Well, all in all things are going okay. Except that I have had the hiccups on and off (mostly on) for the last 29 hours. The doctor said its probably a reaction to that Lodine and Penicillin, and told me to stop taking both (apparently the risk of infection is pretty low at this point). If I don't stop soon they'll perscribe something to stop the hiccups.
Well, I now have four fewer teeth than I did yesterday. It went very well. I woke up, and bathed. About an hour before I wrnI applied some topical anesthetic that they had given me to the crease of my arm. 15 minutes after that I took, a Valium they had given me, with 1 tablespoon of water (what a nutritious breakfast). My mother drove me to the surgeon, and after a little paperwork they took me into a room and told me to lie down. The assistant asked me how I was doing, and I said that honestly I had more trepidation about the IV than the operation. They asked me if I wanted something to relax a bit more, I said sure (quite frankly I was not sure the Valium had had any effect, but I really don't have a good reference), so they gave me some Nitrous Oxide. A few minutes later they said they were starting, I felt a prick in my arm, and woke about 40 minutes later in another room, sans teeth.
After we drove home I swapped out the gauze a few times, took and took the various medications they prescribed. I took one of the pain killers, but honestly it seems to just be ineffectual, but in the end the pain has not been so bad. In fact my tongue and lip have regained feeling (they were supposed to be numb until late tonight), and I actually have already moved back onto some solid food (well, fried dumplings, but their pretty solid). All in all in turned out pretty well, I guess the next pick thing is to see how much I bruise/swell up tomorrow, but I have been icing my face, so I things should turn out pretty well.
Eric posted a very interesting story, but the last comment is what I want to talk about:
(On a related note, this is one reason not to have a publicly available list of Apple bloggers. I wonder how many people bulk-mail all of the known Microsoft bloggers.)
Ever since I saw the list of Microsoft bloggers I have been amazed there is no list of Apple bloggers. Don't get me wrong, I am really, really glad there is not. I know several dozen people at Apple who blog. I often link to a friend's blog. And since I have many friends who work for Apple there is this sort of incidental community. But, despite the fact that sometimes work can be quite consuming, we all do more than just work. In fact, while very few people hide that they work for Apple, very few people decide to say much about their jobs. Its just generally not a good idea, since Apple is a pretty secretive company. Its also a pretty large, and very diverse company. That means, most of us are not directly involved with most products. Let me tell a little story.
I was at a BANG meeting. Since BANG actually meets on Apple's campus, there often tend to be quite a few Apple employees in attendance. After the meeting I was introduced to someone, who had some questions about some particular issues with his University's setup. I said I wasn't really involved with the area of the system he was having issues with, and that I didn't know of anyway to solve his issues, but that he should ask his University contact and that they could probably either point him towards a solution, or make a feature request. He immediately started railing at me "How does Apple expect to be taken seriously in the UNIX market with this!?!" At this point I kind of wanted to end the conversation as quickly as possible, so again I said he should make a feature request through whatever his preferred channels were. He said that he was telling me. I commented that I was just an engineer, and if he wanted the feature he would need to make a real feature request through some formal channel, and if enough people asked for it some engineering would probably be allocated to it. He looked at me somewhat incredulously. He was honestly shocked that I had no direct influence on the feature that he thought was so important. At that point he realized it didn't matter whether or not I agreed with him, because I was in no position to decide to work on his issue. The problem is that this is a very common situation. When people find out I work for Apple, often they not only assume I am involved with whatever product they are interested in, they are also immediately certain that I have some sort of influence over it, and that if they can convince me that their right they'll get their particular issue addressed.
I have this feeling that if there was a well known list of Apple bloggers, the situation would probably be a lot worse.
Tonight I had dinner with Jamie and his sister Margot. Somehow emacs came up, and since Margo is not that heavily involved with computers we had to explain what it was. Once we were done she said "I'm not a computer person, but even I can tell that's stupid."
I have been working with a friend on a new pet project in my free time. Its a large project, but we finally straightened out all the hardware issues this week, and both of us have made more progress on the bits we are working on than I expected. I don't want to get into what we are doing just yet, but I will say that its pretty cool, I now know far more about the 3D hardware and how Mac OS X interfaces the window system to it than I can to admit, and I wish there was still a MacHack to present this thing at ;-)
Well, my mythtv project is on hold until I have enough time to devote to it, so instead I decided to install Windows on the PC I built so I could play some computer games. I'm (generally) not a dumb guy. I work on computers professionally. Hell I even work on an OS full time. So I figure no problem. I pop in the Windows XP Home CD, it boots up, I choose to partition the drive into two big partitions, and start the install.
Then the fun starts. Windows reboots after the CD portion of the the is complete. It should boot of the HD. It doesn't. So I stick in the CD, delete all the partitions and give Windows the whole drive. It reboots, same problem.
I reboot the CD enter its recovery console, and start looking at the tools. I notice one named "fixmbr" which sounds about right. I run it, tells me my master boot record is fucked up, and that it can fix it, but I might loose data. No skin off my back so I tell it to go ahead. It completes, says everything is fixed, so I run it again. It tells my mbr is still fucked up. I decide to try an install since it should be fixed, it still won't boot. I look for something on the CD to just totally wipe the mbr, no luck.
So I stick in a Redhat 9 CD, use its rescue mode to get a console, run fdisk, wipe the mbr, reboot off the Windows CD, tell it to install. This time when it reboots off the HD it works.
Of course now I have a totally unpatched Windows install, just waiting for SoBig or Slammer. So I start running Windows update to try patch it up, which of course involves me plugging the machine into the net. It looks like I got the 60+ patches installed quick enough. Which just leaves me with having to install video drivers (Nvidia made things relatively painless), and audio drivers (DFI and C-Media made things a PITA).
All told I am not sure it was worth the 5+ hours it took, just so I can play Magic.