When my hair fell out

I recently found out that I have pancreatic cancer and as a result have started chemotherapy. My first session went fine with no real problems. I was sick as a dog but it wasn't the chemo causing me problems, it was the pain killers I was on. The second chemo session also came and went without much fuss until a few days later and I noticed a few hairs floating around after rubbing my head. No problem. A little while later I realize that a slight tug on my hair results in a handful of hair. No problem. I decide to take a shower and as soon as I start to shampoo I am deluged by my own hair. I'm not sure how, my hair is not very long but I have hair everywhere, in my face, my mouth and eyes. I'm hollering for my wife to come help. "I can't see!" I spit hairs and sputter trying to wipe the hair from my tongue and eyes. I finally get to the point that I can see and breath. I clean a small dog worth of hair from the drain cover and get dried off. That's when I decided that I have to cut to the chase and head off the remaining hair by clipping it all off and shaving it bald. Fortunately I don't have a very odd shaped head, have no tattoos, scars or markings that I have to spend hours explaining. I just have to have a hat because it's cold. No problem.

Setting up the new phone

Nothing to see here. Just setting up the new phone. Oh, here is a pic of the new kitty, Boo.

Local Drive Q

I was puzzled to find a mysterious local drive Q on my laptop and immediately jumped to all the worst conclusions; virus, root kit, daughter loaded some rouge peer to peer. It turns out it was just Microsoft again. I recently tried out the Office 2010 beta and it uses "click to run" which apparently uses their virtualization. See the details here . But the telling sentence is "Click-to-Run users may notice that they have a virtual Q: drive on their PCs, this is the virtual file system used by Office". Well, that's well and good but it doesn't look like a virtual drive although I'm not exactly sure what one would look like. I do know that I have less space on my "C" drive than I had before I noticed it but it says it has zero space allocated. I'll have to look more at it later just to know more about it but for now just know that it's not malicious.

CNCInformation.com

Recently I was looking through the wanted ads looking for local jobs in the IT industry and kept seeing a need for CNC programmers. I thought I had heard of about every programming language known but had no idea what CNC was. It turns out to be Computer Numerical Control and is a language used to control things like lathes, mills, routers and such. Being an old wood worker and hobby nut you can imagine how cool I thought I thought this site was. If you are interested in such, CNCInformation has all sorts of information, tips and community to help you get started in using CNC as a hobby.

IE8 Blues update

I was able to get around the problem of IE8 hanging. I went to add/remove programs and looked for anything that looked like a plug-in and removed it. The one that seemed to do the trick was removing IE7PRO which is a pretty nice plug-in for IE7 that apparently gives IE8 congestion. I guess I'll live without it or wait for an update that is IE8 compatible.

IE8 Blues

Well, I'm having to write this post from the Opera browser.  I could have used Chrome or Firefox or just about any other browser.  Since I let the "upgrade" of IE8 go in, I am unable to access ANYTHING using IE.  The problem first reared it's head when IMDB said I had to load flash 8 or later.  I knew I had flash 10 on already so I knew something was up.  When I tried to reload flash it said it was already installed and sure enough I could find it and it said enabled.  After some poking around I found that if IE8 has trouble with ANY ONE of the add-in it put IE in a "special" no add-ins enabled mode.  You have to figure out what it is having issues with and disable them, restart IE and hope you don't run into any more.  At the moment, I am locked into a mode where IE won't even come up enough for me to manage the add-ons.  I'm quite sure I won't be able to uninstall or go back to IE7 and many other posts I've read seem to back that up.  Google around before you load IE8 and see if the problems have answers before you leap.  I wish I'd have.

More on the virtual wasteland

I am starting to warm up to twitter a little more. I still can't get the direct messages to work, my dropdown box does not list any of my peeps in it and I can't just type into the textbox. The reason I am warming up to it is that I am finding some useful places to follow. One is my daughter's school. They have a twitter account and send out school announcements. I like that.

I'm enjoying the heck out of FaceBook. I joined to keep tabs on my daughter and soon old friends started finding me. It's a great place to hit for just a little while and catch up. It could be a huge time sink if you let it though. I just have to get in and get out. I've found that using the web browser "flock" is helpful when using the social networking sites.

I've been toying with the Microsoft Office Live site as well but the real benefit is for collaberating with others and I'm having a hard time getting the "others" to move past email. I forget that everyone isn't a tech loving geek like myself. I have plenty of tech loving geek friends I just don't have a need to collaborate spreadsheets and powerpoints with them. We just get silly on FaceBook.

How can 90% tax make me happy?

When it happens to fat cats who mismanage huge amounts of money and cry to the government to bail them out, then grant themselves huge bonuses.  That's when.