Home from vacation

Well, I'm back home, but wish I wasn't.  Had a wonderful vacation and have a wonderful tan thanks to the beaches of the US Virgin Islands.  Flew back to Ohio in the midst of a snowstorm, which sucked ass pretty hard, and I'm really wishing I could have stayed on vacation until, say, June.  But alas, there are important things that need tending to here before I can enjoy warmer weather again, mainly doctor appointments.

Today I get my knee drained again.  I am not looking forward to this at all, and really, really hope the doctor numbs me up well and good today.  I don't know how successful he's going to be if the pain is as harsh as the last time.  He only got 7 cc's of fluid out then and he thinks there's at least another 40 in there.  But, if I can walk normally in a couple of days, so be it.  And if I can't deal with the pain maybe he'll go with a steroid shot or something.  Anything to kill the pain that normal walking tends to cause.

Best games of the past decade

Since everyone else and their brother is doing a best games of the decade list, I thought I'd go ahead and do one myself.  It's not like anybody else is actually right, anyway, so I figure why the hell not.  Besides, while my taste in games may be slightly different than the average person's, it's still my list, and if you disagree that's fine, just keep in mind, nobody's asking you to play them.  They're just the games that I liked.  So here we go, in no particular order.

• Microsoft's Flight Simulator X:  As much as I hate Microsoft under the leadership of Steve Balmer, this is one product that Microsoft has never failed to do right.  The improvements to the physics and graphics were incredible, and the AI was light years ahead of its predecessor FS9.  Even better, many of the mods made for FS9 worked as well or better in FSX, and that's where Flight Simulator really stands out.  Throw in new aircraft, flight routes, and AI carriers from countless different sources, and you felt like you were living in the world of commercial air transportation.  Of course, I was just happy that the jetways actually moved and connected to your plane at the airport, so I suppose I'm easy to impress.  I would have preferred a more instructive flight training simulatiion, more along the lines of what FS9 had, but it wasn't a big deal to just go back to FS9 and learn how to fly again.  Other than that, the only thing I was really hoping for out of the followup to FSX was people on the ground.  Airport workers, people walking to and from the airport terminals and near the hangars, even kids watching the airplanes from inside the terminal.  That would have been cool, but sadly it will never be since Microsoft killed Flight Simulator's production team and laid off all of it's developers.  One of many reasons I wish Steve Balmer a thorough anal probing by aliens.
• Portal:  An FPS with no weapons, no enemies, but just amazingly thought out puzzles and one of the most hilarious narrative stories I have come across in video games.  When we are old and wrinkled, when our grandchildren come to us seeking sage wisdom from our long, experience-filled lives, we will look at them with a tear in our eye, smile at them with the compassion of one who has seen it all in our long years, and say "the cake is a lie".  They will look at us and think we're fucking nuts, but we know what we're talking about.  Our own grandparents suffered through hard years of economic disaster, wars that killed millions, and untold suffering for generations, yet we were fortunate enough to learn all of life's lessons in 19 puzzles created by a computer construct trying to tempt us with cake.
• Company of Heroes: I generally don't like many strategy games, but Company of Heroes is one of a few exceptions to the rule, and I'm not even sure why.  Yes, the graphics are pretty frickin' awesome, and the gameplay is somewhat realistic, but usually that's not enough for me to fall in love with a game.  What matters most, though, is that the game is quite simply fun to play.  I really can't place my finger on a single item that makes this game stand out in my mind, but it simply is one of my favorite games from the last decade.  I even have this strange sort of addiction to it that is beyond explanation.  I'm dead serious about this, too.  It's triggered almost every day, when I'm putting the dishes away.  As I'm taking the silverware out of the dishwasher and putting it in the drawer, I always, and I mean that literally, I always get an extremely strong urge to stop what I'm doing and go play Company of Heroes.  I doubt a team of the world's greatest minds will ever figure out what makes that connection in my brain, but there it is, and any game that can do that has to be an outstanding game.
• EVE Online:  Otherwise known as making spreadsheets fun.  Seriously, that's essentially what this game is, a giant fucking spreadsheet with pictures, but it's a blast, and has some of the most unique qualities I've ever seen in a video game.  Admittedly there's an awful lot of grinding if you don't want to pay to play, and the LONG process of leveling up can, I admit, take some of the fun out of the game, but if you're willing to be patient, put in the time, and not get mad when someone flips a can on you, then you can have a blast with this game.  Besides, it's still the only game where everyone is playing in the same universe.  You don't choose a server to play on, you log in, and literally everyone is there where you are.  I haven't played it in a while, I admit, but I waisted far, far too many hours in that game simply mining ore, and I liked it.
• Auto Assault: This game got short shafted big time.  I will probably never understand why it didn't take off any more than it did, but sadly it had a short lifespan, even for your average MMORPG.  I mean, you're a battle car, in a future apocalyptic world, and your job is to go out and kick ass.  What's not fun about that.  I know, a lot of people complained that the populations were too low on the servers, that finding people to campaign with was too difficult, but I disagree.  Then again, I'm not your typical MMO player, either, even though I like to play MMO's.  I liked Auto Assault because in all actuality I could play it as a single-player game.  I liked the fact that I could be out doing a quest, and some random person, another human, could be lying in wait to kick my ass.  I never got worked up over the crafting bugs in the game like other people did, but then again crafting has never been my thing in video games.  I much prefer to take all the loot I pick up, sell it, then buy what I need, but that's how I am in real life, too.  I don't want to make a sandwich when I can buy one, so why would I want to do that in a game?  But that's just me.  If I ever get rich and start my own development studio, this is a game that I'm going to try to remake.
• Guild Wars:  No, it's not World of Warcraft, and in spite of what GW players typically say, should never be compared to WoW.  The only comparison between GW and WoW is the fact that they're both fantasy-based games, but otherwise the gameplay is completely different, and that's a good thing.  I like Guild Wars because it has a pretty awesome story line, but mostly because, again, it's an MMO I can play as a single-player game if I want to, and if I don't want to engage in PvP play, I don't have to. Ever.  Then again if I do want to engage in PvP, that's easy enough to do also, and I like the way that PvP is structured in arenas, like in some ancient Colosseum.  Many argue that Guild Wars is not a true MMO, and there's some merit to that argument, but it's still a fun game that can suck up way too many hours of your life if you let it.
• Day of Defeat/DoD:Source:  Easily my favorite game for several years running.  The gameplay itself is simple.  Shoot the enemy, don't get shot, but it was the first multiplayer game I really got into.  I spent far, far too many hours playing this game, but I made some great friends in the process.  Graphically, not the best game in the world, but I found it much, much more enjoyable than Counter Strike, for the simple fact that even if you suck and die a lot, you don't have to wait long to respawn and start playing again.  I got better, though, so I didn't suck for too awful long.
• Battlefield: Vietnam:  Another mod that was, in my opinion as good as or better than the original.  Battlefield 1942 wasn't a great game in my opinion, because even though it came with a single-player campaign, it left a LOT to be desired.  BF:Vietnam wasn't like that at all.  They made no attempt to pretend there was a playable single-player element to the game, the weapons and vehicles were fun to play, and most of the stock maps were big enough that you could play for hours without wanting to change maps.  Loved this game, and wish I still had it.  Not only that, but the game's soundtrack seriously kicked ass.

There are more really great games that came out over the last decade, many that probably deserve to be on this list.  These are primarily the ones that stick out in my mind, and others that deserve to be on this list, like Doom3, F.E.A.R. etc... didn't get listed simply because I'd be here writing all damned day.

Making charts

So today I took some of that data from the National Weather Service I've been playing with, and I used it to figure out how to make dynamic charts in PHP-based websites.  Turns out, it was pretty easy using Libchart with a few tweaks here and there.  I don't know how long it'll stay up, but the charts look something like this:

I know, nothing to get overly excited about, but it's a start.  As I collect more data (this was only about 5 hours worth) the chart should begin to look a little more interesting, but I'm not completely satisfied yet.  Tomorrow, assuming I'm not catching the flu (it feels like it right now) I'm going to play around with JpGraph and see how that works.  It looks to be a lot more robust, with a lot more options, like letting me plot temps in Fahrenheit and Centigrade on the same chart with scales that are locked to each other, the ability to set the minimum number on the bottom to something other than zero, and so on.

I'm really not all that interested in learning how to completely code the chart making from scratch.  I mean I am, a little, but instead I think I'd rather learn a new language like C# so I can create desktop apps for myself that do similar things.  There are a lot of benefits to web-based apps like this, but until I'm able to afford a new gaming rig I don't have a dedicated linux box.  Right now I'm stuck running all of this on a vmware image, which is fine since I have tons of memory, but sometimes I need to shut vmware down for extended periods and then all of these nifty little apps I've been working on stop collecting data.

For now, though, I'm just playing around and learning new concepts.  Something to keep me occupied in the evenings, at least.

Fuck that hurt!

How in the hell I kept from cussing out loud while the doctor was draining fluid out of my knee is beyond me.  I have literally never been in that much pain in my life.  I mean seriously, that hurt so much I nearly passed out because of the pain.  The bad news is, I have to go back in a week or so and do it all over again.

Not blaming the doctor on this one, although it's partially his fault it hurt so much.  He did try to numb the area where he was sticking the needle, but where he numbed it he wasn't getting any fluid out.  Then he backed out a little, changed angles, and holy mother of every god the universe has ever known, the world went dark on me and it was everything I could do not to scream at the top of my lungs.  But I'll be damned if that part, where it hurt worse than any pain I've ever felt, didn't end up being the part where fluid began to flow out of my knee.

We're talking a pain like I have never felt anywhere in my body.  It didn't feel like when you cut yourself or slam your fingers in a car door.  This felt like a deep, hollow, explosive pain that is almost impossible to describe.  I really wish I could put it into words that do it justice, but the closest I can come is it felt like he was right under the edge of the patella and set fire to the back side of the bone. Fire started from potassium, or thermite, in the bone.  That's kind of what it felt like.

In all, he gave it three tries.  The first try didn't hurt at all but he didn't get any fluid out.  The second try was the one that hurt like a motherfucker.  That time he got 7 cc's of fluid but stopped when I nearly passed out.  The third time he tried a slightly different area that didn't hurt as much, although it still hurt, but he didn't get any fluid.  That's when we decided to give it a rest.  He used a lot of lidocane but he numbed things up before he stuck me, which in retrospect was a bad choice on my part because it was the wrong area and he didn't feel comfortable using more.  That's why we decided to stop, even though he thinks there's another 40 cc's or more he can get out.

Chances are we're going to go through the entire process again in a week or so.  He's ordered an orthopedics   consultation, which he wants me to have before my primary care appointment on Jan. 4, but if I can't get the ortho consult before then (unlikely in my opinion) he's going to stick more needles in my knee and try to get the rest of the fluid out.  I'm hoping like hell I'll get that ortho consultation next week, though, because I really, really don't want to go through that pain again.  I will if I have to, but damn, I'd prefer to avoid it if at all possible.

Today's the day

Today's the day I see the knee doctor. Been a long wait, but it's finally here.  Leaving in about 10 minutes or so, even though my appointment isn't until 2:30 but I need to get there early so that I can find his office.  My knee seems to sense the impending visit, because it's swollen pretty good and I can't straighten it out very much.  Stairs are almost impossible unless I take them one step at a time, and if I've been standing for a few minutes I have a hard time bending my knee again just to sit down.

It's amazing how, when we have a long-term injury (in this case osteoarthritis) we learn ways to cope and get around the pain without even thinking about it.  When I stand after sitting, I put all my weight on my right leg because I can't support any weight left.  Chairs have to be higher than your average chair, so on non-adjustable chairs I have extra pillows I sit on.  Little things like that, things that I barely notice most of the time, are what makes me realize just how much of a problem my knee actually is.

Hopefully today I'll get some answers, though, and it won't be a problem for much longer.  I hope.  I really, really hope. :)

Dreamkiller

Looks like Valve is having a free weekend of play for Dreamkiller.  Never heard of the game until today, so I think I'll give it a shot and see what it's about after it finishes downloading.  I like trying new games, so hopefully this one will be good.  If it is, maybe I'll buy it when I finish Dragon Age: Origins.

Weather Messages Done!

Sweet!  I managed to write a script that collects weather forecasts from the National Weather Service and sends them via text message (MMS actually) to my cell phone.  I realize it's been about 24 hours since I first mentioned this little project, but I really didn't get started until about 9:00 last night, then slept and started on it again late this morning.

The only difficulties I ran into was with the raw XML data from the National Weather Service.  When I started last night, it listed minimum temperatures (the low) first, then in the next section it listed the high temps.  No big deal, I just grab them in order, insert the lows into the database, then the highs, and I'm good to go. Right?

Fat chance.  This morning I started working on it again and the first thing I noticed is that that low temps are about 20 degrees higher than they should be, so I look, and my low temps are in the high databases and the high temps are in the low database.  I ended up having to write a whole new routine to first figure out which temperatures I was dealing with before inserting them into the database.  I got it figured out, though, and it really wasn't difficult but was annoying because I had to take a few steps backwards.

I also ended up sending the messages via MMS rather than SMS to get around the 140 character limit Verizon places on you.  I understand why they set it at 140 characters, because of the extra stuff they add in, but I wanted to send the full forecast for both today and tomorrow so MMS it was.  I don't get charged for either, so it's not a big deal, really.

But at least it's done, and it works much better than I expected it to.  So I'm a very happy girl right now :)

Wx via SMS or MMS using PHP and XML

Heh, I love acronyms :)

Anyway, playing around with the Bing API the other day got me in the mood to play around with web-based data once again, which happens on rare occasions.  I find data, then I want to find out if I can import that data and make it useful to me, personally, and maybe a few of my friends.  That was part of my motivation behind messing with the Bing API (not to mention porn) but now I've moved on to other areas.

Way back earlier this year I started working on a project to grab weather data from the National Weather Service and was planning on creating a way to send short-term forecasts to Twitter.  I already started a way to send news headlines to Twitter, using the free Daylife API, and I've long thought that getting the local weather via Twitter would be cool, too.  I may still do that, but now I have other plans.

When I first started looking at the weather data, figuring out how to use it was way beyond my capabilities.  I only knew how to deal with PHP-REST data, and had no idea how to deal with plain old-fashioned XML data in PHP.  Once, a long time ago, I was able to write a script that imported and parsed RSS feeds, but that was a few years back and had long since been forgotten.  But messing with the Bing API taught me a few more tricks so I started playing around a little more.

Before the weather idea came up, however, I had a more immediate need.  I'm on your basic residential DSL connection at home, and it serves my purposes quite well until FiOS is available in my area.  But being on a residential DSL circuit means I have a dynamic IP Address, which makes it difficult to remotely connect to my home machines if the lease expires and my IP changes.  So the question was, can I monitor my home IP address and send a text message to my cell phone when it changes?

The answer was a surprisingly easy yes.  Sort of.  Writing the script to send the message was extremely easy, but the difficult part was configuring sendmail and apache to send an email through Verizon's smtp servers.  That's a long story and not really pertinent to this discussion, but let's say that spammers have made life much more difficult for us honest folks.

Anyway, if you have a Verizon cell phone, here's the little script I use to send a text to my phone when my IP changes.  Note, I don't have telnet or SNMP access to this cheap-ass router they provide, so I have to grab the IP from an external website.  I store it in a database so that I can check it frequently but only send a text message when there's a change:

@mysql_pconnect("localhost", "username", "password")

    or die(mysql_error());

@mysql_select_db("ip_monitor")

    or die(mysql_error());

    

function mailIP($ip) {

    $headers = "your email address \r\n";

    $headers .= "Cc: another email address \r\n";

    $headers .= "Content-Type: text/plain;\r\n charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";

    

    mail('your verizon phone number@vtext.com', '', $ip, $headers);

}

$ip = file_get_contents('http://www.biranchi.com/ip.php');

$time = time();

$lastRow = "SELECT * FROM addresses ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1";

$numRows = mysql_query($lastRow);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($numRows)) {

    $id = $row['id'];

    $epoch = $row['epoch'];

    $oldIP = $row['ip'];

    

    if ($ip == $oldIP) {

        break;

    }

    else {

        $insert = "INSERT INTO addresses SET epoch='$time', ip='$ip'";

        $insertAction = mysql_query($insert);

        

        if (!$insertAction) {

            //echo "Old IP ".$oldIP." matches Current IP ".$ip;  //just a visual reference

            die(mysql_error());

        }

        else {

            //echo "time= ".$time." IP= ".$ip; //just a visual reference

            mailIP($ip);

        }

    }

}

That's it.  Easy as pie and now I get a text message whenever my IP address changes.

Once that was done, I had another idea.  Some strong winter weather was moving through the area (the whole country almost) and I noticed on the National Weather Service website there was an alert issued for my area.  So the little lightbulb goes off and I think it would be really, really nice to have those sent by text to my phone as well.

That, of course, was a little more difficult, but I managed it.  I won't post all of the code here because I'm not done making changes to it, but basically it's very similar to the code above except instead of just grabbing an IP from a web page, I now have to parse a potentially lengthy XML response.

Parsing the XML was a little bit of a learning experience.  In all honesty, it was pretty easy once I figured out what I was doing, but I did run into a problem with namespaces.  Parts of the XML document I use for severe weather alerts is based on the Common Alerting Protocal, but the document didn't provide a reference to the namespace schema, so I had to learn how to deal with that.  It would have been ok, but the prefixes used in the document weren't completely consistent with the CAP schema, so I had to come up with a workaround.

Well, I didn't have to come up with a workaround.  I didn't need the CAP messages for what I was trying to do with the data since I'm only sending the timestamp and the first 120 characters of the alert summary to my cell phone, but I definitely wanted to be able access all of it regardless of its current usefulness.  In the process of figuring out how to use the CAP data in the weather alert messages, I found that there are all kinds of agencies using that same protocol.  That resulted in the realization that I could grab tons and tons of XML-based data relating to emergency situations and use it in dozens and dozens of different ways.  Send it to Twitter, send it to cell phones, display it on the web in maps or develop mobile applications.

I even saw where the Department of Homeland Security uses RSS to disseminate alert information, including the famous color-coded terrorist threat level, although I could easily fake that and just send out a message every day saying the threat level is orange.  California's emergency management agency uses CAP, as does the USGS and some Canadian provincial governments.  The amount of XML emergency data sitting out there on the web, relatively unused, is tremendous, and I'd like to find a good, preferably profitable, use for it.

Will I?  Probably not.  I'm not sure I have the inclination or the energy to set about another project that huge, at least not by myself.  I don't really have the skill to do it properly, either.  For now, I'm just satisfied playing with the data for my own personal interest as a way to teach myself new things.  I'll figure out how to parse some of the more complex weather XML documents and grab useful information from them over the next few days, and if I'm not entirely bored with it by the time I'm done, maybe I'll sit down and figure out what it will take to start a small company that mines emergency data from the web.  It could be fun, it could also be a headache, so we'll see how it goes.

Someone needs to tell MSNBC Tiger Woods is not a politician

Just a quick gripe before I head out for the day.  I'm at MSNBC.com reading an article about the Afghan war, and I see their typical, and often amusing, link to the political cartoons for the week.  I figure hey, I like political cartoons, especially when they agree with me, so I'll click on it.  What do I see as the first cartoon?  Tiger's wrecked car.

Folks, Tiger is not a politician.  There's nothing political about him.  Making fun of him does not constitute political commentary.  Yes, it is social commentary, and if a cartoonist wants to poke fun at him, that's fine, but that would be an editorial cartoon, not specifically a political cartoon.  So folks at MSNBC, leave the sports figures out of your political cartoons, please, and try posting more political stuff instead.

kthxbye

Google Real TIme Search and Tiger Woods

It's a horrible situation this morning, and let me preface this post by saying that my heart goes out to Tiger, his wife, or whoever has been hurt by this situation.  Maybe not so much Tiger but I include him because there are so many conflicting reports this morning.  Chances are by now many of you have heard that a woman, or someone, was rushed to a hospital from Tiger Woods' home this morning.  Some reports are saying that it was Tiger, some say his wife, others simply say it was a blonde woman.  Whoever it is, my hope is that everyone will make a full recovery.

But in spite of the horrible news, this is an opportunity to show just how important Google's Real Time Search released yesterday is.  Doing a search for Tiger Woods and clicking on latest (remember to add &esrch=RTSearch to the address if it isn't showing up for you) has the results literally flying in.  At the moment (7:00 AM right now) many of the results are from Twitter, which is literally abuzz with talk of what's happening, but it's not just Twitter results showing up.  Just within the past few minutes there have been dozens of Twitter posts, but numerous Facebook updates, and as news articles come in, they're showing up in the timeline as well.


I have to say that, sad as this particular story is, Google's Real Time Search is absolutely shining.  As an example, if you were one of the millions following the Iranian election protests earlier this year, you know that it was a royal pain in the ass trying to use some of the third party live searches that relied heavily on large amounts of javascript or (gasp!) flash, that you frequently had to shut down your browser and reload the page, and the tools, while great at the time, were really rather clunky.  Most of them required you to be logged into Twitter in order to make full use of them as well, which meant sharing your account information with a possibly not-so-honest group of people.  It worked, but it wasn't the ideal way to handle information.


Besides the problem with services like Twitterfall, if you wanted information from other sources, you had to have multiple tabs or browsers open, flipping through them frequently to keep abreast of the latest information.  You had to watch each news site individually, follow blogs in separate windows, and follow each and every social media site separately as well.  Those days are now officially over.


Now, it is all in one place.  Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, news organizations (haven'st seen any Newscorp stories though :) ) are all streaming into my browser on a single page, updating every second.  Google's Real Time Search quite literally takes all the work out of information gathering on breaking news.  Who needs wire services (I'm looking at you, AP) when I can do a simple search in Google and have access to more information than I can possibly use.


The only downside I've found so far is that after ten minutes or so the feed seems to stall out.  I don't know if this is a result of my browser or if there's a timer built into the code on Google's end, but it's not a horrible inconvenience.  It may also be based on the number of entries on a single page.  I'm not certain, and it could be a feature designed to prevent your browser from soaking up all of your memory.


But regardless, real time search has finally come of age, and in my opinion has absolutely revolutionized the way people will think about search from now on.  Admittedly, I'm something of a Google fanboy, but nobody can deny how game-changing this technology is.  I have a feeling that I will be using this feature a lot from now on, and so will a lot of other people.


On a side note, the real time search seems to be enabled by default when using Chrome, however when I use Firefox I have to manually enable the feature by pasting the string above into the address bar.  Word is they're rolling this out a little at a time, but if you can't get it to work otherwise, try it out in Chrome.

Google's Real Time Search

Way back when I was doing news aggregation, I would have killed for real time search capabilities.  Now that Google has launched real time search, I'm tempted to delve back into that wild world.  Well, maybe not, but the real time search is pretty nifty, in my opinion.

Take, for example, a Google search for Nathan Fillion.  Your standard search shows you the expected results, such as imdb page, wikipedia page, image results, all that good stuff.  Now click on Show options above the results, and then click on Latest when the sidebar opens, and bam, a whole wide world of wonderful.

What's that?  Latest doesn't show up for you?  There's an easy fix for that.  Up in the address bar, scroll all the way to the end of the address (the right end, not the left) and add &esrch=RTSearch to the end.  Hit enter, and "Latest" should show up in the sidebar.  Click on it, and there you go.

At the time of this writing, the oldest item listed on that page is 44 minutes old, and several twitter posts occurring within the last minute.  The Twitter part may not be so useful, but it's kinda cool, especially if you're not logged into Twitter at the moment and are curious what people are saying.

Personally, I like it.  Now...  I wonder if I can access real time search through the Google API and craft my own custom pages to play around with.  I also wonder if the real time search works with images because seriously, who wouldn't love a continuously updating stream of midget porn right there in your browser :)

Bing Image Searching Script

So I wrote this script to download images from the web using Bing Image Search.  It's nothing fancy, just searches Bing for whatever terms you input, gets the results, and either displays them in your web page or downloads them to your hard drive.  Very basic.

Now, before I get to the script itself, note that this is not a tutorial on how to write your own script.  My programming skills leave a lot to be desired, I know, and I wouldn't dare instruct anyone on how to write any kind of script other than maybe a simple hello world script.  So in case someone downloads this script and wants to comment about how much my coding skills suck, I'll save you the time.  I already know that, so go away.

A few notes about the script itself.  First, this script is absolutely NOT INTENDED FOR USE ON A PUBLIC SERVER!  Hopefully I've made that clear enough.  If you put this script on a public server and something bad happens as a result, then you suck, not me, because I've warned you.  Feel free to run this on your own personal linux box on a home network, however, or better yet get the VMWare Player and run it on a virtual machine so as not to expose anything vital.  I suppose it's possible to run this script on a Windows machine running apache, php, and with wget installed, but I haven't attempted it myself and don't intend to.

Specifics about what this script does:  You enter a search term in the box.  Then you tell the script how many results you want it to return (max 1000).  Then, because Bing will only allow you to retrieve 50 results at a time, you tell it how many results per page you want to return.  This is just to tell Bing how many results you want to process at one time.  The script will continue to run until it reaches the total number of results you have indicated and then display them all on a single page.

You can set the adult content (Safe Search) filter level just like you can on the Bing website.  There are three filtering options, none, moderate, and strict.  You can also tell the script what size images to download (all, small, medium, large).  The sizes are determined by Bing, not me, so don't complain if you select large and you get a bunch of tiny images, but for the most part it's pretty accurate.

Now for the important part.  Display/downloading options.  You have three choices:

• Full Size: This will display each search result at its full size in your browser, one above the other.  It's fine for a small number of search results, but can use a ton of memory if you're trying to display a thousand large images all at once.  This option does not save the images to your hard drive, however, so if you want to save any of them you have to right-click to save.
• Thumbnails: I put the most effort into this option, because it's what I prefer.  It will display thumbnails of each search result, along with the dimensions and file size of the actual image, and the type of image (ie. jpg, gif, png).  Clicking on the thumbnail will load the full size image in your browser.  You can also check the box beneath each image that you want to download, then click the button at the bottom of the page to save the checked images to your hard drive.  How fast that happens depends on your internet connection.  The images are downloaded into the same directory where you placed the script.
• Display None/Direct Download (not recommended):  This option doesn't display any images, but will print out the url of each image it is downloading.  Images are downloaded to the directory where the script resides.  This option is semi-dependent on how your permissions are set, because it first writes all of the urls to a text file, then executes wget to actually download the images from that text file.  Not the ideal way to do it, but I never went back and changed it when I realized how stupid it was to do it that way.  A final note on this option: Be very careful, because you can accidentally download scripts instead of just images this way.  Some servers that disable hotlinking will replace the image with a script that can then be executed on your machine and wget seems to not know the difference.

I definitely DO NOT recommend doing a direct download.  When writing the script it was the first method I created, and I ended up with some pretty nasty files on my hard drive.  Some of them were goatse/tubgirl type images, others were scripts and html files that could potentially be malicious.  Use it if you want, but again, I'm not responsible for anything bad that happens if you do.

That's pretty much it.  Here are some screenshots so you can see what it looks like:

The first one is the initial search page:

This one is the thumbnail results page:

UPDATE: I removed this image because I realized that I left some debugging code in that shows my app id.  I'll replace it with a different image tomorrow.

And that's pretty much the gist of it.  You can download the full script from http://www.mediafire.com/?qwvd3damnwg. Have fun.

Dragon Age Origins

Ok, this game pretty much rules.  It is, in my opinion, the true heir to Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment, which every serious gamer should have played through at least twice.  I literally spent all day yesterday playing this game, and I'm 11% complete.  When they say there's 100 hours of gameplay in this game, they aren't kidding at all.  I can see easily spending 100 hours in this game, because I know I've barely scratched the surface.

Admittedly there are a lot of cutscenes in the game, which do take some time.  But that's ok.  I actually like the cutscenes because they're important to the story itself.  So far, I haven't noticed any truly detrimental consequences to my actions, but I can see where some of the decisions I've made may end up making a difference later on.  A couple of my party members don't appear to be too fond of each other at the moment, and I'm wondering if that may end up causing problems later.  Whether or not that type of interaction is built into the game I'm not sure, but if it is, it could make life really interesting down the road.

Now, time to start playing again.

Just bought Dragon Age Origins

Went and bought Dragon Age Origins today. Hadn't paid any attention to the game until I saw that the lunatics at World Net Daily were all up in arms because of a gay sex scene. Thanks wingnuts, you just made the creators more money :) Said video below:

Sucks to be SyFy tonight

Just heard the news that NBC, which includes SyFy, Bravo, and countless other TV networks, is being sold to Comcast.  That news absolutely, positively sucks donkey balls.  I mean for NBC itself, I really don't care.  There aren't any shows I currently watch on the broadcast network.  Ever since they destroyed Kings I've refused to give them a single moment of my attention.  But I do watch SyFy and sometimes I watch Bravo, and I'm really not looking forward to losing any of the other shows I watch.  With Comcast in control, I honestly can't see shows like Sanctuary or Stargate Universe being allowed to continue, not to mention anything as conspiratorial as Warehouse 13.

I know I'm being a speaking doom before it happens, but there aren't words to express my hatred of Comcast.  It nearly rivals my hatred of Clear Channel.  I'd rather be buttfucked with a scimitar than give Comcast any praise, and if they fuck up my channels, I'm going to be even more pissed.

Oh, and I have no doubt that MSNBC will quickly become a competitor to Fox News under the new ownership, considering the bastards that run Comcast.  Fuck them.

Can you tell I'm pissed?

Gaming problems fixed

Yeah, so it wasn't so much the USB headphones that were causing my gaming problems. I assumed it was CPU related because I've noticed a number of other things bogging down when there was heavy audio usage, not just in Day of Defeat:Source. Other games, like Civilization 4 would massively slow down the longer I played, especially on huge maps, and some games that used to be playable weren't so playable any more. But I've found the problem, and it is now fixed, albeit temporarily.

The problem was dust. Yep, good old-fashioned dust. I hadn't cleaned out the inside of that machine for quite some time, and the heat-sink on the GPU (among other things) was simply caked with dust. So I took the card out, vacuumed everything really well, plugged it back in, and there she was. Working just fine.

After my initial post on the problem last night I got to wondering what my GPU temperatures were like. The CPU temp was fine, that much I knew in advance, but I didn't have any real way of checking the GPU temp. So I did a little searching and found a handy-dandy little utility called GPU-Z that is basically a video card info tool, ran it, and just about shit myself when I saw that the idle temp while doing absolutely nothing was 80 degrees Celsius. That obviously wasn't going to cut it, so I went to bed, slept like hell because I kept wishing I'd fixed the problem before going to bed, then got up and first thing I did was take a good look inside the case.

Yuck. It wasn't pretty. I had good airflow into the chassis itself because I have the sides & top off the box, but the machine was down on the floor and pretty much out of sight most of the time, so I had no idea how dirty it was in there. Took me just a few minutes to vacuum all the dirt and dust out, put my video card back in and fire it up. Instantly I noticed that the temp came down to about 55 degrees. It rose to about 60 degrees after a few minutes, but then it pretty much leveled off. Now, one thing I did notice in the monitoring software is that the fan speed was locked at 26% regardless of the GPU temperature, but I don't know if that's actually the case or just bad reporting on the part of the hardware or software. Just to be on the safe side, though I set a little box fan beside the case and I've got it blowing air directly inside, cooling everything off, and now my temp is holding steady at 55 degrees.

Personally, I'd like it to be a little cooler so maybe later on today I'll take the card out, pop the cover off the heat-sink, and do a more thorough job of cleaning it out, but at least now I know what my problem was. I'm much, much happier now, and will probably sleep better tonight knowing that I won't have to worry about upgrading my hardware anytime soon.

Oh, and another thing. I ran a test by playing the Left 4 Dead 2 demo with the video settings on high, and while I didn't get great framerates, it was definitely playable with no lagging or stuttering. Yesterday, I couldn't even play it with the video settings set on low. But I managed to play through the entire demo with no problems today, so that's really all I can ask. Now we'll see how Flight Simulator X responds to my newly cool video card :)

Day of Defeat:Source frustrations

By far my favorite shooter is Day of Defeat:Source. Well, I technically liked the old one a little better, but that's irrelevant. I hadn't played it in a while, so the other day I reinstalled it, and after fooling around a bit got my config back to the way I like it. I'm not a graphics junkie for most games, as long as they're fun and entertaining, so I like to turn a lot of the extras off when I can for better performance.

But here's the thing. Back when I played the game a lot, I could play it on my (mostly) current hardware setup with maxed out graphics and 60-100 fps with no problem whatsoever. Now however, I get about 50 fps when I first load the game and log into a server, and over a period of about 5 minutes my framerate gets worse until it locks in at 9 fps, maybe jumping up to 15 if I'm inside a small room or something. If you've played any shooters, or hell, any game at all, you should know that anything less than about 25 fps is almost unplayable.

It's definitely not server lag, because my loss and choke numbers are fine. It's a hardware issue on my end, that much I know. Now, the only difference in the hardware on this rig between when I played a lot and now is with audio. I have an Audigy 2 card in the machine, which isn't a high-end card, I know, but it's what I played with in the past. The thing is, I'm not using it right now. A year ago or so my headphones gave up the ghost, and in order to have any sound at all on my machine (a necessity) I went out and bought a cheap Microsoft Lifechat set of USB headphones.

I'm wondering, and if anybody actually reads this maybe they can confirm, but is it possible that the audio is what's causing my fps to drop? I notice my fps starts to go down whenever I get near a machine gun, stays at that level, then drops a little more when the mg fires again. Is it possible that the audio from the game is taking up too much cpu? If I had 2 monitors on this machine I could probably watch for that, but I don't have 2 monitors, so it's a guessing game.

It's not a huge deal, because I've got a much better set of headphones on the way already. I've been planning to get a new set for a while, and they're not USB headphones this time so maybe I'll end up answering my own question. The only other thing I can think of is that my video card is getting too hot as I play, but if I shut down the game and restart it my fps is back up to normal again. I wouldn't think 30 seconds would be enough to cool the gpu off enough to make that noticeable of a difference. I suppose I can test that, too, by sticking a huge honking fan in front of my machine, but I'm still leaning towards the audio issue.

Anyway, if anybody's heard of this issue or something similar, I'd love to hear what you found out and how you resolved the problem. I spent all evening cracking my skull on my desk, and I'm not sure what else to consider at this point.

Finally!

I've been waiting to get an appointment with Rheumatology at the VA Medical Center since August. It's now November and until today I had heard absolutely nothing from them about my appointment.

I have, apparently, a pretty bad case of osteoarthritis in my left knee. Had it for years, actually, but I never had it looked at because I could deal with it. I lead a pretty sedentary life, sitting in front of a computer every day and, although I admit I don't get the exercise I should, it never bothered me to the point where I felt like I needed to see a doctor. Yeah, it was pretty difficult to climb stairs or ladders normally, and coming back down was hard, but I would go slowly, one step at a time, and deal with it.

Then back in August the problems really kicked in. My knee swelled up something huge and was literally hot to the touch. The pain was almost unbearable, to the point that I could barely walk from the living room to the kitchen, which are right next to each other. My family had been urging me to get my knee looked at for several years, and now I was in so much pain that I had no choice.

Part of the reason I didn't have it looked at was a lack of health insurance, and I knew that anything major was going to have to come out of my pocket. I couldn't afford to go to the doctor, and even if I could afford an office visit, I couldn't afford the treatment, which I was certain would be extremely expensive. Then I remembered I have VA benefits, and I'd never used them, not even once in the decade plus since I've been out of the military.

When I got out of the Coast Guard, my last duty station sent all of my records and pre-registered me with the VA Medical Center in Indianapolis, since that was the closest one to where I was going to be living anyway. But I never made an appointment, and I had no need to see a doctor back then. Then I moved back to Ohio, and never bothered to have my records transferred over. This was back before they were doing electronic medical records.

A few years ago, however, I gave some thought to having my knee looked at, and on a whim I started the process of registering with the VA again, this time just a short drive from home. I was having knee problems then, too, but I was still in the stage where I could deal with it so I checked the box that said I was only registering in the event I needed to see a doctor there in the future. Once the paperwork was done (relatively easy, considering it's the government I was dealing with) I promptly forgot about my ability to use the VA if needed. I rarely ever got sick to the point where seeing a doctor was called for, so it never crossed my mind.

Then comes this past August and the pain. I'll tell you right now that in all of my life, through broken bones, all kinds of cuts and bruises, and various other injuries, I have never been in as much pain as I was when my knee decided to go all jihad on me. (wonder if that phrase will put me on a terrorist watch list :) )

I had no choice. After laying on my back for three days to keep my leg elevated, alternating heat and ice on a knee that was the size of a very large grapefruit, maybe a little bigger, I had to see someone. I called the VA, and this is where I wished I'd seen a doctor there before.

After all the paperwork had been completed to register me with the VA, they sent me a letter asking me to call and schedule an initial consultation with a primary care physician. I never did. I'd intended to, but I put the letter aside and promptly forgot about it. So now when I called up to see if I could see a doctor, I was told that it would be at least three weeks before I could get in. No fucking way could I wait that long to see a doctor. I couldn't even stand long enough to fix dinner for myself unless it was something that could go in the microwave, so I thought I was screwed and would have to make a trip to the local urgent care and pay for a visit out of my pocket.

But, thankfully, another phone call to see if anybody had cancelled an appointment and could I get in earlier led me to a very helpful scheduler. My total unwillingness to familiarize myself with my available VA benefits meant that I didn't know the VA had a 24/7 urgent care clinic themselves. The scheduler asked me if it was an emergency for me to see a doctor, and I said no, but I was in a lot of pain. She started looking through my file, and then told me what options I had available to me.

First, I had to go in and get my VA ID card. Without that, I wouldn't get very far, but I could do that at 7:00 the next morning if I wanted. I did. Then I could take my brand new ID over to urgent care and be seen by a doctor that day. When I heard this, I told the lady on the phone that I wanted to kiss her, and I meant it.

I got up early the next morning and hobbled to my car, then headed down to the VA, hoping to be the first in line when I got there. Yeah, traffic had other plans, so it was closer to eight o'clock when I finally limped inside. I should note, here, that one of the greatest benefits the VA hospital has is the free valet parking, because making the trip from the already full parking lot was not going to be easy. The other great benefit. Free coffee before 9 AM and after that, Starbucks. I had no idea just how much I'd be needing that coffee, but I was thankful it was there.

The guy at the information desk pointed me to the Maroon Desk (everything is color coded there), so I slowly worked my way down the hall and found a large waiting area full of people as well as another, fairly long line of people waiting to be seen. The desk was maroon, and I assumed the people sitting were waiting on others, so I got in line with everyone else. It took almost an hour of standing there in line for me to get to the front, my knee was absolutely throbbing and I nearly had tears in my eyes, but the lady finally called me up and said "Last name, last 4, and destination".

I gave her my last name, the last 4 digits of my social security number, and told her I was going to urgent care. She looked at me like I was the single most ignorant person in the world.

Turns out, I was standing in the wrong line. The Maroon Desk apparently serves more than one function, and I was in the line for travel, as in to other VA facilities throughout the country. I explained to her what I'd been told on the phone, and thankfully she didn't think me too much of an idiot and passed me off to a cardboard sign sitting right beside her with a stack of laminated numbers sitting below it. Ah, I had to take a number and have a seat. Little did I know just how much the VA relies on the "take a number" system. I didn't care though. The opportunity to sit down was more than welcome, so I took my number and had a seat.

My number was finally called around 12:30 in the afternoon, four and a half hours after my arrival at the medical center. Part of it was my fault for getting in line, but part of it was the fact that three people in the office I was there to see were out sick, and one guy was trying to handle everyone. I felt bad for him, because I'd watched him very skillfully deal with some very irate people and he was doing the best he could, which for a couple of folks wasn't good enough, so when he finally called my number and I went back through the locked door to his office, I offered to wait if he wanted to grab his lunch. He declined and just kept on working as cheerfully as he could.

Since it had been more than a year since I'd registered, I had to take a new means test, which was basically a review of my finances to see how much my visits were going to cost me out of pocket. Turns out, I fell just under the adjusted income level, and I have no copay for visits and free prescriptions. That was the best news I'd heard all day, and it would remain that way.

After getting my ID card and filling out some more paperwork, I was on my way to urgent care. The guy who I'd just seen gave me directions, but I still managed to get lost. I was supposed to make my way to the ER, sign in there, then wait to see a nurse. Ok, but it took me stopping at three desks before I actually found out exactly where I was supposed to sign in at. Found it eventually, a little pad of paper on an old music stand set up at the far end of a waiting room.

I had to be seen by a triage nurse, and it looked like it was a pretty busy day all around. When I signed in, I wrote down my name, the time, and the reason for my visit (left knee pain) so I figured I'd have to wait a while. I've worked in hospital ER's before, and I understand how the triage process works, so I made sure I was in the right frame of mind to wait. Most of the time, if I understand the reasons why, I don't mind waiting, and in this case I knew that I was going to be low on the priority list.

So I sat down in the waiting area with all the other people and managed not to gag on the soap operas that were on the TV, instead entertaining myself by listening in to the other conversations around me. This is where I heard one middle-aged guy say "I'll be damned if I'll ever use government run, socialized medicine." Yes. He said that while waiting to be seen at a VA Medical Center. This was, of course, during the height of government fearmongering about the dangers of healthcare reform so I refrained from pointing out the obvious.

Surprisingly it wasn't long before I heard my name called and I got up to go see the triage nurse. She asked me why I was there (because she had to confirm that I wrote the right thing down on the sign-in sheet, I guess) and then proceeded to take my vitals. Temperature, blood pressure, that sort of thing.

Oops. Something wasn't right. The machine said my blood pressure was 220 over 140. She got a different blood pressure cuff out, hooked it up, and tried again. Same reading.

"Well that just can't be right." she said, then invited me to follow her into the nurse's office where she had me sit in a chair. She left and came back with another nurse, or maybe an actual nurse, I'm not sure, who then took my blood pressure the old-fashioned way. Manually. Same deal. My heart should be ready to explode.

The nurse sat down and began typing in the computer, recording my responses to a bunch of questions. I didn't know of any family history of high blood pressure (it was true, but I was wrong), I'd only had one bout of high blood pressure in my past, when I had seen a doctor while I was drunk (long story), but it seemed to have been fine for years as far as I knew. I didn't have a headache, and the only reason I was there was because my knee was fucking killing me. She asked if I could think of any reason why my blood pressure would be so high, such as medications I might have taken (just 1600 milligrams of ibuprofen) or other drugs, but the only explanation I could honestly give was that I had barely slept for the past three days and I was in a hell of a lot of pain.

Now remember, this is at the emergency room with an ER nurse, so I'm assuming she knows what she's doing. I don't know what her thought process was, but she leaves, and a minute later the other lady (probably just a tech now that I think about it) comes back and hands me a yellow laminated card that says "Urgent Care" on it, and sends me to the Blue Desk, just up the hall.

So I take my card, go to the Blue Desk, and the lady there takes my name and all that stuff again and prints off one of those paper wrist bands hospitals like to use. She puts it on me, and sends me on another walk, this time to the primary care area where the urgent care clinic is. Now, I think, I'm finally getting somewhere.

I walk up to the window, hand the lady there my little yellow card, and she tells me to have a seat. I do, and then I begin to watch the hours tick by again. I think it was about two hours that I waited, again thinking I'm still low priority, so no complaints but I did see four complete episodes of Charmed, which is cool because I like that show.

Finally, and I think it was after 4:00, I heard my name called. Not by a nurse, as the others I'd been waiting with had been, but by a guy who was obviously a doctor. Tall fucker, he introduces himself and leads me back to his office/exam room. I didn't know this at the time, but I guess the docs see their patients right in their office there, which is convenient for the doc, but I'd never seen it before.

He sits me down in a chair and tells me to relax, then immediately gets out the blood pressure cough as he begins asking me questions. No mention of my knee, just more questions about my blood pressure, which was understandable, but was not getting me any closer to getting my knee looked at. This was when I had the very first inklings of frustration begin to arise, way back in the recesses of my mind, but at least I was seeing a doctor so I wasn't going to say anything just yet.

Well, the doctor is in stunned disbelief at my blood pressure, which I suppose he should have been considering I exhibited absolutely no other symptoms of high blood pressure at all. No shortness of breath, no headaches, no fainting or dizziness. Just a knee that hurt like hell. He checked my blood pressure three times over a ten minute period, then walked out of his office without an explanation, but he returned less than a minute later and asked me to follow him.

We walk a short distance down the hall, and he points to a chair right next to the nurses station and asks me to have a seat, saying he'll be right back. I sit, he walks off. A couple of the nurses jokingly ask if I got in trouble, and I laugh, explaining that I didn't know what was going on, and I wait. Since this was my first visit to the VA, I had no idea whether this was normal procedure or not, although I suspected it wasn't normal. Then again, I'd heard numerous people talking about being short on staff that day, so maybe he was looking for an actual exam room and not just his office.

Wrong. When the doctor came back, he explained that he was extremely worried about my blood pressure, and that he was sending me to the emergency room. I know he saw me roll my eyes, but he ignored it and explained that should I have a stroke or heart attack, the ER was much more prepared to deal with it than his clinic.

A what? He was worried I might have a stroke or heart attack in his office? Hell, I'd been there at that hospital since 8 in the morning, so that was the least of my concerns. I just wanted my knee looked at, maybe some x-rays and a shot of celestone or something to reduce the swelling. Not a trip to the ER.

I didn't argue, though. I mean, I did understand that my blood pressure was dangerously high. I really did, but I was in so much pain from my knee and having walked all over hell and back inside that hospital all day that my blood pressure really wasn't my top priority. I wanted the pain to go away, and I was hoping that getting rid of the pain would lower my blood pressure. Still, I stood up to head back to the ER, but he made me sit again. Apparently he didn't want me doing anything at all, and I had to wait while he tracked down a nurse to take me to the ER in a wheel chair. I would have thought it was for my knee, but he explained that it was hospital policy that patients with a heart condition have to be wheeled from point A to point B. Whatever. Let's just do whatever it is we need to do.

I got to the ER and they put me in a room, leaving the door open, thankfully, so that I could hear what was going on. There had been some sort of miscommunication and the ER wasn't expecting me, but they figured it out and a few minutes later a nurse comes in and checks my blood pressure again. Still way off the charts, and now I'm sure my slowly waning patience was adding to the problem, but again, I was being seen finally and that's all that I cared about.

The nurse who I now had was, in my opinion, exceptional. Kinda hot, but she was a very good nurse. Unlike the doctor I'd just seen, she took the time to explain what was going on, asked what seemed to me like relevant questions, and when she left she told me what was going to happen next. At this point, it was just a matter of waiting ten minutes to take my blood pressure again to confirm that it really was that high. If it had been that high on every reading since I'd arrived, which was now more than a dozen times, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to change, but she was nice so what was another ten minutes of waiting?

During that time, I began to consider all the events that had led me here, to the ER, up to that point. It really bothered me that when I first arrived to see a doctor (not counting the admin stuff), I had started off at the ER. The reasons for that were obvious. Walk-in patients didn't feel they could wait a few days or a couple of weeks to see a doctor, so they come to urgent care. If they can't wait, there might be something really wrong with them that needs immediate attention, so triage them at the ER. If they're sick but not in a life-threatening situation, send them on their way to urgent care, but if we uncover something major in triage we'll take them back to the ER where they need to be. Sounds like as good a plan as any to me.

But if my blood pressure was high enough to have the doctor who saw me immediately transfer me to the ER without so much as asking why I was even there, why didn't the triage nurse catch it and admit me when she saw me? If I needed to be in the ER, then it should have been caught in triage because nothing had changed, not from the time I first had my blood pressure taken to that very moment. My blood pressure had been consistently high. Extremely high, but it hadn't changed. The only explanation I could come up with was that the nurse who sent me on to urgent care was an ER nurse, and the ER was extremely busy, not even enough beds for the number of patients they had there. Maybe she was hoping I'd get sent on my way without them having to deal with it and add to their workload. I have no idea, and I didn't ask, but only because I now had a different nurse who I could tell was working her ass off, but was extremely pleasant to all of her patients and coworkers.

Here's the kicker. After ten minutes, she came back, checked my blood pressure, and it was perfectly normal. 120 over 75. At that point, I was stunned. I'd had my blood pressure checked so many times that day that this reading was an obvious outlier. It had to be. But it was normal, and I was tired and hungry and I was getting to the point where I just wanted to go home, so I have no idea why I suggested she should check it again, just to be sure. She probably would have anyway, but I still can't believe I actually suggested it.

So I waited another ten minutes, she comes back, and of course my blood pressure is high once again. Damn. Not that I was surprised, but I had at least a little ray of hope there for a few minutes. Now my worry was that they were going to try to admit me. With blood pressure as high as mine was, I didn't know what the procedure would be, but I did know that I wasn't going to be admitted. They could do whatever else they wanted, but not keep me there.

My nurse left to talk to the ER doc, and a few minutes she came back in. This time she had answers with her, in the form of a shot and a pill. The pill, and I forget what it was called, was to bring my blood pressure down rapidly. The shot was Toradol for the pain in my knee. They were operating under the assumption that my pain was the primary factor in my blood pressure, which I think was a safe assumption because I didn't really have a history of high blood pressure.

Well, they both seemed to work. An hour later my blood pressure was nearing normal levels again. It was still high, but I wasn't in any danger of exploding anytime soon, so I finally got to talk to the doctor about my knee. She ordered x-rays and some blood tests, and a urinalysis just to be on the safe side, and even though I was more than ready to go home I decided to stick around and wait on the test results.

Here's the funny part. Unlike the first doctor I saw, this doctor wasn't as concerned with my blood pressure. It was down, so in spite of what I'd been told was hospital policy, they had me walk down to x-ray to get pictures taken. It hurt, but I didn't care. Anything to get some answers and get out of there.

The rest of my visit was rather uneventful. She got the x-ray results and lab results back and while there were things wrong with me, they didn't merit the time it would take for an ER doctor to handle them. She was busy enough, and I'd overheard enough conversations that I knew damned well there were people who needed her attention much more than I did. A guy in diabetic shock, a stroke patient, two heart problems, and someone with a massive infection that had to be quarantined amongst the dozen or so other patients she had. I had a sore knee, so not once did I open my mouth to complain about having to wait. I knew she'd get to me when she could.

And eventually she did. She said the x-rays looked like my kneecap was making contact with the other bones in my leg, and that was causing the pain and swelling. She gave me a few days worth of Toradol and enough Vicodin to last until I saw my primary care physician, and after one last check of my blood pressure sent me on my way. She also did a couple of other things for me. She ordered an MRI and a consult with orthopedics just to get the ball rolling while I was waiting to see my primary care doc. Those were two things she didn't have to do, but she did.

I got home at 11:30 that night, and the dogs, thankfully, had not pissed in the house. They were ready to burst, but they'd made it all day long.

A few weeks later I finally saw my primary care doctor. Well, she wasn't necessarily my doctor at the time, just doing the consultation and during that process we agreed I'd become her patient. She kept the MRI, but after looking at the x-rays and other test results said it looked more like my problem was arthritis. That surprised me. Usually you don't hear about arthritis in people my age, but sure enough, the MRI confirmed it a couple of weeks later.

So at that point, with my blood pressure under control and me actually feeling much, much better -- I didn't even realize how bad I'd been feeling until my blood pressure was back to normal -- my doctor ordered a consultation with a rheumatologist for my knee, along with follow-up with her 3 months later for other things (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.).

Well, with all of my other appointments I've received a letter in the mail telling me when it was supposed to happen. If I needed to change it I could, but I was always notified by mail of when I should have one. I have never received anything regarding my rheumatology appointment. In fact, just last week I got a letter asking me to call and schedule an appointment with my primary care physician, the follow-up I mentioned, but the rheumatology appointment was supposed to happen first, or so I thought. Maybe I was wrong.

I called today to schedule my appointment, like the letter said to do, and with flu outbreaks all over they're pretty busy so I won't get in until January 4th. Not surprised, really, and not a big deal. It's closer to 5 months than 3, but it's not an urgent appointment. But while I was on the line, I asked the scheduler if I have anything with rheumatology coming up, and he looks, and he says that I was supposed to have an appointment in October but it never got scheduled.

Great. Well, I get transferred over to the Green Desk, and the lady there checks, and says nope, no appointment. Sorry, can't help you. I ask who can, and she's already hung up. Now, I have to mention that is atypical of my experience with people at the VA. The people I've spoken too prior to her have always been extremely helpful and if they couldn't personally help me, found me someone who could. This lady was just a bitch.

Anyway... now that I know someone has dropped the ball and the lady who was supposed to help me out apparently won't, I make another phone call. I get customer service, tell him the situation, that something got messed up in scheduling with rheumatology, and he says I need to speak to John and he gives me his extension number before transferring me. Again, very helpful.

So I end up talking to John, and he pulls up my information. He sees that yes, there was supposed to be an appointment more than a month ago, but it never showed up on his printouts. While I'm talking to him he goes back and runs his daily process again, just to be sure, and nope, my name doesn't appear even though he can find it in the system if he does a search for my name. But until today he didn't know to do a search for my name, because it never appeared on his task list to schedule an appointment for me.

Now to make a very long story as short as possible, John and I talked for about ten minutes, and in the end I got my appointment scheduled with the specialist who, I hope, can make my knee work properly again. I'm not looking for a cure here, at least not right now, just the ability to walk somewhat normally again. Even better, I see the new doctor in less than three weeks. I did a whole lot of waiting for nothing, but I guess in a way it's a good thing I did, because I managed to help the guy find a bug in their software that hopefully now will get fixed. So yes, if you've read this far, you now feel exactly how I feel. I finally got the knee appointment I've been longing for, and you've finally, after all your suffering, reached the end of this post. :)

Chrome OS in VMWare

Not sure if anybody has tried out the new release of Chrome OS yet, but there's a VMWare image of it already, so feel free to give it a poke if you want. Link here. I'm still downloading it now, but I think a cloud/thin client OS like this could be extremely useful in the right situations. I'm already in the process of converting all of my documents to work with Google Docs just because of the unreliable nature of magnetic storage. I keep a local copy as well, just in case, but for most casual computer users, such as my mother and grandparents, Chrome OS could be the perfect solution. Also wouldn't be bad to take a netbook running Chrome OS to the park or coffee shop on a nice afternoon, either.

I'll let you know what I think of this current release after I get it downloaded and running.

Update: Ok, so I got it running, but... had some issues. The download I linked to above comes with just the .vmdk file, which is ok, but a pain in the butt to get working correctly in VMWare Player 3, which is all I have installed. I'd explain the steps to get it working, but there's another issue.

After logging in (with a throwaway account) I'm getting warnings that the security certificate for the far end of things has been revoked, and it won't let you proceed otherwise. Something funky happens (technical term), and suddenly you're back at the login prompt. So... it's now been almost 24 hours since the release and there are other appliance downloads out there other than this first one, so I'm going to give some of them a shot to see if it was just a problem with this one particular download. We'll see.

Only bad part about downloadable games

Downloadable games are great, for the most part. When you have a hard drive failure like I've been prone to have lately, it makes it really easy to restore games, especially if you no longer have the original media. But then there's the actual reinstallation part. I'd reinstalled Guild Wars shortly after replacing my hard drive, but hadn't played it since then. It didn't even occur to me that I should, because the download and installation was quick and smooth.

Thing is, I forgot that a lot of games like Guild Wars download on the fly, meaning that the actual content of the game isn't necessarily installed when you install the game. That is downloaded later and installed as you need it, which means that right now, when I want to play Guild Wars, I have to wait a good thirty minutes and counting before I can even get into the game.

I shouldn't bitch, though. At least I can install the game a million times over if I need to and not have to worry about losing any CD's or license keys. Same deal with Steam games. I really like the fact that if I've purchased something, it's there for me when I need it. Now some Steam games, like Company of Heroes for example, I'd like to have physical media to keep on hand. I'm not even remotely concerned about Steam going away, but for single player games like CoH I'd love to have a physical copy of the game installer, just in case. I mean, if Steam goes away, it means Valve went away and I won't be playing Day of Defeat or Left 4 Dead anymore anyway so I don't care about those games, but it would be nice to have physical media available/burnable for single-player games.

Oh well. Just ranting while I'm waiting on GW to finish downloading. I'm 120+ MB into the download, still got a thousand or more files to go, so killing time I guess, and boring others while I'm at it.

Maybe I'll break down and buy a new gaming rig this weekend so that I can give MW2 and Aion a shot. Aion is really tempting to grab, but I doubt this box can handle it. It barely handles Eve Online, which I also want to start playing again but am avoiding because I lag so hard in fleet battles.

Can you say rambling? I knew you could.

Later.

What's up, Chrome?

Ok, a little annoyed with Google Chrome today. I tend to use Google's browser for social media sites like Twitter and for interacting with blogger because it's a fast, lightweight browser that works well and doesn't need any configuring to work the way I want it to, and also because I like to separate my identities and log in with this anonymous account on a browser that has never been used to logged into accounts using my real name, just for security purposes. But this morning it seems I've been unable to access my other blog with Chrome, and I'm not sure why.

My other blog has an adult content warning on it, which I put there, because I do write about sexually explicit things there, and include photographs (not of me, silly). No big deal, but for some reason today the warning page won't load, and if it won't load I can't get past it to my blog. Works fine in Firefox, Flock, and (yeck) even Internet Explorer, but Chrome won't work today, and I'm really annoyed by that. So annoyed, in fact, that it's disrupted my entire morning.

I know, stupid to get worked up over such a petty thing, but damnit I like Chrome and want it to become a very popular browser, so shit like this pisses me off, especially when it won't work right with another Google product.

Long week

Not for me, necessarily, but definitely for some of my relatives. I have a cousin who is 28 (I think) and is now seventeen weeks pregnant with her first child. She's always had some medical problems, but nothing life-threatening, mostly digestive issues and stomach problems. A long, long time ago, when she was a kid, she had a minor heart murmur but nothing that kept her from being an outstanding athlete in high school, so for the most part nobody thought anything about it when she told us she was going to have a baby.

Now though, we remember that when she was a baby she had a small hole in her heart. Back then they didn't do anything about it and it healed on its own, but now that she's pregnant it has apparently returned, and it's a very scary time for everyone, especially her and her husband. The hole is 1 cm across, so it's too large to leave alone, but it explains why she's been so short of breath lately.

My aunt (her mother) just called, and at least right now they're not going to terminate the pregnancy, but supposedly they're going to do a cardiac cath at Ohio State University to I think either repair it, or at the least further diagnose the problem. She didn't say when, but considering the number of doctors she's seen in the past few days, I can't imagine they're going to wait more than a few days.

At least her cardiologist has a doctor in her practice that specializes in treating pregnant women. That was another big worry initially, because the cardiologist she's been seeing wanted to do a cardiac cath using ionizing radiation, even though she was pregnant. That had a lot of us really concerned, especially at this point in her pregnancy because of the damage it would do to the fetus. But it looks like radiation isn't going to be used, so even though it's a risky procedure on a pregnant woman, it's at least not going to be unduly dangerous to the fetus.

Going to be a nervous week for everyone next week, I think.

Monday's Suck

Yes, they absolutely suck, and I mean hard. I've been up for an hour now and my eyes still feel far too heavy for normal function, my head is full of gunk from it getting too cool in my bedroom last night, and I didn't get anywhere near enough sleep to be able to function normally today. Thankfully I've got about 20 pages of notes I can transcribe from last week to get my brain in gear instead of trying to be creative this early in the morning. That's one of the reasons why I'll sometimes get up from the computer and work with good old-fashioned pen and paper. Eventually there will come a time when I need something to focus my mind, and typing out my notes is a good way to do that.

Of course, if I'd gone to bed at a decent hour instead of staying up until a very ungodly hour of the morning playing video games this wouldn't be an issue.

Researching Lilith

I've been doing a lot of research lately on the mythology of Lilith, and there are many different mythologies to go through. Mainly I'm doing this for the novel, because the idea of using a succubus-like creature of the underworld really appeals to me. One thing I want to avoid, though, is getting too close to modern vampire lore, especially the cuddly and cute kind, which is where a lot of modern tales of Lilith eventually lead. Also, I don't want my demon-creature to be revered as some sort of benevolent goddess as Lilith sometimes seems to be portrayed because of her supposed refusal to lay down and stick her legs in the air when Adam told her to, as a number of witchcraft mythologies of today suggest.

I think in the end I'm going to create a new type of demon, loosely based on Lilith, the succubae, the vampire, and the Valkyrie in a mashup of folklore and mythology from a number of different cultures and periods of history. She will definitely be a creator of demons, a queen of the underworld type of figure whose view of humans/civilization is a complex mixture of revulsion, envy, pity (but not love). She's definitely not going to play a key role in the book, but not as a main character, at least not until near the end. More, she'll be a sort of guide for the main character, acting as an unseen, unknown muse. The main character will be her plaything, being tested to see what choices and decisions she'll make along the way.

Before I sit down and actually write out her biography, though, I'd like to know more about Ailo, said to be the daughter of Lilith who slept with men. That could be useful in creating my new she-demon, but I haven't found much on her in a few quick Google searches. Namely all I've found is just that Ailo is the daughter of Lilith who slept with men, and that's it, but I'm also pretty much done researching for the day, too, so I haven't looked very hard. Maybe tomorrow when I'm a little more awake I'll look into it a little further.

Elections mixed

Sad to hear that the bigots in Maine repealed their same-sex marriage law, but at least they didn't go so far as to ban domestic violence charges except for straight, married couples like they accidentally did here in Ohio. Sucks to live in Virginia, too, but then again the Democrat running was a complete idiot and in a way I'm glad he didn't get elected. The dude was more right-wing than the Republican. Also laughing my ass off that the Palin pick in NY-23 got beat after screwing over the Republican candidate. It's funny, the GOP could have held onto that seat with ease, but the lunatics on the far right keep trying to purge the party of mainstream Republicans, and as a result they keep shedding seats to the Democrats. Keep up the good work.

Locally I'm glad to see that most of the issues I voted for went my way. All of the local library levies were passed after the Governor slashed their budgets by over 50% this year. I was worried about that, because there are a lot of people in this area who won't even vote for a school levy to educate the kids who are going to take care of them when they get old. But as I watched the returns come in last night, I slept a little easier knowing that the one public resource I use more than any other is going to be able to operate for at least a few more years.

The casino bill passed also, which in my mind is a good thing. Religious wackos have managed to defeat casino bills for almost 20 years, but finally we got one passed, and it allows more casinos than any bill I can remember. I don't gamble, don't even play the lottery, but I'm tired of people telling me I can't do something just because the Bible supposedly says it's a sin.

The only issue I wish had failed but didn't was the farm bill, that let's corporate mega-farms hand-select a board of regulators that has complete control over farming regulations in Ohio, over and above the Department of Agriculture. Not only that, but the board shields the mega-farms from lawsuits over animal abuse and pollution violations. So now these huge corporate farms can basically treat animals however they want and dump whatever nasty chemicals into the ground they desire. I'm not anti-farm, but I am against animal abuse and the massive pollution these huge farms can create if left unchecked.

Nightmare

Photo Source: Auriethepixie at deviantArt

Been looking for dark images to give me bad dreams for the last few days. Got some work done on the book, finally, following my hard drive crash and subsequent three days reinstalling everything. Been in a very dark place as far as my mood goes lately, and for some reason I've really been drawn to dark, death-filled images.

I go through periods like this, where I'm into really nasty, ugly, bitter things, then I'll turn around and want to listen to bubble-gum pop for three days and stare at photos of sunsets and beaches.

The mood, I think, is brought on from frustration at having been extremely unproductive for the last month or so. I got up yesterday morning with this burning desire to sit down and write, but couldn't because of other obligations. Now, when I have time, I'm feeling less than inspired, so I'll look for inspiration elsewhere. Hopefully that will give me the spark I need to get something worthwhile written down, and this blog doesn't count.

But the photo is cool, I think, so I thought I'd share it and my thoughts.

Oh, on a side note, if you're into fantasy novels and/or mysteries, you should definitely read Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire. Excellent book, and it's her first novel. Can't wait to read the next one.

Why web-based apps are good

It looks like it's going to be another one of those days. I know I have a hard drive going bad on my primary machine, and after being an idiot and thinking I'd defragment the damned thing, it barely, barely wants to run. Which really sucks because I've got a lot of data on there that I don't want to lose.

But... I have a backup plan this time. Unlike last time, I can actually log onto the machine. It just takes about forty minutes for the thing to settle down long enough for me to actually do anything. Once I get everything off of that drive, which thankfully isn't a ton, I'm going to see if I can run a utility to permanently mark the bad sectors as bad so that fucking Windows won't write to them anymore. I've got a ton of hard disk utilities, it's just a matter of finding the right one so that I can do it and not have to fuck around with this problem again, at least until I get a new hard drive.

The best part is that I don't have to worry about losing any of my documents. The last time this happened I got smart and uploaded them all to Google docs. They were already in open formats anyway, so there wasn't any problems with formatting when I uploaded them. My bookmarks are all backed up with xmarks, so the only thing I really need to worry about is a couple folders of photos and music, some of which I've got stored offsite already. But rather than upload all that data, I'm just going to transfer it to another machine if I ever manage to get logged on, which may not happen anytime soon, it seems.