The Newton community is attracting a lot of attention in the media again. Since the upcoming World-Wide Newton Conference has attracted ex-Newton engineers as well as enthusiasts, and former Apple CEO John Sculley is the honorary president of the Worldwide Newton Association, we’re getting press in places like Wired and Slashdot, and hopefully a few other publications too.
Author: chuma
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back on tour, 1-2-3
Snagged the new Prodigy album/EP/whatever the other day. I’d heard the single ‘Girls’ before and it felt sort of lukewarm, and so did a lot of other people. Well, I’ve been listening to the album and I’m hooked on it, especially the track “Wake up Call”. So much grinding guitar goodness.
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bloody comment spammers
I’ve gotten over 50 comment spams in the last two hours. Therefore I’ve intentionally broken comment posting for now.
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paint everywhere!
We can now safely say that over half of the inside of our house is painted. We went on a painting blitz this weekend. There are only three basic painting tasks left!
- Finish second coat on “The Blue Monster” – the single largest wall in the house, in the stairway – including ceiling detail and touch-ups
- Finish kitchen, dining room, and living room – these rooms are all connected so they’re one task
- Paint the computer room. Which means moving our ultra-heavy desks and bookshelves away from the walls.
After that, there’ll be a few touch-ups and we’ll probably re-do the white on the baseboards. But it is coming along quite nicely! And we really want to get it done so we can invite our friends over for a big party!
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CBC News: Prince Charles in ‘near miss’ – Damn it! Near miss?!
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It’s my barf-day
Yay me! I’m 24 today.
Yesterday my parents and Sandy and I went out for dinner. Unfortunately last night Sandy woke up with food poisoning 🙁 I wasn’t feeling too hot either, plus I’ve gotten only 4 hours of sleep the last few nights because of Oliver hogging my side of the bed. So today I was forced to work from home! On my birthday! I hope they didn’t get a cake 🙁
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why Canadian cell phone companies suck.
It’s that time again… time to bitch about cell phone plans!
Our contract with Rogers is up at the end of August, and Sandy is adamant about shopping around. I’m always up for getting a better deal, and for technology-related shopping, so I’ve already started looking at the companies again (Rogers, Telus, Bell, and Fido) to see what they’re offering.
However, they’re all still out to gouge you in mostly the same ways:
- Long Distance – Rogers and Telus charge 25¢ per minute for Canada/USA long distance. Bell charges 30¢ per minute! Fido’s got everyone beat here: only 10¢ per minute. This is a big deal for us, because our most common calls are between Whitby, Cannington, and Toronto, all of which are long distance calls from each other.
- Most common features not included – No one bundles call display into any plan. Rogers just started charging an extra dollar for it. I personally hate voicemail. I don’t have it because it’s a waste of time. Call Display means that if I miss a call, my phone knows who called and 99% of the time I know who it is based on the number. Seriously, everyone wants call display. The first company to bundle it gets my business. At least Telus includes basic voicemail with some of its plans. Seriously though, why not let people choose one feature out of voicemail, call display, or call waiting? Fido and Bell bundle call display with their prepaid service. Hrm.
- Only two out of four have multiple phone plans for personal accounts – Rogers and Telus let you have a second (or more) phone on the same account, sharing the airtime, for a low fee. We’ve got Rogers Family Plan right now and I’m loathe to bill two phones any other way.
- Connection Fees. Actually, Bell doesn’t charge a connection fee anymore. Sometimes you can get it waived if you’re a new subscriber.
- Continuously redefining “evenings and weekends” – The definition of “evening” and “weekend” varys from plan to plan on Telus Mobility’s site. What garbage!
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happier things that we did this past weekend
Besides caring for Oliver, we did do some other stuff this weekend:
- On Friday we went to the last Erin Smith Band show for… a long time! Mike, their drummer, is off to BC for a while, so the band is going on an official hiatus. Nia at C’est What was packed and most of the people were friends of the band it seemed. They had tons of special guests on stage and the show was amazing, just awesome. It was also sad as everyone’s going to miss the band’s amazing energy and talent.
- On Sunday Sandy’s folks delivered the rest of our wedding presents – specifically, the ones that wouldn’t fit in our car:
- A backyard bench swing
- A wooden bench
- A fountain for the backyard
They also delivered my birthday present, a few days early, but I don’t mind. I knew what it was going to be anyways: a brand spankin’ new ViewSonic Pro Series P95f+ monitor! Mmmm…. screen real estate. Thanks to Sandy, Brian, Jane, Mike, Nicole, and Raven!
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Feline Hyperesthesia
That’s what the vet said that Oliver has. I finally figured it out and remembered. I’m collecting links to information about it:
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Oliver update
Well, we spent a lot of time this weekend figuring out what was wrong with Oliver. The end result is he’s not attacking himself anymore, and seems pretty OK for now. But here’s the full story…
On Friday evening we took him to the same vet who treated him for his cut three weeks ago. We hadn’t really had a chance to shop around for a vet in Whitby yet (when you have five cats, it pays to get the best deal) but we’d been here before so it seemed like the best option, plus it is a cat-only vet office.
So we took him in, explained to the vet what was going on with him. The first thing the vet asked us was if he had fleas. Now Sandy and I are not dumb and we’ve both seen what a flea infestation on a cat looks like and how to spot them. None of our cats have fleas. The vet didn’t really seem to believe us.
We told her he was attacking his rear end and tail. She took him away for a few minutes and checked out his rear end and its environs for a minute. Up until this point he hadn’t freaked out at the vet yet, he was just acting normal. When she came back she said that he seemed to react when she prodded his hip joint, so she suspected there was something wrong with that. She gave him a shot of anti-inflammatory drugs and gave us a few more pills of the stuff to give him over the weekend. She advised us to keep him confined to a room over the weekend so that he would get some rest and not give the others any fleas. She was so stuck on the flea theory that she insisted we leave the office with a box of Advantage flea control stuff, so that if we found any fleas on the other cats we could treat them. She said if the shot didn’t stop him from attacking himself we should take him to the emergency clinic the next day to get some X-Rays done to rule out any hip problems. They said that their office didn’t have enough time to do it the next day.
So we went home and confined him to our small bathroom, along with food, water, and a litter box. Now, cats may be solitary creatures at heart but our cats like to see each other and do not like to be separated. While he was in there he was clearly freaking out and attacking himself – he was even louder though! Soon though we left to go see the last Erin Smith Band show. When we came home he obviously wanted to get out of there, but we were following the vet’s advice.
The next morning (Saturday) I got up and checked on him. I swear, our bathroom looked like a horror movie scene: there was blood all over the toilet, walls, litter box, floor, everywhere, and Oliver was in the middle desparately trying to get around me and out the door, to the freedom of the rest of the house. I grabbed him and checked him over for any cuts or damage: the only thing was his tail, which he must have shredded: the tip had obviously bled quite a bit and was still red-tipped. I couldn’t bear to keep him in there anymore and I took him out, and just stayed with him around the house for a while, petting him so that he didn’t attack himself.
By this point I was feeling really bad for him. I called the emergency clinic about getting the X-Rays, but the price they gave me over the phone was insane. We looked in the phone book and found another vet closeby, that was open all weekend.
On Saturday afternoon we took him over to Thickson Road Pet Hospital. By this time we’d decided we were looking for a second opinion. We saw the vet and once again Oliver was acting normally at the vet’s office. He was so normal I said to Sandy maybe we should move here, because Oliver was so happy. We once again explained to another vet the whole situation, what he was doing to himself and what the other vet had told us and the result of her “treatment”. She heard us out, examined Oliver a bit, went away and then came back with her diagnosis.
Her opinion was that he had a condition (the official name of it escapes me now) where a buildup of anxiety could be released by certain triggers or stimulus. It all fit together: he had hurt himself, and then right afterwards we left him for two weeks. The vet thought that he was probably most afraid of being left alone, which made sense to use because he would sometimes go into the basement and then cry for us to find him, plus separating him from everyone last night had only made things worse! The treatment for this condition are anti-anxiety drugs and mood stabilizers, similar to what is prescribed to people for manic depression. Even with this diagnosis, we decided to do a bunch of tests to rule out anything else that may have been causing his behaviour. We had to leave him at the vet’s office for the rest of the afternoon.
When we came back to pick him up he was sedated (for the X-Rays). The vet said that he had had a few episodes of attacking himself before they sedated him for the X-Rays, so they had seen first-hand what we were talking about. His X-Rays were perfect: no problems with his hips or anywhere else. (It was really cool for me to see what was inside him, I’d never seen a cat X-Ray before). We’ll have to wait until Tuesday to get the results of the blood tests but we started him on some drugs immediately. He’ll be taking two drugs for a week, after which the main drug will be in effect and we can stop giving him the other one.
Sunday morning we gave him his first dose of pheno-barbitol. Overnight he was still groggy from the vet’s office and hadn’t attacked himself at all. After we gave him his pill, he was pretty out of it: he spent basicially the whole day just sitting by the sliding door, mostly asleep. Still, he wasn’t attacking himself so that was a good thing. Later on he perked up a bit and we spent some quality time together. In the evening we were to give him another dose of pheno-barbitol but we only gave him half a pill this time (the vet said we could do this if he was too groggy with a whole one). He was a bit more active but really, really mellow.
A nice touch was that on Sunday the pet hospital called us to see how he was doing! I talked to one of their assistants and they said that they were all worried about him and wanted to know how he was doing on the treatment. It was really nice to hear that they cared! That’s why I’m linking to them: if you live in Whitby I’d highly suggest Dr. Jones at the Thickson Road Pet Hospital.
So where do we go from here? Once we get him off of the pheno-barbitol and onto the other drug, I’m hoping he’ll be more alert but with less anxiety. I don’t want to have to medicate him for the rest of his life… I hope deep down that this was just an episode triggered by some bad circumstances.