HerdingChaos

I got my new scooter in today. It is a Z20a from EVT America. (warning: annoying noise in flash animation at the head of every page on EVT’s site).

It is all electric. I have a eGo Cycle2 that I am replacing with the z20. This thing has a really nice ride and is way faster then the eGo scooter. Should be a great commuter bike for getting back and forth to work.

I am now 10 weeks out from my jaw surgery. I can now eat pretty normal again. I still avoid anything hard to chew. In the last 2 weeks I have really started to feel like myself again. On Monday, the surgeon told me things were looking great. I saw the orthodontist a little over a week ago and he said I would be able to take off my braces in about another 4 months. I would have never thought that a softball to the face would cause 3 years of recovery work.

I expect I will be very pleased with the end result. But I sure wish none of this had ever happened. Like my friend Derek told me, “You should just kickbox, it does not hurt as bad.”

I am just looking forward to not having crap glued in my mouth anymore.

Surgery recovery is going well. My teeth finally feel like they are mine again. Most of my gums have feeling again and my bottom lip is almost back to normal.

I am about done with oatmeal, ice cream, anything mixed in a blender (with milk to cut it), and any and all potato based foods.

Today I was given very good news. I am allowed to have “meatloaf consistency” foods. These include: fish, soft chicken (whatever that is), chili, meatloaf (duh!), and pasta.

All these choices!

I had jaw surgery 4 weeks ago to correct some damage that was done during a softball game ~2.5 years ago. The surgery went fine. Pain was about what I expected and similar to the original injury. The swelling from the surgery was worse than I was expecting but still not too bad.

I spent two nights in the hospital. I then came home and lived in my lazy boy recliner since laying horizontal did not help the swelling of the face. When I got home I looked a bit like Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers movie.

I got off the codeine before the first week of recovery. I really don’t like the way the narcotics make me feel and I would rather deal with the pain. By the end of the second week I was feeling pretty good. I was a bit restless.

At right around 2 weeks from the surgery I went back to work. The only bad part about going back was smiling or laughing. People around the office came by to say hi and see how I was doing. And those that were not humor impaired were doing the best to cheer me up. However, I had one of those self dissolving stitches in my lip/nose right under the right side of my nose. This stitch had not dissolved yet. So each time I would smile or laugh I would get a nice shooting pain from my nose and it felt like someone was ripping said nose right off the face. Luckily that passed in another 4 days.

Just as I was finishing up week 3 of recovery my wife became more sick than I have ever seen her. It has been a week and thankfully she is doing much better now. But that week was rough on her. I took on kid taxi duty, tried (unsuccessfully) to keep up with all of the other things around the house, tried to help my wife as much as I could, and also tried to squeeze in as much work as I could. It was a rough week with little sleep.

I think this weekend is the start of things returning to normal. So maybe now that I am getting out of the funk I will be able to make some more posts.

Last night I finished the last of the Jack Aubry and Stephen Maturin series from Patrick O’Brian. It was 20 full novels plus the start of another. More than 7000 pages. I really liked the entire series. Some of the books were better than others, but I enjoyed every single one.

Speaking of great literature… Jessica Stover’s latest installment is a short story called Greyfeather: Catch. This is the second story from the Greyfeather universe that Jessica has brought to life. I loved the entire thing. The first story was in the collection called Aidmheil. Both Aidmheil and Greyfeather: Catch are limited editions but you can still pick up copies here: Aidmheil and Catch.  I own both and they are strongly recommended.

Whenever I finish a really good book/series I am conflicted. I am happy to have enriched my life with the stories, but I am sad they are over. But all is not lost. I have a strong feeling that Jessica is just getting started and I am patiently waiting with great anticipation.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,249110,00.html

The video is my favorite part.

The short version is that someone built some battery powered light brite looking images of the mooninites from Aqua Teen Hunger Force and the law enforcement establishment in Boston went nuts. And I give FOX huge credit for turning something so stupid into something so humorous with such clueless and funny coverage.

I have a head cold and feel pretty awful. I came home from work a little early and tried to lay down. Laying down made things worse. So I got up and started cleaning a bit. We hired someone to help with cleaning and they are doing the first cleaning tomorrow.

Most people have a junk drawer. It is usually in the kitchen and holds all of your foreign change, broken pencils, rubber bands, etc.. We have one of these in our kitchen.

We also have a junk room. We call it the media room since the majority of the junk is all of the books, CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, 8-tracks, and old forgotten computer media. It also happens to be a great place to stick things when you want them out of the way and you are not quite sure what to do with them.

Well the room was exploding out into the foyer. Something needed to be done. I started cleaning. It is like trying to eat the entire never-ending salad at Olive Garden. No matter how much I chip at this thing it still looks like a complete mess.

But none of that is very blog worthy. I just wanted to let you all know that I have found 4 years worth of unopened and untouched white pages and yellow pages from the phone company. We’re talking around 50 lbs. of useless paper. The good news is that all that paper is out in the recycle bin right now. The bad news is that I am not sure I remember ever doing anything with any of the other 4 years of white and yellow pages that have been delivered to this house. Does this mean I am only half way done with cleaning the junk media room??!?

I think I have figured something out about spammers. If you setup a catchall rule in the virtual map table for a domain such that *@mydomain.com will always get delivered to someone, then the spammers will figure it out. And when they do they will send a ton of spam spoofed to be from various usernames at your domain.

This has three major problems:

• You get emails from idiots that do not read mail headers telling you not to spam them anymore.
• You get email from auto-spam rejection bots (that IMHO add to the spam)
• You get a ton of postmasters sending failure to deliver errors.

All three of these added up was equal to about 2500 spam/spam-bounce/postmaster-return emails per day for one of my domains. Today I killed the *@domain mapping and I had one email make it through my normal spam filter. And the total email sent to me dropped several orders.

So the lesson to learn here: Do not use *@domain maps.

So what is a TWCHDDVR you ask? The Time Warner Digital Cable High Definition Digital Video Recorder is simply the worst executed DVR that I have ever used. However, it was pretty much the only option to get something that even the kids could use that would work in HD at home. Well no more you craptastic monopoly! Tivo has released the Series 3 HD DVR. I own a Series 2 DVR and it has always done what I wanted, never crashed and in general helps me dig through the billions of crap shows and boil my viewing time down to the 2-3 hours a week that I really want to see. I can not wait to take my TWC DVR into the TWC office and ask for two CableCARDS in return. The Tivo is expensive, but they have earned it. I cannot think of any other bit of electronics that I have bought recently that I felt really produced a high quality product for a decent price (except maybe the macbook I bought for Becky). Anyway, once I get it in I will let all two of you know what it is like.

My buddy Derek owns and runs Derek’s Martial Arts Gym. Back when Derek started the gym I helped him a bit here and there getting it setup. The building was in pretty bad shape when he started with it. It looks great now. So great in fact that a few months ago the gym was the setting for a music video for one of Derek’s students Ron D. for his video South Sea. The video has been posted to you tube. Check it out!