Anthony's Journal

lousy options

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:03:20 GMT

[recreation]
Hi Anthony. We, your doctors, decided that we should do this in person, instead of on the telephone.

You are 90% through your radiation treatment so here are your choices:
- You can have a major surgery in which half your pelvis is going to be removed and your sciatic nerve is going to be severed (it wasn't working well anyway), leaving you with no movement/feeling below your ankle. Also there might be some risk of other nerve damage, affecting bladder/colon control. A followup surgery will replace the missing pelvis with an unspecified substitute (meanwhile your leg will be "unsupported").
- You can continue with radiation, in which case you have a "non-zero" (later 40% and later still "too difficult to estimate") chance of controlling the tumor. In this case surgery becomes very risky/impossible for the next 6 weeks and after that will have a 30-40% chance of developing major complications. In other words the best time to have the surgery is now. After radiation we will monitor your tumor and if it starts to grow again we're going to "salvage surgery".

You have 30 minutes to decide. BTW I, your surgeon got to go midquestion, so talk it over with your radiologist.
[/recreation]

This cute little tidbit took place on Monday. I decided to continue with radiation (because, in my understanding, both doctors winked at me to take this option), which was very frustrating for my family, who apparently didn't like any option and would prefer for me to get magically better. In case I didn't communicate the stressful nature of the situation (i.e having to decide something so major in so little time), my sister _and_ my radiation oncologist were openly crying and my mother, who had no idea what was going on because she didn't speak the language, was in an mildly hysterical state of seeking information.

After a case of "broken telephone" my relatives in the US arranged another meeting with the doctors on Thursday, one day before the end of my radiation treatments. Fortunately (and understandably) the doctors were now semi-openly supporting my decision by understating the risks and overstating the rewards, since it would be stupid to change our minds now. Everybody was happy after that.

Now my treatments are over. I'm probably starting chemo next week. Half of my butt is completely red and is expected to start pealing soon. They gave me a cream for that.

Mood: decisive

cool rider

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 01:37:13 GMT

I have been living in a hotel for the past few days. The culprit: snow. There are about 15 steps that I have to tackle to get in and out of the house where I live and them there are some 10m of uncovered road area to get to my ride [1]. If you fill that up with snow/ice it can really be a death trap. I had the misfortune to land one of my crutches on a piece of ice the other day and it wasn't pretty. As a precaution, we moved to a hotel for the duration of snowfall. There was internet access (curiously not wireless) but I didn't bring my laptop because it was just one more thing to carry (especially on a very complicated route the last day where we hop from building to building with all our stuff trailing).

Anyway, that's why I haven't been in touch for so long.

I have 8-10 more radiation sessions to go. Thankfully I switched back from twice a day to once a day treatments. It seemed that between the long rides and the waiting (and the eating) it was the only thing did all day. The old twice a day treatments where stronger than the once a day ones (when you add both together) by 30% but they were less focused. I remember that they took several minutes to position me before treatment on the once/d regime with people tugging and prodding and shoving and stuff. Lately with the twice/d they just throw me in there, give me a little push and "I'm perfect". So I guess once/d is using a smaller dose but it all goes to the tumor.

The pain is a bit better, but the huge thing sticking out from my right pelvis hasn't gotten any smaller. It seems that every time I see my doctor, a very stressful chinese woman, she has a different explanation: "it's too soon yet", "it's probably dead and we're seeing scar tissue". Today she told me that it may not go away for years: "I'm pretty sure it won't stay there forever". That's entertaining. Overall she's optimistic though, so what can you say.

For the guys that e-mail me about not seeing me at jabber/skype, I have to say that there is not really a position in which I can use the computer for a long period of time (i.e. more that 3m). You can only roll around for that much time. So I'm offline and do some hit and runs to answer e-mails and write some blog entry.

[1] I'm actually using a wonderful service called "The Ride" which helps disabled and senior citizens get around for $2 per person. You just call them the day before about where you're going and what time you need to be there and they just show up and get you there. It took three weeks for me to get accepted but in a rare demonstration of perfect timing, I got my first ride on the day I switched to twice a day. They use minibuses and other people's rides can interfere with yours (we had a ride last 1:45 with several pickups/drop offs before we reached our destination). Also some times they can be horribly late. You get what you pay for I guess but it has been a life (/money) saver.

Mood: expectant

radiation continuation

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:43:45 GMT

The doctors changed my radiation regiment. I guess the tumor grew some more and they're trying something more aggressive. So now I'm having two lower-dose sessions per day, six hours apart. The great thing is that each session lasts for less than 10 minutes which is a piece of cake.

The bad thing is that this means 4 routes to and from the hospital each day. Just today the taxi was $30 going to the hospital and $35 going back. And we still have the afternoon appointment. "Taxi!", you say; "are you some kind of millionaire?". Well. It can't be helped. I don't think I'm capable of hanging on the metro, which is 30m walking from where I live. My uncle and my aunt's friends have done a great job as transportation thus far and our taxi rides are kept to the minimum [1].

In other news I have changed my pain control medicine from a patch to pills and it seems to work a bit better. I have been using the patch forever now and the american version's glue is not that strong and with my sweats and all they were not delivering "the stuff" to my skin that well. Also my hair-falling phase has quickly turned into hair-growing and it's the first time in a long time I can see grey stuff on my hair.

[1] We are collecting receipts from every ride and each one is crappier and scantier than the last one. No driver will give you his name "for security reasons" and on the rarest of occasions that they don't just hand you a blank receipt, they always ask how much should they put down for the fare. I have a feeling we are not getting a dime out from these.

Mood: abused

bring on the heat

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:24:23 GMT

Last time I told you how bad was my first radiation session. Well I have had 6 more since then and they were way better. First of all they were shorter than the first one, which helps. Second, and more important, the radiation guys know me by now and they propose a break themselves on the first sign of trouble. On the last 3 session I didn't need any. In case you are wondering I'm handling my own genitalia now so no more Frozen-Fingers-Jim.

For the last 5 days I have something new to worry about, and that's fever. I routinely went up to 40oC. Since the fever is completely asymptomatic and every blood culture has come back negative the fever is caused either by the tumor dying or by the tumor getting bigger, or both (can't get more pythionic than that.

Fun facts about fevers: A fever alone cannot cause real damage to an adult person. However high it goes it won't fry your brain (in little kids it can cause seizures) or disable an organ or even twist your smile. That is why I have been completely ignoring my fever (currently 38.8oC) and aren't taking any medication for it. Best decision I made in a while (doctor approved). Taking a fever suppressant at 39oC will make you sweat for 3 hours and when you're done you end up looking like you just got out of a pool. Also, two hours after that the fever was exactly where it was or even higher. I used to handle the situation with a lot of towels since I had to routinely go past 2 of those fever roller coasters in a signle night, but it was getting tiresome. Once you get the "get rid of the fever NOW" mentality you had since you were little, you realize that the fever can be your friend.

Last but not least, today is Thanksgiving in the US! My uncle has bought a 17 pound turkey for an 8 person dinner. Thank god I have the cancer excuse to not eat that much.

Mood: zen

Sit still or burn

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 02:53:22 GMT

I had my first radiation session yesterday. What a freaking nightmare. Being the first one, It lasted longer than the rest, including a planning session I had previously which was described to me as "about the same as the real deal". My pain control has failed me completely and it's only a few positions that I can hold more that two minutes. The "getting nuked" position wasn't one of them, let me tell you.

After the first 15 minutes of the 30m process I had a steadily growing pain in my leg, started sweating and became overall very agitated. I've been in similar situations many times already. As you might recall, I had to stop my last MRI because of the pain. Difference is, in an MRI if you move to relieve the pain you just ruin the scans. If you move during a radiation session you fry your penis or your colon or some other innocent organ. A (male) nurse had already tucked my genitalia in an appropriate position (talk about full service) and I wouldn't want to mess with that.

To make a not that long story, shorter: I had to stop and take a break, which consisted of lifting my leg up at the knee for 30 seconds (I was down on my stomach to take the radiation), which was absolutely wonderful while it lasted. Afterward they had to set me up at the correct spot again (I did my genitalia myself this time) and continue.

I can't wait for the rest of my sessions.

Other than that I have a constant bitching pain which doesn't go away even if I drug myself with quadruple the original dosage they prescribed for me. There is just this spot, with me being on my stomach with my right leg forming an equilateral triangle on the pelvis the foot and the knee, which just might dampen the pain for 10-15 minutes, which gives you just the right amount of time to sleep. If you miss the window, or wake up, I think I have perfected a routine (which includes getting up, sitting and then taking various weird positions on the bed) that allows you to reset the timer and try to sleep again. Special.

In other special news, I thing the hair-falling phase of my last chemo has kicked in. I haven't shaved since I left Greece since my electrical trimmer hasn't got the right socket. As a result I have a slight non-even shade for a beard which might not look like much but it carries enough hair to weird you out when you see it on a pillow. Similarly with the hair but in much lesser extent.

PS: FYI my bum is not glowing (yet)

Mood: radiated

Me first tattoo

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 03:36:51 GMT

Yey. When it rains it pours. I got me three tattoos today. They may look like little dots, but they really are miniature chinese symbols that impart great wisdom. Too bad it's below my underwear. I guess spiritual girls need to form a line for enlightenment.

The tattoos are actually markers that will help the radiation oncologists aim their radioactive beams at me. [1] They are employing a technique called Intensity-modulated radiotherapy which seems very cool (it takes several hours just to simulate the beams in special simulators so that it's shaped like the tumor).

Oh yeah, taking the radiation that early actually means that the chemo they gave me was not working. The doctors have an indicator in the blood (called LDH) that tells them how good the treatment is doing and it has gone up again (we didn't use that indicator in Greece). The pain has gotten a lot worse and an MRI I tried to do yesterdays (but failed to complete because of the pain) showed the tumor growing again. My first scheduled radiation appointment is for next Thursday, but they're trying to push it for early next week. We'll see.

[1]: Yes! I have already thought of bringing my pet insect and have it casually bite me after it's had a healthy dose of radiation, but my physician (Dr Caterpillar) did some experiments in the past with said technology and is not very confident in the results. Beautiful set of hair though, the multi-legged bastard

Mood: marked

out of the hospital

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 06:10:15 GMT

I was released from the hospital yesterday and I'm back at my aunt's house.

In Greece I spent 9 out of 10 months I had chemo at the hospital. Here I wouldn't even be there for those 6 days if it wasn't for the fever. The fever is gone and so am I. You know what they say: "The hospital is the worst place to be if you're not sick". I mean, last Tuesday they gave me the chemo, handed me a list of things to look out for (fever was one of them) and sent me home right away with a pat on the back.

I guess if you're paying through the nose for hospitalization that's a great thing.

They also suggested to take it easy at work, which made me feel horrible for sitting in my butt for the last _year_. Thank the lord for not being able to walk or I'd feel like such a prick. :-P

Mood: homely

Mass General

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:04:01 GMT

I just finished setting up wireless at mass general. I swear there are dozen SSIDs around here... Turns out it's "phspiaguest". I've been here for the last four days (but I just gotten my laptop) and the differences with the greek hospitals are already screaming at me.

Here's a bullet list. I'm trying not to focus on too much technology stuff, like how much better was the MRI (even the fact that there was NO MRI machine in a freaking cancer hospital) or the CT scanner, or even the excellent intercom between patient and nurse.

Hospital food was absolutely _crap_ in Greece. I mean they had some three main core foods (chicken, lousy steak, awful burger) and three sides (pasta, rice, mashed potatoes) and all of a sudden they have nine menus they replay over and over. I used to eat that for a month or two and never touched it since. Here at MGH they have a menu selection that takes my sister 30 minutes to check (you see I select what I want for the day and my sister checks for "mistakes" [wacko]). Not everything is great, or even good, but they have specials every day and it could be many days before you have the same dinner twice.
There is no cotton lying around. Back in Greece everywhere you looked you saw this artificial cotton made of plastic net which they used for everything. Want to get some blood? Poor some alcohol on the cotton, rub, puncture, tape cotton to hand. Want to sterilize something. Poor betadine in cotton, rub, done; can also use twice or more. There is none of that here. Everything comes in tear-away containers (think restaurant wet paper mini-towels). There are special ones with simple pieces of alcoholi-dipped paper to sticks pre-dipped in betadine. A nurse can come in and tear size or seven such bags in a session.
Everything is faster. From scheduling CT-scans (hours vs days) to taking blood from my special port (7m vs 1m) to taking my temperature (3m vs 5s) everything is done faster here.
Nurse shifts are 12h in MGH vs 4 or 8hr in Greece.
In MGH policy is king. No EKG without your bracelet ID (no such thing in Greece) and birth date verification. Nurse comes, lifts bed (15s), realizes she forgot a paper, lowers bed, returns in (15s), lifts bed, etc just in case I have to go to the bathroom real quick.
Nurses are 100% prettier here.
The IV in MGH goes through a computer that controls flow, warns you for flow problems and tells you when you're done. If only I had that all those time when the IV had stopped all night and had to switch veins, which was extremely difficult for my scrawny hands.
In MGH the patient is treated better than the doctor. In Greece, when doctors come by, everybody is so reverent and pulling their chins up, like going undergoing inspection, especially nurses. When a top doctor (clinic head) visited, everybody but the patients had to vacate rooms in advance. Not so over here. I don't actually blame doctors personally (though they are partly responsible for that obviously). The other part of the blame hangs with how _people_ see doctors. I mean a doctor walks in a room filled with visiting family in Greece and they are all over them like something terribly dramatic happened during the night that only that particular doctor can explain.
When you have to have a blood transfusion in Greece you have to ask your relatives to come give almost as much as you are to take. I must have had 25+ platelets transfusions during my stay in Greece. Taking platelets from a person is a one hour process and only mornings on weekdays. And you can do it about once per 20 days. Oh, and not everyone can "donate" (over 55, high blood psi, being "anxious", etc). Do you know how deep in your family tree do you have to dig to come up with that number? In all probability I'm having some platelets here tomorrow, no questions asked (though I guess that'll be in by bill). That's what you get when you can give blood for money. Oh, no. That's immoral so it must be illegal. Make the sick man beg for blood instead.
This is a (very big) pet peeve for me. Whenever a doctor came by in Greece, we had a 3 minute conversation for an update and then the doctor stepped out and had a 10 minute talk with my family. I was completely out of the loop the whole way. I learned about the tumor a week late (I'm pretty sure some doctor was actually lying at my face at some point) and I had late or no notice about every important (bad) fact about my health. Turns out it was my mother that somehow forced that policy (also there is a thing called "afternoon appointments", where you pay 40e or so and see you doctor for 15m, which encourages the doctor to say less during visits and enabled more scheming in my case). I was so freaking mad I told the nurses to forbid them from checking out my test results, which wasn't really practical and I retracted, in exchange of complete disclosure. 10m later they were at it again. I don't think there's one person in the wing that didn't hear me shouting that day. Anyway, I'm not sure about the legality of all this but I feel I'm getting the real story in here (partly because my mother doesn't speak any English).
In MGH the doctors may be the experts but they sure make you think that _you_ are in charge. I'm not sure how much of this is watching out for lawsuits but they always ask, "how about this" and "do you agree with that" and stuff. Not a great practical difference but a nice psychological one.
Something slightly related to the above. My roomie here at MGH is having one of the same chemo I had in Greece. One thing you should look out after you take it, is not let you PH be acidic or it could form salts in your liver and other places. They test the PH every couple of hours when you pee (and believe me, you pee a lot, or take a pill that makes you go every 15m). If your PH is suspiciously low they had me drink _baking soda with water_. Sure they had medicine for that (which the gave me some times) but baking soda was "better", I guess "more natural". Now chemo thing also brings you nausea you wouldn't believe. I (apparently unlike any other person) HATE drinking baking soda and when I told everyone that I'll throw up if I drink this, I got a "don't be such a baby" look from the freaking nurses. It doesn't help that the surrounding family members were "naturalist" freaks. The fucking nurse put me in all that hell (I might have to drink that stuff 5 times in a day, actually threw up twice), I'm still ungry about it. I fucking begged them to give the other stuff. Fuckers. My roomie here just takes his pills and when I told me about the baking soda he was looking at me like I was in Rwanda or something
I was supposed to be in a highly monitored wing at the Greek hospital when I was having my bone marrow transplant. One vising person per room, wearing mask, special shoes and all that, because my white counts would be very low for a long time. Despite all that, every day I had a couple of persons come in "just like that", leave a freaking commercial pamphlet on my bedstand (advertising wheelchairs and stuff) and walk away. Or they would be selling little icons of famous saints and stuff. Now, when they were selling stuff at least you could shout them out with a fulfilling righteous monologue that you had down to perfection and put the fear of god in them (not that they wouldn't come back. But the other guys, the ones with the pamphlets, they were so quick they were out before you know it which left you simply frustrated. Every week there was something reported stolen from some room in our floor. I would expect that a salesman or a thief would be as likely to come in my room at MGH as a beggar at a fancy restaurant.
I just downloaded a trailer at 17mbit/s. In Greece the tech guys were nice enough to setup an access point for me and have me share their 1mbit/s leased line which had any decent speed only when doctors left in the evening.
When I had to do an CT scan in Greece I had to drink to spoonfuls of a bitter "contast" fluid in two glasses of water. Here in MGH I had to drink 2 780ml vanilla shakes with the bitter stuff. Just give me the damn water man... Who can drink 1.5lts of goo.

What I'm doing

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 13:28:31 GMT

Hey! It seems blogging is useful again, even if it's just to spread news.

For those that don't already know my present situation, I'll give a generous introduction:

Around June 2006 I was decided I'll become a marathon runner or something and started doing some lame laps around the municipal track or along the beach at Loutraki, carefully measured in googleearth to keep perfect records. Some time after that, say August 2006 I started to have some nuisance pains on my right hip which of course were attributed to the "let it burn" aspect of training. It was a few months after that, following an embarrassing round of rafting that I couldn't even step on my leg and decided to go to a doctor. Of course the doctor, after having me do some x-rays and CTs diagnosed it as what all his other previous appointments had, which was that herniated disc in my back was pushing on a nerve that goes down my foot. Very very common and very very annoying. As a result, I got me some pills and prescription for physiotherapy. The pills I took but the physio I skipped (which is just as well).

Anyway. The pain grew gradually stronger and stronger until one day, around January 2007 I couldn't get out of bed. My doctor, plus another one I got for a second opinion, suggested more of the above. Only instead of pills I was shooting shots up my butt and laying really still, or there would be pain. Actually I had mastered a regime where I was laying down for 20 minutes and then standing up for 10 because the pain hated too much stillness. It came a day that I haven't been able to sleep properly for weeks, except if you call sleeping on your toes with crutches sleeping.

After a few weeks of this, and seeing that my situation was getting worse we decided to go to a hospital. Three hospitals toy be precise. It was an orthopedic one, a kind of neurological one and guess in which one did I end up: a cancer one. Turns out what was causing the pain was a huge tumor on my right pelvis which, wasn't really happy about having injections of anti-inflamatory drugs being done twice a day to it.

That was January and as much as that was ages ago, it feels like it was only last week. Hospital time sure flies. I had my opiates and my "too much to put on our report" morphine to keep the pain away, along with too much chemo, if comparing to other folks there is any tell. The diagnosis was osteosarcoma on the pelvis, which is a nasty thing, kind of resilient to chemo and all too frequently involved in limb amputation.

Well I did my chemo and I also did something called a bone marrow transplant where they get and keep stem cells of your blood, then they zap you with some pretty devastating meds and in order to recover you need those stem cells that they took earlier. All very cutting edge and all (although probably two decades ago).

While I was doing all these, the big treasure at the end of the rainbow was that some time the tumor might be ready to be removed by surgery, preferably abroad. The greek surgeon we visited in order to have permission to go out (and have the insurance pick up the bill) told us that he could give no such permission, as he has proudly performed many amputations where the fellow lived to tell the tale. That was a distressing time for me as you might understand, but my very resilient parents finally convinced him he should let us go.

So right now I'm in a bed at my aunt's house at Boston Massachusetts writing you about the past and something about the future.

The hospital I'm treated at is Mass General Hospital which I guess is very respected and all. The first doctor I saw, as well as every other doctor I saw told me "this doesn't look like an osteosarcoma". After a new biopsy (big needle in butt taking samples) this was confirmed and it seems that I am suffering from a Ewing's sarcoma which is, I guesss, a close cousin of my previous diagnosis. This is just as well because the doctors here had pretty much told me that if it's osteosarcoma we probably have to amputate the leg (you see the tumor is now tangled in some blood vessels that are too critical for the leg so the leg must go). Being Ewing's we have an opportunity to shrink the tumor down further using new chemo and radiation therapy (Ewing but not osteo is kink of sensitive to radiation). This way, they say, there is a chance to save the leg. Don't you just love doctor speak.

My feelings about the whole situation: I can't say I've come to terms to loosing a leg just quite yet. Sometimes I think I am but the next moment something shudders inside me at the thought. I almost laugh at myself at when my hair fell out and was kind of upset about it. All in all I think I've been a pretty good sport and haven't gone into drama mode (yet). At least that's what the nurses tell me.

Anyway, I had my first chemo in Boston on Tuesday which went pretty well. I was pretty much sleeping from then on. Today I think I'm better. I think I'll go to my _600 channel IPTV with PVR and pausing live tv_ TV. Internet is on the room upstairs though and I'm too lazy to go there with my crutches.

Anyways. Take care. I only check my gmail account (that's where lj comments go).

symmetric marvels

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 22:44:51 GMT

It's been many years since I've seen the movie Doppelganger [1] but it left me with a lingering question that I finally got answered this week.

The plot of the movie is that a planet is accidentally (duh) discovered in the exact same orbit as the earth, only rotated by 180 degrees [2], so they send a man out to investigate. The spaceman ends up crash landing on the strange planet which is actually a mirror earth, where everything that happens on our earth, happens on the other earth as well, the only difference being that everything is reflected, just like looking at a mirror. Right is left and left is right. So when the spaceman disappears behind the sun, another "reflection" spaceman appears. Of course nobody believes him, even though they see that his internal organs are set up the wrong way.

So the question: Could this movie plot happen. I'm looking for "possible" not "probable".

So the other day I was listening to a lecture by Richard Feynman which was about exactly that problem. Only he didn't mention the movie. He was more concerned about whether the laws of physics are valid when you look at them in the mirror. As he puts it "can we describe 'left' to an alien over the phone?".

I will answer the original question first (could this movie happen) which is easy. No, it couldn't happen because of the parallax view the reflection earth would have of the universe. Astronomers would have placed their telescopes a tad differently to inspect close-up objects. Another problem I can think of are meteorite collisions (the dinosaurs could still be alive even it weren't for those). These didn't concern Feynman.

Here's another one: could life be sustained on a reflection earth? Feynman says that yes but not exactly. It seems that proteins and stuff are not symmetrical in that way and left-handed life could eat only life that evolved with left-handed life around it. So life could be there but the spaceman that landed there wouldn't be able to survive [3].

How about the physics. Is there a physical law that cares about left and right? A variation to this question is "If we were to substitute every occasion of the word 'left' with 'right' (within the relevant context) and vice versa in every physics book ever printed, would the books still make sense?"

You would be surprised to know that it wouldn't. Ok they actually would make sense but I said they wouldn't so that you would be a bit surprised and perhaps thought about it a little. In another twist, they actually wouldn't make sense if you didn't change some other stuff there as well, such as "north" and "south" (this also explains how come all those "right hand rules" in electro-magnetism, like in Laplace force could remain in place). This is getting really silly, but north and south are arbitrary also, so in case we don't care to be compliant with geography it's fine to leave everything as is.

So there, just as you have imagined all along. The symmetry holds. Wrong! And this isn't just a half lame technicality like "north" and "south". There are honest to goodness real phenomena that actually do define a certain "right" and a certain "left". You can do as I did and file it into the "under a strong magnetic field the products of some tiny particle's decay tends to go more to the left than the right" category, or you can look up CP-violations.

So there you have it. Contrary to what anyone would reasonably believe and to what everyone believed until the 60s, there _is_ a difference between right and left in the physical world, so reflection-earth could not exist.

I am really sorry about this but there is a final (?) twist to the story. It turns out that if matter spins to the left, antimatter spins to the right. Reflection earth would work the same as ours if only it was made out of antimatter. Now how cool is that. A seemingly obvious perfect symmetry that has tiny quantum flaws, which can be fitted in an even larger symmetry.

Feynman concludes with the rather poetic:

"So our problem is to explain where symmetry comes from. Why is nature so nearly symmetrical? No one has any idea why. The only thing we might suggest is something like this: There is a gate in Japan, a gate in Neiko, which is sometimes called by the Japanese the most beautiful gate in all Japan; it was built in a time when there was great influence from Chinese art. This gate is very elaborate, with lots of gables and beautiful carving and lots of columns and dragon heads and princes carved into the pillars, and so on. But when one looks closely he sees that in the elaborate and complex design along one of the pillars, one of the small design elements is carved upside down; otherwise the thing is completely symmetrical. If one asks why this is, the story is that it was carved upside down so that the gods will not be jealous of the perfection of man. So they purposely put an error in there, so that the gods would not be jealous and get angry with human beings. We might like to turn the idea around and think that the true explanation of the near symmetry of nature is this: that God made the nature laws only nearly symmetrical so that we should not be jealous of His perfection!”

I say that long before the spaceman hits reflection earth with 8.1 x 10^17 Joules of energy freshly converted from his mass, various chunks of space debris and solar winds would no doubt have eaten away the whole planet.

[3]: To be fair, I'm not sure he survived, though I'm not sure it was the food that killed him.

[1]: Or I might have saw it with the title "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun". Actually I'm not even sure if that's even the movie I saw, since I had to google for the plot to find it.
[2]: that's not an 180 degrees phase shift, mind you. Distances from the sun are (presumably) the same

Mood: awed

mySQLObject

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 20:32:20 GMT

About two month ago I was asked to build a website for internal use, acting as a kind of Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for IPTV. So I started building it using php which was pretty much the only web development tool I knew. As time went on, more and more functionality needed to be added and the website had to communicate with other servers and network elements and stuff, which isn' t so great to do in php. So I decided to switch to turbogears, which is a python web dev framework and which I had long wished to learn.

Using turbogears was super-easy. I was able to convert the whole site in just two days and I ended up with half the code. Once you get the feel for this kind of web development, you just can't go back to embedding code inside your html. Absolutely brilliant.

Then, as I was beginning to get comfortable, I was dully informed that the site would be accessible to "up to 200 pilot users". These news were really disconcerting, for many reasons, not least of which being that it had to be translated in Greek. It turned out that I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make the turbogears database subsystem, called SQLObject work with database fields that used utf-8 encoding. Many failed attempts later and after realizing that I could never debug SQLObject in time, I decided to reinvent the wheel by writing my own sql object wrapper.

Behold mySQLObject.py

This is probably the most redone project in the history of CS but I wanted to do this since my third year at the university. I wouldn't believe you back then if you told me that you could do this in a day by picking the right programming language, but that's exactly what I did with python.

Its functionality is pretty limited in that it only supports things that I already used in the site (e.x. it only supports fields of strings, integers and boolean). My biggest concern right now is how stable it is. I'm particularly concerned with the stability aspect of things, especially regarding database timeouts and stuff [1]. I'm also pretty sure there are a bunch of security considerations that are not covered, since I did most of the checking and "escaping" in the site code.

Sample usage:

from mysqlobject import mySQLObject

class Table(mySQLObject):
.	_columns = { "id":"id", "name":"str", "description":"str", "value":"int"}
.	_table = "dbtable"

t = Table.selectBy(id = 5)[0]
t.value = 10
t.commit()

for t in Table.select():
.	print t.name, t.description

t = Table(name= "asdf", description="desc", value = 10)
t.commit()

for t in Table.select(joinlist = [ "dbtable2" ], sqlwhere= "dbtable2.id = dbtable.value"):
.	print t.name

[1]: that's mainly the reason behind the paranoid try: except: of every query. I didn't really have time to actually wait for a real database timeout so I catch everything. This means that you have to remove these checks to debug a faulty query.

PS: The site went up yesterday to a limited number of "friedly" users. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Mood: hopeful

captain president

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 14:31:34 GMT

As in reply to a previous post here is what the president has to say. The link is in Greek, but here are some translation clues:

μαιμούδες = monkeys
βδελυγμία = (roughly) disgust
βόλεμα = getting comfy

But I'm sure I got all these out of context.

service meltdown

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 09:58:46 GMT

Well, it's not "everything goes to hell on Friday 17:00" but it's close: Monday and half the services are critically ill. Does wonders for your disposition.

Lots of red.

Mood: frustrated

where did you _think_ you were?

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 12:41:32 GMT

In case I had any doubts that I was actually a second rate civil servant reality recalibrates my point of view. It is indicative of the uniqueness of the situation in the western world, that I struggled to come up with a translation of "κατάληψη". When a westerner hears that a company was "taken over", he would probably think that someone has bought enough stock to have a controlling interest in it. "Picketed" is a _gross_ understatement. "Under siege" would seem more appropriate though it would be misinterpreted as figurative.

In greece, "κατάληψη" is something that habitually happens twice a year in the universities and somewhat less commonly at schools.

When I heard that the same thing happened to the executive building of the most vital telecommunications organization of the country, my first thought was "... and where's the army".

Mood: militant

18 weeks?

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 10:16:04 GMT

It's been 18 weeks since I last updated?

I swear by the mighty orifice that spawned the universe that it will not reach reach 19, even if it's the end of me.

And so it is done.

Mood: resurrected

The Aqua Tunes Saga, Part 1 of 4, The Mobile

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 05:12:32 GMT

My mobile phone was stolen at the end of last summer, along with other stuff and I got around to replace it only a few months ago. My requirements list was fairly simple:

Infrared port, for sure and easy connection to the PC and the zaurus

Bluetooth, for advanced connectivity to the PC/zaurus

GPRS, mainly to use as a modem

Not to be a clamshell design, to keep slim/sturdy enough to keep in my backpocket

These sound straightforward enough and you'd expect that half the modern mobiles out there fit the bill. Not according to a products catalog I browsed through some months ago. Being a notorious minimalist in marker research I had decided upon a model right from that catalog. It was the Sony Ericsson w800i.

At the time I though that that particular model, along with another one from nokia was one of the few ones that met my requirements stated above. What I didn't know is that, apparently, the catalog I consulted had time travel abilities and had actually fallen into my timestream from 3 months in the future. Further, the phone wasn't really called SE w800i, rather sported the fancy name SE w800i Walkman (R) mobile phone, denoting that it was a phone _and_ an mp3 player. Sure, I had noticed the steep price tag (around 400e) but as I mentioned, I though it was because it had such wonderful features.

The whole affair got further complicated since my 5yo phone number in under the name of my mother and so in order to take advantage of any special deals, my mother should do the buying. I will not bore you with the(se) details, but after several shouting matches, misunderstandings and half inaudible phone conversations, I was finally the owner of a se w800i. Proud owner? Not really.

If you suggested to me back then that I should buy an mp3 player / mobile phone, I would have laughed in your face and called you names. First of all, I wasn't all that into music. My honest-to-god-purchased-cd-from-a-store (not the ones from newspapers, gifts, etc) amounts to 0 or 1 (I can't remember if I actually bought "master of puppets"). My mp3 collection is hardly 5 CDs, copied from friends, (in a totally fair use way I'm sure), mainly to take advantage of my super-early-adopted MP3 cd player I got 7 years ago(!) on a trip to the US.

The phone is great though. The screen is the best thing I have ever seen in a mobile (though I couldn't care less about that), the operation is sensible and interrupting your radio program to let you answer the phone you just received is actually quite intuitive. And that was before I got my mind blown by Google maps mobile. The only thing I'm really annoyed about it the little slide button on the back which both uncovers the lense and activates the camera (2.0 MPs), even if the keyboard is locked. This happens 1/3 of the times I get the phone out of my back-pocket. Oh, and it's orange

So the phone is nice. But how to use it?

(to be continued)

Mood: epic

ascended

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 19:10:20 GMT

After 2 years of playing nethack I have finally ascended (to demigod) for the first time. What is nethack, you ask? Well, I don't know, just the MOST DIFFICULT COMPUTER GAME EVER.

The following is part of my YAFAP on rec.games.roguelike.nethack. You shouldn't understand any of this if you are normal:

I guess it wasn't such a feat since I came across the bones of
countless wizards that met their end. To give you an idea, I used 14
wishes, with as many more to spare! I actually ended up carrying the
wands of wishing instead of the spellbooks I needed. I also broke
pretty much every conduct, spent way too much time with nurses in
sokoban and abused charm monster and finger of death spells.

Rodney was really sweet and stayed out of my way (I only killed him 4
times). I guess it was the full moon.

All in all I think that (other than all those wishes) being careful was
the key. I noticed that I check my armor _every_ time I touched a
cockatrice corpse, without even thinking it.

The biggest scare was kind of stupid: I'm standing on the right altar on
astral and I #offer the amulet only to get the response "You have
nothing to sacrifice". My first thought was that somehow rodney
switched amulets on me and I started a pretty detailed post on getting
answers about what happened. Only later, as a last resort, I tried to
#offer while having the amulet in my inventory and not on the altar.

That's my YAFAP. Can't wait for Nethack 2: Ascention to Full Goodhood.

Mood: demigodish

MTBD theorem

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:04:49 GMT

After years of research, I have found the following theorem to be accurate.

MTBD (Mean Time Between Drops) Theorem:

Given any newly acquired electronic device, the time between drops (ie the time that passes between two consecutive major drops [>1m]) of said device will diminish exponentially with time.

Corollary: Intentional TBD (a.k.a throws, tosses, poundings) follow the same distribution with different factors

Corollary 2: Given two consecutive drops and a durability/resilience factor we can calculate the time when the device will be crushed/ rendered inoperative.

Mood: calculating

extracting wmf

Sat, 27 May 2006 21:40:51 GMT

Q: What is the best way to extract a figure from a word file?
A: Open the .doc from openoffice, save to OpenDocument format (.odt), unzip .odt and the figure should be in the "Pictures" subdirectory. No loss in quality for scaled images.

Q: Why would you want to do such a thing?
A: Oh, I don't know. Perhaps because you need to extract the figures from 10 book chapters written by 10 different authors and deliver them to the publisher as different files. Recycling is also a possibility.

Q: Does this work for .WMF files too?
A: Yes! If you thought the only way to move such a figure was to copy-paste it from app to app now you know differently. Of course the only way (that I know of) to use such a file is to insert it into word or openoffice, so why bother.

Now I have to delete all those scripts that turn word -> ps -> psselect page -> pdf -> pdfcrop.

Mood: exploratory

BIOS upgrade

Wed, 24 May 2006 12:07:54 GMT

The sight of a sysadmin cheerfully on his way to upgrade the BIOS of a server used by a lot of people is eerie indeed.

I have never heard anyone say: "I just upgraded the BIOS of my PC and it's _so_ much better!".

On the other hand I have heard many a people say: "I just upgraded the BIOS of my PC and now it just goes BEEP. BEEP. BEEP".

Oh the folly of man.

Mood: perplexed

hot again

Mon, 22 May 2006 14:41:42 GMT

The temperature is picking up fast here. Summer is here and looks hot.

Every weekend the beaches are flooding with people in a way that tops some summer days. This is the result of people going to the beach to work on their tan and not actually getting in the water, which makes them concentrated where it's dry, which is usually the smaller part of the beach-sea complex.

One thing' s for sure: I won't be alone at the sea anytime soon. And I kinda got used to it.

Mood: cornered

tabular vim

Fri, 19 May 2006 11:39:04 GMT

This was my most bestest absolutely wonderfulest item in my software features wishlist.

Vim 7.0 now supports tabs! No more split windows. Finally you can copy paste the vi way across documents.

You can add these lines to your ~/.vimrc to get Alt-1, Alt-2, etc. tab navigation (Unfortunately I use Alt-n to switch between konsole tabs so I can only use this for gvim)

inoremap <M-1> <C-C>1gta
noremap <M-2> 1gt
inoremap <M-2> <C-C>2gta
noremap <M-2> 2gt
......

Hint: use :tabedit to open a new tab.

PS: there are also some useful goodies such as spellchecking (:help spell), but that's just for wimps.

Mood: happy

useless energy pseudo-facts

Tue, 16 May 2006 21:31:49 GMT

In order to test google notebook with its sweet firefox extension I went about calculating some energy figures that I was wondering about:

Total global immediate energy consumption (electricity, coal, oil, etc): 11039 GW

Total human needs for energy (biological needs): 600 GW

Total energy required to produce food [1]: 360000 GW

Sun energy to the earth [2]: 101993188 GW

So what could these numbers mean:

human biological energy needs are 30 times as much as "modern" needs [3]

the sun sends earth 300 times the energy we need [4]

0.2% of earth's land area must be cultivated/grazed for our dietary needs (that I didn't expect)

we won't be needing dyson speres any time soon

Wanna see the "facts"? Go to the notebook

[1] I assume that all energy in our food comes from photosynthesis in plants (i.e. there is no energy added from processing using other fuel). Photosynthetic efficiency is 5%. I arbitrarily assume that only 30% of plant "energy" is transferable (we don't eat most roots or leafs etc). I also arbitrarily assume a 90% loss accumulating from the plant -> animal -> human transfer.

[2]: Arbitrarily assuming 20% loss from clouds. Energy per sq.m x pi x mean_radius ^ 2

[3]: this is "needs" not actual consumption, as I'm sure many 3rd worlders would love to point out. Also I didn't account for animals and other natural processes that we would like to preserve.

[4]: Disregarding that most of it falls in the ocean or places that can't be reached.

Mood: calculating

DSL NAT TCP and other acronyms

Tue, 02 May 2006 14:47:34 GMT

In case you don't know/haven't noticed, I'm on DSL for about a month now. Despite the previous sentence that implies (?) addiction, it's not as life-disruptive as I thought, since I had (very permissive) broadband every weekday for as long as I can remember. In fact, I guess that the person that have benefited mostly from my having DSL is my employer, since I'm doing most of my bill-paying/e-shopping/idle-surfing at home instead of the office (that's ok since they actually subsidize some of the cost).

Anyway, since I'm really cheap, I'm now behind double NAT (one from the ISP and another from the modem [if you already have NAT why not enjoy it's advantages]), which I swore I'd never do. I use vtun with two remote computers creating an encrypted tunnel so I can have access to my home PC most of the time. I have also moved my old (and only) desktop on a very strange place in a storage-dedicated room (i have to climb on a table to turn it on) so I can have it on 24/7 and keep my sanity by not sleeping with an ambient noise that can keep you from hearing the phone ringing.

Anyway, the problem was that the tunnel was actually dropping dead when it went idle for a while. As a matter of fact every idle TCP connection (like ssh) went dead after a while. This is, of course a problem with the NAT table entry of my connection in either the modem or the ISP expiring. In my PC the value of /proc/sys/net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_conntrack_tcp_timeout_established is 432000 (seconds, ie 5 days), which is the time a TCP entry will remain in my NAT table once it is established when it's idle. After trial and error I found that the NAT entry in my case is gone in between 10 and 15 minutes. Lame.

The best solution for this in my case is to set /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_time to something small (I changed the default of two hours to something smaller that 10m). This will send keepalive TCP packets to the destination every 10m in order to keep the NAT entry fresh.

Mood: keepalived

I-ran to the hill.

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 09:33:46 GMT

So Iran tries to convince the world that it wants to use nuclear power for the peaceful purposes, i.e. energy production. Or does it really? Greek media (not the most accurate sort) states that Iran does indeed say it plans to build nuclear weapons and that it is their right to do so. Some greek far-right wing politicians have also supported such a development "Who is to say if one nation can or cannot have nukes?" (Karatzaferis).

Inaccurate or not, it seems to me, it's non the less true. Iran is the fourth largest producer of oil in the world and the second largest natural gas producer (especially efficient for electricity production). Its energy consumption is less than that of the Netherlands, who has 1 / 5th its population. I guess Iran went eco-friendly all of a sudden and doesn't mind paying more for its electricity, even more so because they can get gas extremely cheap). Here is a suggestion: you guys have more sun than you can handle; why don't you go solar?

Maybe they get the bomb and maybe they don't. They probably will, if they aren't stopped somehow. Whether they will use it is another matter. Pakistan has had nukes for years and it's scary to watch its president, Musharraf, wearing a military uniform all the time, but they haven't nuked themselves to extinction with India, yet. On the other hand Israel is so darn close to Iran and there's nothing like red buttons to scratch those itchy fingers of some generals. And Pakistan is not such a blatant theocracy (although you couldn't readily say the same thing about the US these days either).

Here's hoping the wind blows eastwards when birds start flying.

Mood: quixotic