if you would be embarrassed describing how you got hurt to the medical personnel treating you, you should seriously reconsider your actions.

last night, i conspired to violate the hospital rule:  with a straight faces, a colleague suggested that he climb a step ladder, onto his roof (steep pitched, metal, and covered with snow), and fire roman candles.

it seemed like a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem we faced and i agreed to climb up on mine with the cordless phone and binoculars. his wife vetoed and unknowingly invoked the hospital rule.  probably best; explaining how he got the burns and broken bones in the same accident might have… well… violated the hospital rule.

after the typical new patient foreplay… filling out forms, blood pressure, heart rate, etc., i spent 45 minutes talking to my new gastroenterologist. he was very well read on barrett’s esophagus and 80% of his practice is treating the condition.   i’d intentionally used medical terms (“7cm segment of intestinal metaplasia with no dysplasia observed” instead of “i have barrett’s”), when completing the forms, to avoid being talked down to. it’s incredibly frustrating to have to explain that you don’t need an explanation.

after a minute or two of gauging my knowledge and interest, we discussed bârrx (he prefers “halo”, as bârrx medical is the name of the company while “halo90″ “halo360″ are the names of the procedures/products). note that i’ve been putting off this surgery for some time now. immediately following my diagnosis, i made up my mind that this was a course of treatment i wanted to pursue. he explained that treatment of barrett’s patients who have no or low grade dysplasia isn’t something he does often. he explained his reasoning behind it. he quoted some much lower figures than i’d heard, for the probability of developing an invasive carcinoma, in any given year. i explained why i was still interested, despite the fact that it’s not the american medical association’s ’standard of care.’  he seemed to understand and said, “let’s just get a scope and talk after that.”  fair enough, so back in the lobby, i made a date with a camera on a stick.

being treated like an educated adult by an educated adult, in this circumstance makes all the difference. i learned a ton, felt like my opinion mattered, and came out if the conversation with a degree of trust for my new doc.  did i mention that a doctor spent 45 minutes in a consultation? 

the process of prepping for an “egd” (short for: esophagogastroduodenoscopy – best word ever) is pretty simplistic and the instructions on the photocopied sheet they hand you fall into a few areas:

• keep your stomach empty (no food or drink for ~8 hours beforehand)
• don’t mess with your body’s ability to heal wounds (no blood-thinners or anticoagulants including aspirin)
• before you start fasting, don’t eat anything that would confuse the doctor (mostly this is defined as “no purple or red staining foods”. the examples they give are red jello and kool-aid.)

no problem, right?  these are easily followed directions, right?  only a moron could screw this up, right?

kat took me out for dinner the night before.  spur of the moment, we went to the barking frog in woodinville.  great menu and it just seemed like the right thing to do that night and with my appointment mid-morning, leaving 8 hours between food and scope was going to be easy.  the place was pretty empty, even for a thursday night, so we managed a small table near the fireplace.  we enjoyed the meal so much that a couple at the table next to us literally said, “we’ll have what they have.”

their menu is always great; i had:

Seared Hudson Valley Foie Gras
House Made Beignet, Strawberry ~ Vanilla Drizzle

Baby Beets & Arugula
Laura Chenel Chèvre Crottin, Aged Sherry Vinaigrette

Wild King Salmon
Pan Fried Tomatoes, Cucumber & Dill Créme Fraîche,
Roasted Romanesco Broccoli with Dry Aged Jack & Roasted Poblano Cheese Fondue

amazing meal, but see any problems with it?  i had a minor freakout, when i realized that the (quite tasty) beets quite easily met the “red or purple foods that might stain your insides” criteria.  a call to the surgery center in the morning assured me it was not the crisis i’d imagined, mostly because my appointment was mid-morning.

the scope was uneventful.  the drugs are great. after spraying your throat with lidocaine, a healthy dose of versed is pushed through the iv catheter. in addition to the euphoric “please shove that 4 foot long hose down my throat, i won’t mind” state it leaves you in, it has the tremendous side effect of partial amnesia. apparently i insisted that i needed a bagel sandwich, on the way home… don’t remember it. as with my past scopes, i slept for the rest of the day.

got the results in the mail, a couple weeks ago. along with a fairly graphic image of my food tubes, a brief and barely legible note that reads “10cm segment no dysplasia some ulceration sched. followup.”

given that, the punchline is that the segment has grown some (30%) in the past 24 months, i don’t have dysplasia (more significant probability of developing cancer), and the symptoms of my reflux/gerds are not completely controlled.

i’ll likely schedule a follow-up appointment for the week after new year’s.

bengt.org was accumulating roughly 1000 spam comments a day.  while they were queued for approval (and auto-deleted after 7 days), any actual comments would have been buried in the onslaught.  i intend to post more frequently, but touching doing so on moveable type was just a reminder of how janky my instance had become.

after 45 minutes of fiddling with captcha and openid plugins, i started looking for a cleaner solution.  i’ve been with moveable type since may of 2004, the pre-3.0 days, and upgraded several times, so bitrot had definately set in.  hack upon hack and left a fragile pile of php, perl, and really bad css.  any of the less elegant patches were non-starters, as they conflicted with my previous hacks.  i pretty quickly realized a clean install (app, database, themes, and plugins) was the only real solution… so, while i’m reinstalling, i might as well consider my options, right?  it’s possible sixapart has taken their eye off moveable type while they’ve “diversified” in vox, typepad, and blogs.com (not to mention the brief affair with livejournal).  whatever the cause, moveable type has flagged.

as i mentioned, my previous experience with wordpress was several years ago and the early versions left me underwhelmed.  somewhere in the interim, it’s become a full blown content management system, with a plugin and theme architecture that makes it pretty compelling.  i exported my posts and piloted a moveable type install on an unused domain (i own several that are typically just redirects to bengt.org, including the puke.net and monkeylove.org).  while some of my glee is clearly neophilism, i was very happy with what i found.

i was able to setup the blog, import my old moveable type posts, add some pretty workable anti-spam measures, find a canned theme i liked, modify it, and integrate my flickr photostream within an hour or so.  after another couple hours of fiddling with permalinks (including some fairly nasty mod_rewrite hackery) and kicking the tires, i was satisfied it’s a relationship i was willing to commit to.

i can’t lie down/sleep too soon after eating or drinking.  (see the life posts for a full description of why.  in short, i have a hiatal hernia and bad acid reflux.)  on vacation with not much else to do, i pulled the trigger last late night.  the most noticable effect is that rss readers refetched my last 10 posts.  a minor, but annoying side effect of differing rss schema.  i had figured out a way to avoid it, but not without propogating some of my foul moveable type hacks to wordpress, a sin to which i was unwilling to fall victim.

there are still a few things to figure out, especially before i move the misc. farm site over to it, but i’m quite pleased with the results, thus far.  after the honeymoon period has worn off, i’ll post a more objective comparison of the two platforms.

I was thrilled to catch one of your commercials on television the other night.  The URL “silenceyourrooster.com” displayed at the end told me that your product might fulfill a need in my life.  In examining the collateral provided at silenceyourrooster.com, I’m unsure how to proceed with getting Ambien CR for my rooster.

 

My rooster is a 7 month old Buff Orpington with traditional markings.  He has recently started persistent crowing from sunrise until 9AM or so.  While we find his crowing amusing and live in a rural/agricultural area, we have neighbors within earshot of his usual pasture.  If Ambien CR can actually (temporarily) silence my rooster, I believe it might be the perfect product for this situation.

 

Please advise on how I might get Ambien CR prescribed for my rooster?

as the possibility of relocating became more tangible, we turned our focus to finding a house… and land.  i briefly flirted with the idea of a downtown seattle condo.  a new construction two bed, one bath penthouse with all the ridiculous trimmings (granite counter tops, pool, gym, home owners association and annoying pretentious neighbors) somehow seemed like a good idea to me.  i came to my senses.  i did a naive statistical regression using three variables, price, acreage, distance, and direction from microsoft’s main campus.  not surprisingly, there were pretty significant correlations to be found.  the size of the parcels increased as you moved farther from redmond, to the east, and decreased to the west.  price/acre similarly decreased following the same pattern w/cardinal direction.  there were two outliers that we investigated.  the area along the snoqualmie river valley (duvall, carnation, and down toward fall city) and monroe highlighted statistically significant differences in price/acre and price/mile (from main campus).

we took this info to a realtor that’d been recommended by a friend (thanks j+l) and committed ourselves to a few solid weekends of house-hunting.  we’d visited duvall, while poking around in july and fell in love with the town.  it probably didn’t hurt that we were there on the day of the farmers’ market.  monroe and carnation looked doable, from a commute perspective.  with this information in hand, we compiled a list of several properties and kat set about evaluating them on a multipoint weighted scale that included "kitchen", "acreage", "distance from campus", and "bathrooms".  we narrowed it down to 14 properties for the first weekend and after setting expectations with the realtor, booked a trip for that weekend.  the list included a couple of places we "weren’t sure about" and probably should have skipped.  one was a 2 acre place with a 1500 sq foot house and a 3 bay 7 car garage and 20+ foot ceilings.  the other turned out to be correctly listed as an almost 3000 square foot with 5 acre condo.  the second was built as a "duplex" style house with an adjoining garage wall.  the 5 acres turned out to be half of a 10 acre horse track.  even though the realtor said the listing agent had insisted that the "neighbor" was a very nice man named "wally", we decided not to even look.

the top three properties were:

• a large house in monroe with all the most amazing features you’d want, including granite countertops, slate floors, all new viking appliances, a wrap around porch, etc.  it came with some downsides, though.  it was located a the back of a 2 acre lawn and very little privacy.  the very friendly neighbor mentioned that it had some cc&r-style restrictions, including "no horses."  the commute was also likely to be a little hellish.  this was our #2 choice.
• right at the upper edge of our price range was a big new england style house in skyhomish on 2 acres in a somewhat suburban neighborhood.  it appeared to currently be inhabited by the owners, but looked as if it’d been rented out to a horde of college boys.  the hardwood floors were trashed, the oven was missing most of the oven door (!?) and the exterior showed complete neglect and left us wondering what else was lurking behind an inspection report.  we called this the "sad house" because we sooo wanted to make it shine again, but ultimately decided that it was just too much extra investment, given it’s current price.
• the house we purchased is a 2000 square foot, one story, 3 bed 2 bath on 15 acres.  it was newly listed and the third house we looked at.  we both absolutely fell in love with it.  we walked back to the creek that forms the southern border of the parcel (cherry creek) and kept asking the realtor, "this is still the same place!?"  before we saw it in person, we’d been pretty sure that the mls listing was a mistake and was supposed to be 1.499 and not 14.99 acres.

after a full day of house hunting we returned to "make sure" we wanted this one.  after gawking at the more open floorplan and huge (though dated) kitchen, we wrote an offer on the dining room table.  we received a counter offer that was not materially different from our offer and entered escrow two days later.  we’d gone to look and returned having an offer accepted on a place we couldn’t believe we’d found!

the details of the move aren’t any more interesting than the typical "moving is hell" story, so i’ll skip those.

in my last post, i explained that i’d moved to washington state and that my fiance and i live on 15 acres.  i left out the type of details that apparently make my story "interesting."

i’m going to try to catch up on some blogging i haven’t done.

i’ve received a relatively large number of messages from people that read similar to: “hey, how’ve you been? haven’t talked to you in awhile. life’s good here (insert details). i ran across your blog. how’s your health?”

i’m horrible about replying to personal email. i get distracted with things that aren’t nearly as important and lose the mail behind a few hundred pieces of spam. i think i need to adopt some work habits for my personal mail. in the short term, i’ll post here and reply to these people that think i’m ignoring them.

having tapered off to a slow trickle of posts, there’s alot of “big” or “important” life events that have passed unmentioned:

• i’m engaged to a beautiful woman, katherine brown, i met through work. wedding isn’t until sept. of 2009, mostly because we’ve been busy with the rest of this list
• we moved to duvall, washington, a town of ~7000 people
• we bought a 3 bed, 2 bath house on 15 acres.
• kat is working in redmond, i haven’t changed jobs and am still working in microsoft’s silicon alley campus. i fly alot.
• my kids still live in idaho falls, id. celeste turned 8 a couple weekends ago and eva turns 4 in march. did i mention that i fly alot?

on the health front, in short, i still have barrett’s and am looking for a gastroenterologist up here. the aciphex has done a pretty good job of controlling symptoms (and further damage), as long as i’m careful about what and when i eat. i’ll post more on this, later this weekend.

and where’s my flying car?

i can geek out on almost anything. in trying to figure out how i’m going to structure the work my team will do over the next year, i did a fair amount of research on the topic of “innovation”. i totally geeked out on it, and came out the other side feeling dumber for my efforts. connceptually, it seemed a little odd to research “innovation”. in my mind, research is an attempt to uncover “prior art” (what other people have done), while innovation is all about the forward looking and the “radical departure from status quo.”

having said that, i really really really like talking to people who have a novel approach to solving an old/common problem or a clever application of a new technology and want to give my team some space to do that. i have some ideas about how i might acheive this, but wanted to back them with “measurable goals”.

the earth-shattering outcome of my research? i’ll save you the frustration and brain damage:

• i’m really glad i’m not the director of it for some small company.
• lots of people think their reuse of something clever someone else did is “innovative”.
• “innovation” is a good way to explain something that you spent a bunch of time on that still hasn’t paid off.
• people who do innovative work don’t generally use the word in a sentence without “air quotes”.
• and… the only thing i’ll retain… there are two approaches to innovation, supply driven and demand led. (more in the following paragraph)

two simple thoughts:
supply-driven innovation occurs when you have a new technology looking for a problem. (“oh, look! new hammer! where nail?”)
demand-led innovaiton occurs when you have a problem looking for a solution. (“pile of nails and i got nothing heavy.”)

yep. that’s it.

it’s not much, but it’s what i took from three hours of reading papers on innovation, metrics to evaluate the impact of innovation, and a fair amount of meaningless drivel.

side note: in the right light diana krall sounds an awful lot like queen latifah. (see also: various artists: we all love ella: celebrating the first lady of song)

this is my 100th post to bengt.org. based on some pretty weak apache log analysis, i estimate that roughly 165 people will read this over the next year. i apologize in advance.

billy talent
black strobe
eagles of death metal
hazel adkins
idaho
tortoise
metric
ratatat
dean martin
spiderbait
the smiths
white stripes
elvis
elliott smith
skinny puppy
portishead
fujiya and miyagi
bad brains
the black keys
ladytron
the donnas (yes, still)
the apples in stereo
lisa loeb
yardbirds
reverend horton heat
billy bragg
the knife
neutral milk hotel
cracker
x
johnny cash
bmrc
le tigre
morphine
magnetic fields