Life, The Universe, and Everything

[johnf]

Good to see you online Doug

[Doug Coulter]

Spent all day in a big H field booping and bleeping today - 4 scans. I'll report more when I know more, but I have doctor stuff till the weekend just now and some of it is pretty exhausting, I may take till then to write anything worth reading. Thanks for all the encouragement, friends, it's appreciated and helpful.

[Doug Coulter]

Now here's something weird in the coincidence department. I got back late from the scanning, and the meds knocked me cold (woke stiff on the couch). to find that my lan of things master machine had passed out to, at least insofar as putting things in the database all the plot stuff uses. It had had 2 months of uptime since the last time I booted it, it may have some failing hardware (SSD or the cpu, dunno, it's an older ras pi).
You can see it in the straight lines in the plots shown here. WTF, I didn't think hardware/software was sympathetic to its owner.

The times are right in my timezone, mostly.

[johnf]

Least they are not vertical flat lines!!

[Doug Coulter]

I guess that would depend on whether they go up or down...
I guess either kind of vertical line ends in a point if it ends, and I'd guess points are flat? Oh, wait...not enough dimensions to tell!

[Doug Coulter]

After some effective pressuring on the oncologist, by both me and my GP (Amanda) - I'm going in for this procedure tomorrow.
kyphoplasty with osteocool

Which apparently (still reading up on it) uses RF to kill at least the more obvious and big chunks of bone tumors to reduce the pain and slow the spread.
Without ionizing radiation...

Or, the way things have been going, just a pep talk and discussion of when they're finally going to get around to doing something useful.
They've given me all kinds of drugs, which might have been fun a couple decades ago...but now I don't like being out of it.

[Donovan Ready]

Dammit. I did my experimentation with interesting things more years ago than I wish to calculate. Sometimes I remember what it was and what I did, and the statute of limitations has expired on being high in the seventies and eighties.

Maybe I don't remember disco for its inadequacies or maybe I was messed up. I'm thinking both..


Prayers and well wishes, Doug. Fight the bastard.

[Doug Coulter]

Have no fear, I'll be as difficult to kill as possible, while maximizing possible fun. Hmm, that's no different than normal. Interesting new drugs arrived, but I have to wait for old ones to wear off before I can test in isolation (And safety). I'm about to get this procedure - actually the very first treatment I'll have gotten other than palliative drugs...
What's interesting here - actually insanely humorous to one who speaks engineer jargon - is the marketing wank displayed, from contra-lateral (instead of other) to coaxial bipolar used to mean we move RF via coax and of course you need two of anything to make a circuit, to algorithm to mean "we used the right amount of power to not explode the patient or our stuff" and on and on. I almost hurt myself laughing at the use of this jargon to try to convince customer physicians that "we're in the club" - like the dog Rusty in the famous Far Side cartoon or something. Enjoy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tBwoFT ... =Medgadget

Oh, I'm getting kyphoplasty as well in this procedure. That means "fill in the hole we just made". They are going to use methyl methacrylate (acrylics!). Which of course reminds me of Frank Zappa ... hope it doesn't affect that sort of plastic. Unlike Frank, if I don't run out of dough, I'll get my prostate cancer treated too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy4KU0b ... STICDADAII

[Donovan Ready]

Wow! A superglue spine!

[Bob Reite]

Trivia. Most of the footage in the Frank Zappa Plastic People video is from The Twilight Zone episode "Elegy" from the first season.