How the Flu Works

I'm pretty sure I saw this on the Discovery Channel, but I may have confused some of the details (heh). 

The flu begins its life as a nasty little bug, the kind of bug that none of the other bugs likes because it's always mean and never shares. When it grows up to full bugness, it has achieved Supreme Meanness, and it is ready to take on humanity. 

It jumps into its first victim, where it begins its nefarious plot. The game begins with a clone army, which it prepares in the lungs of the infected, hapless soul, even before that person realizes s/he is sick. The first sign of illness, in fact, is a teeny little cough, which serves the evil bug by dispersing clone minions into other hapless victims -- again, before the cougher even knows s/he is sick.

After the victim has done a few days of the bug's evil, the clone armies begin to march out of the lungs and start tearing up other parts of the body. The victim now realizes s/he is sick because s/he begins to feel nausea, fever, chills, runny nose, headache, etc. In short, the victim feels s/he has been run over by a bulldozer.

The truly evil part of the bug's plan is the nausea. The bug knows that if the victim does not eat or drink enough to keep the body's defenses up, the bug can win. So the victim must stuff him/herself with water, chicken soup, Gatorade, Saltines, and/or Girl Scout "Cinna-Spins" even though they would rather just curl up & die.

All of the battle is going on at the cellular level, so you can't *see* anything. Victims may look flushed from fever or pale from nausea, but they don't have any knife wounds or missing limbs. Thus, it's easy to poke them and call them slackers. But in fact, their metabolism is running so high they are burning more calories than they could wish to eat. This leads to what cyclists call "the bonk," where your body just runs out of energy & shuts down higher functions, like consciousness. And thus, we nap. And nap. And then nap some more. 

I've been sleeping on & off for the last 36 hours, trying to let my body handle the Battle of the Bug. I've avoided drugs because fever is one of your body's natural defenses for these nasty bugs, and it's a good and useful thing as long as it doesn't get up over 103-ish, where it starts frying brain cells (not a great idea). I have this mental image of my body's defenses all lined up & ready for battle, and some Pharmaceutical Pom Pom Squad standing in the way trying to 'help.' No thanks. My body is well-equipped for this battle. 

And so, I'm letting my body handle the mess. I'm tired of coughing, and I really wish I could take some aspirin to stop the general aches but that would reduce the fever too, so, I'll suffer. Actually, rather than suffer, I'll just go back to sleep. Right after I force down another cup of soup. 

Another geeky success

This week, I squeezed in my third adventure in oilfield engineering education. The adventure began as the previous ones did: Instructor goes through the class roster, sees female person from -- what the hell? -- the advertising department, assumes she is going to be a dunce, places her on the front row in the center so he can give her extra attention, which clearly she is going to need, right?

I have to admit that despite my previous success with these classes, I was nervous about this one. The head of engineering training told me that the last two sessions of this class had a 50% failure rate. In English: half of the class failed. Part of the reason for that is that my company holds its engineers to a very high standard: You must achieve an 80% average to pass. The other part is that this class is the first one most of our fledgling engineers take, and some are ill-prepared for the work.

So I went in with a bit of a fear factor. The math for this class was said to be the most intense of all our introductory engineering classes, and math scares me. On the first day, I could barely keep up with the instructor on some of the calculations, and I got very frustrated by my slowness.

These classes are five days long, with a test every day, and total brain stuffing. The first day has a pre-test, just to gauge your knowledge. I got a 47, but that's ok because it doesn't count for anything, and it showed that my brain had plenty of space. Tuesday through Thursday tests measured our ability to use information we'd learned the day before. My scores were 98, 98 & 90, respectively. 

The Thursday test was a big deal because apparently it's the one that caused most of the failures in the previous classes. It put a number of my classmates "on the bubble," as well. I felt good about my 90 because all of my wrong answers were due to my own carelessness -- not my lack of knowledge. Carelessness I can deal with. Being stupid, not so much. 

Thursday night homework didn't go well because I didn't feel well. Maybe something I caught from a classmate who felt poopy on Monday & Tuesday? Seriously medicated myself for Friday. Upon checking homework on Friday morning, I found I'd totally messed up a page of calculations. Took me 15 minutes to find my error, but I did. Stupid carelessness!

For the 80-question final exam, we were allotted 3.5 hours. The exam was 60 1-point multiple choice & then 20 two-point calculation questions of the type where if you get one wrong, all the ones underneath are also wrong. You calculate one thing, which you use to calculate the next, and then use one or both of those to calculate something else. Carelessness = high failure potential.

Friday's instructor was not the guy we'd had earlier in the week. I finished in 1.5 hours and the instructor gave me a look that might have been either, "Did you just give up?!" or "Holy shit, you're done?!" Then he graded it and grinned. I got a 96. I can live with that.

But this flu/cold/poopy-feeling thing is not so good.

"Cute" + Technology = Drool

Once upon a time, in the mid-1990s, I was a "road warrior" with platinum frequent flyer miles, suffering from that shoulder ache you get from lugging too much junk in your carry-on bag. The biggest piece of junk, of course, was the laptop computer. 

To ease my shoulder, I bought a Toshiba Libretto, one of the first micro-notebook computers. Unlike the PDAs that were all the rage at the time, the Libretto runs *real* Windows software (Win 95 I think?) and has a real keyboard, although I am pretty sure most people could not type on the thing because the keys are so tiny. Importantly, it weighs in at just 2 lbs with the standard battery. It has a modem (remember those?) and an external floppy drive, although I can't remember whether I had to buy that separately or it came with the thing. (At the time of purchase -- 1996ish -- a floppy was all you needed!) It has a 75 MHz Pentium processor, so it was pretty much standard/high performance 10 years ago. In the photo above, you see the Libretto (left) with my Mac Mini and a CD, for size comparison. You can imagine how big the screen and keyboard are. Or click here.  

In addition to being practical, the thing was a very cute conversation piece. Even in Japan, where I traveled a lot, most people had never seen one "in the flesh." So OK, it's not "elegant," but it's functional, compact, and it cost me about $1400. I can't remember whether that included the spare oversize battery &/or any other gizmos I may have bought at the time. 

These days, I am no road warrior. I have not booted the Libretto in years. When I need a notebook at home, I have a 7-year-old Dell. Most often, I sit at the computer desk and use my sweet iMac (pat pat). If I need Windows, I also have a desktop Dell that is faster & more powerful than the laptop (but I have not booted the thing in months). For work, they gave me an IBM laptop that I occasionally carry to meetings or classes, but mostly it sits in its docking station.

So I don't *need* a MacBook Air, but dang if I don't want one. 

As the Houston Chronicle's Dwight SIlverman points out, the Air has the same sex appeal as an iPhone. I should note that I took the photo above with my iPhone. I like sex appeal. In fact, John Gruber at Daring Fireball suggests that the MacBook Air is made for me. It is, he says, the computing analogue to a sporty convertible coupe. Lest anyone forget, I drive a yellow Mini Cooper convertible.

The nay-sayers point out the Air's lack of "necessary" features: just one USB port oh n0z! no Ethernet port, oh n0z! no optical drive, oh n0z! The list goes on. These factors do not concern me. I do worry about battery life; when I bought the Libretto I did get a spare battery, which I occasionally needed. I also hate it that the built-in mouse has only one button. Sorry, Mac purists: I am a right-clicker.

But hey, let's put this in a different perspective for this non-power-user: When I bought my Mini Cooper, I had a choice between the base Cooper and the Cooper S that has the awesome supercharger and some other sweet performance features. I had the $. I could have bought the S, and, in fact, I drooled over it for a long time. In the end, however, the "S" did not come in yellow, and yellow was more important than zoom. (I do not regret the decision, except very occasionally when a little more straight-line acceleration would enable a pass that would relieve some drive-time stress.)

I'm going to go back to The Woodlands Mall today to drool on the Air again. It's sunny, so I might even drive with the top down & iPod blaring through the Mini's speakers, just to get into the right mood. 

The Naked Guy

Got up at the usual hour, dragged my sorry self out of bed, got ready for work, let the dog out into the backyard.... Everything is normal, and then I see the naked guy.

I can't be sure he's completely naked because he's on the other side of the fence, in my back-door neighbor's yard. He's at least not wearing a shirt, and it's only about 40 degrees out there. And he's decidedly not my neighbor, who is not tall enough to be viewed so plainly over the fence.

Obviously, I'm curious about this fella, who appears to be staring in the back door of the neighbor's house. My first thought is that he's a pervert, perpetrating a sex crime right there in my (well, almost) backyard. Then I wonder if he belongs there & I'm over-reacting like a nosy neighbor.

Either way, I wonder exactly what I'm supposed to do. I figure running out into my yard and yelling, "Hey, you pervert, get away from that door!" is probably not a good choice. I can't really see far enough, well enough, to decide whether he is a threat. However, before I get the phone out for a little 9-1-1 action, I figure I ought to be prepared to answer when the dispatcher asks, "What is your emergency?".

So I grab my trusty binoculars and try to look out the window in such a way that if the pervert turns his head, he can't see that I'm looking at him through binoculars. And that's when I see...

...that he is just a life-size mannequin standing on the back porch. I first saw him Monday morning. He's still there, freezing his sorry butt off out there. I'm awfully glad I took a moment to use the binocs before I sent some of Montgomery County's finest over there with guns drawn and adrenaline all rushing. I can just see the headline in the local paper on *that* police report:

Nosy neighbor reports peeping tom in neighbor's backyard. Officers respond to find that both she & the alleged perpetrator are BIG DUMMIES.

Birthday fun

What I did on my (ahem) 24th birthday:
-- Went to the Apple store. Looked at iPod Touch, Looked at iPhone. Looked at iPod Touch again. Looked at iPhone again. Repeat until noon.
-- Ate lunch
-- Went home. Plugged new iPhone (happy birthday to me!) into the Mac and got her activated. WOOHOO!! Everything works and is oh so wonderful except -- the phone part. Gotta love A&T. Apparently they were messing with the network in Houston, or so the phone support bimbo informed me. I find on the Internet a solution & restart the 'network.' Phone works :)
-- Installed new Leopard operating system & iLife on the Mac. Smooth as glass.
-- Watched dad clean my gutters. Send iPhone photos of this to my brother in Brazil, via iPhone mail program. Happy birthday to me!
-- Ate pizza.
-- Texted brother & fiancee just to play with the iPhone.

It's cool. I'm *such* a geekette.

LinkedIn

I don't remember how I stumbled into it, but I've located yet another "Social Network," this one called LinkedIn. Call it Facebook for boring old grown-ups. That is to say, it is where I have found most of my current & former colleagues & friends. Unfortunately, it's boring. It's like going to a convention & having no fascinating speakers, no fun dinner parties, no drinks at the bar, just one enormous poster session of everybody's resumes. Yawn!

I suppose if I were looking for a job, it would be the hot ticket. If I were looking to hire someone, it might be the hot ticket, too. In fact, I think I found it because there was a post on one of my Facebook groups about a job opportunity available by visiting someone's LinkedIn profile. I wasn't interested in the job, but I was curious about LinkedIn. Go figure.

Anyway, it's sad to say that I have more 'connections' on LinkedIn after a couple of days than I do on Facebook after a couple of weeks. I believe this means I am old (sigh) How did that happen?

Facebook is more fun. My birthday is ... soon. I'll be 24. Again. One of these days, I'm going to get it right.

I have my shots

I feel like I am a dog when I say that I went with my parents to get our shots yesterday. (I would have blogged immediately afterward, but Blogger was down...)

In another 9 days, I will be immune from Yellow Fever, one of those nasty mosquito-borne diseases that you only have to worry about in tropical climes. Houston is, apparently, not tropical enough. But some parts of Brazil are, which is why mom, dad & I paddled up through the wet weather yesterday to get Yellow Fever vaccinations. They are not required for the places we are headed, but they have been recommended. So we got 'em.

Unlike some shots (I think the flu shot may be one) where the nurse tries to jab the needle deep into a muscle, the Yellow Fever shot is subcutaneous -- just under the skin. Or so the nurse said as she looked at me, the brave one, going first. "It will bubble a bit," she added.

"Bubble?" I asked as she stuck the needle just under the skin of my forearm and started pushing the plunger.

"Bubble" was the perfect word for it. It was like a ripple as the fluid was injected in there, ripping one layer of skin from whatever skin is attached to under there. And thus, it did not feel great. But it was cool to see, and I was busily letting my eyes keep my brain from noticing the pain when dad suddenly spoke.

"Did you *watch*?!" His voice was a mixture of surprise, horror and respect.

"Of course I watched. It was totally cool," I responded. "Was I not supposed to watch?"

Mom, next up, responded. "I can assure you that I'm not going to watch."

In fact, mom looked completely away and winced. "It huuuurts!"

"It's like a bee sting," I offered helpfully.

"Big damn bee," mom responded tersely.

Dad avers that it did not hurt at all. He did not, however, watch the bubbling. He claims that once the needle was in, he watched it all, but by the time he turned his head, it was all over. Ask the nurse. She'll tell you.

And it did *not* hurt that much. But it itches like a sun-of-a-gun now.

Is it me?

I'm struggling with the word "modest," myself. If you blog, can you really be said to be 'modest'?

Also, some 2/3 of all people who have visited the site have been paired with lions. Is this a statement about the kind of people who are on the "New Line Productions" e-mail list, or people who are interested in 'fantasy' type stories?

Edited: Hey, I just changed into a ferret!

Friends & Twits

So how's this for irony in the digital age: My first 'friend' on Facebook is a neighbor. Sorta. Well, he lives in The Woodlands and has a dog, so I've probably actually at least seen him at a dog park. Or walking the dog. Or not. Anyway, he founded the Facebook "Pet Owners of The Woodlands" group, and after I posted a picture of Lakrids on there, this fella 'friended' me. I feel so (sniff) friendly!

I also got 'poked' by a perfect stranger, which was worth a giggle. I poked her back. I hope that was the right thing to do heh.

My second friend is a real friend, albeit one from work and one who lives in Brazil. I wrote to him in Danish, saying my Danish is miles better than my Portuguese (I really gotta get back to those Rosetta Stone exercises before the Unnamed Male Relative's wedding in November.) My Brazilian friend doesn't speak Danish. So naturally, he wrote back in French. It's a fun world...

Meanwhile in real life, another friend from work (who happens to live in Kilgore, Texas) was in town yesterday to take a class, so we had dinner & the world's margaritas. He's the fella who -- oh my goodness, I never blogged about that adventure (#2 on this link). Briefly, he let me operate a piece of coveted machinery on a job site, which I will blog about another day. I giggled like a girl about being allowed to do this, and he & his cohorts were greatly amused. I've since made him famous in print, which made him smile.

All the while, people have been "tweeting" on Twitter. Feel free to call me a "twit" for falling into it, but it reminds me of the best part of old 1980s chatting, but even better -- because if you log off & go to sleep, all the messages from people overnight are there waiting for you in the morning.

It's a sickness. I think you either 'get' it or you don't. I'm not sure I 'get' it in the long term, but it's a giggle at the moment. There's something very amusing about the fact that my very first 'follower' was Robert Scoble.. If you don't know who that is, then you probably won't 'get' Twitter, anyway.

Old People in Social Media

Egged on by something I read on the Internet recently, I decided to try some Social Media sites. I had already joined myRagan.com, a Social Media site for people in the communications industry, but I read something last week about MySpace and Facebook being useful 'networking tools' for grown-ups. So I thought, what the heck.

Understand that I have been "networking" online since about 1984, when I ran the Chameleon BBS here in Houston and "networked" with friends from across the metropolitan area . I also "networked" with people around the country to develop new applications/code for the particular brand of BBS software we used on our Apple II computers. We all used 300-baud modems and dialup, when "online chat" was typing, without avatars, graphical smilies, video, audio or anything else. Many of us could type faster than our modems could send/receive the data for realtime chat, and for the BBSes, many of us could read messages as fast as the modems could retrieve data.

But it turns out I am old & have no clue about how these new networks "work." First, it appears (to an old fart like me) that 99% of the users on these things are under 30. Oddly, so was I back when I started online networking. But more importantly, none of them are people I know -- or maybe I just can't find the people I know. So I have no "friends," which is just (pout) pathetic.

In the real world, when you move to a new place, you join some groups of like-minded people and you "make friends." So I started that this weekend. Joined some "groups" to see what happens. I've heard/read stories about so-called "creepers" who "friend" anyone and everyone in an effort to appear popular. (And thus, the perfectly nice noun, friend, becomes a verb.) There is some debate about whether this is a horrible breach of etiquette or enthusiastic extraversion. Until I figure it out, I'm not "friending" anyone, even if I think I may know them. But I did "poke" someone I'm *sure* I know, but now I'm not sure that was wise -- but I don't know because I'm old & out of it. I feel a bit like my parents must have felt when I started online chats in the 1980s: "Why don't you just pick up the phone?"

Anyway, this is me on Facebook. If you're not on facebook, that link won't take you anywhere. If you are, but you're not a friend, I don't know what you will see: maybe everything, maybe nothing? (The dog refuses to log on & find out.) I also made a MySpace account but I'm not going to do anything with that right now.

So give me a .... poke? I don't really have any idea what I'm talking about here.

(Addendum: I also joined Twitter, which I really don't understand. It's like a global chat room... Very interesting...)