Rubénerd!

Had a bit of a scare with our oldest little doggie Romeo yesterday, he completely lost his usually veracious appetite and looked as though he was struggling to move. We rushed him to the vet where a blood test revealed his white blood cell count was through the roof, so he was hospitalised overnight. We were told the symptoms pointed to a a severe infection, but there was a chance he had a tumour in his liver. Needless to say, we didn't get much sleep last night worrying about it.

Fortunately he was discharged today after being placed on several vitamin drips and his blood returned to normal. We have to keep him under close observation over the next few days and have a cocktail of medications to give him, but he's already looking more like his old self. Hopefully he'll be looking as happy and silly as the photo above again soon :).

My 2009 Easter eating!

I saw this post from the White House blog and Jim's comments on it, and I had to add my own family experiences around this time of year. If you're not on Google Reader here it is:

My family could best be described as agnostic I guess, but we still had hearty dinners over Easter and Christmas. Since moving to Singapore though when I was a kid we were disconnected from our extended families so it was just mum, dad Elke and I. We also started celebrating Chinese New Year which is much bigger in Singapore than Easter or Christmas which is mostly celebrated just for the tourists and business folks!

I have fond memories of those gatherings; for a few hours we pretended my mum wasn't terminally ill and we didn't have a care in the world. Except when it came time to clean up of course!!!

It would bore you to tears if I were to relay all the gritty details, but suffice to say when I took my extended leave of absence to be with my mum before she passed on it messed up my university timetable because the degree I started changed during the time I was away. I was able to start studying again, but there was lots of ambiguity and confusion as to what I was supposed to be doing.

One quick session at the Student Advisory Centre at the Mawson Lakes campus this morning fixed it all right up. I sat down with one of the friendly councillers who drafted a new study plan and timetable, explained to me in detail what the new courses are and how they're structured, and even gave me some help and advice on the Federal government study payment scheme whatnot. I now know what I'm doing again.

I'm all for flexibility but there's some security and comfort in knowing that things have been taken care of and something is definitive. I've been living week by week with far too many variables, health scares and negative experiences over my now 23 year life that something stable and set in stone is refreshingly consoling, if that makes any sense.

For the first time since 2006 I have a 100% clear and structured path to achieve my study goals. I'm not sure what "study goals" means, but it sounded fancy. No matter what it is, my life is finally back on track. Look out world, Ruben Schade is back!

ASIDE: I'd cite the "Shady's back" lines from an Eminem song, but I respect you, dear reader, too much to subject you to it.

Suntec City and the Convention Centre from the Padang, taken with my D60. I will get around to uploading all these photos I took to Flickr... eventually!

Isn't it always the case that we focus on the things we didn't end up doing on a holiday instead of things we did end up doing? Or is that just me? Well after spending late December, January and most of February back in Singapore from Adelaide I can confidently say I got done less than 1% of what I wanted and needed to.

At least I had an excuse this time; I was out of action for weeks with... let's use the word "uncomfortable" food poisoning and then a flu which the doc says I caught while my immune system was weakened when dealing with the first darn thing! Whooptie-do. As a result I spent most of my Singapore end of year holiday either in bed or curled up on my computer chair covered in blankets and a thermometer in my mouth. To be fair, I can think of worse situations, and I'm certainly glad it happened while I was on holiday instead of when I was studying, but it did bother me that as a result I couldn't do anything.

ASIDE: The following two lists were literally transcribed from my own to do lists, but cleaned up a bit. As such, there are no links whatsoever, treat them as the seething masses they are!

Things he wanted and needed to do

Going down the list of things I needed and wanted to do that didn't happen, I was supposed to go back to KL again and see Julee and the guys from RHB; upload all my photos taken with my new Nikon D60 on Flickr; meeting up with Kevin in Singapore to have a coffee, chat, philosophise and to help him out with his MacBook; renting a Segway and riding it around Sentosa just like Jackie Chan did earlier this year; do some more Nikkor lens window shopping with my dad; going to Harry's at Clarke Quay to listen to some live jazz; getting Skype working with our gateway to talk to Felix; getting up early and going with my dad and sister for a walk around Sungei Bulloh Wetland Reserve and the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve; paying bills that were due back in Australia while I was in Singapore for the phones (whoops!); sorting through most of my late mum's posessions; beating my dad and sister at Wii Golf and Wii Bowling again; looking at motor scooters; starting a public and light road transport advocacy blog (long shot, but I did get as far as creating a theme); finally get some prescription sunglasses; demo my alternative ideas for Whole Wheat Radio; looking for a cheaper version of my dad's ultra wide angle Tokina lens to take back with me; throwing away stacks of old burned CDs that contain data I now have on multiple hard drives and dual layered DVDs; taking a budget airline to Cambodia and hiking through Siem Reap; eating more prata and teh tarik with my dad at 3am at Mr Prata; cleaning my bedroom in our apartment there; test all our old computer hardware and donate it to schools or figure out how to send them elsewhere in South-East Asia... wow I'm not even half way down my list yet. Sheesh.

The Singapore Flyer and the top of the Esplanade, also taken with my D60. I will be uploading these to Flickr, I'm determined!

Things he did get done

As for the things I did get done, most involved things at home because that's where I was stuck for weeks on end! I managed to work around the restrictions on installing drivers on my dad's work laptop by connecting his home office laser, photocopiers and photo printers to a second machine and accessing them over the network; I ripped our entire 3,200+ CD collection to our DIY media PC (THAT was a really good way to pass time!); I copied all my Rubenerd Shows over to the Internet Archive; converting my old Pentium MMX 200MHz desktop into a fancy firewall between our modem and router; upgrading my FreeBSD desktop I access through SSH in Adelaide to FreeBSD 7.1 Release; and a whole pile of other technical and non outdoor related things. I did manage to see my shrink and now a good friend, and go out a few times for dinner with my dad and sis too, just wish I had more time and was feeling well enough to have done them more.

The end is the best place for an ending

Ah well, I guess as I said before disappointment over what you didn't and did get done on a holiday is natural to a certain extent. Now that it's Monday the 2nd of March and I have class in 20 minutes (ugh), the volume of homework, assignments and tests will preoccupy my mind enough. And my sister doesn't even have classes today, so she's still fast asleep as I type this at the Boatdeck Cafe. Some people have all the luck.

Looking down my To Do list for Adelaide, I have about a dozen things that need to be done today, another dozen tomorrow, and a dozen on top of that for later this week at the latest. Can you get student secretaries? As in a secretary for a student? That'd be fantastic.

Screenshot from Google Reader yesterday afternoon

Another quick but very warm thank you to everyone who's been sending me emails and messages on Twitter and Google Reader regarding my latest and worst ever personal health problems. I'd emphasise though that given family history and what others have gone through, I'm relieved I can say that this has been the worst instead of something far more sinister. Did that make sense?

My symptoms are getting better; the lethargy and constant tiredness still exists but I can already feel the pain in my joins ebbing and I can feel myself becoming more alert; or as my dad says "more full of lerts". I had one really scary incident this afternoon when I coughed up enough blood out of the blue to scare the living daylights out of everyone, but fortunately a frantic phone call to my GP established that it was a "benign" result of the new medication trying to cure me of this nasty throat infection and that while that amount of blood was unusual wasn't it unexpected.

Phew! One thinks I would have been warned of this potential side effect in advance though! Sheesh!

I still need to eat most foods in liquid form, am on several different antibiotics, cough medicines and other riff raff, and my temperature is still uncomfortably high after now two weeks of separate but overlapping problems, but today was easier than yesterday and fortunately I've largely been spared crushing headaches which has meant I've been able to still stay huddled at my computer and buried in books. I've been sitting up in bed and reading a lot. I mean, reading a lot.

I am starting to get sick of feeling sick though, I haven't been able to work on finishing any of the pet projects I started over these holidays (using Haskell in X11, RubyCGI, WxPython, making Linux more BSD-ish, implementing some Whole Wheat Radio and uni intranet wiki ideas). Guess I should be really thankful this happened over the holidays instead of during a semester of studying, that would have been just awful!

Now if you'd excuse me I'm off to grab a glass of warm water and some more P.G. Wodehouse. If there's any other author who can make you feel as good and happy even when you feel like crap, I don't want to know. Well okay I admit I've been reading Mark Twain, Ogden Nash, Jeremy Clarkson, John Grisham and even an Alan Alda tome too ^_^. No Bill Kurtis though, because I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Lots of book reviews coming out when I'm back to 100% it seems!

I know one of the so called golden rules of blogging is that for no reason whatsoever should you ever create a blog post that merely describes why you haven’t created blog posts for a specified period of time. Bullhonkey.

Turns out the medication and treatment to deal with my bout of food poisoning last week fixed the problem, but in my weakened state I contracted something else entirely. After feeling like I was starting to get better, in the last 48 hours my throat has been so sore all I’ve been able to eat is strained luke warm broth, multivitamins and water; the doc gave me some steroid treatment to ease the inflammation and another type of antibiotic to bring it under control.

I’ve jokingly said I’m just like my good buddy Felix Tanjono and am always tired, but with this weird thing I’ve been even more tired than usual, probably because I haven’t really been sleeping or eating well.

I have lots of great ideas for blog topics swimming around my head, but it’s been somewhat of an ordeal typing out just this one! I’ll see you all when I’m back on Earth again as it were. Thanks ^_^.

Thank you to all you fabulous folks for your supportive words on Twitter, Google Reader, in email and in the comment fields here. I've still got a dreadful head cold and a high temperature today, but I don't feel like I'm going to be sick and I feel SO much better! I mean 10,000% better!

I know I said this before, but in a selfish way this really makes me appreciate what my beautiful late mum went through... for over a decade. And she said she wasn't a strong person, biggest load of crap I've ever heard!

Off to the GP now for some follow-up. Funny how we never figured out what food it was I ate that made me this sick. I guess we'll never know. I'm not Bill Kurtis though.

Well isn't that just great, I think I might have food poisoning. I could list the symptoms, but they're not pretty and I think some of the worst I've ever had. I'm sitting upright and sipping water slowly so I'm doing a bit better now.

I'm confused though, according to Wikipedia you're not supposed to eat acidic or fatty food, but on About.com they list Apple as something good. I trust Wikipedia and About.com on computer software and such, but perhaps this is case where I give them a pass!

I'll be waddling down to the GPs office soon, fortunately Shaw House is close to our place. I don't think I could survive a taxi or motorbike trip! In the meantime I'll attempt to occupy myself by working on my W3C compliance... if I busy myself it puts it out of my head. Fortunately I don't have a headache.

My mum had these symptoms from her chemotherapy for... 12 years. I've had this less than 12 hours and I'm already winging on blog posts. Mustn't have got that gene.

UPDATE: Doc says it's food poisoning, bummer. Fortunately he said I did all the right things. Will be going back on Monday for another checkup. This is called fun!

I feel as though I could start a blog dedicated to the science of sleep -- I sure talk about it enough here. Perhaps this topic is worthy of a new category even?

This morning I'm having the exact opposite problem to what I normally have: I'm too awake. Last night I went to sleep around 20:00 which is extraordinary early for me, but it unfortunately had the same result it always has: it made me bolt out of bed around 03:00 ready to start a new day! It's 03:40 already and I've had a shower, a bite to eat and tacked a small programming problem that's been gnawing at me for the last few days, and I'm still wide awake.

The ironic thing is, for most of my life I'm tired. Virtually any time of day, if you give me a comfortable pillow to rest my head on, I will doze off. The only time of the day I have trouble sleeping is... late at night. It's as if I'm a nocturnal creature by nature and trying to force a sleeping pattern that's the opposite to that is unnatural and doesn't work. Some people my age are nocturnal because with all the booze filled partying late at night they've conditioned themselves for it, but for me it seemed to happen organically with all my regular day-to-day tasks.

I'd say other than deciding what to do when I finish university and whether I'll finish all my studies in Adelaide after all, figuring out how to sleep properly is currently the biggest problem I'm facing. Nobody should feel tired 100% of the time during the day and only a low percentage at night... at least I don't think they should.

I'm going to figure out how to sleep one of these nights if I have to stay awake all night to do it! I'm not Bill Kurtis.

My dad would agree with this. By luisrivera on Flickr.

While I'm holidaying back at my dad's place in Singapore I've thought I've been having some pretty bad nights again, but it's nothing compared to what he's going through. He's designing a new manufacturing plant in Woodlands and suffice to say the disagreements between the designers, engineers and managers are all being funnelled through to him. You'd have to have a darn thick skin to cope with stuff like that.

After going to bed at a ridiculous hour having only arrived back from the plant a few hours ago, it's almost time for him to wake up again... at 5am. I've managed to drag myself out of my comfortable bed to see him off and to tell him to break a leg, but here I am barely able to keep my eyes open after sleeping for six hours. Luxury!

Here's hoping he can finish earlier today and we can grab a bite to eat afterwards. I'm not Bill Kurtis.