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See an Orthopod

Before and after, one wrist/arm with twin fractures, the other normal. Click if not squeamish. Although the E.R. told me to “see an orthopod in a few days,” my PCP wouldn’t give me a referral over the phone. Tomorrow I go in, no doubt, to waste two hours and half a day of work, take my blood pressure, and get referred to “an orthopod.” I hate that aspect of HMOs — against all common sense, referrals always required. Actually worked today one-handed, which is NOT half-speed, but around 1/4 speed since left hand has to float and search for each letter. Patience wearing thin, going to file a police report tomorrow and am now considering suing after all. I can’t change Miles’ diapers, can’t even pick him up. Can’t drive, can’t ride, can’t pull change out of my pants. Amy has to tie my shoes. My life is screwed for a month while the driver is scot-free. It’s a moral imperative to get her off the road, that’s a given, but I’m starting to think compensation makes sense too … unless it would be trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

Music: Fila Brazillia :: Asthma
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Polyester, Desperate Living

Part of the fun of breaking limbs (Amy commented today that I’m starting to look familiar in a cast) is staying home, checking out, and renting movies. Saturday brought home a pair of John Waters films.

Waters’ goal for years was to make sure that each film outdid the last in bad taste … though Polyester broke that tradition somewhat in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience. It’s still my favorite, and I still have one of the original Odorama cards in a box somewhere.

Desperate Living somewhat harder to watch unless you’re thirsty for 90 minutes of extreme, wonderful trash. Picture Queen Carlotta as a “special” actress missing two front teeth, half-spherical, giant red hair, ruling prone from her perch on a four-poster cot held aloft by Castro boys in leather motorcycle caps and black mesh shirts.


Peggy Gravel: The citizens of Mortville are beneath contempt. Only the rich should be allowed to live.

Queen Carlotta: I like the way you think. I’ll give you a trial run. Your first duty will be to help my soldiers spread rabies to the whole town. Do you think you can handle that?

Gravel: Oh, yes, your majesty. And I know just the person I want to give it to first.

Now imagine 90 minutes of similarly insane scene making and you get the basic idea of Desperate Living. If you’ve already seen your share of Waters’ films, his directors’ commentaries on the DVDs make them worth re-watching.

Music: Count Basie and His Orchestra :: Broadway
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Accident

So 80% of my bicycle commute is off city streets. The remaining 20% is still in the car-o-sphere, as I discovered this evening when a woman with no insurance (of course) hooked a sudden left in front of me. Half a second to react, and I was looking at a horizontal Honda in my path. That quick pang of inevitability before my front wheel hit her flank and I went sailing over the trunk. Right wrist and forearm took most of the impact, back and ribs caught some too.

What pissed me off was the way she started yelling that she didn’t see me, as if that somehow made it my fault. It was broad daylight, the sun was at her back, and she wasn’t on the phone. So then… what? Why are bikes so damn invisible to cars? As she continued her stupid defensive rant, I lay on my back halfway on the sidewalk and told her about Matthew, and how that driver “just didn’t see him” either. It started to sink in and she started to cry.

A very kind woman (a theology prof) gave me a ride home. Turns out she was connected to Matthew as well. Eerie.

Spent the rest of the evening in the emergency room. Two fractures in my right forearm/wrist. In a splint and sling for the next long while. I feel a monstro cars/bikes rant coming on — the one I’ve supressed since Matthew’s death — but typing one-handed is too slow.

Music: John Fahey :: Knott’s Berry Farm Molly
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XServe Arrives

The XServe arrived at the J-School today. Sysadmin is out of town, so it gets to live in my office for a while, bootstrap it through the transition from Wintel. Surprisingly large. Surprisingly loud. A work of art. Packed with software, ready to rock. In the rack. Dancing blue lights on the front of the box monitor dual CPU activity, which I haven’t seen since the BeBox went bye-bye. Afternoon spent RTFM’ing and exploring config options. Tomorrow we get down.

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14,600 Redux

Since posting about the DSL bandwidth bummers in the new house last week, the outlook has not brightened. Speakeasy put me in touch with their throughput gurus and we looked at the problem from every angle (I can’t recommend Speakeasy highly enough – their customer service is sterling). Conclusion – they can get me maybe 5% or even 10% more upstream, but we’re not going to get anywhere close to the 768kbps upstream I had in the previous house until the telco builds a closer C.O. Called the telco and got laughed at — “You’re already within DSL range — why would we build another C.O.?”

Started doing more research into cable options via Comcast. Just getting through to them has been a study in frustration. Half a dozen phone calls and emails unreturned. All I wanted to know was what their upstream cap was and whether they impose any restrictions on ports/servers. Their web site was totally unhelpful. Their commercial service sounded promising, but no details online. Finally, a sympathetic soul in tech support passed me to someone with a clue. Sure enough, 384kbps upstream cap and no traffic on port 80 allowed. Period.

So I’m back to square one. Home T1 too expensive. Colo probably affordable but will necessitate buying another box. Having too much fun running servers to throw in the towel, though someone with a less-thick head than myself probably would have long ago.

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Did Jesus Compile His Own Kernel?

What stranges me out about Does Linux equal socialism? is the fact that the author seems very careful to point out that the GPL allows for profit, and that open source therefore isn’t entirely socialistic after all. The implication is that if open source [anything] is socialistic in nature, we’d better steer clear because Jesus wouldn’t like that, but thank goodness Red Hat and IBM have profited from open source since that makes Linux capitalistic, and therefore okay.

The implication being that Jesus was a capitalist, or that there are anti-socialist teachings somewhere in the Bible. If you had asked me, I would have said that Jesus was a socialist. “We are our brother’s keeper” and all that. I would have thought Jesus would have compiled his own kernel.

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No Cable

Had it up to here [points to gullet] with the endless expanses of nothingness on standard cable TV. It’s not that there’s nothing on, just that every time we sit down we have usually half hour or so and just want to be entertained for a bit. More often than not the burrito is done before the commercials finally end, and what’s on is just plain bleak, unsatisfying. There are a few things we like, but the likelihood of them being on when we have free time is slim. Tivo seems like the grail, but to have that, you have to subscribe both to Tivo and to the cable or satellite to feed it.

Feh. Mutiny. Jacked in the 50-year-old antenna on top of the new house and whoa, we get almost a dozen network channels, most of them fairly clear. Unfortunately this also means no 24 hr news and no trigger happy tv, but we’re going to live with this for a while and see how it goes.

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Cahoustics

A while back a friend was was working as a janitor in a recording studio in L.A. During a session, another janitor walked in and exclaimed “Great cahooostics in here!”

Our new living room also has great cahoustics. Same gear. Same music. Way better audio. We rock.

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Dean Gets It

Stirring campaign announcement speech by Howard Dean. The more I learn about him, the more I like. And more than any candidate I’ve known of, Dean is using the collaborative power of the internet to build support. All politicians and candidates have had web sites, but Dean has a blog and a meetup space. More importantly, he’s somehow managed to generate more backing funds in a shorter period of time than analysts figured he’d be able to. There’s a lot to his platform, bu what seems to be lighting fires is his blunt declaration that we’re not just living through a standard right-wing pendulum swing — the country has been taken over by extremists who don’t represent what most Americans believe America stands for.

Gives me hope. Take it back.

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GFCIs, Oops Hole

A dozen receptacles in the new house are two-prong. Those always turn out to be the ones into which you need to plug a three-pronged electric cheese grater. Adapters aren’t really safe, elegant, or convenient, so I’m removing all the old receptacles and replacing with ground fault circuit interruptors. Which takes a bit of hard swallowing, since the old receptacles all had lovely bakelite covers, which now go into a drawer to gather dust.

Hired a pair of electricians to do the hard work prepping new circuits for the garage, add a receptacle to the kitchen, replace our antique fuse box, add a phone jack, etc. We love ’em, they’re great. But came home from a wedding today to a VERY contrite note explaining that a “miscommunication” had resulted in a 1.5″ hole accidentally being bored through our beautiful new floors. Mercy. I can just see how the moment unfolded:

“I got daylight.”

“I’m not seeing your drill bit.”

“I’m through.”

“Where are you?”

“Uhhh…”

They came up on the wrong side of a wall. Rather than behind the stove in the kitchen, the hole is near the stereo, in the living room. They’re willing to pay for repairs of course, but what a drag.