Tag: Brian Carnell

Saying Goodbye

Today was a very unhappy day, as my wife and I attended the funeral of my aunt, Opal Shrontz.

Not too long after my wife and I were married, Opal was diagnosed with Huntingdon’s Disease — a genetic degenerative brain disorder. Currently there is no cure for Huntingdon’s.

The disease is caused by a defective gene which, to oversimplify a bit, causes the overproduction of a protein in the brain. As the protein accumulates, it gradually destroys brain functions (exactly how this happens is still not understood). The cruelest part of Huntingdon’s, then is that before the victim dies, he or she experiences years of gradual mental deterioration accompanied by symptoms such as involuntary movements and difficulty controlling basic motor skill such as walking or speaking. Typically, death occurs 15-20 years after onset.

My aunt was only 53. One of the more vivid memories I have of her is visiting amusement parks like Cedar Point. At a very young age I concluded that my aunt had inherited the brains in the family since, like me, she refused to go on many of the rides. We agreed, for example, that ferris wheels were clearly the devil’s work.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to know my aunt as well as I would have liked as a child due to some BS family conflicts that had nothing to do with her, and then Huntingdon’s robbed me of the chance to get to know her better as an adult.

Go, Lisa, Go!

About six weeks ago, my wife Lisa started a weight loss program. So far she’s lost 17 pounds and counting. I lost 12 pounds during the same period.

Our secret? Weight lifting three times a week, cardio two to three times a week, and keeping calorie intake at moderate levels. We really wanted something we could to do lose weight at a reasonable pace and not fall into the trap of losing a ton of weight quickly on some fad diet and then gain it all back later (like most of our friends who have gone the high-protein diet route have done).

Time for a Vacation — Yuck

When I was younger I was a real lazy ass. Now that I’ve reached my mid-30s I’ve become someting a workaholic. In fact I’ve accumulated so much vacation time that I’m dangerously close to the maximum allowed (after that, they simply don’t give you vacation time until you are once again below the maximum).

The payoff for all that work is that 18 months ago I took over a group that was losing upwards of $250,000 a year. Now, however, we’re well on our way to turning a profit of upwards of $250,000 a year.

And what am I going to do on my vacation? I’m going to hole up at the WiFi-equipped library and work on my weblogs, of course.

From My Blog to John Leo’s Column

Update:

After I wrote this, John Leo sent me a nice e-mail apologizing for not citing me. As I responded to him, this article was actually written semi-tongue-in-cheek. I realize that professional journalists don’t always have time to track down who was the first to point out this or that error.

Henry Hanks sent me an e-mail today alerting me that John Leo had picked up my report about the BBC’s convenient editing of stories at its web site.

Leo writes,

The BBC, probably the most relentlessly anti-American organization in Britain, recently altered a transcript of one of its own stories, thus misquoting itself. The story dealt with Park Jong-lin, a 70-year-old veteran of the Korean War who “served in the North Korean army fighting against the imperialist American aggressors and their South Korean accomplices.” In the altered version quote marks now surround “imperialist American aggressors” and the BBC’s reference to “accomplices” was changed to “allies.”

Prediction: Because Internet bloggers now watch the wayward BBC carefully, more touched-up transcripts will come to light. The BBC, by the way, falsely reported the Jessica Lynch rescue as a made-for-TV special faked with U.S. soldiers firing blanks for the cameras. (Change that transcript!)

This is the fourth or fifth time something I’ve blogged about here has wound its way into a national story which is kind of cool. But come John, if bloggers are doing such a good service how about throwing us a little love with a link or at least a mention when you incorporate our scoops into your column?

I’ll even make it a quid pro quo and promise to always link to your column when I incorporate parts of it into my blogging.

Source:

Mangled quotes take on a life of their own. John Leo, Universal Press Syndicate, July 27, 2003.

Seeing the Doctor

Today I went in and saw my doctor about the viral infection that’s been making me feel lousy most of this week.

Not very interesting, perhaps, except my doctor has a peculiar habit that I’ve never seen any other physician do and which is simultaneously scary/intriguing — when he gets to the point where he’s convinced he knows what’s wrong with you and starts to tell you what to do about it, he closes his eyes and tilts his head upward as if he’s concentrating on some universal truth.

So he’ll close his eyes and look to the ceiling while he says, “You need to take this antibiotic for the next five days.” Then he’ll open his eyes, look at you for a second, and then close his eyes again to say, “And makes sure you drink lots of fluids.”

It’s like doctoring as a performance art. Or maybe he’s got all the answers written on the back of his eyelids.

Thoughts Conceived While Sick on the Couch

I left work early today with some sort of virus. Spent most of the afternoon moaning on the couch (temperature was up to 103 degrees before I took some medication). Stupid viruses. Unfortunately I’m overseeing a meeting at work tomorrow that I absolutely have to be there to make sure it goes off without a hitch. Then more couch time.

After the week-long downtime I was worried that it might take a while for the traffic to pick up again. In fact, traffic has been through the roof since Seth got everything back online again. There are some excellent conversations going on at AnimalRights.Net where there about 80-100 new posts every day now.

In fact my server at a whole is quickly approaching the point where it will have more than 60,000 messages. I remember when I was first considering using Conversant asking if it would scale to active sites with large messagebases and high daily traffic. And the answer has been overwhelmingly yes as Seth has made a lot of progress on optimizing the software.