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

Spring weather is coming, and with my new shaved head I'll have to remember to wear a hat and sunscreen—especially because chemotherapy side effects also mean I should avoid prolonged sun exposure.

More positively, my family has been looking at accommodations on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast for a weekend getaway, possibly sometime in June. We're the sort who avoid camping, and much prefer places with restaurants and perhaps a pool. There are a few such places up the coast from here, including Rockwater, Pender Harbour Resort (beware, flashy Flashness), the Sunshine Coast Resort, and the West Coast Wilderness Lodge (not really that much wilderness).

Does anyone have experience and recommendations for fun family places to stay between Gibsons and Egmont for a couple of nights?

Labels: cancer, chemotherapy, family, holiday, oceans, travel

I met with my oncologist, Dr. Kennecke, today. When I go to see him, I try to moderate my expectations. Pragmatically, I plan on the metastatic tumours in my lungs maybe having grown a little bit, or maybe shrunk a little bit, or maybe stayed stable. I don't go there thinking they will have miraculously disappeared, or that they will have grown dramatically.

And fortunately, that's pretty much where I am. Last week's CT scan showed that the largest of my four lung mets has grown slightly, but is still less than a centimetre across. A second one might also be a little bigger than before. The others seem like they're stable. So my chemo isn't eliminating them, but it appears to be keeping them somewhat at bay.

In the short term, I'm pleased with the other plans Dr. K and I worked out today. I have two more chemo treatments planned this month, the 15th and 16th of this round, which started back in October. Then, finally, I get to take a bit of a break through June, and with luck I might begin a clinical trial of a new artificial monoclonal antibody (more advanced than the Avastin I'm taking now), which may be able to enhance the action of the other chemotherapy agents, perhaps in July.

Having a few weeks off from chemo side effects will be nice. Maybe we'll take a weekend trip to Victoria or something. As nice things go, I'll take what I can get.

Labels: cancer, chemotherapy, holiday, travel, victoria

The Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, Germany, bills itself as the world's largest computer museum. James Harton at Flickr has some photos of key elements of the collection, which include old typewriters and an Enigma machine.

Labels: apple, encryption, geekery, retro, travel

From Salon: "More and more, the strict new [U.S.-Canada] border rules appear to be a huge cultural and economic mistake. As the United States walls itself off against illegal immigration and terrorism, the relationship between Americans and Canadians will be a casualty."

Labels: americas, politics, security, travel

• "You call this traveling? Twenty-one days, 15 countries, 45,000 miles—without setting foot outdoors."
  
  
• "The more affluent a country gets, the more things parents come to see as essential for raising children [so] as long as the world keeps creeping out of poverty, families will continue to shrink."
  
  
• jamNOW lets you jam online with other musicians, interact with fans, and listen to live streams from nightclubs all over the place. Haven't tried it, so I'm not sure how well it works.
  
  
• Looks like the iMac DV in our kitchen is finally officially obsolete. It's slow, but it still works pretty well.
  
  
• Are things really this bad for biology teachers in significant portions of the U.S.A.?
  
  
• "If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound."
  
  
• "I rejoice in this life that I have, and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me, and an earth that will abide without me."
  
  
• "Studies have shown that abstinence-only education does virtually nothing to prevent kids from having sex [and that] abstinence-only group[s] used birth control less frequently."
  
  
• "When I get a resume, the first thing I do is type the person's name into Google.  If nothing comes up, I trash the resume without reading it."
  
  
• "I don't want my ISP looking at how I use the Internet to target ads to me, period, any more than I want the phone company listening in on my conversations in order to sell me stuff."
  
  
• TripIt looks like one of the best online travel resources out there, though I haven't tried it.
  
  
• How to make your website or blog faster.
  
  
• The Universe is 13.73 billion years old, give or take only about 120 million years. Now that is a cool finding.

Labels: apple, astronomy, evolution, family, google, linksofinterest, music, school, science, sex, space, travel, web

I've ordered several of this year's Christmas presents online from the U.S., although none of them has arrived yet, which is a bit worrisome. Nevertheless, the current U.S.-Canadian dollar parity means waiting for Customs clearance is usually worth it.

For instance, I was looking for a particular present that I wanted to pick up today in town. No one had it in stock, despite several stores listing it on their websites. So I went to the manufacturer's online store in the U.S., and they were happy to take my order and ship it expedited to Canada, so that it may very well arrive before Christmas (no guarantees, though). And even with rush shipping and taxes, it was still several dollars cheaper than if I'd found it locally at retail.

My podcast co-host Paul has a post office box just across the border in Washington state (he lives in Cloverdale, B.C., about 15 minutes north of the line) which simplifies things even further: he can order from stores that don't normally ship to Canada at all, then pick up the stuff and deal with Customs himself. That saves him quite a bit of time and money—even when the dollar isn't as strong as it is now.

He does seem to be spending an awful lot more than he might otherwise on gadgets and gizmos across the border these days, though. I don't know if we're saving money in the end, or simply spending on more stuff.

Labels: americas, insidehomerecording, money, paulgaray, shopping, travel, web

Two photo-related things today:

Passport photos for infants: little things

Passport rules have changed in the past couple of years in Canada, and now children, even infants, must have their own passports rather than riding along on those of their parents. That includes passport photos. For our kids that was no problem, since when we got them passports in 2006 they were already 6 and 8 years old. But I've been to a few photo stores and watched as parents and staff have some difficulty keeping their floppy-headed two-month-olds upright, looking at the camera, and reasonably calm in order to get an acceptable shot.

Yesterday I had some time to kill in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano before my wife took me to my latest chemotherapy appointment, so I popped into the main store of Lens and Shutter to do some photographic geeking out. Their infant photography technique is smart: put a big white piece of cardboard on the floor, lie the child down on it, and have the parents stand behind the photographer to keep the kid engaged during the photo process. The little one I saw there was reasonably happy, kept his eyes open, and managed a reasonable passport photo in only a few tries.

My wife suggested I mention this as a useful tip. So if you have baby who needs a passport, go to Lens and Shutter or ask your local passport photographer to try a similar method.

Best astronomy photos: big things

Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy Blog has posted the 2007 edition of his annual Best Astronomy Photos list. This year features more galaxies and fewer planets than the 2006 version. Look at this example:

NGC 3808A and NGC 3808B are several hundred million light years away, yet still we can see what they were up to back then. Wow.

Labels: astronomy, family, photography, science, travel

In a comment on one of my photos of the first real snowstorm of the season yesterday (it's almost all melted now, by the way), an Australian reader noted that he had never seen snow first-hand in his life.

That's a strange concept for any Canadian, but I started thinking about it and realized that not only did our hominid predecessors evolve in parts of Africa where it never snows, even today the great centres of human population—some of the most densely inhabited parts of China, the vast majority of India, Indonesia, almost all of Africa, the supercities of South America, and elsewhere—are also largely snow-free zones.

In other words, it has probably always been true that a big proportion, and likely the majority, of the human species has never experienced snow. And despite much easier travel, that is becoming more true as populations and climate shift. It's amazing that any number of us, from the Inuit, to the mountain dwellers of Peru and Afghanistan, to the bureaucrats in Ottawa, Vienna, and Ulan Bator, can handle the white stuff at all.

Does anyone have any data to back up my theory?

Labels: australia, environment, evolution, snow, travel, weather

Via Brian Chin, here is a list of 30 particularly egregious mistaken predictions about technology, derived from Wikipedia's much longer list. I've always liked this one:

Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.

High speed being as much as 50 kph in some cases!

Labels: history, science, travel

• Speaking of the whole Dumbledore thing, here's a funny list: "Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall."
  
  
• "What is it about the world of enterprise software that routinely produces such inelegant user experiences?" One explanation: "'Enterprise software' is software that has to be sold to an 'enterprise', where someone who doesn't use the software (typically a manager) must be persuaded to use his purchasing authority to buy the software."
  
  
• Secrets that airlines don't want you to know (nothing too earth-shattering).
  
  
• 25 awesome action heroes.
  
  
• "Power users are a minority, and while they point the way to the future, they tend to be disappointed when the rest of the market catches up with an inferior product that has a lower barrier to new users."
  
  
• Gmail is finally getting IMAP support. If POP-only support frustrated you until now, you'll find that useful.
  
  
• "If it happened under Bush, Iran-Contra wouldn't even make Page A-18."

Labels: books, design, gmail, government, linksofinterest, movie, travel

My parents are visiting San Diego for a few days. Their hosts live right by the seashore in La Jolla, and are in no danger from the massive fires to the east, but the sky is still raining ash, and the sun is reddened by the smoke, as my dad's photo shows.

Hundreds of thousands of people (I thought I misread that, but no, 500,000 it is) have had to evacuate their homes. To see what's really going on from way high up, check out this satellite view:

Nasty. My parents return tomorrow, assuming flights out of San Diego Airport are running normally.

Labels: americas, disaster, family, fire, friends, sandiego, travel

I've been having unusual, interesting dreams this week. All of them have been about transportation problems.

Last night it was a strange chase by a Customs agent/bounty hunter who followed my companions and me across the border from the U.S. into Canada. The night before, I was running around an airport, late for a plane, with stuff spilling out of my luggage (by the way, earlier that day, in real life, I'd taken my parents to their flight). A day before that, I was struggling to get aboard a ferry. And Thursday night I was in a crowded van crawling through huge crowds on a muggy street, maybe in New Orleans.

I'm sure this all has something to do with fighting cancer—a way for my brain to try to resolve the frustrations of surgeries and radiation and chemotherapy going on and on and on. Anyone have further analysis?

Labels: airport, cancer, psychology, travel

This morning, for our last major meal in Victoria, my daughters and I let my wife sleep in and met my friend Simon for breakfast at a place he recommended, the Blue Fox Café on Fort Street.

I've walked by the Blue Fox a few times before, noting how busy it was, usually with a lineup. Fortunately, since today is Monday, we found no line at 9 a.m., although the place was still busy. I can see why it's popular: tasty and wholesome versions of basic breakfast foods (eggs, French toast, roast potatoes, sausage and bacon, coffee) in large portions, with reasonable prices and friendly service, plus vaguely ethnic Mediterranean-Mexican-Southwest decor (lots of saffron yellows and deep blues) and reggae music on the sound system. We all ate a lot, and my daughters had two hot chocolates each ("Best ever!" said my oldest). Ah, vacation.

Anyway, it seems that meal finally helped me reach a milestone. When I weighed myself at home tonight, I hit 176 pounds, the first time I've been over 175 since before my cancer surgery way back in July, some 30 pounds above what I weighed at my worst in hospital late in that month, and only about 15 pounds below what I probably should weigh, which is about 190. (I hovered around 200 pounds for many years until my cancer diagnosis early in 2007.)

I'm still a bit too thin and bony, but, other than the damned ileostomy bag, I feel more like a normal human being than I have for a long time. And I take considerable pleasure in being able to pig out pretty much as I like, within the confines of my diabetic diet. I hope I can keep that up once the next round of chemotherapy starts in a couple of weeks.

I'll be back to the Blue Fox on our next visit to Victoria, that's for sure. The kids want mom to come with us.

Labels: cancer, diabetes, food, travel, victoria

My family and I are in Victoria, B.C., where we often go on mini-vacations. There has been a remarkable sprouting of condominium towers downtown in the past year—the place has changed quite a bit in a way it hasn't done for a few decades, at least since the first high-rise office and apartment towers appeared here in the '60s and '70s.

We actually got lost on the way to our hotel because we didn't recognize some of the streets we'd been down dozens of times before, and part of the southward view of the Olympic Mountains in Washington from our eighth-floor suite has been blocked by a new tower built next door.

I'm not complaining—it's just surprising. Until recently, Victoria seemed to have eschewed (or avoided) the condo-tower mania of Vancouver, which has completely transformed that city's downtown (and my own neighbourhood in Burnaby) over the past 20 years.

Labels: family, travel, vancouver, victoria

My wife and I have always had a good relationship, and not just in the stereotypical sense. We're lovers and partners and parents together, of course, but we're also pals, best friends. And while the past year has Sucked in a Big Way so far, it has also, in some ways, forged our bond even more strongly.

First of all, last year, before my cancer diagnosis, my wife made a rather sudden and delightful transition from putting up with my web-nerd geekiness (in a wifely way) to becoming a web geek herself. She started her own podcast, and then took off into realms I haven't touched, including helping to organize tech conferences, going whole-hog with Second Life and Twitter, and finally pulling me, heels dragging, into Facebook. I hope I've been able to make finding her inner computer nerd a little easier.

Going the other way, she's proved incredibly supportive during my cancer treatment, and I hope that in going through this awful experience, I have also come to be able to conceptualize some of the shit she's gone through in her own life. I don't know if a man will ever know what childbirth feels like, for instance, but I now know how a perforated bowel and blocked kidney feel, as well as a not-quite-effective epidural anaesthetic. And that's just the start of it.

There are a lot of times now, good and bad, amazing and heartbreaking, when she and I can simply give one another a look, and understand. Not always, of course, but I feel closer to her now than I ever have.

In a way this is all background for what might seem like a shocking thing for her to do less than two days after I left hospital following major cancer surgery: she's flown out of town with three girlfriends for a party week in Las Vegas.

"B-b-but she's supposed to be taking care of you!" I imagine the traditionalists might sputter. "How could she possibly leave town? For Vegas?!"

And that's why I wanted all the explanation up there. Because she booked this trip a few weeks ago, when my surgery date was still in flux, so we knew full well that I might end up in some sort of treatment hellhole just as her ticket dates came up. But in 2007 so far we've already been through so many canceled trips and sidetracked fun times and so much crap. We talked and talked about it, and of course she should go. Even if I were still in hospital, she should go. Not cancel another trip, but take that trip, dammit.

As it turns out, my parents (who live next door) can take care of anything I need—including our daughters, until the in-laws pick the girls up on Tuesday—and I'm genuinely feeling better than I have for months and months. I mean, I was cracking jokes while being wheeled from Recovery to my ward, more then nine days ago. I've had a few setbacks in between, but I'm feeling emotionally great, if physically drained.

So I want my wife to spend this, my first week at home where I'm mostly just snoozing and shuffling around slowly anyway, to have a big blast of a good time on the Strip, partying at night and hanging out at the MGM Grand drinking huge poolside beverages during the day. I can't go right now, so I want her and her friends to have enough fun for both of us.

I think that having her do that while I get better here is a pretty accurate measure of how good we are for one another. It's realistic, it's fun, and it feels good for everybody. And, more important, neither of us gives a damn if somebody else thinks we're wrong about that.

Labels: cancer, family, lasvegas, love, travel

The other day in the car, my wife asked me if there were any places in the world I'd still like to visit. While yes, there are—it would be nice to see Paris, or New Zealand, or Istanbul—the question got me thinking more about my favourite places, the ones I've already been to where I'd like to return.

The ones that leaped to mind were all relatively close by, beautiful places in our Pacific Northwest neighbourhood of "Cascadia," wild places with water and evergreen trees, and each one reminds me of the people I shared them with:

1. Crater Lake, Oregon, for my parents - I stayed at the rimside lodge at Crater Lake National Park several times with my parents when I was a kid, starting in 1976. The last time I was there was a day visit in 1993. I still want to go back, to see the bluest water I've ever encountered (yes, it's really that colour), the darkest and most star-filled night skies I've ever seen, and the clear evidence of our volcanic part of the world—the lake formed a few thousand years ago when the former Mount Mazama erupted so violently that it collapsed in on itself, and the resulting caldera filled with rain and snowmelt.
   
   
2. Schooner Cove, Long Beach, B.C., for my friends - In the late '80s and the early '90s, my nerd friends and I (sometimes several dozen of us) made an annual car trip across Georgia Straight and the spine of Vancouver Island to Pacific Rim National Park, more specifically to the beachside campground at Schooner Cove south of Tofino. It took a bit of a hike through primeval rainforest and a slog along the sand to get there, which was part of the fun. We pitched tents and drank and sang around the fire over the May or July long weekend. Once we picked a bad spot and nearly got flooded out by high tide in the middle of the night, so we were smarter in subsequent years. Another time, a juvenile elephant seal was molting on the beach right near camp, and pretty much ignored us even when we were mere feet away. The beach is closed to camping now, which makes the memories even better.
   
   
3. Cannon Beach, Oregon, for my wife and daughters - I'd never been to Cannon Beach before my wife took me there in 1997, when she was pregnant for the first time. We've gone back several times since with both our daughters, in 2000, 2004, 2005, and 2006. It's an expensive tourist town in a spectacular location, which is one reason we like it so much: we can stay in a top-flight resort hotel steps away from the sand, and return from roasting marshmallows at sunset to a room with two bathtubs and a full kitchen. (As our fridge magnet says, "I love not camping.") We have had tremendous fun there each time, and I'm sad that my cancer treatment means we can't go back this summer, even though we were getting a little tired of it by last year.

Don't get me wrong. I love deserts and the tropics and mountains and other places too, but these three spots mean the most to me. So, inevitably, as we talked about them, the question came up: what if I don't make it back there? I do have metastatic cancer, after all, and there is even a small but non-trivial chance that I could die in surgery this week, something that's always a risk with an operation.

Here's what I told my wife. If I die, donate anything donatable: any organs or other parts, corneas, hair, whatever is useful to someone. If the rest of my body can be used to train medical students or get turned into a classroom skeleton or something, great, do that too. If there's anything left that no one can make use of, cremate that. Have a party, but not any kind of religious or spiritual ceremony—I don't believe in any of that stuff, so please don't pretend I did. If you can get together a band, have them play some fun songs, plus "Four Seasons in One Day" by Crowded House.

Then, when all that's done, split up the batch of my ashes and take them to Crater Lake, and Schooner Cove, and Cannon Beach, and put them in the water. Then enjoy those places as I did.

Labels: cancer, cannonbeach, craterlake, family, friends, longbeach, travel

Back in February, before I had my first, small cancer surgery, as the date approached I started getting a weird set of mixed messages from surgeons, doctors, medical offices, and so on—like they weren't communicating with each other properly, or weren't noticing that they were sending me conflicting information and requests about dates and appointments.

As my planned July 26 major surgery date approaches, it's started happening again. Three days ago I called my surgeon's office quite specifically to see if my wife's planned trip out of town in mid-July could possibly cause a conflict, i.e. would my July 26 date be moved earlier for any reason? They said no. Then this morning they called to say that the date might move forward (I had to remind them about my call on that topic on Friday!), and could I meet with another surgeon on Wednesday? Then this afternoon, a different person from the same office called to say that my original surgeon wanted me to meet with a urologist—on one of the dates the first person had said could be my surgery date.

Once again, WTF? Now I have no idea what the hell is going on. I meet with Dr. Kennecke my oncologist tomorrow, and Dr. Phang, one of the surgeons, on Wednesday. I hope we can sort something out. Fighting cancer has a significant mental component, and right now the confusion and uncertainty are not helping matters. I want to make sure my medical team understands that.

Labels: cancer, ego, family, surgery, travel