Being sick is boooooring

So, yea, being sick is really boring. There is only so much TV a guy can watch before getting all loopy headed and depressed, right? Right. So I’ve been trying to come up with little projects to keep entertained while not over exerting myself…. you know what that means right? Yea, lots of nerding out on the computer…

Songbird
I decided a little while ago that I’ve had enough with Itunes. I never really liked the interface, and I especially didn’t like that it started deleting my music without telling me. So I did a bit of research and happily discovered Songbird.

Also I discovered I really like Dr. Steel

Songbird is a full featured completely free open source music management application developed by Mozilla. Perfect! I had actually discovered songbird a couple weeks ago, but it wasn’t until my downtime that I had a chance to move my music library over and get it all configured. I’m still getting used to it, but my first impressions are all great. Just like firefox it supports a multitude of awesome plugins, and if you want to change the appearance of the app there are plenty of “feathers” for it too. Feathers, cute huh?

New Dock
I had known it was possible to modify the dock under Leopard for a while, I just hadn’t had the time or motivation to do it. Well… this week I’ve had nothing but time so I figure I should get to it.

Truedock + Power Indicators + Dark Separator

The process was actually much easier than I thought it was going to be. All you need to do is replace the default “scurve”png files in your dock resources directory. You can find all the required info here as well as quite a few pre-made doc images. I ended up mixing and matching to create something that worked for me.

AdBlock Plus + Add-Art
I also installed some new firefox addons… AddBlock plus in conjunction with Add-Art has made for more pleasant web browsing. Addblock plus blocks ads and Add-art replaces them with art. My one complaint has been that so far the “art” is almost more obnoxious than the ads are. I mean, wtf is this?

“this was the worst I’d ever cut up before. I cut open my old appendix wound, stuck pins on the inside of the wound and swallowed a broken light bulb.”

Seriously? I mean, in context I’m sure this is a powerful story… but I really don’t want to see it while checking my Hotmail.

Add-Art cycles the art every 2 weeks, so I’m willing to wait it out and hope the next round of art is more palatable.

Sooooo sick *cough*

Oh man, this is possibly the sickest I’ve ever been. I’m on my 4th day of high fevers, violent coughing, and horrible sinus congestion. I spent about four hours in the emergency room Saturday night when my temp hit 104.5. I was in bad shape for sure. When I got there my vitals were all over the place. My resting heart rate was in the 140s, my blood pressure was dangerously low, my blood oxygen saturation was poor, and I was extremely dehydrated. If they hadn’t been able to get my temperature down as quickly as they did I would have been in real danger of permanent brain damage.

When my vitals settled down a little bit they took blood samples, mucus samples, and chest x-rays to figure out what was making me so sick. Strangely enough, everything came back negative. I didn’t show pneumonia in my x-rays, and I tested negative for both the cold and flu virus, and they ruled out bronchitis as well. My doc was pretty stumped. He said he figured it would have to be a nasty bacterial infection to be able to push my temperature that high. Since my co-workers got sick as well, I’m blaming it on some crazy Indian bacteria that hitched a ride, but who knows.

After four hours hooked up to an IV dripping saline into my arm, 800mg of Motrin, two Tylenol, and four antibiotics I was able to go back home. Now I’m taking an additional five day course of antibiotics to kill whatever this thing is. Here’s to hoping this goes away without much more of a fight!

mah brain!

I haven’t gotten the results from my MRI yet, but in the meantime… here is my brain!

Still frames can be found here. It’s a little bit creepy being able to see inside my own head…

Skittles the photographer

This year Skittles got his very own camera for Christmas. It attaches to his collar and sees everything he does.

Skittles has been wearing his camera and taking pictures for a couple weeks now so I figured I would start showing off all of his hard work. Skittles has his own photoset on my flickr page that I will continue to update as he takes more and more great pictures. Check it out here.

Omg teh caves!

Mel’s dad was visiting this weekend so we decided to go down to Carlsbad to see the caverns. It seems like that place gets cooler and cooler every time I go, but I suppose I’m just learning to appreciate it more.

We got to see the swarm of bats leaving the cave this time, which is cool since I hadn’t seen them since I was a little kiddo. Unfortunately they don’t allow you to take photos or video of the bats mass exodus, but I did manage to get some neat pictures from inside the cave. Have a gander at my Carlsbad Caverns set here.

Santa Fe Airshow

Went to the Santa Fe Airshow for the first time last week and it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be.

Plenty of pics on my flickr page for your viewing pleasure.

Trip to Cali! Pics! Finally!

I’m a gigantic slacker… I know. It took me 3 months to get around to it but I finally uploaded the pics from my trip to California.

Head on over to my flickr page for lots of Disney goodness!

Flight of the Slow Stick

Yay! My first real flight with my Slow Stick was a success! I decided I was going to fly until one of two things happened, either I ran out of batteries or I broke three props. Luckily, or unluckily I guess, neither of those things happened. I managed to only break 2 props after about 10 crashes, so that was pretty good, but I did eventually snap the rudder in half on a particularly nasty crash. Oh well, It was still a pretty successful day of flying. Here’s a video of me crashing it into a cactus. Oops!
[flashvideo filename="http://www.reconscious.com/blog2/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/flight-of-the-slow-stick.m4v" /]

Spanish Market

So I went to Spanish Market with Mel and my Mom this weekend…

It was pretty much as you’d expect, as it is every year; endless rows of booths spiraling out from the plaza, all of them with the same exact stuff. A twisted crucified Jesus here… a carved Santo there… a Spanish-Traditional furniture booth here… a tiled something-or-another booth next to it. It’s not that I don’t like going to Spanish Market, it’s just that so much of it is so predictable. I guess a lot of people go to spanish market for the traditional stuff, but even in the “contemporary alley” where all the innovative stuff is supposed to be, it all just felt so unoriginal. Oh well, at least the S.W.A.T van was new and exciting.

Fancy cars are killing my fun…

I hate fancy new cars with their fancy new “assisted parking” features. Screw those cars. Let me explain…

I work downtown and spend a great deal of time here. As such, I have adopted a couple pseudo-hobbies to keep me entertained. One hobby that I’ve discovered I enjoy is helping tourists parallel park. It seems like every time I walk down the street to get my morning coffee I see some tourist struggling to parallel park their giant SUV. I used to just stop and watch as they made a 15-point turn into the parking space, but lately I’ve been helping them out. I’ll position myself on the safety of the sidewalk and wave them into the space, making sure they pull far enough into the space without actually bumping the cars around them. This is actually a lot of fun and the people in the car are always very gratuitous.

However…

Three times now I’ve attempted to help only to realize that their lame ass car is doing the job for me. Twice my generosity has been thwarted by those beeping sonar doo-dads that warn when you’re about to back into something, and once by a reverse camera. Way to make me feel like a moron technology, thanks a lot. >.<

I’ll probably continue to help out if I see somebody backing into a space, but I’ll definitely keep a look out now and give preferential treatment to older cars, cars that aren’t too cool for me.