Looking back at recent entries here, I see that I haven't been posting dilligently. Didn't end up getting to Los Alamos until Wednesday afternoon. Chiliworks breakfast burritos are the best food ever. I now have all 448MB of RAM fully operational, sorta. I've been working at Dimitri's house on the PHD Fortran code. He has a samoyed that is really dumb but cute. And a calico cat that is less cute and less dumb.

John is down in Carlsbad for the weekend, I stayed here to work with Dimitri and hang out with Mike. Can I just mention once again that the girl in the pool was a total hottie? shite.

Mike's friends are all really cool. And hot. Geez. Except for the one guy who puked all over his own head. That was gross.

And the people who's house it was at have all this space shuttle stuff. Like a real shielding tile from STS-70. And an indoor pool. Not related.

The playstation game "Bust A Move" is really aggrivating. But I trounced someone in Mariokart, so it's all good.

We all went out on the balcony and watched a rare occurance for these parts - the northern lights! They were all red and lacked the distinct lines of the other times i've seen it, but they persisted for many minutes and there were three white streaks that went from the horizon up to a single point straight above us. Very cool skies tonight. And the stars!! Whiterock is such a great place for watching stars...

Afterwards, Mike showed me his GPS receiver and the software on his new titanium G4 mac laptop that will track movements and overlay a track on a GPS quad or aerial photo. Very interesting.

Oh, and we got the photohydrodynamics (PHD, get it?) code working at a simple level, which is good, and I got the new version of CodeWarrior and Tecolote installed as well. I'm ready for some serious codin' and portin'.

Wow. Technical surveillance countermeasures sounds like something I would love doing. Possible career alternative??

Stayed up all Friday night cleaning my house, packing, taking Mel hacking, and eating. Oops. But I managed to sleep on the plane. The Cincinnatti airport has a really good resteraunt in it. Spaghetti & Italian sausage. Most delicious. The Albuquerque airport, as always, has tons of military jets all over the place. This time I got to see a bunch of F-14s lined up preparing for takeoff.

The F-14 is the sexiest aircraft ever built. And it has nothing to do with it being in Top Gun, despite Maverick being dangerous [chomp]. It's just an aesthetically pleasing shape. I'm jealous of Guy, who is training to fly them at this very moment.

Rental car: another gold Taurus. No CD player. And wow am I overdressed for Albuquerque. It must be 80 degrees here, and I'm wearing a sweatshirt, a winter hat, and I've got my parka draped over my arm. The Hertz guy was making fun of me, said he thought it was part of my "style."

The drive to Carlsbad was uneventful and long. They've finished all of the highway improvements between Clines Corners and Carlsbad, so the speed limit is 65 the whole way now. This is good, it cuts down travel time significantly. Dinner in Roswell at Wendy's, surrounded by a bunch of NMMI steakheads in full uniform.

Said hi to John, and went to bed. Slept forever. It was great.

The whole of Sunday was spent trouble-shooting my laptop. It turns out that my 128MB add-on RAM was in the laptop, it just wasn't being recognized. After four hours of futzing, I discovered that if I unplugged the laptop, remove the battery, and discharge a capacitor on the motherboard (!!) I could get it to recognize my full 192M. How bizzare is that?? And don't ask how I figured it out... heh

Anyway, so with a little tinkering I can get my machine up to full capacity. AND John decided to just buy me 256 more MB of RAM out of the blue! That's a total of 448MB!! That's a lot!!! Woo!

See, things are always better here. As soon as I get out of Boston things start going my way. Not sure why that is.

Anyway, had dinner with Cliff & Wren last night. Cliff decides to play one of his endless series of practical jokes on me. As the waitress is taking orders Cliff turns to her and says,

"Are you single? Because this guy here is single and he's from MIT and is working in Los Alamos and I think you should give him your phone number."

He just keeps going on about it and I'm beet red at this point, and she's not sure what to make of it all. When I come back from the bathroom later on, he has produced a business card with the girl's name on it and phone number. I assume, because it's Cliff, that he's written it himself. So he further embarrasses me by giving the card back to her and telling her to give it to me. Geez. So now I'm beyond embarrassed and this poor girl is totally confused. Cliff tells me that he'll give me $50 if I call her and it turns out she didn't write it. John tipped her bigtime for all the hell we gave her.

And now I'm stuck with this girl's number who I have no intention of calling, and John and Cliff are having a field-day telling me how rejected this poor girl is going to feel if I don't call, etc. Geeeezzz!!

So I think this is war, and I have to start brewing up something special to do to Cliff.

We were supposed to drive back to Los Alamos today, but the Bronco is leaking fluids and is in the shop. So we're stranded. And I spent all of today writing out schematics and state diagrams for my CallerID circuit.

Not one of the shining moments in my academic history - turned in my midterm with one of two questions blank. Ouch.

But it's all behind me now and I can relax. Or so you'd think. I'm off to Los Alamos in about three hours for two weeks of 20-hour days. But the difference is that I really like working out there. So I don't mind. Plus, for the first two days I'll actually be in Carlsbad and won't have to do much work. It's 70 degrees there. Here I come.

As always, good news; bad news. The good news is that IBM service is really really efficient and so is Airborn Express. Laptop arrived at 9:01am this morning. That's about as fast a turnaround as is humanly possible.

They replaced my main system board, CPU fan, PCMCIA slots, system BIOS, and most importantly, the little rubber feet on the bottom. The best part is that when I got it back, the harddrive I didn't send in worked and everything is running like a charm.

The bad news: they seem to have downgraded my RAM from 192M to 64M. So this means I'll probably be looking at another day of phone tag and genearl annoyance. And with so little RAM, the machine is too slow to run CodeWarrior effectively, so I can't really work with it.

In other bad news, I spent 13 hours yesterday on my midterm and almost finished one problem. And I'm pretty sure I did it not entirely correct. The second problem I have no idea on. It is similar to a homework problem that I haven't done due to my recent surgical fiesta, so I'm going in today to get help on that homework which I hope will lend insight into the test question. But the thing is due at 5pm, so we'll see...

Back to the good news: Tomorrow morning I leave for LANL!

Met a girl who is squatting in her office. Very transient living space. Wanted me to show her various hacking locations that she might move into because they were rennovating her floor. A highly interesting person.

Laptop: dead. Mailing it in to IBM this morning. They will probably have to mail it to me in Los Alamos, I doubt they can get it from me, fix it, and have it back to me by Friday.

The good news is that I don't have much of a limp anymore and can walk around wherever I please. OK enough good news. Midterm on Wednesday.

So good news and bad news seem to be travelling together these days. The good news is that Airborn Express starts delivering at 9am, and theygot my box here at 9:12am. So my laptop is all packaged up and ready to ship to IBM. So far everything is going quicker than I planned, and that's definitely good.

The bad news is that Moncure is sleeping with the fishes, so to speak. Yes, Moncure est mort. Not my surgeon, the goldfish. Dead. And he was the cute one too. And now Ashby is lonely.

oh tell me this isn't happening. some idiot spilt orangina all over my laptop at the coffeehouse tonight just before my radio show, and it's dead. tech support is calling it "user damage" and says the bill for repair will be approximately $800.

and i just know that's coming out of my pocket. and i need the machine and the data on the harddrive by saturday, when i leave for los alamos. fuck.

ZBT threw a rave tonight. For the first time in a long time I've felt like dancing in public, and of course I can't. But the music was great. So the two big headliners were Knowledge and Entropy. Knowledge looked like Kevin Mitnick, he was hillarious. Dirty ill-fitting Budweiser tshirt, greasy hair, kinda chubby, kept his records in a trash bag - he looked like a total slob. But he played the most kickass speed-garage set I've ever heard and he was messing with the EQ like nobody's business.

Entropy, on the other hand, looked like a total raver poser. Overabundance of jewelry and piercings, wacky raver clothes, wacky raver hair, looked like a DJ, looked annoying. And though I didn't really go for his breaks set, he did open up with a great rendition of AYBABTU. As played-out as all your base is, hearing a remix I'd never heard before, which was actually a really good song, mixed in smoothly and having several hundred sweaty MIT nerds dancing and screaming to it was a really really cool experience. (And it was on vinyl!)

75 years ago today, Dr. Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in nearby Auburn, MA. The flight lasted only 2.5 seconds but is considered to be the Kitty Hawk of modern spaceflight.

So it turns out that getting sutures removed is actually every bit as painless as everyone told me it was. In fact, watching the guy tug on the little pieces of string with tweezers, I couldn't believe that it wasn't hurting at all. The only scary part was the little scalpul he was using to cut the strings. It was within a milimeter of me, and therefore violated the Mouser treaty of 1975.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Happy Pi Day to everyone. Only 14 more years until 3/14/15.

Those bastards. So I made the resolution to go to class this morning for the first time since my repair. I got up earlier than I wanted to and made my way over to campus in what could be described as a very pathetic gait. And class was cancelled. Apparently they had class on Monday instead of today, and no one told me. Neeugh.

Who is the acquarium water-changing man? Me. Who's fish are still alive? Mine.

My get-well fish, Ashby and Moncure, or as I like to call them, The Poopogenesis Duo, had fouled their toilet tank so badly that I had to change the water (after two days!). There was some concern that the hastily-treated tap water would bring about their rapid demise, but they're tough troopers and they've survived to poop again.

In other news, I'm going home today. Finally freeing Z of my gimpiness.

Mornings are good. Sleep seems to make the pain go away, and until I move a lot I feel pretty good. I was feeling well enough this morning to get up and shower, shave, etc. Am capable of walking around in short stints now. Made an appointment for Wednesday to get my sutures removed, and now I'm heading over to the med center to get my prescription filled. I'm slowly getting used to the look of this thing now that the wraps are off. I took them off yesterday with the aid of my Gerber tool (cutting hairs is much better than pulling the tape off with the hairs. Sorry that's gross. But it was the only exciting thing to happen to me yesterday.

So Z was nice enough to obtain another IP address for me while I'm staying with him. This laptop and net connection has been the only thing keeping me from going nuts with boredom. NASA TV, you are my savior. And thank you Z for registering a subdomain name along with the IP...

C:\>nslookup 18.244.1.158
Server: BITSY.MIT.EDU
Address: 18.72.0.3

Name: MOUSER-IS-A-GIMP-AS-WELL-AS-A-COUNNOS-AND-ALSO-A-LORD.MIT.EDU
Address: 18.244.1.158

For those of you who aren't Australian gits, counnos and lord are apparently insults of some kind, though generally everything Australians say is summarily ignored.

[Warning: This post is enormous, and contains mundane details of my life for the past two days. I have nothing to do but write about it, so the details may get rather boring. I don't suggest reading this unless you're as bored as I am.]

OK here's the long version:

I bought a bunch of snacky food and brought it all over to Z's place before my radio show. I wasn't allowed to eat after midnight, so I ate a whole package of poptarts just before the my show. The show was somewhat weird, I played all MP3s and talked a lot. Mel called up and told me she thought my music sucked and that I should listen to "normal" music. That was somewhat aggrivating. Z called up and I put him on the air and he bitched her out, but she had stopped listening.

After the show I hobbled home and had somehow become tired enough to overcome whatever surgery anxiety there may have been. I woke up on time and headed out on the subway by myself, heading towards uncertainty and pain. Somewhat unnerving.

So the day surgery waiting room is full of people waiting to pick patients up and patients waiting to be operated on. Some people are wearing hospital pajamas and everyone is reading magazines they aren't interested in. It only took about five minutes before someone came and took me in back, had me change into the PJs, and put me back out in the waiting room.

I'd heard that they make you sit there for a couple hours, and I was prepared for that. So I started in on the magazines. People. Improper Bostonian. Automobile. Another People. Time. Newsweek. I really got sick of reading magazines so I took a nap. They had taken my watch when they made me change, and there was no clock in the waiting room so I had no idea how long I had been sitting there. But it was so long that towards the end I was wishing they would come take me away and cut me up just to prevent me from having to read the "Better Homes & Gardens" magazine, the only one remaining.

It was a clever technique, I thought. Countering fear with boredom. And it was just when I was contemplating reading BH&G when a lady came around to see who was still waiting to make sure they hadn't missed anyone. I explained that my surgery was supposed to begin at 12:30, that I'd been there since 10:15. She expressed some surprise and left to go check on my room. She came back telling me that it was 3:00pm and that it would be another hour or two before they were ready for me. She said they had a temporary bed in the recovery room they could put me in where I could watch some TV if I wanted. I figured a bed would be much more comfortable than the bench in the waiting room, and TV would be better than BH&G. So they moved me.

TV ended up meaning soap operas (general hospital, humorously). I rapidly fell asleep again. And when I woke up they had rotated the TV back around so I couldn't see it. I was stuck looking at people recovering. Many of the same people that I had been sitting with in the waiting room, most of whom arrived after I did.

Finally a lady came to wheel me up to the operating room. It was a really long trip through hallways filled with indescribable technical gear and people in pastel scrubs. They parked me outside of an operating room in a sort of holding pen. Across the hall was the new MRI neurosurgery hall where I could see through the window that they had someone all opened up inside. But as soon as they noticed me looking at the surgery in progress, they pulled a curtain around me so I had nothing to look at again. It seems that enforcing boredom is part of their policy.

I sat outside the OR for awhile. The previous patient was still inside, they were just finishing up with him. I got a glimpse of him as they wheeled him out, there were tubes coming out from under his blanket all over the place, one of which had a lot of blood in it. yish. Then they drew the curtain shut again so I couldn't see what happens "as they change out the room for the next victim."

I got a breif chat with Dr. Moncure and his two residents, Dr. Cameron and the lady who had given my scrot an exam at my pre-op. I also talked to several orderlies and then I finally met the anethesiologist. He was a relatively young guy, pretty funny. He made jokes about getting out "the big needle" and played humor against my fears in a very effective way. Then he gave me the big choice: spinal or general. I voted general.

He gave me an IV, which didn't really hurt at all and then started injecting stuff into it like crazy. I asked if I was going to go out like a light or if I'd realize what was happening. He said that I probably wouldn't even remember this conversation because he had just given me an amnesic that would cause me to forget everything. In addition, he'd given me a pain reliever and something to put me to sleep. I don't remember anything after that. There wasn't an experience of getting knocked out, of impending unconsciousness, or anything like that. There is just a hole in my memory from that general time frame to when I woke up in recovery.

I remember waking up, there wasn't anyone standing over me but there were people in the room that I didn't recognize. They seemed to notice that I had woken up almost instantly. I don't remember much of the conversation; I must have been pretty high off my ass at that point. I remember them giving me some morphine which burned when they injected it into my IV, but didn't seem to nullify the dull pain in my crotch that was becoming more apparent as I slowly regained consciousness.

Dr. Cameron came by and asked me some stuff I don't remember and I remember noticing that the recovery room I was in wasn't the day surgery recovery room that I had been waiting in earlier. I didn't make anything of it at the time, I wasn't making a lot of analytical connections in my head at this point. Anyway Cameron must have cleared me to leave the recovery room because an orderly wheeled my stretcher out and through a maze of hallways again.

This time it was much less fun because every time the stretcher went over a bump I felt a stabbing pain in my abdomen. And it wasn't like a little piercing pain like bad gas or something, it was like someone had a big rusty dagger stuffed into my gut and was twisting it around. Yow. By the time they wheeled me into my little room, I was really in a lot of pain. They gave me more morphine which stung some more but still didn't make a noticeable dent in the pain. They said they couldn't give me any more because it would make me stop breathing.

The good news is that they gave me a fresh saltwater IV which rapidly satiated my overwhelming thirst. I was still pretty woozy at this point. I remember Jessica being there, but I'm not sure when she arrived or left. I just remember her wanting to see my scar and giving me a hand massage.

The night nurse was really cool. His name was Rich and he was my companion for the night. The kitchen had already closed so they couldn't bring me food. It turns out I wasn't out of the recovery room until 9pm, so I hadn't eaten in a really long time and I needed food. Rich managed to come up with a package of saltines, a glass of apple juice, and a big spoonful of frozen yogurt that he had purchased for himself. It was a pretty pathetic meal ,but it turns out that one sip of water and a nibble of saltine was all i needed to make me want to hurk my guts out.

Over the course of the night, between the hourly temperature and blood pressure readings and my obnoxious nocturnal roommate, I managed to get in a few half-hour naps. I also managed to put down about three packages of saltines and several glasses of water.

When the morphine had "worn off" they started giving me percocet, which made my head hurt a little and made me more nauseous. It had a noticeable effect on the pain, but not the effect I was hoping for which was total removal. It did, however, make it so that I could move slightly and sit up enough to drink without pouring it all over my face.

I finally managed to pee at about 6am, at which point i had taken in a lot of water as well as the IV which was constantly adding water to my system. It was a heroic urination.

The criteria they had given me for discharge from the hospital were that I was able to pee and able to eat, both of which I had done. But there was no way in hell I was getting out of that stretcher. Even with the percocet I could not move significantly.

At 7am, my surgeon, Dr. Ashby Moncure, stopped by to see how I was doing. "You had quite a lot of repair work last night! How you holding up?" I said I was feeling adequate, except for the big knife wound in my crotch... The percocets were making me a bit forgetful so I neglected to ask him what the deal was with my surgery, why I had gotten out so late and why they had kept me overnight.

Rich had told me that I had just gotten out of surgery so late that they had to keep me overnight, but I had a hard time accepting this since they told me I was only going to be under for 30 minutes to an hour. I was out from ~5pm to 8:30pm.

The residents came in a bit later to check on me and I remembered to ask them. They said that the surgery had been a lot more complex than they had anticipated from the original diagnosis. They did not elaborate. I was still too wonky to ask meaningful questions about what this meant.

Breakfast was abominable. Two tiny rubber pancakes, a jello, some frozen orange juice, and a coffee. I ate about half a pancake before getting sick.

By now I was really really bored again. I had managed to find a position I could lay in that would not cause too much pain, and then all that was left to do was listen to the incessant complaining and bad TV coming from the other side of the curtain. At 10:30 I called Mel and woke her up. She provided a much-needed diversion from the tedium and pain, and it helped a lot to talk to someone.

At noon they said they'd give me lunch and that the lunches were much better than the breakfasts. They also made noises about sending me home same day. When the lunch came it looked much better and I was ever so hungry. I ate half my chicken-salad sandwhich before getting sick again. I was desperate to eat so I asked the day nurse if she had anything that could make my nausea go away. She said "of course" and went out. She came back in with this huge needle and told me to roll over so she could give me a shot in the ass. I told her I'd rather be hungry and nauseous, thank you very much. Then she mentions that she could give me the pill form instead, to which I was thinking "duh, who chooses the needle??"

The pill, unfortunately, took some time to take effect. During this time I dozed off and when I woke up 15 minutes later, they had taken my lunch away! Foiled! And when I asked if I could get it back, they started asking me if I could come have my ride get me ASAP. I guess they were sick of my crap. I still didn't believe that I'd ever make it out of the bed.

I called Jess and woke her up, she didn't have Alex's car anymore. She was only available to come get me at the time I said I would be leaving; last night. So I called Z and woke him up. He suggested that I call Rob. Rob wasn't home. I tried him several times until 2pm, when the day nurse seemed to be hinting that I should really be leaving now. So I called Z back and he convinced Donna to drive them over and come get me.

I was left with the arduous task of changing back into my regular clothes, which were in a bag on the floor which I was incapable of reaching or lifting. The nurse layed everything out for me and then left me there to fend for myself. Try this one at home: change outfits while laying down, without flexing your abs at all. It's physically impossible, and getting my pants on killed. Wow I thought for sure that I had torn the incision open again and that it would be spraying blood all over the room.

Getting my shoes on was out of the question, so the nurse had to do it for me. When this ordeal was over with, I was exhausted and passed out on the bed until Z and Donna showed up. They had a wheelchair set up for me and I was supposed to get into it somehow. This took a long time and was very embarrassing and painful. They stuffed a presciption for percocet in my coat pocket and whisked us out the door, Z wheeling me down to the hospital entrance. Every little bump in the floor was like a knife in my side.

Getting out of the chair and into the car was another ordeal. I think I blacked out for some of the car ride home because I don't remember anything until getting out of the car in front of Senior House and having to walk up to Z's room. My maximum speed was about 0.5mph, and I walked with a bigtime hunch. Z made sure to point out to everyone in the lobby that the gimp had entered the building.

Jess and Donna put some sheets and pillows on a matress on Z's floor and I layed down on it. Immeditely I had to get up to go to the bathroom again, which required them picking me up. Z's strobe and blacklight peeing experience took something away from the pain and that's good.

I don't remember a lot about the rest of the night. Only that I was in a terrible amount of pain and there was no comfortable sitting position. I still couldn't eat anything. I slept a little but not any appreciable amount. Getting up and going to the bathroom was a half-hour experience and by the time I made it back to the bed I was sweating and out of breath. It was really really hard work to move around.

Then the weirdest thing happened. I hadn't picked up my prescription (oops) so I had no pain killers. Jessica brought down a few advils and some tylenol for me at about 3am. I had two advils and took a nap. In an hour, the vast majority of the constant pain was gone! After narcotics like morphine and percocet had failed to relieve my pain, advil seemed to do a great job!

Finally, I was able to rest comfortably and I could do simple movements without feeling like I was causing irrepairable damage. This led very quickly to my sleeping for a long time (read: four hours). But it made me very happy. I was able to go get a bowl of cereal by myself and go to the bathroom without aid or great pain. It was still very uncomfortable to stand, but I was not complaining. I could rest at last.

NASA TV was covering the First Robotics Competition finals live, so I watched those all morning. I also had to listen to Z and Donna... doing stuff through the wall. Highly amusing.

The rest of today was spent in bed except for when Donna cooked at 2pm breakfast of pancakes (good ones this time) and bacon. Mel came by and brought me the coolest get-well gift! She bought me a little mini-acquarium and two goldfish! They are the cutest things ever. I guess they are super low-maintenance, they don't need a heater or pump or anything. We just put them in the little 1/4 gallon tank and let them sit there.

I decided to name them Ashby and Moncure, in honor of my surgeon who was a direct cause of these fish becoming mine. Z donated a little plastic lobster toy to spice up their somewhat boring tank. I put the fishfood can and a jar of peanuts next to the tank to give them something to look at. Mel thinks I'm feeding them too much. But it's really fun to watch 'em eat!

I slept again after Mel left until Donna cooked dinner. Tom came over and we all talked about bonsai kitten. Dinner was steak and corn. Very good. I was getting more and more able to eat normal portions. And I'm able to walk around a little more now as well. The only bad thing to happen since I had those advils was when Z and Tom decided that it would be funny to get me laughing, which causes me enormous pain, and then just keep me laughing.

I tried to control myself but Z can be really goddamned funny when he tries to be and I just broke out. They kept me laughing, the bastards, until I was in tears from pain and I felt significantly worse. It's been a few hours now since that and I'm starting to feel better again. I think I'll take a nap.

So i'm in a lot of pain; this is going to be short.

The surgery started four hours late and ended up being much more complicated than they had anticipated. I was unconscious for longer than they planned and they ended up putting me in the trauma ward overnight and for most of today.

I can't eat anything without getting nauseous and I can't sit, stand, or walk.

I am currently living on Z's floor. I hope recovery is exponential because this is unbearable.

OK I'm all set up. All the necessities are at Z's and I'm ready to go. His advice: "Don't forget your organ donor card." Thanks, Z. We'll see how I feel 12 hours from now when I awake from the anesthesia. Possibly no posts for awhile.

Transformers, the movie. Haven't seen it since opening day. Considering renting it. But I'm concerned that it'll be one of those movies that I loved as a kid and had good memories of until I see it again as a more sensible person and it ruins it. Like Labyrinth. Loved it, hate it.

But look at that voice talent! Who knew that Leonard Nimoy, Orson Wells, Eric Idle, and Scatman Crothers did voices for transformers?? Not me.

OK time to stop jerkin around and pack up some stuff to bring to Z's place for my post-surgery recovery ennui. Looks like good weather for tomorrow, nothing to stop me from going under the knife now. Hrmm...

Hey what am I not doing right now? Having surgery, that's what. Oh, and the weather's fine. Still.

I turns out that one of the pieces we cut for the macquarium was too wide (the waterjet cut it exactly as we told it to; we just told it the wrong size). I went back over the the medialab today and we cut a new one. Then I went to the ambulence warehouse and thermoformed it into the appropriate shape. This was my first time using a propane torch or melting bulletproof glass. Somewhat exciting.

Anyway, so I am now very close to a finished acquarium. I just need to get to Mr. Plastic and buy some methylene chloride and an applicator bottle. Oh and I should probably go to a pet store and get some fish...

And the hospital called last night and rescheduled my surgery for Thursday. Not too bad, I guess...

So at Unlockedgroove's thing, The Appliance of Science, I met a guy who works in the medialab and he hooked me up yesterday with some sheets of 3/8" lexan for the fishtank. Not only that, but he let me use the medialab's giant waterjet machining rig which uses a beam of 50,000 psi water to cut through anything. It'll go through 6" of solid steel if you want it to. So 3/8" of lexan was no problem for it.

Anyway it produced these great-looking mac-shaped side pieces and a center piece to be bent and bonded into position. Now all I need is some methylene chloride and an applicator and I'm ready to go!

So that was last night. This morning, I got up arse-early to go to MGH and do my pre-op testing. I was sort of not looking forward to the blood test because of the needle bit, but otherwise i wasn't too worried. It seems that the routine there is to slowly move you from room to room, where each room is smaller and has fewer chairs and better drinks and snacks.

I started in this room that was huge and empty, with a watercooler and no cups. After about ten minutes there, they moved me into a smaller waiting room with a watercooler, cups, and a coffee machine. This room also had friendly attendants who I chatted with about the supposedly inclement weather that hadn't really shown itself yet.

Finally, they took me from that room and made me put on a dress. I had to do the blood pressure thing and a weird thing on my finger to test the O2 content of my blood, and then my weight. Yes, me weight. I underguessed it by 15 pounds. That's probably not a good thing. Does this dress make me look fat?

And then.... duh dum dumm... the blood test. And I have to say, blood testing technologies (thanks in part to space-age polymers) have come a long way recently. They use this thing called a "butterfly needle" now which is tiny and mostly unnoticable. It really was only the momentary prick they said it would be. Left no bruise, no pain, etc. Didn't even gross me out which is really weird. And I didn't have to sing to distract myself, which is really good for them.

So after the blood they move me to waiting room #3 which is really really small, but has two coffee machines and assorted canned drinks plus cookies and crackers. I couldn't wait for room #4, which I assume would have a personal masseur and prime rib and white russians on tap. But alas they didn't move me again. Just had some people talk to me about how I could end up a vegetable from the general anasthesia and it wasn't their fault, etc. And then some sorta good looking reisident had to examine my crotch which was a bit odd... "This may be a bit uncomfortable," she says while basically punching me in the scrotum. "Yes. Yes you're right." (ok it wasn't a punch, it was more of a poke but yow what the hell was that supposed to do??)

Anyway, they send me home and I'm supposed to arrive tomorrow morning bright and early again for fun and exciting surgery. Woo. On the way home I marvel at the complete lack of inclement weather. There's less than an inch of snow on the ground and it's coming down really really lightly.

I get really annoyed with preemptive freaking out concerning the weather. Evan spent all of last night being really anxious and annoyed with the weather which hadn't appeared yet. Boston closed all highschools before a single flake had fallen, and then when it did snow a quarter inch, the govenor declared the area in a state of emergency! I can't believe what I'm seeing.

And looking out the window, there is zero precipitation and about an inch on the ground. And the forecast for the rest of the day calls for rain and freezing rain. Hardly the end-all "biggest storm of the century" that Evan was harping on about last night. Now I just got an email from MIT saying that "the institute is closing due to anticipated severe weather." What the fuck is going on??

So, predictably, I get a call this afternoon from the hospital telling me that they've gone ahead and preemptively canceled all non-emergency surgeries for tomorrow and they can't tell me when they'll reschedule for because they're had to cancel so many.

Why??

One of the projects at Collision that I forgot to mention was Andrew McPherson's compact Mac audio display hardware hack. He had opened up some old mac, a plus i think, and detached the deflection coil leads, and wired them to an external audio amplifier and tuner. When the tuner was turned on and the amp turned up, it drove the deflection coils with the voltage of the music. When the mac was switched on, it still provided a video signal to the electron beam gun which created a bright spot of light that moved around the screen in a chaotic squiggly pattern based on the audio signal. Very cool.

Over the past few days, he and I have been sending a lot of email back and forth about video hardware hacks and compact macs and other projects we'd like to try. I'm thinking of making a working oscilloscope out of one of those mac SE/30s I have sitting in my office, and he's trying to make a NTSC converter so that he can watch TV on his. We may join forces and build some really cool stuff.

In the meantime, I've got a second mac SE/30 and I think I'm going to build a fishtank out of it.

What a difference a free afternoon makes. Went to home depot with luka to get fishtank supplies. They had no 1/4" acrylic, so I just got a propane torch and will get the plexiglass elsewhere later. I took my dremel in to my office and field-stripped one of my Mac SE/30s down to the empty case. Then I spent several hours grinding off all the little plastic nubby bits that would prevent the acrylic from being as big as possible.

The next step is to actually build the tank, so it's off to Mr. Plastic I go as soon as I can find someone who wants to take me there. Probably won't happen before the big event on tuesday, which means it won't happen for at least a couple weeks. Damn.

Watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again today with Tong and Tonia as part of the Chinese new year celebration. The projectionist was terrible, sound was off, and the screen was small. It's startling how much a technically bad theater can screw up a great movie.

Now it's time to go cheer for Jamie, Dan, Heemin, & pals on their inagural night.

So Dan's art & technology Collision went really well.

I managed to get the arcade controller finished at about 4am the morning of, although the second controller's buttons and joystick were lost in the mail somewhere. They finally arrived this morning.

The first seven or so hours of Collision were sort of like a museum. People would wander into la sala and look at the installations and leave, there were never more than a few people there at one time. This gave me an opportunity to check out some other people's stuff. Aaron's robot arm was probably my favorite. Also of note were Geo's spinning computer fan and LED mobile, Frostbyte's LED towers, a kinetic sculpture made of aluminum bar stock, and a drum kit made of water containers and contact mics.

After about 10pm, the place started filling up and it became more like a concert as the attention turned to the live music performances. I managed to keep a line at the arcade machine for the whole time, tho. The #1 requested games were Galaga and Street Fighter II by guys and Ms. Pac Man by the ladies.

The last performer of the night was Tube, and I heart Frank. He kicked so much butt. He was playing a really really hard set of sick d&b, and he'd throw in these weird sequences of banjos and messed up vocals and whatnot. A lot of fun to listen to, plus he was spazzing out behind the gear and obviously having a great time.