Apologies for the gap in posts of late; currently I find myself hospitalized for a particularly nasty gastric affliction. Normally I don’t like to post about such things but since everyone I know now knows about it anyway I figure I might as well go ahead and tell everyone I don’t know as well.

This is my first time ever in hospital as a patient, and [unsurprisingly] I am not much enjoying myself. By necessity a whole bunch of everyday social niceties go out the window, especially discretion/privacy. It all leaves me feeling rather vulnerable and frail, and listening to the various sufferings of the other patients around me makes me feel that HUMANS ARE REALLY BADLY DESIGNED when it comes to maintenance. Access, drainage, contamination, infection, pain— everything is so damn messy and squidgy.

Random Observations

• There is remarkable disagreement about what constitutes a "clear fluid"
• Never let someone attach a cannula in the crook of your elbow; it will restrict your arm movement. I have a new one now on the back of my left arm and it is much more convenient.
• Everything in a hospital is urgent, so don’t expect everyone to jump when you have a problem— experienced staff cannot be rushed (or fazed).
• Inexperienced nurses are lovely because they will show sympathy much more easily— probably best not to milk it though.
• Having a team of doctors spontaneously turn up to stand around your bed asking you how you are feeling is an incredibly effective way to make you forget every important question you had prepared. Write stuff down.
• Other patients’ visitors are remarkably annoying, talking too loudly, praying, offering sage advice etc.
• My visitors are the best*
• People snore and fart a lot.
• Little air bubbles in your IV tube do not kill you, but watching them disappear into your vein is still very unnerving.

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* especially my #1 visitor who I might have to mention soon in a post that’s less about icky things.

Have upgraded both MySQL and Wordpress… hopefully nothing is too broken.

Comment pages/permalinks are currently broken, but I know how to fix that. It will require a small tweak to support the date-stamp style permalinks I like to use.

BTW I am sick of wordpress, it is too big and requires too many upgrades. My blog could almost be handled by a single page of PHP, and yet there’s about a gazillion of them in wordpress, so debugging and customizing is a super pain. If I had some time I think I would write a “Lite” version which uses the same database but isn’t full of rarely used cruft.

Warning: This post is very computer nerdy

It is honestly amazing how much can be done with virtualization these days. Right now I am typing this in a virtualized WindowsXP running on my MacBook (using Parallels ). When I want to control my other PC I then run Remote Desktop Connection (within my virtual XP session).

At work I find myself running a virtualized Win2000 session remotely via RDC (the reverse of the above situation) which in turn is used to connect to a remote VPN (Virtual Private Network).

Also, I will soon be setting up a separate virtual machine to run Apache+PHP to host a Wiki which I am hoping to encourage people to use for internal documentation (as a replacement for the abominable Sharepoint). This will be run on Windows since we have not a single Linux box here, and not a soul interested in maintaining one.

In all cases of running these virtual machines, it is quite convenient to have them save state rather than shut down, and for some reason this seems to work faster and easier than, say, hibernation on a non-virtual PC. When virtual machines come back to life, they are in exactly the same state they were when closed, so there’s no additional login or startup delay (less than 4 seconds to bring to life from a saved state).

With Microsoft’s free VirtualPC 2007 it is possible to dynamically resize the desktop of the client OS, as well as copy, paste, share folders and drag files between host and client. Why run a real OS when can you have several virtual ones?

I’ve been enjoying season one of Dead Like Me, although I’m not entirely sure why. It feels a little like a Joss Whedon knock-off, but has strong enough characters to keep me interested. The premise is terrible and like just about every show about the supernatural it feels like the writers are just tweaking the rules as they go— this cheapens everything a little. In case you’ve never heard of it the premise for Dead Like Me is that occasionally when someone dies instead of passing over to the other side they are sometimes selected to become a reaper (as in grim). It appears that the job of a reaper is to pull the soul out of a person’s body, and that’s pretty much it. As a courtesy, most reapers will "pop" the soul just before death, but exactly what happens if they don’t is one of those things that is rather poorly defined. Then there’s the badly handled issue of why people have to be allowed to die in the first place (since the reapers know in advance that a death will occur, they often have the means to prevent it). This is explained away early on with the assertion that a soul will "rot" if death is cheated, because, er… some reason… and then later the explanation appears to be that a balance will be upset and lots of other people will die to compensate (when they otherwise were not going to). Unfortunately both of these explanations suck balls and undermine what is otherwise a very entertaining show.

And don’t get me started on those stupid gravelings…

PS: Thanks to suggestions by RichardN, I’ve been enjoying listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe recently, and have just started on Logically Critical. If you like listening to trash-talking atheists and skeptics, then these are the podcasts for you :)