. Email: joe at artlung dot com.
Oh man, this is good. A 
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