The caller introduces herself as a paid caller on behalf of the American Lung Association. I ask her to remove me from their call list, which she agrees to do.

Then I mention that it’s before 9am on a Saturday, which is too early to call someone. Her reply: “we start at 8am”.

Dear American Lung Association: pissing off potential donors is a bad idea. Having your solicitors take a holier-than-thou attitude about the time they call is a terrific way of pissing off those donors. Be assured that your mail will go directly to my recycle bin from now on.

How to lose a donor - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

Facebook

There was a time when I felt compelled to keep up with my friends’ postings on Facebook. If I was too busy to check the site during the day, I’d make a point of scrolling back as far as it would let me so I’d miss as little as possible.

I remember feeling that way as clearly as I remember yesterday.

But yesterday seems far away; today, Facebook gifted me with their latest design change, and suddenly, I have no desire to catch up. In fact, I have very little desire to go to Facebook at all – the new design is complicated, what with a scrolling ticker in the upper right, an arbitrary division in the main text area between the “Top News” and the “Recent Updates”, and, in general, a lot of visual sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Google+ looks more attractive every day; I just wish they’d let me use it from my primary email address (hosted on Google Apps for Your Domain) instead of forcing me to use my depreciated GMail address.

Netflix

Perhaps Facebook’s new complication was inspired by the Sunday night Netflix announcement. If so, they have more work to do – after all, you can still interact with everything that Facebook offers on one website, while Netflix is going to force their remaining users to deal with Netflix and Quickster.

I didn’t mind the price increase much, but doubling my workload because Reed Hastings has a vision of the future…what do they think they are, an airline?

If it’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

links for 2011-09-14 - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

My original design constraints became irrelevant more than five years ago, but every time I thought about changing the appearance of the blog, I thought about the mass of CSS and PHP I’d have to deal with and put the project aside for another day. Or year.

This week, though, I started assisting the Webmaster of
the Los Gatos Silver Tongued Cats Toastmasters club in moving our site from FreeToastHost to WordPress (a project not yet complete), and he showed me how easy it was to make changes using modern themes and their associated widgets. So I spent this afternoon updating this blog to use the Weaver theme; the hardest part was figuring out how to get my Google AdSense to display where I wanted it (under the title) at the full width of the page (the answer: put the AdSense code in as a snippet instead of using the header widget).

I’m not sure that I’m finished with the redesign, but it certainly seems more modern (and less tiring to read on a widescreen display). Comments are welcome, of course.

Redesign! - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

This morning, a friend from shul (who happens to be a Googler) answered my Google+ post, asking if this review might be of the story I was looking for. It was, and a quick search found the first few pages on Google Books.

I wanted to read the whole story, and I thought I’d probably be able to find Matheson’s book in a local library, but I was still curious where I’d originally read the story. I was pretty sure that I’d read it in an anthology, not a single-author collection, so I went to the Contento Index and looked for “The Creeping Terror”. I discovered two interesting things there:

• The story was also called “A Touch of Grapefruit”
• It had been anthologized under that name in Star Science Fiction 5

Both of those facts seemed awfully familiar. I got up from the computer, went to the bookshelves, and found my copy of Star Science Fiction 5. And “A Touch of Grapefruit” was right there on page 35.

Yes. I’d been searching for years for a story which was sitting on my own bookshelves.

At least I got to read the end of the story today!

Five Days — That’s Not Too Many! - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I was worried about spam – not the random spam that we all have to put up with, but spam created by companies sharing email addresses. So I took advantage of having my own domain and started giving out unique email addresses every time I created a new account. Everything funneled into one mailbox anyway, but I had control.

Over time, I realized that there really wasn’t a lot of leakage due to email sharing. In fact, I found that I got more spam sent to “random_address@my_domain” than from any other source. So I stopped making up new addresses but I didn’t do anything about the hundred-or-so addresses I’d created.

In the last year, I’ve gotten quite a bit of misdirected legitimate mail – some of which I really didn’t want to have anywhere near my computer (other people’s financial data). But I couldn’t easily block it, because I had to leave my catchall forwarding in effect to handle all of the accounts I’d created years ago.

Today, I decided to fix the problem once and for all. First, I had to find out what addresses were getting mail. I fired up Mail.app and downloaded all of my current mail; then I crawled through the mail folders, pulled out the “Delivered-To” lines, and built the list of addresses in use (not all of which were ones I wanted to maintain).

After that, it was a straightforward, if slow, process:

1. Look at the next address in the list
2. Search for the mail referring to that address (on Gmail, search for “address in:anywhere”)
3. Figure out what company or companies was using that address
4. Log onto their website and change the address (or unsubscribe, if it was someone I no longer cared about)
5. While I was there, I usually changed the username to something I could remember and made the password stronger (1Password is my friend!)
6. Lather, rinse, repeat

It took all day (with frequent Facebook, Google+, and newsreader breaks, of course).

And I’m not finished – I still have quite a few weak passwords to strengthen. But not tonight.

Memo to self: sometimes, simple is just fine.

If it wasn’t broken, why did it take all day to fix? - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I have been searching for the story for many years, but with no success. I’m sure it was published well before 1970 (probably in the ’50s), and I think I read it in an anthology.

If you know this story, I’d be grateful for the details. Thanks!

Can you outdo Google? - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I’ve removed the general Amazon link on my site; it’s too much trouble to edit out all of the other links I have scattered throughout the site.

Over the course of four years, I earned nearly $11 in referral fees, so I can’t say I’m terribly upset about this development. I do think that sales tax needs to be simplified and made consistent between online and brick-and-mortar retailers; online retailers should, at the very least, collect and remit the state sales tax for every state (dealing with the complexities of local sales taxes is a problem — even a five-digit ZIP code isn’t sufficient to properly compute the tax in many areas).

Collateral Damage - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

My first step was to join ProMatch; I was lucky enough to get on my first choice of teams there, the JumpStart team, and I’ve jumped right in; I co-facilitated a workshop on “Marketing Yourself” yesterday (which, by sheer coincidence, followed a presentation by Dilip Saraf on “Personal Branding” which set up our session very nicely, as well as being interesting and useful in its own right) and will be co-facilitating another workshop next week. I also got invited to the Facilitation Team, and have given a Brown Bag seminar on Improv. I even got called in for a short TV news piece about the improving unemployment numbers.

I also have gotten very involved in the local Toastmasters club, the Los Gatos Silver-Tongued Cats; I volunteered as Webmaster and am going to be the VP for Education for the next six months; I’ve also given 8 speeches as well as visiting other clubs and competing in the area Table Topics contest (I placed second).

I’ve even started looking for actual jobs. I went a long way through the process at one company but didn’t get an offer, at least not this round; I’m now casting my net wider.

In short, I’ve been busy.

But today has been a change of pace; I managed a long walk this morning for the first time in a couple of weeks, then went out and hit a bucket of golf balls for only the second time this year (I haven’t improved!). And then I came home, and did nothing in particular.

Ahhh!

Selfish Friday - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

Making it to 100 years is a big deal, whether for a person or a company – and in both cases, you should expect a lot of changes along the way. That’s certainly been the case for IBM; if it had stayed with its original products, it would have gone bankrupt decades ago.

I was with IBM for just over one-third of its history (so far!). At times, it was a great ride; of course, there were other times that I’d rather not remember too clearly. But throughout my association with the company, whether as an applicant, an employee, or an alumnus, the people have always been first-rate. And as long as that stays true, IBM will be able to continue onward – in fact, ever onward.

100 years - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

The coming (and going) of Passover is probably the most obvious reminder that another year has passed, along with the inevitable note from the synagogue reminding me when Kaddish will be recited for her, but this year, I got a special and unexpected reminder — a comment on my Driving Shiva posting.

I close posts for comments after a few months to reduce spam, but William, the person who sent the comment, didn’t let that stop him — he commented to a post that still was open for comment, and I’ve moved his comment where it belongs.

Thank you, William; I appreciate your thoughtfulness and your persistence!

Five years? - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

Tonight, Diane and I blended our own wines at Cinnabar Winery. It was fun, and completely legal – and this time, I absolutely plan to drink the product!

We had three reds to use in our blending:

• 2008 Sonoma Syrah, aged 29 months in Hungarian Oak, 30% new
• 2007 Solana Vineyards Paso Robles-San Miguel Petite Sirah, aged 40 months in French Oak, 30% new.
• 2008 50/50 blend of Paso Robles-Templeton Gap Grenache-Mourvedre, aged 29 months in American Oak, 20% new.

I tried each wine separately and decided I preferred the Petite Sirah to the other two; then I tried a few combinations before settling on 80% Petite Sirah, 12% Syrah, and 8% Grenache-Mourvedre as the recipe for Traffic Calmer.

Diane went for more balance, ending up with 55.5% Petite Sirah, 40% Syrah, and 4.5% Grenache-Mourvedre in her After Work Red.

We have to wait a few months for the wines to marry and mature…maybe for Thanksgiving!

BYOW - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

We almost watched the next episode, too, but I wanted something lighter, so we turned to our brand new TiVo Premiere for Ovation’s Orange Blossom Special special.

It was entertaining and full of music, but it didn’t have any full performances of the song, so I let my fingers do the walking on YouTube in hopes of making my ears happy. We found (and played) a few conventional versions, and then stumbled across The Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain’s version, which was distinctive, to say the least.

That wasn’t quite enough ukelele for the night, so we kept looking and finished the evening with the Ukelele Orchestra’s memorable performance of Shaft.

Can you dig it?

From War to Shaft - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I guess this shows two things:

• I’m feeling better
• Groupon’s Super Bowl ad fiasco didn’t drive me away

Now, if the rain would just stop for a while….

An inchstone on the road to recovery - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I made it through level 4 (16% grade, 4.2 mph); my heart rate was about 140 at that point. She must have been happy with the results, because she told me that I didn’t need to go to rehab. She also told me that I was free to exercise as hard as I want (subject to the surgeon’s weight constraints, anyway) and that I should keep walking a lot (which will be more difficult now that I’m cleared to drive!).

She’s keeping me on beta blockers because of my circumflex artery, but she doesn’t plan to do anything else unless it becomes symptomatic. And I will be doing another stress echocardiogram next year to see how the artery is doing.

My pain level is pretty low, so she wants me to start weaning myself from acetaminophen, since using it for a long time isn’t good for the liver.

Next steps: a fasting blood test to see how the pravastatin has affected my cholesterol levels, and another checkup in three months.

At this rate, I’m going to need to find something else to blog about soon!

Rehab? I don’t need no stinkin’ rehab! - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I’m not completely recovered yet, though, so my activities are still restricted for some time to come. Here’s what I have to look forward to.

I can start driving tomorrow, but I need to avoid heavy traffic until mid-March (I guess that translates to “stay off freeways”). And I should be especially careful about bad weather (at least I don’t have to worry about snow here).

I’m allowed to move my arms freely, as long as I don’t hyper-extend myself or reach backwards; in fact, they want me to stretch after my shower. Until today, I wasn’t supposed to raise my arms above my head except to wash my hair, and then I was only supposed to use one arm at a time.

I still can’t lift more than 5 pounds for the rest of this month; then I’ll be limited to 10 pounds till March 15th, and 20 pounds until April 15th. Once tax day comes, I’ll be allowed to bear as much of a burden as I want.

They want me to slowly cut down my pain relievers; I need to stop taking Tramadol before I start driving. As far as Tylenol goes, I should switch my nighttime dose to just before bed; I can stop taking the midday dose when I’m ready, and if that goes well, drop the morning dose. The bedtime dose may continue for quite a while.

They were happy with my walking (both distance and pace), but suggested I be better about bringing water with me.

Golf is not going to happen soon – I can try putting at the beginning of March. A week later, I can chip – if that’s successful (which would be a pleasant change from before the operation), I can hit some balls at the driving range a week later. And if I feel no pain from that, I can try a 9-hole round at the start of April. Bowling and bocce are out for a while, too.

I also need to be very careful and keep the scar from my incision from getting sunburned; if it sees the light of day, I need to cover it with SPF 72 sunscreen.

And the best news: I can stop wearing my HeartHugger and I don’t have to use my incentive spirometer any more, either.

Discharged, with restrictions - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I walked something over 8 miles yesterday; the last walk was fairly late and I felt a little achy towards the end, but it was nothing that acetaminophen couldn’t cure. Or so I thought.

I slept pretty well, too – until I woke up at 5:30 with a very sore back. No matter how I moved, I could’t make it feel better, so I finally got up along with Diane at 6am. A hot shower and breakfast helped a lot, too – enough so that I made a pie for the Oneg Shabbat tomorrow. I even remembered to take care of some reimbursement paperwork from IBM, too (we’ll see if they consider golf classes to be “retraining”).

But around 11:30, my back started hurting again. I had to go pick up lunch, but that was a short walk to Safeway (very slow, though). I took a Tramedol with lunch, and felt a little better. But it didn’t last, and the back pains were soon accompanied by an achy chest.

All of my doctors’ offices were closed for lunch, so I couldn’t call right away. When the cardiologist opened, they said it soundled like musculo-skeletal problems and to call my family doctor or visit the ER. I didn’t want to visit the ER, but I had no way to get to the family doctor, so I decided to wait.

But it kept hurting more and more. I had been planning to go out for a long walk with a doctor friend, so I called him – when I described my problem, he suggested calling 9-1-1!

In the meantime, Diane had come back to her office – she said she’d come home and take me where ever I thought would help. And by the time she got home, I was convinced that I needed a trip to the ER.

Off we went. As soon as I got to the triage window, I used those magic words: “chest pains”. Someone was helping me in a minute, and I was given a bed in ER right away.

They strapped me to an EKG – normal. They took X-rays – normal. They gave me pain killers (morphene for sure, possibly other things), which made a big difference – my pain level dropped from 6 (higher than it had been at Sequoia, even right after the operation) to 3. And they took a CT scan – also normal. By this time, I was dozing off, and my pain level was down to a 1 or so.

When all was said and done, the doctor decided that the problems were almost certainly from overdoing my exercise earlier this week. He increased my aspirin prescription to a 325mg pill (up from 81mg) for the next few days, and urged me to take Tramodol if I hurt. And if I don’t feel good on Monday, I need to visit my cardiologist.

This turns out to be a good weekend for doing less, anyway – we’ve got Shabbat services, a play, and the Superbowl. I see lots of sitting-down time – just what the doctor ordered!

The answer is “yes” - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

I’ve been doing a lot of walking; most days, I take three or four long walks which add up to somewhere around six miles, though I walked a bit over 12 miles on Tuesday. Since I still can’t drive, most of the walks have to start and end at my house – that limits the variety substantially.

I’ve been lucky so far, and haven’t had any coughing or sneezing spells – when I do cough or sneeze, it’s an unpleasant experience! And I’ve been slowly reducing my use of pain medication – I’m down to two or three doses of acetaminophen daily.

Sleeping is still a bit of a challenge; it would be nice if I could sleep through the night, because getting in and out of bed is a hassle (I have to be sure not to use my arms).

And I’m bored. I’m beginning to think that it might be time to get serious about my résumé, even though I am officially not allowed to work for another month or so.

Two Week Update - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

If you’re a Mac user and think you’d find a two-minute timer app handy, go visit twominutesoftware.com and give it a try.

Two Minute Warning - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

On my body…that’s a different story.

I’ve just returned home from having aortic valve replacement surgery at Sequoia Hospital. My surgeon was Vince Gaudiani (previously described as “Dr. G.” in Decisions on Incisions). He was assisted by colleagues from Pacific Coast Cardiac & Vascular Surgeons – I don’t know all their names, but one was a fellow RPI graduate, Adam Harmon, as we discovered while chatting as I was recovering in the ICU.

Diane and I drove up to Redwood City on Thursday, January 13th, for pre-operative testing and paperwork. The first step, of course, was the walletectomy; after that, they drew blood and took a chest X-Ray at the hospital, then I went up to the surgeon’s office. The first step there was a meeting with a volunteer from Mended Hearts; she’d had six open heart operations and four atrial valve replacements (both biological and mechanical) over her lifetime, starting at age 10! Then I had my legs examined (I’m not quite sure why at this point – I guess it was to look for places to harvest veins if need be) and met with one of the physician assistants. I was surprised when they asked me if I’d brought my angiogram CD with me – I hadn’t even thought of it. Fortunately, I’d saved a disk image of it on my MacBook Pro, so I was able to burn a new copy on the spot, but it could have been a problem.

By the time everything was done, it was 2pm, and we were very hungry – luckily, Redwood City has a lot of good restaurants, and we let Yelp steer us to Paradise Kebab House. After lunch, we returned to the hospital and checked in to the Sequoia Guest House. We spent a quiet afternoon, getting a quick walk in before the rains came. For dinner, we went to New Kapadokia – I’d been advised to eat lightly, so we split an entrée and skipped the wine, but probably made up for it with dessert!

Then it was back to the Guest House to shower, disinfect, and try to sleep; I’d asked for a prescription for Ambien, just in case, but I had no trouble falling asleep without help.

The alarm sounded at 0430; we walked over to the hospital and got to the “Short Stay Unit” just before our 0500 checkin. They were ready for us, and almost before I knew it, I was out of my clothes and on my back, being shaved from chest to ankles (though certain areas were skipped, somewhat to my surprise). Then another shower and disinfection, and it was time to meet the anesthesiologist (who I’ll have to call Dr. K., because I don’t remember her full name!), who gave a brief explanation of what she’d be doing for me. And then it was showtime. Diane and I said our good-byes, and I was wheeled to OR.

I’d watched Dr. Gaudiani’s videos on Valve Replacement Surgery (part 1 and part 2), so I knew what the OR would look like; there was a little chatter among the team as I was wheeled in and they said “hello” to me; then Dr. K. started doing her magic, and that’s all I know.

I woke up many hours later in the ICU; they had told me to expect to awaken with a breathing tube, but if I did, I’ve lost that memory – my first solid memory from ICU is seeing Diane and being able to talk with her. I was in some pain, but not much – perhaps a 4 on the 10-point scale they asked me to use throughout my stay. I was being given oxygen through a nasal tube, and there were lots of wires and tubes elsewhere on my body. They gave me ice chips and a little water; time passed in a blur. I even slept some, but at some time during the night, I felt a few pinpricks in my heart – I’d gone into atrial fillibration, and they used an external pacemaker to restore me to normal (sinus) rhythm. This happened twice that I know of.

I was pretty uncomfortable during the night – the nurse wanted to slow down my intake of fluids from the ice chips, and that made me even less happy. They kept medicating me, but it didn’t help much – I felt hungry, but they didn’t want me to eat yet. Eventually, they were ready for me to try a little food and gave me a breakfast tray; I surprised them by eating more than a slice of toast and a good bit of the eggs, as well as all of the liquids they let me have. And I surprised them even more by keeping it all down. My discomfort level dropped from 5+ to 2 as soon as I’d eaten, too.

After breakfast, Dr. Harman was ready to remove my chest tube; the Mended Hearts volunteer had said that would be an uncomfortable experience and advised me to ask for more pain medicine. Dr. Harman said that I’d be fine as I was, and he was right; I felt a tiny bit of tugging, but that was about it. That was the last step before I was ready to leave ICU, but we had to wait for a room to become available in the Cardiac Surveillance Unit (CSU), which took a couple of hours.

I was transferred to CSU just before lunch – there was no nonsense about limiting my fluid or food intake in CSU, either, and I polished off most of what I was given (one note about Sequoia: the soups were uniformly tasty, usually the best part of the meal). Diane was even allowed to bring me fruit and candy from outside (I suspect they would have disapproved of salty foods).

I won’t go into great detail about my stay in CSU; it was mostly uneventful. I watched videos, read books, did a crossword puzzle, ate, slept (some), got awakened when necessary, learned how to get in and out of bed without using my hands, walked around the floor as much as I could, did breathing exercises, and, basically got better. The one complicating factor was that I was retaining some fluid, so my weight was up – they didn’t want to let me go until I was back to my pre-operative weight. They used diuretics to make that happen – it was pretty convenient until they took off the catheter; after that, I got lots of practice getting in and out of bed. My weight dropped back to the desired level by the Tuesday early morning weigh-in, and when the doctor visited, I asked if he was ready to discharge me. He was.

That started another flurry of activity; first, he had to remove the pacer wires from my heart (an interesting feeling – not painful, but very very odd) and put me back in bed for an hour of observation. While I was in bed, the patient educator visited to tell me a few things I needed to know before I left (probably not optimal timing, especially since I was also eating lunch and had a visitor!). Then a chest X-ray, followed by a return to the room for the removal of my central line, which required another hour or so in bed for observation.

And that was about it. Diane came and packed up my stuff; I put on real clothes for the first time in more than four days; they put me in a wheeled chair (not to be confused with the kind of wheelchair they used when I was taken to X-ray as a patient) and brought me to the car – and off we went, into the setting sun (and rush hour traffic).

I haven’t named everyone who helped me while I was in the hospital; in some cases, I don’t know their names. Everyone who worked with (or on) me was terrific and clearly interested in making my experience as painless as possible. The nurses were, of course, the people I interacted with the most; Erin, Kelly, Sev, Sharon, Melissa, Sonya, and Jin, you were all wonderful (I don’t remember the names of my first few ICU nurses). I got lots of help from Jenny in PT, Carlos and Carla in Respiratory Therapy, and many others who made my stay easier. Thank you all.

I’m very glad I chose Sequoia and Dr. Gaudiani and the PCCVS team.

In case you’re tuning in late, you can read all the postings about my Aortic Stenosis experience here.

Valve Job - from Read This Blog! - Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.