2 Bit Hacker

Just got back from my EMG test. That was not a very fun experience. The test consists of two parts. Part one involved zapping you in various places, causing your muscles to twitch (sometimes kindof painfully, depending on the muscle) so they can measure the response time. The second part involves jamming needles into various parts of you, in my case 3 in the back, two in the back of the leg, and one in the front, for some reason I haven’t quite figured out yet. At any rate, it’s not pleasant. At least I couldn’t see the needles going into by lower back. According to Delia they went in about an inch.

Anyway, the test showed that I have some nerve damage, and apparently some of it’s new and some of it’s old, so my back condition has probably been around for a while. Other than that, it just narrowed it down to the same disc that we already knew was the problem, thanks to the (painless!) MRI earlier in the month.

Oh, and yesterday I met with an orthopedic spine surgeon, who looked at my MRI and Xrays and said I basically have three options. I can do nothing, and hope it just fixes itself. I can do physical therapy, which should help it heal itself faster. And thirdly, I can go in for surgery and they’ll remove the part of the disc that sticking out, which should fix everything. Since it seems to be getting better on it’s own, I decided to go with option two. I’ll be starting physical therapy next Monday, and meeting back with the surgeon next month. I figure if I make good progress, then everything’s good. If it’s not going well, I can opt for the surgery.

So that’s pretty much it. I’m kindof ouchy at the moment, and I keep getting little pricky pains where the needles were. It’s annoying. I’m glad Delia was with me though, so I could crush her hand when the doc shoved the needles in. Thank you, dear.

For some reason my Linksys WRT54G running the Sveasoft firmware died this morning. Originally I thought Comcast had gotten mad and killed my service, but when I checked on the router its little Power LED was blinking away, indicating that it had lost its poor little mind. Luckily we had Delia’s Netgear router from her old apartment on hand, and got back up and running pretty quickly, but I’m annoyed at the Linksys now. I think I’m either going to flash it back to the default Linksys firmware, or try for the OpenWRT stuff. Though I’m planning to stop using it as a router anyway, just using it as an AP.

Which brings me to my plans for the weekend. I’m taking Mage, my server from the office, home with me, going to trade it’s EPIA mainboard for one of the other boards around the apartment and build the EPIA into a home router. I plan to throw OpenBSD on it, which should allow for all sorts of fun. Hopefully I can setup some better packet queue management stuff to keep the VoIP line sounds good even when someone is downloading something. Should be a simple matter.

Finally back at work for the first time since my back started hurting. It felt good to get out of the apartment under my own power for a while, though I don’t feel like I really got much done. Sitting in a chair still hurts after a while, so I had to keep lying on the floor till my back stopped hurting. I figure it’s probably good for me though. I hope by the end of the week I’ll be able to sit mostly normally.

Also, I think I’ve been spending way too much time on my laptop, as it’s now easier to type on this keyboard than the one I used to use at work. Not sure if that’s a good thing or not…

Working on another plugin for Blosxom which I call GaimSmiles. The idea is to replace ‘:)’ sorts of things in the text with sorts of things, based on the Smiley Themes of Gaim. So far it seems to be working pretty well. Here’s a test using the SmallSmiles set:

I’ve finally done the cutover on my personal site from chocobo.cx to 2bithacker.net. To go along with this, I’ve also started using kyzoku@2bithacker.net as my primary email address, instead of chip@chocobo.cx. Both still work for now, but I’m going to be putting a bouncer on the old one in the near future telling people to use the new one instead, and once the domain expires next summer, it’ll be gone for good.

In other geek news, I’ve been experimenting with some stuff on my laptop (now wraith.2bithacker.net instead of tonberry.chocobo.cx, for anyone who cares) including switching from the XFree86 X Server to the X.Org Server. The new 6.8.0 release has a bunch of neat features, including real window transparency and drop shadows, however neither work very well on my laptop. I suspect it’s because I have so little video memory and I run at 1400×1050 at 24-bit. Ah well, I’ll have to try it on my desktop sometime.

Oh yeah, and I now have a phone line at the apartment. It’s a VoIP line from VoicePulse. So far it seems to be working out pretty well.

Well, after months of procrastination and a few hours of coding, I’m pleased to announce my CrossJournal plugin for Blosxom. Since switching away from MovableType, I hadn’t been posting much on my website, due to the lack of automated crossposting from Blosxom to LiveJournal, but this should fix that.

For anyone interested in testing the new code, you can download it here. You may also want to read the documentation.

Note: In future, do not use release announcement as a test. I found several bugs and fixed them, so it’s now 1.0.1 instead of 1.0.0. The download link has already been fixed.