Paul's blog

Archive for the ‘Diary’ Category

Have you ever ‘done’ ‘Penquin Milk’ also known as ‘White Out’, which, like the typo removal stuff is white and takes you ‘out’ fast?

I’m talking about C₁₂H₁₈O.

It’s better known as Propofol, and it’s amazing stuff.

“… This was the most unpleasant part of the day”, said she after she inserted the needle in my vein.

I was skeptical.

I still had a rather vague, yet distinct memory of the last time I got brutally invaded .. and it was far more ‘unpleasant’ than a simple needle being stuck in my arm.

And the prospect of someone potentially (and, as it turned out, in reality!) snipping and burning stuff from deep inside my body only fuelled my skepticism.

Soon I was wheeled into an operating room of sorts, nurses covered me with a warm blanket, the anesthesiologist came running in and asked me to ‘jump’ on my side and did his thing out of my sight.

“The doctor will be here soon” a nurse told me. Here we go, I thought, another long wait (last time I underwent this procedure I had been laying like this for 45 minutes, waiting for a doctor who got stuck in traffic). But no, not this time, almost immediately after that a nurse tapped me on the arm. “Doctor is here”, I expected her to say.

But no, instead, she said “You’re all done and fine. You’re in the recovery room now. Do you want some water?”

It was pretty amazing! I have had no sense of falling asleep. Maybe getting close to dozing off, and for a split second it was a bit disorientating to realize a full hour had gone by without my having had the sense of falling asleep.

A full hour. Gone. And unaccounted for.

But I swear, I don’t want it back. They can keep it. Along with the three polyps they snipped and burned off.

“.. do you have a living will?” asked the friendly lady at the other end of the phone line.

And especially because I do have a rather strong will to live, I found the question a bit disturbing, considering it was asked by an employee of the Sheridan Surgery Center, Melbourne, FL, where I have an appointment tomorrow morning at 8:15am. Were they planning for a screw up?

Anyway, tonight at 7 pm I weighed myself.

I just did that again, about 2 1/2 hours later.

I’m happy to share with you that I lost 4.8 pounds during that period!

What am I working on, you asked?
I’m looking into some voice quality issues on one of our platforms that utilizes a G.729 codec.
What is a G.729 codec?

I’m glad you asked!

A G.729 speech coder is an 8 kbps Conjugate-Structure Algebraic-Code-Excited Linear Prediction (CS-ACELP) speech compression algorithm.
Since G.729 is based on the Code-Excited Linear Prediction (CELP) model, each 80 bit frame produced contains linear prediction coefficients, excitation code book indices, and gain parameters that are used by the decoder in order to reproduce speech. The inputs/outputs of this algorithm are 16 bit linear PCM samples that are converted from/to an 8 kbps compressed data stream.

I’m sure you, too, are glad you asked.

Off the coast of North West Africa, close to southern Morocco and West Sahara lies a group of islands called the Canary Islands. One of its most western islands is called La Palma (the islands belong to the kingdom of Spain). La Palma is basically just a volcano. It has erupted many times (last time in 1971), and, although controversial, there are predictions of it being close to erupting again soon, with devastating results: it is thought to be very likely to dislodge a 12 mile-long slab of rock that will crash to the ocean floor, causing a dome of water a mile high, causing a tsunami, travelling at 500 mph.

It would reach the US mainland  in 9 to 12 hours and the 165 ft high waves would simply wipe Boston, New York and Miami off the face of this globe.

And, of course, Palm Bay, the town I live in, would be gone as well.

Last night I was reading about all these interesting facts and wondering why I wasn’t packing up my stuff and moving to Nevada. I may make that the subject of another post, but anyway, pondering all these fatalistic scenarios made me sleepy, so I went to bed.

For some reason, ever since my ‘heart attack’ scare back in May, I seem to need a lot less sleep than I  used to. As so many times lately, I woke up around 4am, and, also as usual, started to read.

It must have been around 5:30am that I heard a faint noise. Kind of a rumble, like a truck driving by on the nearby highway. But it didn’t fade. This is probably where this subtle noise entered my consciousness: I laid down my book, and I’m sure I must have looked puzzled: I’d never heard anything like it. It still was very faint and sounded like it came from far away, but it appeared to get louder. “There’s a UFO landing on my lawn” I thought. But I’m a rational guy and parted, with slightly sad feelings, with THAT notion.

Then I noticed the slight trembling of the house, the windows rattling… it was a VERY subtle and a barely noticeable vibration, but it was definitely there!

I got up to investigate, by now I was REALLY puzzled by it.

And then suddenly it hit me! That tsunami! La Palma! It had happened! A wall of water was headed down the street and soon it would all be over.

Then something strange happened: instead of panicing, I was overcome with a deep feeling of peace and I became extremely calm. It was something that I have experienced before .. in dreams! Where I was in situations with a disastrous, really inescapable and irreversible outcome, I would simply ‘resign’. If the outcome is truly inevitable, there is no point in wasting energy in trying to reverse it.

I have mentioned my fear of flying here before. During flight I’m constantly in a state of semi-panic. But when that day comes, that my plane’s wings fall off (and it WILL come), I am convinced that I will then suddenly become very calm again. I probably will even smile, and while everyone around me is panicing in utter chaos, I will grab my book, start reading, and think “told you so!”.

Likewise, realizing the magnitude of what was happening, I calmly walked to my computer to see what I could find out about it. What else was there to do?

And then, while the sound and vibration, while ever so slightly, became more apparent … the light went out.

Fortunately that lasted only a split second. But I had to restart my computer. While it was rebooting, I opened the front door and stepped outside in the dark … expecting strong wild winds.

There was no wind whatsoever, although I definitely could still ‘sense’ the noise, but by now it was getting fainter and fainter. There was definitely something ‘out there’. But clearly, not the dreaded wall of water that my brain had concocted. Soon it was all over, and I was standing in a quiet warm dark central Florida night, wondering what the heck I’d just experienced.

About an hour later I realized what it had been.

And I also realized that, had I stepped out on the patio, instead of the front door, I immediately would  have known what this was and I would have stood there in pure awe and admiration …

I kicked myself for picking the wrong door, and went back to bed.

I received a death threat today.

Not a simple ‘drop dead!’ one, but a seriously meant one, complete with details as to how I should be put to death (in a non-pleasant fashion, I can assure you).

I’m scared. VERY scared.

More on it later, because for now … I’m leaving for a few days.

Packed my bags and I’m outa here. To a far away place in a desert.

Where I will ponder ‘freedom’.

And maybe take care of a few other things, but whatever THAT is … it stays there.

To be continued (if I survive this) …

I have decided to post more ‘diary’ entries: posts about nothing much else than what I’m doing or did on a certain day, no matter how boring or irrelevant to others (or myself). I even created a new category for it ‘diary’.

Take today: The morning started fairly early for a Saturday: Dawnell left early for her yoghurt class, gleefully reminding me of my excursion to the vet. Her smile, when she left, screamed the German word ‘Schadenfreude‘!

I saw her again at the vet, where she dropped by when the kids were already safely back in the carrier, while the vet and his assistants were changing their shredded and blood soaked scrubs. She was on her way down to Jupiter to meet her daughter Laurilee who needed a new ‘ensemble’ for her interview next week, and God knows, a 30 year old child can NOT buy clothes all by herself.

So I was all by myself for the rest of the day.

What did I do?

Absolutely nothing!

So. There you have it.

Let me break it down for you.

First, since I had to get up in the middle of the night (9 am) to take the kids to their annual torture, I went back to bed.

Then, after having felt REALLY pittyful and sorry about himself in the closet for a while, Clyde snuggled up with me and informed me he would forgive me if I would give him ‘wet’ food for the rest of the week .. and not just a serving he had to share with Bonnie, but FULL portions.

I concurred, but now we have to find a way to hide this from Mamma, who does NOT condone such bargaining tactics, and calls Papa a ‘pushover’ whenever he falls for what is called here ‘the faces!’.

After that … I went into the pool, swam ONE lap, then drifted on my floating throne, beer in hand, for a LONG time, got out, read a bit, dried up, went into the pool, skipped the swimming and went straight for the chair with a fresh cold beer, drifted around for a LONG time, got out, read a bit, dried up, went back into the pool … enfin, you get the idea… all the while listening to Beethoven in the background.

Then I conceived of this ‘diary’ idea, went to my office, typed this post, and now I’m getting back to the pool, after making a slight but necessary detour, passing by the fridge to grab another fresh ice cold beer.

Life is good.

And if it’s not good, you have to MAKE it good.

But it’s good.

And short.

So let’s keep it good.