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…and another day closer to death. Pink Floyd lyrics aside, it’s that time of year for the sickness to befall upon me and make my life hell. In the fall, I went to the doctor and got an influenza vaccine. Apparently I fall into the high-risk (or maybe elderly) category for candidates that should get a flu shot. A lot of good that did me. Long story short, I was illness free until last week when some evil little bug crawled up my ass and set up shop in my lungs. I imagine it looked a little like this. It started out with sore glands in my neck, then sniffling and coughing. I went to work that Monday, but by the end of the day, I was chilled but my face felt hot and I was full-on hacking like a 3-pack a day coal miner. I couldn’t lay down without causing severe rattling in my chest. Every time I exhaled, it sounded like a San Francisco cable car rumbling down Russian Hill, and made me cough. By 2am Monday night/Tuesday morning, with no sleep, a sore diaphragm from all the coughing, and a fever of 102.1°F, I sent a couple text messages. I reluctantly called in sick on Tuesday. I hate calling in sick because I’m so worried my managers will think I’m faking it. But the older I get, the more I realized I’m not invincible, and companies give sick days for a reason.
I wasn’t feeling much better by Tuesday night, but waited until it was time to wake up and get ready for work. I was still coughing, my fever was better but still over 101°, and my head was turning out more snot than a school bus full of crying 5-year olds. I felt miserable. So, out went a couple more text messages saying I wasn’t making it to work… again.
I stayed in bed, covered to my neck in blanket with a roll of Charmin (ran out of Kleenex) and DayQuil within arms length, watching TV all day. After The Price is Right and news, television is teh suck during the day. Luckily my TiVo had recorded I Am Legend earlier in the month, so I watched that. Wasn’t impressed. I tried getting some sleep, but could only string together about 60 minutes worth before ol’ rattly would cause a coughing fit and throw out a slimy wad of lung butter. This went on for the rest of the day and night Wednesday.
Even though I was coughing to beat the band, I was feeling better. The fever was down to 98.9° (after being over 100° for more than 48 hours), and my nose was no longer teeming quarts of liquid snot. So, I thought I’d give going to work on Thursday morning a go.
Our normal carpool vehicle needs rear bearings, so I picked up LDriver in my newly-maintained, newly-braked F-150 and we headed to work. I was still coughing, but wasn’t feeling too bad. I spent the day at work eating Halls cough drops like they were M&Ms and answering all the “how are you feeling” questions. My manager asked if I’ve been to the doctor, to which I said no. He said go. I said okay, and Tina got me an appointment for the very next morning. In fact, the appointment was in less than 24 hours if you can believe that. They either had a cancellation, or I’m flagged as “near death” in their computers. Sweet.
In the doctor’s exam room, he couldn’t even get a good listen to my lungs. Every time he said “deep breath,” I’d start to cough. I’d be funny if it weren’t so true. Influenza and asthma don’t mix well, so when my lungs start filling up with Satan's semen, walking and breathing, taking deep breaths, even sleeping, take on a whole new complexity.
Doc said I have acute bronchitis. Yay, again? I’m still getting over all this happiness as I type this. He put me on Prednisone and Azithromycin to kill Fry's worms, and changed one of my inhalers when I told him the Qvar doesn’t seem to be preventing asthma attacks. He has me on Advair now. In fact, the picture above of that Ortho Tri-cyclen-looking diskus on steroids is my Advair inhaler, and is sucks! It’s a dry powder that makes my mouth feel like I licked a chalk board. I’ve done about 8 or nine hits off that nasty dust disk, but it seems like it’s helping a bit. We’ll see how it does after a month.
Sometime around the time several terrorist camel jockeys decided to land their hijacked airliners in buildings, I bought a 19-inch ViewSonic CRT. The price was $300, but 19 inches of glass was cheaper than 15 inches of LCD. ViewSonic makes great monitors, and my new 2001 CRT was awesome. Over time, however, that monitor started getting dodgy. By late 2008, early 2009, the focus was so poor, it was like trying to read the screen through a thick fog… or semen smears. And the contrast was crappy, too. It was time for a new monitor. Of course, I didn’t want just one. I needed two. I’ve been using two monitors at work for years, and it’s such a time saver. Although, ever since they upgraded my system at The Company, I haven’t been able to get my dual monitor setup to work properly. I can get the big desktop across the two LCD panels, and the mouse tracks in all of the 2540×1024 pixels, but the one monitor plugged into the analog connector bounces an “Out of Range” message, which is generated by the monitor, similar to the “No Signal” message when it’s not connected to the computer. Yay for run-on sentences!
Anyway, enough about work’s monitors. I spent many weeks looking over all the monitors and reviews at newegg.com. Did my homework on the type of panel, whether I wanted widescreen or standard, HDMI, 1080p, DVI, VGA, USB, E-I-E-I-O. It was tiring. I eventually settled on two Acer H213H 21.5″ widescreen LCD panels that had a lot of positive reviews, and were voted for a Customer Choice Award.
After three days of waiting, a guy in brown shorts plopped my new babies on the front step, like a stork from the Teamsters. It was just before lunch, and I was on my telecommute day, so I quickly set my jabber client to away at lunch, and disconnected the old 19″ ViewSonic CRT, and an even older 17″ CRT. I opened each new LCD monitor, and removed an assload of protective plastic from them, then plugged them in… and nothing. WTF, “No signal?” Great. I sat for 5 minutes thinking about it, getting a little frustrated. Then it dawned on me. Duh, X windows! A three finger salute to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, and xorg was reloading. Of course, my xorg.conf didn’t jibe with the new monitors and xorg wanted to reconfigure. That worked, kinda. At least I had ONE monitor working so I could manually run some commands. And, after about 90 minutes of trial and error, I finally got both 21.5″ widescreens working as one big desktop of 3840×1080.
I can watch a DVD on one panel in 1080p high definition, while working on the other monitor! There’s so much screen real estate, I honestly can’t fill it all. It’s totally balls! I spent the weekend playing with wallpapers, and making one that would work and look well across both monitors. Tina said I needed boobs, one on each screen. Those would be some big boobs. Not that I’m opposed to big boobs in my face all day! LDriver said I should have a desktop of some chick with a leg on each screen… and that was a pretty good idea. An hour search of some porn forums turned up a nice picture that would work out well. Of course, I didn’t want the small gap and the monitor frames between the two screen to make the chick look… “wide,” so I trimmed out a 100-or-so-pixel gutter down the middle and stitched the two halves together. Then, believe it or not, shrunk the width down to 3840 and cropped to a perfect 1080 height. A screenshot doesn’t do it justice, so here’s a photo of my two new monitors with their new wallpaper. Of course, the two screens are so wide, I couldn’t get them fully in the shot, but you get the idea. For those of you reading this at work, or some other semi-public location, the image is SFW, but barely. Enjoy!
Fuck the “Stealers.” That’s all I have to say about that. But I’ll write about another topic that’s near and dear to my past later in February… I promise.
