Entries from August 2007 ↓
August 30th, 2007 — Shannon
My girl Shannon is out there in the airports tonight – delayed in Indy too late to make her connection in Atlanta so she could be home with us tonight. We’ll see her in the morning and it can’t come soon enough.
Shannon, you crush me and I miss you so much. I love you. Here’s a dedication to you and to us.
Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds
Crush
Live at Radio City Music Hall
Crazy how it feels tonight
Crazy how you make it all alright love
You crush me with the things you do
I do for you anything too
Sitting smoking feeling high
In this moment it feels so right
Lovely lady
I am at your feet
God I want you so badly
I wonder this
Could tomorrow be
So wondrous as you there sleeping
Let’s go drive ’till morning comes
Watch the sunrise to fill our souls up
Drink some wine ’till we get drunk
It’s crazy I’m thinking
Just knowing that the world is round
Here I’m dancing on the ground
Am I right side up or upside down
Is this real or am I dreaming
Lovely lady
Let me drink you please
I won’t spill a drop I promise you
Lying under this spell you cast on me
Each moment
The more I love you
Crush me
Come on
It’s crazy I’m thinking
Just knowing that the world is round
Here I’m dancing on the ground
Am I right side up or upside down
Is it real or am I dreaming
Lovely lady
I will treat you sweetly
Adore you I mean you crush me
It’s times like these
When my faith I feel
And I know how I love you
Come on
Lady
It’s crazy I’m thinking
Just as long as you’re around
And here I’ll be dancing on the ground
Am I right side up or upside down
To each other we’ll be facing
By love we’ll beat back the pain we’ve found
You know
I mean to tell you all the things I’ve been thinking deep inside
My friend
With each moment the more I love you
Crush me
Come on
So much you have given love
That I would give you back again and again
Meaning I’ll hold you
And please let me always
14348
August 30th, 2007 — Friends
I just heard from my friend Dan Lazner (pictured above with wife Fran and daughters Jessie and Sophie). Dan was my best mate from elementary school in Perth. Dan and I connected a little while back after not speaking for…about 26 years or so.
No, not like that.
First he moved away from Perth to Melbourne and then I moved back to The States. A while back something told me I just needed to find him and by the wonders of modern search engines I found his band online and his band mate connected us. Great flowing emails ensued and I think it is OK for me to say that we both got a tremendous amount out of the connection.
Dan is now a software developer after working his ass off over the last eight years to really learn the trade. We’ve connected on Facebook, LinkedIn and most importantly Skype so even with the time differences that should make it dead easy for us to catch up on the phone.
I’m looking forward to it heaps Dan! Talk to you soon.
Jules
August 30th, 2007 — Noteworthy
I’ve been thinking about taking a train ride recently. In my search for the local Amtrak and Tri-Rail offerings just now in West Palm Beach I came across this news.
Luxury Train to Service West Palm Beach, Orlando August 27, 2007
“WASHINGTON — Train aficionados and Florida magnates will now have the chance to experience rail travel in the lap of luxury, after Amtrak announced that it will include West Palm Beach and Orlando as stops on its new GrandLuxe Limited service.
Passengers on the luxury service will now be able to board and disembark the train on the overnight trip between Washington, D.C., and Miami at three Florida destinations: Orlando, West Palm Beach and Miami.
Seven GrandLuxe Rail Journeys cars, which can hold 47 passengers, will be pulled behind Amtrak trains on its Silver Meteor route between Washington and Miami.
For the well-heeled in those cities, this means they can step back into the sepia-tinged era of luxury rail travel at its zenith, when such an experience was the private domain of royalty, diplomats and the glitterati.
Some of the frills include mahogany interiors, five-course meals, hotel-standard sleeping cars and even a lounge car where passengers can sit in plush upholstered chairs and listen to a pianist.“
The bad news is in the closing paragraph.
“Such luxury won’t come cheap, however. Prices will range from $789 to $1,299 per person for the two-day trip.”
Wow! I can fly to D.C. First class and spend less than $789. I think we better go coach. Then again, five meals a day for two days does make up for a lot! Then there’s the ability to stretch out and take a nap. Check out the Grandluxe Express site.
[tags]Grandluxe, Train, Grand Luxe Express, Grandluxe Express[/tags]
August 29th, 2007 — Running, Video, vlog
I vlogged my 30+ minute run today from West Palm Beach to Palm Beach and back and set it to the actual playlist I listened to while running. All very random. I don’t really expect you to sit thru 30+ minutes of bobbing camera – in fact, I’d be concerned for your stomach if you did. Perhaps after loading this one up you can just skip ahead to see different parts of the run like the beach. It’s very beautiful scenery and I just wanted to share it with you. As for the music. Well I just grabbed an eclectic group of tunes that were about 30 minutes long and took off. I had fun doing this and other than the 90 minute encoding session and 40 minutes this will take to upload I only spent about 15 minutes putting the video together.
Set List:
69 Police By David Holmes
Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show
Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie
Ms. Jackson by Outkast
Let the drummer kick by Citizen Cope
Hip Hop by Dead Prez
Cream by Prince
Feeling Stronger Everyday by Chicago
Skateaway by Dire Straits
The Easter Egg at end of movie is me Julia, Charlie and John recording a Julians.name video entry from this summer. Just because I felt like it. 
p.s. I’ll never tell if I fell off the wall at the end of the movie or just ran out of memory on my camera…
p.p.s. No, I don’t expect anyone to watch this. For gods sake this is the internet and it’s a 30+ minute video!
August 28th, 2007 — Commentary
Smoking is one of those sins that can be just scrumptious. Like a good brownie or an expensive bottle of champagne.
I stopped smoking cigars a couple of years ago. I had a couple here and there over the first six months but for the most part I stopped. I rarely think of them. But once in a while I just want to have a smoke. My original plan was to keep smoking – just to have a cigar every week or two. I stayed away from that plan because I wanted to really kick the habit. The pneumonia was a damn good reason to as well.
What I’m most mindful of is that cigars served many purposes for me – good and bad.
They provided me with a break from my hectic job. They got me away from the phone and computer. I stared out at the sky and relaxed. I went back to working and got more done. I often talked with other smokers and I enjoyed the socialization.
Feeding the shadow a little
They keep lions and other big predators well fed in a zoo. We all have a big predator inside that Jung called the Shadow.
I believe you have to feed your shadow and that it is better to acknowledge it (feed it even) then deny it completely. I’ve done complete denial and it only makes your world (and the one that your loved ones orbit) go spinning out of control. Not good.
With my weight loss over the last couple of years I have found more success in having a nice sweet every so often, or in moderation to be much better than trying for the complete shut out. Denial gets you, the shadow is in there.
The question always comes back to one of balance. A smoke every so often, for the right reasons can be a good thing for me. And if done unconciously, for the wrong reasons, it could be very bad.
I had a smoke a couple of weeks ago. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I could really taste the tobacco and it was good. Before I lit up I made sure I was not under any duress or stress. Just a couple of weeks earlier I had purchased that small box of cigars but I refused to smoke one after buying them. I was under the very duress that would feed an unhealthy addiction. I was clear at the time that if I had a smoke then, it would have been from an unhealthy place. I didn’t give in and that gave me more strength. Giving in would have been giving in, and that only serves to make me feel a sense of failure, rather than serving a purpose of merit to me. I think it’s easy to confuse what I was saying earlier about giving in to your shadow and giving in. Giving in to my shadow in a good way is about doing it conciously.
I had a smoke today a couple of weeks after that first one. I didn’t feel compelled to. It was fine but not nearly as nice as the first one. I feel like I need to space them out more and this one wasn’t ceremonial enough. I was just outside with the dogs. It needs to be something more like a special occasion. I also felt as I did during the last smoke that I’m not the same man anymore. It doesn’t hold me like it used to and I like that. I’ll leave the next cigar until it feels right and no matter what, I won’t have more than a couple a month (if that). I want to savor the experience of life and occasionally match that to a nice smoke, when I feel life coursing through me in a positive way as I do right now. For me that can be reinforced with a cigar, a run, a motorcycle ride, or a cocktail, or a good laugh with Shannon. I like really loud music as well. 
Freud said that being entirely honest with oneself if a good exercise. I try to do that as much as I can stand. Sometimes I can’t stand it at all. When I’m denying my own shadow I’m in trouble. Freud was also credited with saying ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ even though most sources say that he didn’t actually say that.
Today was like that and that’s how I want to smoke. Sometimes, every so often, I just want a cigar to be a cigar.
Now where are those Oreo’s dammit!
August 25th, 2007 — Daily NetTrek
-
If you ever want to make a movie using the Web then this is your list! I originally clicked on this link from a Twitter based on interest in video editing and there is good info on here about that but there’s info on how to make a real movie as well.
-
This is stock film for use in your videos.
August 25th, 2007 — Blogs, Cool Sites, Internet, Social Media, Technology
I’ve got a weblog or two (or 6) and I’ve been wanting to aggregate all my blog posts in one place and put them under my main url julians.name which I don’t use at present (only blog.julians.name). I also want to include my other postings from identity tools like Twitter and Flickr. This is Lifestreaming.
There’s a lifestreaming plugin and other LS resources for WordPress (like these here featured on krynsky.com) but I like the idea of using something off-the-shelf that’s easy to setup and maintain. At present the available WP plugins for lifestreaming are anything but. Enter tumblelogs as a possible solution.
I started a tumblelog on http://julians.tumblr.com yesterday. What’s a tumblelog you ask?
“To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.
You can also look at tumblelogs as slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create.”
That’s what leading tumblelog service tumblr has to say on the topic. In the past year I’ve been hearing about tumblelogs and they’ve always been presented to me as something akin to microblogging like Twitter (and similar to how tumblr themselves presents them). That’s good but I already microblog on Twitter and there you have the benefit of being part of a community and conversation. On the down side Twitter doesn’t capture video, pics and other media well like tumblr can.
Yesterday via Twitter Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion presented Tumblelogs as a great lifestreaming solution. Now tumblelogs don’t seem redundant to my efforts on Twitter and elsewhere. SO I’ve plugged in to give tumblr a try. On this topic it seems to me like Jaiku gets you most of the tools that tumblr would have from a lifestreaming perspective with the addition of friends/community.
One thing I really like about tumblr is that you can use your own url for no additional charge – that’s good stuff and I may use one that is hanging around, like jinfinite8.com, since that’s the ID I use on all my online tools and communities.
Stay tuned and check out my tumblelog for an all-in-one place to see what’s happening in life – mine that is.
August 25th, 2007 — Blogs, Cool Sites, Internet
Hi Friends, family and guests.
If you’re commenting on my blog you’ll notice a new addition that looks like this.
It prevents very annoying site spam. The downside is that it also can be annoying for people like you to fill out who are just trying to leave a comment! But hold on, there’s an upside for you!
I thought you’d like to know that your perseverance in filling out my captcha will also help with the accurate digitization of history. You see, those words you type in my captcha I’m using to fight comment spam are words that have been scanned from real books by an optical character recognition tool. People are digitizing books for easy access in online form. Carnegie Mellon University is behind this (thank you).
The problem as you may know is that OCR doesn’t bloody work! Too many mistakes, especially in older, harder to read books. That’s where we come in. The words you type in reCaptcha will be used to correct the OCR work of books that Carnegie Mellon is performing. Brilliant!
More here. Don’t forget that you can get reCaptcha for your site.
[tags]captcha, comment spam, spam tools[/tags]
August 24th, 2007 — Daily NetTrek
August 24th, 2007 — Family, Health, John
We took John in for his blood test early this past Monday because he was showing physical signs of low platelets again (petechiae). Sure enough, his platelet levels had dropped to 39K. This time we moved on to steroids as a treatment – a short four day course with a high dose.
The goal was to test his platelet reaction to steroids and to get him back up above the 50K range. Steroids have the benefit of being administered as a simple pill – no hospital visit needed. The bad side is that they have some strong side effects. Moods, aggression, weight gain, etc. John’s appetite didn’t seem to change but his moods have. He’s just unhappy and grumpy – quite disagreeable at times (like this morning). But also even when he’s not being aggressive he just seems sad. Some good new then? Yes.
I just came from the doctors where John’s latest blood test showed that his platelets had rocketed up to 237K from 39K. That’s the best one-time rise we’ve seen in his results.
This doesn’t mean much however other than he responded well to steroids. Our expectation (and the doctors) is that his platelet levels will start moving down again and the question is how much and how soon. This game continues until his body heals itself or it doesn’t. We won’t get a diagnosis of chronic ITP until we’ve passed the six month mark with no permanent improvement.
The Doc started preparing us Monday to move on to another form of treatment called Rituxan. It’s a heavy duty drug used in chemotherapy and more experimentally with ITP (with good results). It does have the riskiest side effects that we’ve encountered in any of John’s past treatments. They actually administer the drug in the Intensive Care ward. This doesn’t sound so hot to Shannon and I.
The upside is that this drug has been known to actually cause a remission in ITP – something that the other drugs don’t really offer. Shannon found in her research that in Europe they don’t even treat ITP as aggressively as we’ve already done with John until platelets reach 5K! Here in the U.S. anything below 10K is grounds for hospitalization due to concern over spontaneous bleeding (at these levels it is possible to bleed to death without even having gotten so much as a bump). Once again, our experience just keeps reinforcing that modern medicine with ITP is basic trail and error. Let’s try A and see if that works. If A doesn’t work try B and so on. That’s what gives us pause in using something like Rituxan. We’re both in agreement that we need to do some much more in depth research and soul searching before we’re ready to go this route. Shannon made a good point this morning in saying that maybe we hold out (like the europeans do) for his results in six months and then cross the bridge then if we get a ‘chronic’ diagnosis.
