Derek K. Miller - Penmachine words music comment - Vancouver, Canada

A bunch of stuff I've been accumulating over the past few months:

• Types of coffee beverages
• U.S. regional pizza styles
• Build your own Apple Store
• Google Maps mashup of how Greater Vancouver would be flooded by a 4-metre sea level rise (move around to check out your own area nearly anywhere in the world)
• J Allard's thoughts on the first year of the Zune
• Very useful Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) reference for web developers
• How well does restoring from Apple's new Time Machine backup work?
• Intro to Fully Flared features slo-mo skateboarding, explosions
• When you post to your blog, where does the information go?
• Tips to give presentations more like Steve Jobs
• What other sites are on your shared web server?
• How Microsoft would reveal it hasn't done its homework in school (see?)
• New Apple instructional videos
• Long Radiohead video that features all the songs on In Rainbows

Labels: apple, backup, band, blog, environment, extremesports, food, google, linksofinterest, macosx, microsoft, music, publicspeaking, web

We have aquatic snails in our fish tank, rather by accident. They came in on one of the plants we bought for the aquarium, and they multiply like crazy.

As someone who specialized in marine invertebrates for my biology degree, I rather like these little molluscs. They keep the sides of the tank spotlessly clean. They move surprisingly quickly (for snails). There are, however, often too many of them—they outnumber the fish by at least an order of magnitude—so we occasionally have to scoop some out and, uh, send them to greener pastures. (I have no doubt that things are greener, not to mention sludgier, in the Greater Vancouver sewer system.)

The snails perform one stunt that I hadn't seen before. Often they will make their way to the top of the aquarium and then "surf" upside down on the underside of the water's surface, riding the currents created by the tank filter. Sometimes one will circulate around for several minutes, its muscular foot flat against the surface tension, then it will either stick to a side or drift down to the gravel at the bottom to start trucking its way around again.

It's pretty cool, and probably the fastest these creatures will ever travel in their lives. Unless they get to visit the sewer someday, I guess.

Labels: biology, extremesports, family, fish, invertebrates

To honour the end of NaBloPoMo (in which I didn't participate officially), this final post of November will contain a mishmash of nothing in particular:

Cory Doctorow is reasonably digitally paranoid, but he has a point about Facebook: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance."

It's worth listening to what Dave Winer has to say about podcasting, since he helped invent it, so when he writes, "I've heard that podcasting didn't achieve its promise," that's worth reading. His response begins: "First, obviously it depends on what you felt was the promise. Second, it depends whether you think there's more to do." He does.

Evel Knievel was an icon during my childhood, the epitome of cool to elementary school boys in the '70s. He died today.

Finally, here's a video of our pal Dizzy the Podcast Puppy licking my daughter on the face, after some prompting:

Labels: animals, extremesports, facebook, family, friends, pets, podcast

About 13 hours from now, I start a new six-month round of chemotherapy, my first such treatment since back in May. This batch is intended to try to shrink the metastatic tumours in my lungs that spread from the original cancer in my intestine, which was removed in July.

I'm having a whole new fun regimen codenamed "GIFOLFIRI," which involves irinotecan (Campto), folinic acid (Leucovorin), and our old friend 5-FU. No oxaliplatin as far as I can tell. The irinotecan is the nasty one this time around, with risks of hair loss (maybe, not for certain, but I don't care much) and possibly drastic diarrhea, which can be treated, but only about 15% of patients get it, so they don't give the antidiarrheals to everyone. They're also giving me bevacizumab (Avastin, an artificial monoclonal antibody) again to see if it can slow or reverse the tumour growth.

All of that is for the metastases in my lungs, of which I believe there are four, and which are still small and not growing too fast. (I've noticed no decreased lung function, although I haven't been doing really strenuous things such as bike riding like I used to.) I'm just not sure how I'll react, or how I will feel in a few days.

On a cheerier note, I've been enjoying these old TV theme songs (via JWalk), especially S.W.A.T. and of course the immortal Mission: Impossible (MP3 files). And crazy people who jump off mountains are fun to watch too.

Labels: cancer, chemotherapy, extremesports, fatigue, pain, television