Concentration

Besides being an old TV game show hosted by Hugh Downs it is also something I totally lack since my operation. I thought I would be able to use all this "free time" I have on my hands, you know, while the holes in my body seal up, for posting to my blog and doing some painting and some writing and, shit, I just can't concentrate on anything other than how shitty I feel. What a wasted opportunity this is turning out to be.

It's Gettin' Real in the Hyundai Commercial

last month I saw this commercial making the rounds and something about it seemed familiar. Talented people get to do their thing:



If you are like, "Huh?" check out the Whole Foods Parking Lot video This one always creacks me up:

I'm Alive!

Well, I got that pesky gall bladder removed and as the Hollies say, "I'm Alive!" I'm in pain, but I'm alive. I don't know what I would feel like if it weren't for the Percocet. I have four new openings into my body, two of which rip right though my abs and make it frankly hard to pee. But things could have been worse and I thank everyone who was in the operating room on Wednesday and who helped me in my room that night and the next morning.

How Smart is This?

This has got to be the smartest commercial I have seen in years. Man I wish I had written this!

Just Hold Your Gall Bladder

So two weeks before Christmas I am driving home from work and I start to get this ache in my stomach, really high, just under the rib cage on the right side. My first thought is indigestion, though it is getting worse with every passing minute and so my second thought is pancreatitis. This nasty ailment is something I have had once before, about four years ago and it hurts like a, well, let's just say, it hurts. So is the pain I am having that day driving home. About a third of the way home it starts shooting through me like a knife drilling through my body and then the pain starts spreading across my back. I am waiting for it to begin shooting laterally across my stomach, like it did the time before, only it doesn't do that. So though it feels really reminiscent of pancreatitis, I'm just not sure.

I get home and my son says, "Go to the ER Dad. You can go now or the ambulance can come and take you later." Me, I don't like going to the ER, so I say I am going to give it another hour or so to get worse or get better. It does neither. So, at 9:00 that evening, we go to the ER. As soon as they get me in and into a bed, I start to feel better. Now I feel like a fool. Indigestion I think. They run battery of tests including an ultrasound, but find nothing and I get home around midnight, my insurance company now $4,000 the poorer.

A few days later I go to my doctor for a regularly scheduled check up and he pulls my records from that night and tells me they missed the gall stones when reading the ultrasound that night, but the guy whose job it is to read these things sees them the next morning, so my gall bladder has to come out.

I see a surgeon a week ago and he schedules me for the Wednesday with the pre-op visit today. I go in, spend over an hour waiting to be seen, I see the doctor, I see his assistant, I see the doctor again and the assistant then starts asking me questions. The last question she asks is when did I stop taking my daily aspirin. I say, "What do you mean stopped? I took it this morning."

Seems they forgot to mention that I had to stop taking the damn aspirin, so I am now scheduled to have my gall bladder removed a week from Wednesday. I'll let you know if it happens.

Slashed!

I had said a few days ago that I was able to remote access my Kindle Fire using Slashtop and that was true up to a point. The point where it was not true was when I left my internal wi-fi and went out into the wild blooming yonder of open access wi-fi. From there I could not get to my desktop. I searched the Kindle Fire Forum and found another app mentioned, TeamViewer and downloaded it.

Today, from my Dr.'s waiting room, I was able to access my home PC and work on my novel. Pretty cool. The problem I had with Slashtop was that it only saw my internalal IP address, not the external one being generated by FIOS. TeamViewer doesn't seem to have that issue.

All Fired Up!

I am all fired up, Kindle Fired up that is. My son bought me a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I have been giddy ever since. I've had it for over a week now but I am really just beginning to see the potential in the product.

Bezos should have come out singing, "I am the God of hell fire and I bring you FIRE!"

I bought a nice leather case for it with a stylus. That comes in handy when I want to use Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile. It will take some getting used to the stylus which is not nearly as easy to use as my Wacom Tablet on the PC, but will suffice for now.

It's Kindle, so all of my Kindle books are available to me for reading at my leisurere. Though not an e-Ink screen, I can still use the Fire as a reader while on the go.

I'm not really much of a gamer, never owned a gaming device, though I have played with my son's XBox 360 and Kinect a number of times, but I seem to be loading the internal memory with  games like Asphalt 6: Adrenaline, Back Stab and Madden 12, all of which play amazingly well on the Fire and for each of which I paid 99 cents. The graphics and the response of the machine are pretty damn amazing.

Video is another treat on the Fire. From YouTube to streaming full movies and TV episodes, the Fire is a smooth experience.

A few months ago I ripped all of my CDs to my PC and then moved all of them to the Amazon Music Cloud so that I could listen to them on my phone or at work. With the Fire I have access to my entire music collection.

A few months ago I gave my laptop to my step-son who needed it for work and so I went through November's NaNoWriMo without benifit of a way to go out and socialize while writing. I wrote my first novel using Scrivener for Windows and put my Scriverner data files into my Dropbox folder which allowed me to have access to them on my PC and my phone and anywhere else I had a Dropbox folder. Well, though not natively supported on the Fire, I was able to side load Dropbox onto the Fire, so my novel is now there as well. My problem is editing the files. The Fire does not have an editor for RTF (Rich Text Format) files, which is what Scrivener uses, so though I have access to them on my Fire, I still cannot edit them. Enter Slashtop!

Slashtop is a remote access app that allows me to have access to my PC desktop on my Fire. Utilizing Slashtop I have been able to work on my novel from my Fire. Not a perfect solution, but it does work and for the time being, that is enough for me.

So let's see if I can bottom-line this. I can surf the web, play amazing games, read my books, paint and draw, watch movies and TV, listen to my music and write my novel all from a $199 tablet, all for $300 less than the cheapest iPad. Only a complete fool would waste their money on the big Apple.

I am So Ashamed

I don't know what to say, I laughed. I really laughed at this. I don't know if this bodes well or bad for this new year.