Tvindy

Wisdom Teeth

Last Wednesday I had a couple wisdom teeth extracted. I still have two left, but one of them is impacted, and there is danger of nerve damage if the oral surgeon tries to remove it. He says the risk increases with age but that if it's done sometime in the next decade, the danger will not increase substantially. Anyway, he decided to just do the two teeth on the right side, so I could use my left side to chew.

Despite some pain, I was surprised at how easy the whole thing has been. Back in my teen years, I had a much more horrendous process done to try and preserve my bicuspids. The same surgeon did that (although he no longer remembers me). That involved two extremely painful injections in the roof of my mouth followed by 45 minutes in which he gouged a large hole in the roof of my mouth. Even though there wasn't much pain, I could still feel the pressure and cutting. I kept my eyes closed the whole time, and the nitrous oxide put me into a weird mental state in which I saw a bunch of strange colors and patterns and communicated with a weird swirling entity named Nutmeg. I spent the whole time trying to will myself to another place far away from there. For years after that, whenever I heard a lound pounding, drilling, or scraping sound, I was afraid I would find myself back in that chair.

The pain for the next several days after that was substantial. I was on a strong pain killer called Empirim. It had the side effect of making me quite happy with my life. In fact, I wasn't aware until then that I was unhappy. When I went off the medication, I completely crashed and spent several days in the darkest state of depression I had ever known. No one had warned me of these effects, and it was only some days later that I connected my changed mental state to the pills. It's a good thing I'm not suicidal. Something like that could easily push someone over the edge.

Anyway, after several months, I ended up going to Cameroon for a year with my parents. The hole filled in, and I got to go through the whole process all over again when I got back to the US. The initial shots were as horrendously painful as I had remembered. And this time, I had the added benefit of getting an infection. It was incredibly painful and went on for days.

So I was understandably trepidacious about having a similar procedure done by the same oral surgeon. But it turned out to be a piece of cake. It was ten times easier on me than that whole hole-in-the-roof-of-the-mouth thing. I haven't even needed any of the pain pills (Hydrocodone) I got. (I guess I can take them all for fun some time.) I would have no problem having my wisdom teeth out again, which is good, because someday I will get to do it all over again.

Another Kitty Pic

Another Sub

This submarine isn't as cool as the weeble one, but I thought I'd let you see it just the same. This was made for GI Joe. No, not that newfangled team of idiots; I'm talking about the original -- the one with "life-like hair" and kung fu grip. Unfortunately my mother got rid of GI Joe, but I still have the plastic squid. (I just don't know where it is now.) Actually the squid was the only part of the set to really get played with. I was well into my twenties before I learned that squid are not really grey.

Old TV

Receptionista showed us her TV. It's so old that it predates her birth. Well, here is my TV. Unfortunately, I don't think this quite makes it as a success at outcooling Receptionista, because her TV was passed down to her, whereas mine was simply picked up by me at a thrift store. This crazy thing almost certainly goes back to the forties. What on earth did people watch back then?

More iPod Fun

Slim had a link to this article, which I found quite interesting. It seems that a British company called Nykris, has come up with a guide to 114 public loos (that's "bathrooms" to us Americans) in central London. What makes the guide unique (other than its scatological element) is that it's made to be downloaded to the iPod. Hence its name -- the pPod (not to be confused with the PPOD Syndrome or even the short-lived pPod made by StarBrite Solutions).

Ever open to experimenting with new technologies, I tracked down the download page and loaded it into my iPod mini. I was a bit concerned at first. According to the installation instructions, the software is only compatible with third-generation or later iPods. There was no mention of the iPod mini at all, but I was relieved to find that, after following all of the instructions, pPod works perfectly on my device.

What really impressed me about the product (besides the fact that it includes tracks of music to listen to while peeing) is that it employs a form of hypertext. In other words, you can actually click around on underlined words to navigate to a specific bathroom. A link can lead you to either another text file or a sound file which plays while leaving the relevant text on the screen.

I didn't know the iPod could do this. I searched around on Apple's site and could find absolutely no documentation for creating pPod type downloads, but it looks pretty easy to go through and look at the commands used and reverse-engineer something similar. Besides area reviews and travel guides, there are several other possibilities for how this technology might be used. Two immediately come to mind.

First, since I can't really share my music via an iTunes playlist, because iTunes still only offers about seven songs, most of which are crap, I could set up an iPod download with a text explanation of some of my songs with clickable links that would play the first thirty seconds of each track. (A program like Audacity could easily snip out short sections of MP3s.)

Second, this would be a great way to offer a simple foreign language dictionary. Imagine a few hundred words and phrases, each accompanied by its English translation and an audio pronunciation track. Sure there are things like this online, but wouldn't it be much more convenient to be able to carry it around in your pocket and consult it on the go?

Nevertheless, there are problems, and I still maintain an iPod is not the ideal portable academic tool. For starters, the download process needs to be streamlined. Instead of dragging text files and then audio tracks into their respective folders on your iPod drive, it should be possible to create a single executable file which automatically installs all the files in their correct locations. Also, all of these extra tracks get added to the "Browse by Song" list, meaning that if you had several hundred short pronunciation tracks, browsing by song would no longer be an option.

Gonzo Science

I know finding great new music to download isn't anything new, but since I got my new iPod Mini, my interest in this practice has been revived. As I said before, I have made a few additions to my playlist, but finding an absolute gem is very hard. I'm not easy to please music-wise. I tend to like songs that are highly lyrical and a little bit silly. Yesterday, though, I came across a veritable treasure.

Here's how I found it. I was reading Bill's latest post, in which he offered a download to an obscure song that he believed was no longer available anywhere else online. A commenter replied with a link to a site that did, in fact, offer that song as well as the entire album which contained it. I checked out the site, and, on the off chance that they might have something else of interest to me, I scrolled down and checked out the other albums. That's how I discovered this.

Gonzo Science is the work of Jim Richardson and his brother Allen, both of whom believe that scientific orthodoxy unnecessarily holds back new ideas which may be valid. Each track of the CD is the defense of a theory not generally accepted in the mainstream of science. But it's also a song. You can play it and rock to a defense of the Aquatic Ape Theory or to a criticism of the Big Bang model of the Universe. And the music is good. You could easily include one or two tracks in a party mix without anyone thinking you're some sort of wackadoo. (Of course for me, it's a bit too late to be worrying about that.)

But what I really like about these guys is that they're not nutcases. I love non-conventional theories, as anyone who has been reading this blog for any amount of time can attest. The problem is that most people who defend such ideas are usually a little nutty. They have no concept of the scientific method and are willing to pretty much believe anything, and if no one believes them, they think there's some big conspiracy out there trying to suppress the truth. For example, Coast to Coast AM is a great radio show, but they take everything seriously, including ghosts, UFOs, alien abductions, governmental conspiracies, and the fact that one of their regular guests was incommunicado for a couple of weeks, because he was traveling through time.

The Allen brothers, on the other hand, have a much more critical eye for such theories. This is perhaps more apparent on their website entries than in their lyrics. They consider the existence of the Loch Ness Monster highly unlikely, and they also don't believe that the US government has secretly acquired extraterrestrial technology. Most of the ideas they defend are things that I agree with, many of which I have already blogged about, such as the Aquatic Ape Theory, and life on earth originating in space. (The Expanding Earth Theory was new to me, though.) For more information on their scientific philosophy, listen to the interview on NPR and check out Debunking the Skeptics.

Glowing Eyes

Jason's favorable response to the pic I posted of the cat in the tree with glowing eyes prompted me to post this one which I believe to be even better (at least in terms of glowing-eyed kitty pics).

Adventures in iPodding

I'm still playing around with my iPod. The first thing I did was to download some of the better stuff I already had on my hard drive. Once I discovered Napster in 1999, I pretty much downloaded everything I could ever need within a six-month period. In terms of music I'm pretty much set, and most of what I got from Napster still isn't available in the iTunes library. (They don't even have Pippi Longstocking singing her theme song in the original Swedish.) Nevertheless, I have been doing some downloading of late.

It started when I heard about Linda Ronstadt's recent problems in Las Vegas. That was scary, and it illustrates that there are still a lot of Bush supporters out there. To show my support, I purchased two of her songs: "Don't Know Much" with Aaron Neville and "All I Have to Do Is Dream" with Kermit the Frog. Perhaps if enough people out there purchase Linda Ronstadt songs, we can save the country.

Then on Mind Pollution I read a really positive entry on a new band called The Mathematicians. I checked out their site, and they seemed cool, so I downloaded the two MP3s available for free to the public. It's good stuff. In fact, it's so good that iTunes doesn't offer it. But even though I appreciate it, I don't really think it's anything I would listen to on a regular basis, so I probably won't be purchasing their CD.

My latest discovery comes straight from Receptionista, who has more culture than you can shake a stick at. (For you Australian readers out there, that's "bloody heaps".) She recommends Scissor Sisters, which is in the iTunes library, but is very good nonetheless. After browsing through the first thirty seconds of each of their tracks, I ended up buying an entire album, so I could hear them in their entirety. I also got the Pink Floyd "Comfortably Numb" track to compare it with the Scissor Sisters version.

Now here's where things get a little screwy. In the middle of the download, the computer froze up and had to be powered down and restarted. (XP isn't supposed to do that, is it?) Fortunately, iTunes has a "Check for Purchased Music" command that lets it redownload stuff that's been paid for. Everything was recovered except for Scissor Sister's rendition of "Comfortably Numb". I tried buying and downloading it again, but it still wasn't didn't show up. Finally I browsed my iPod Mini's hard drive and found two copies there, which I was able to drag to my desktop and then my iTunes library and then back to my iPod. I guess having two songs with the same name, but by different artists, was what had caused the problem.

That's all I've downloaded so far. The question now is what I should do next. Perhaps I can take my iPod apart and put it back together again. This idea really appeals to me, but I don't have access to a hairdryer. Hmm, perhaps if I used a brute force approach . . .

Also of interest, Tim posted about an article he found, reporting that next Year at Duke University, all incoming freshmen will be issued iPods. The rationale is that they are experimenting to see if it can be used as an educational tool. But I think they're just trying to come up with gimmicks to attract new students and appear hip. After all, wouldn't some form of pocket PC be much better suited to the task (and less distracting to the students)? This isn't what the iPod was designed for. Can it record audio, as in classroom lectures? Yes, if you want to pay an additional $35 for something like this and still only be able to record in memory-hogging WAV format. Can you take notes on it? No. How about wireless capabilities, so the profs could just beam written documents right to you during a lesson? Of course not. An additional feature that would be great would be the ability to take pictures with it. (Currently I use my digital camera to take pictures of notes written on the blackboard, so I don't have to write them out.) I would love for Apple to create such a device modeled on the iPod interface. That would be awesome, and I would be one of the first in line to buy it. But the iPod itself just isn't there, and I think the administrators at Duke are on the pot.

Mediocre Post

Lately my blogging is at low ebb. I just don't feel like writing much lately, but I'll keep posting little daily tidbits until my inspiration comes back.

Not much is going on in my life right now. My knee still hurts a lot. It's very hard for me to go up and down stairs. Hopefully not running will allow it to heal properly, but, so far, there is no sign of healing.

I got my iSkin to put on my iPod. It doesn't look as cool in real life as it does in the pictures. Sure I can make my iPod pink, but it looks like a piece of cheap crap when it's in its skin. On the plus side, it does offer a great deal of protection. Now I can throw my iPod down on hard cement with no fear of damage, and it even bounces a little.

Cat & Squirrel in Tree