Life, The Universe, and Everything

[Doug Coulter]

Just got back from a couple "procedures" at the hospital after months of test$. Seems to have gone well. More when I recover enough to be able to touch type again.

[Donovan Ready]

Good to hear from you, my friend.

I sympathize with the typing problem: I'm working with 9 fingers now. I tore an extensor tendon in my left ring finger, and it hurts like hell if I don't splint it. Not much in the scheme of things...

[johnf]

ata boy doug

[Doug Coulter]

Well, in the good news portion...the fiber crews are here every day digging in the cables. I should have "real" internet in a month or so, assuming I can be in good enough shape to use it. The plan is to set up server(s) here and move the board and some other really nifty stuff to here, where I have some terabytes to share that I just can't really upload to the existing servers due to various limitations there and sheer bandwidth limits. I've been serving a little from here, unlised IP (no domain) to look at who and what quality the attacks are that come.
Frankly, it's the Chinese and the 5 eyes, who seem pretty frustrated that I've not got anything online they can steal or mess up. Some of the attacks are obvious script kiddies, some are pretty sohpsticated. I get a few from "everyehere" but Chinese were in the 1000/hour range till I blocked some big chunks of their address space. A little from every other country, maybe a Russian a month (they're pretty good at this), and a ton from Bangladesh, no telling who those really are, blocked most all of that so far.
It's informative what they try and what not to make easy for them to do....everyone seems to be after admin access to any database for example, and I've made it extremely hard for that to happen already. The stuff I want to share...doesn't seem to generate that much interest, there are other ways to get most of it anyway, all I've really done is curate, organize and collect the niche stuff we sorts tend to be interested in.
Getting home visits from nurses etc now. That's nice. We're talking about getting more support on a more frequent basis...

A truck to carry big ditch witches etc, caught in the act by my driveway cam.

[Donovan Ready]

Nice having fiber! How are you doing?

[Doug Coulter]

Yeah, I hope the actual fiber gets hooked in before I can't have fun with it anymore...Right now they're doing the directional drilling stuff to get under culverts and paved driveways, the actual fiber laying truck is parked uphill on my land, no idea how much if any is spliced back to the main office. We'll see. I'm going to try to negotiate a fiber-only setup, which would in theory reduce my bill, and move to voip phone. Time will tell.

As far as my personal condition, well, state of flux. I'm on hospice care now, which means some house calls, some free med equipment like a hospital bed, commode, oxy tanks, and new drugs - some nasty stuff, they want me on methadone now, which I'm testing for the first time now...in a few hours I'll know if it's OK with me. Doesn't seem at this dose to be as good as the oxycodone, which I've been taking half-doses of, re - it's more happy pill than painkiller, so far. But it's supposed to last longer so I can maybe resume a full night's sleep. Waking up because a painkiller wore off is very not fun. They take a long time to start working again if you take more at that point.
Got the new bed tricked out...it's nicer than my old one, which I now have to figure out how to get rid of, it's out in the yard.

But it feels like "thanato-therapy" at this point, as in just dope 'em up and let them die. There's still one doc insisting he needs to work on my prostate, either to just farm medicare bucks, or just as likely, not in tune with the rest. All that stuff works as well as expected and likely won't be what kills me, so I may blow the guy off. The lung/bone/gland cancer seems a lot more pressing, and basically there's nothing more to be done there. The gland stuff moves all my regulatory systems all around so I have to constantly monitor all this crap manually - a dose of this or that which is right one day might kill me the next. Some days blood pressure is high and barely responds to meds, some days it's super low, for example, with no other changes on my part. So I don't take those meds when it's too low already for example.

Sucks, but they're doing their best to make me comfortable while still giving me the mushroom treatment - keep 'em in the dark and feed them bullshit, as if that will be better for my 'quality of life' if I don't know till just before it won't matter.

Sad to report all this nasty news. I'm doing my best to give things away to "good hands" before hand, things I was going to get around to someday which now looks like it an't gonna happen anyway. Might as well make people happy if I can and ease the job of the executor.

I'm making a backup of my 'digital estate' which is taking forever, just building the machine is taking awhile - a couple days so far just copying the master node for that ( a few million files, and I did the dumb drag/drop instead of writing an rsync script, so ext4 and a zillion files == slow,) then I'll be adding a few tb of my normal shares and machine backups to it. The originals will stay intact here for awhile too. If I do get fiber in time, I'll put it all up on google drive and share that too.

[Bill Fain]

Doug Coulter

It is with great sorrow I announce the passing of Doug Coulter in the wee hours of Thurday May the 6th. As you know Doug had been battling Non small cell lung cancer. None of us thought Doug would leave us this soon. He had unbearable pain in his bones as the cancer had metastasized, but he somehow managed to carry on. I will write more later. I intend to keep this board running as long as I can, but his provider may shut it down due to an outdated version of PHP. I am trying to figure out how to make a complete copy of the site. I suggest that if you have a particular subject from the board that you are interested in, that you try to make a copy of that part for yourself. Of particular interest is Doug's tutorial on making high voltage feed throughs. Many of Dougs videos are still available on youtube under Dcfusor. If you have paid a youtube premium you can download them for safe keeping. I intend to reach out to Donovan Ready for his help with the site. I also have possesion of Doug's fusor and intend to run it with another board member and try a few things maybe Doug did not. We are also going to try to recreate Doug's accidental exposure run, but at a safe distance. Doug automated the fusor so we could run it from a control room many feet away. Grown men don't cry, but I did. Doug has been a great friend for close to 14 years. Thank You. -Bill Fain

[Donovan Ready]

Thank you. I'm crying, too. I knew it was coming, but I hoped he could get more things done that he wanted to do. Damn and damn.

You've got my email, Bill. I'll think about how to at least archive everything, but I'm rusty.

[Bob Reite]

It was sure a surprise to me that Doug passed this quickly. If you need help in moving this forum to another server, I have experience with phpBB.

[Donovan Ready]

Thank you, Bob.

Bill, you are now a full admin.