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Article posted on Jul 31

Neck surgery info

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on July 31, 2007, 7:59 pm

Surgery is next Monday. While I've known the date since last Tuesday, this is still pretty quick. It was either August 6 or August 29, and I'm glad I didn't pick the 29th. Surgery itself begins at 7:30AM, and I have to be admitted at 5:30AM. Ouch. I'll be kept at the hospital overnight.

Yesterday was pre-op tests at the hospital. EKG, blood tests, and a set of X-rays.

In related news, I've just taken my 200th Vicodin pill.

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Article posted on Jul 21

Hello, pain.

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on July 21, 2007, 11:30 pm

I figure I'd finally get around to "blogging" this, since I'm telling the story often enough. In March, I had some shoulder pain that wouldn't go away, so I went to urgent care (I didn't have a PCP and hadn't been to a doctor in about 10 years, so I paid the $25 co-pay for urgent care instead of the $15 co-pay for office visits). The doctor gave me a cortisone shot and said to give it a week. A week later I went back with no change, and he said I should try physical therapy. However, the pain wasn't that bad so I put it off for awhile.

In late April, for no reason I can remember, the pain increased dramatically, spread to my bicep, with tingling in my thumb. I got a PT recommendation from a co-worker and scheduled an appointment. At the first appointment, the therapist mentioned it looked like I had whiplash from an auto accident. My neck was too tense to do anything with right away, so he hooked me up to this machine that sent series of electrical waves through my muscles. It felt awesome, by the way. He did the "give it a week" thing, but when I came back in a week, nothing had changed. He called a neck/back specialist and got me in for an appointment.

Initial appointment with the specialist, back and forth with getting MRIs, insurance pre-approvals, more cortisone shots, lots of waiting, drugs, etc, etc. I'll cut to the chase:

2 ruptured cervical (neck) discs, one of which is rather serious. The specialist referred me to a neurosurgeon, who I met with last week. I'll need surgery. (After insurance approval, of course.)

Oh, and the drugs. For the past month and a half, I've been on 10/325 Vicodin (the most potent form) 4 times per day. Actually, generic equivalent to Norco, which is a competitor to Vicodin, but same ingredients. Funny enough, according to the tab markings, the generic equivalent is actually made by the same manufacturer as the "genuine" Norco itself. Anyway. Also, "Soma" once before bed, which is a muscle relaxer.

The pain itself means I can't sit upright for more than a few minutes. As a result, my chair at work has been modified into an ad-hoc lay-z-boy. I know Vicodin can be vastly different for different people, but for me it was nausea for the first day only (which funny enough was the day I was working on buying a car, so that was fun). After that, it just causes me to be tired all of the time, sleep 10-12 hours on an average day, sweat a lot, and drink a gallon of water per day (literally). I can still work, but some days I can't last an entire day, and go home a few hours early. Work has been very accommodating about that.

I've lost almost 20 pounds in the last 2 months, even with being much less active and eating more. All I can guess is it's all the water consumption.

According to the insurance company's nifty web portal thingy, here's what I've done so far this year:

Urgent care visit, $25
GP office visit, $15
PT session, $15
PT session, $15
Specialist visit, $15
X-rays, free
MRI, free (this one was actually aborted because I couldn't stay still long enough, since the headrest put pressure directly on the neck area)
MRI under general anaesthesia, free (at hospital, the result of the previous MRI attempt)
Specialist visit, $15
Neurosurgeon visit, $15

Also, 4 prescription fills so far, at $5 each. The surgery itself (inpatient) will probably be $500, if I'm reading the price sheet right.

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Article posted on Jul 12

Reload, reload, reload.

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on July 12, 2007, 5:07 pm

UPS should put GPS units on all of their trucks and report a map back to the package tracking page for people like me, who suffer from OCPTS (Obsessive/Compulsive Package Tracking Syndrome).

In case you care (you don't), I'm currently tracking 2 packages. One is my WRT54GL-based VPN-in-a-box/IP phone setup being sent to a remote co-worker, and the other is an expensive power strip.

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Article posted on Jul 9

If you can't take the heat, get out of the NOC.

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on July 9, 2007, 1:34 pm

(I wrote this story to submit to The Daily WTF, so it's simplified in some places. Keep this in mind if you know details about the company and want to go "THAT'S NOT EXACTLY HOW IT HAPPENED!")

"Failover Networks" was designed to be the best of the best in the datacenter world. High security, multiple upstream networks, dual datacenter design (one on the west coast, one on the east), all the luxuries.

Sadly, we learned the lesson that you probably shouldn't build datacenters targeted at high-end clients immediately after the dot-com bubble burst, and Failover Networks itself went out of business. At the west coast datacenter, a few employees were retained after the rest were laid off, to help the existing clients move out and turn off the lights. There was a business-type person, a security guard, and myself, to look after the network.

Two days after the layoffs, I received an SMS page, alerting me that a server had gone down in the MIS room (which held internal company servers, DNS nameservers, etc). The particular server was not critical during this "turn-down" period, so I didn't run to the MIS room to investigate. However, 30 minutes later, 2 more servers went down, so I went to the MIS room.

When I opened the door, a blast of hot air greeted me. The thermostat read over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. I ran to the shipping/receiving room, took the plastic wrap off the emergency portable A/C unit (which had never been needed or used during the datacenter's lifetime), quickly skimmed over the instructions, and wheeled it into the MIS room.

After a little trial-and-error (a quick lesson in thermodynamics: if cool air comes out one side, hot air must come out the other side; the collapsible accordion vent is used to route that hot air out of the room), the room was back down to a workable 85 degrees. With that safe for the moment, I went to the security guard, who also monitors the HVAC systems.

"That can't be!" he said. "The MIS room is 64 degrees, in a zone set for 68. The heater actually kicked in to bring it back up to 68." After assuring him it was just a bit warmer than 64 degrees in there, he manually overrode the zone, and we started discussing what could have happened. Faulty sensor, perhaps? What do the other zones say?

"Datacenter floor?" "Fine." "Node room?" "Fine." "Offices?" "Fine." "Lobby?" "Fine."

"NOC?" "... Uhh, I don't see a NOC zone."

After a brief tracing of cables and sensors, we pieced together what happened. The Network Operations Center room has been empty since the layoffs 2 days earlier. The NOC itself was mainly for show; I could do everything I needed to from my cubicle in the offices. As it turns out, when the building was built, the HVAC guys messed up and placed the NOC and MIS rooms in the same zone. The sensor was in the NOC room, and the vents were in the MIS room. Before the layoffs, the NOC was staffed 24/7, and the presence of human heat always kept the ambient temperature above 68F, thus keeping the A/C blowing all the time in the MIS room. With no humans in the NOC, the HVAC system started pumping heat into the MIS room.

The zone was "tweaked" to 50 degrees so it would once again start blowing cold air, and the failed servers eventually came back up. 2 weeks later I took my final paycheck and happily pulled the breaker to the MIS room, as the network was no longer needed.

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Article posted on Jul 1

Buy American, pay too much!

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on July 1, 2007, 12:19 am

(No, it's not what you think.)

I was at the supermarket this evening, in the bakery section, where I saw "freedom" cookies, IE cookies that have red, white and blue sprinkles. These are the same type of cookies they normally sell, except they had red/white/blue sprinkles instead of assorted color sprinkles. In fact, the pan of cookies were right next to their regular cookies.

The freedom cookies were $.50 more expensive than the regular cookies, for the same amount of cookies.

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