in hospital

I'm in the hospital OSF st jo in bloomington, the catheter they put in at ST james didn't work from the moment I left there. Went back the next day. tehy found out there was some brick wall up in there that was blocking it and that it actually wasn't in the bladder in the first place. They sent me down here, where urologist tried to clear block but couldn't, my urethra is simply to diseased and in such bad shape. I have two choices, wear a pubical catheter for the rest of my life or have major surgery that few people do. I would have to go to a big city for that.

the hospital tv's have a kind of webtv thing that's letting me post to blogger but mHB is blocked. So if any mHBers see this, let everyone know, okay.

I don't know how long I'm going to be here, turns out the UTI that st james thought I had was wrong, it was a different one that needed a different antibiotic.. I also found out my potassium level is a little low, just like mom's. I feel like crappe, sore, because of what the urologist tried to do to my penis something leaked into my scrotum and it's swollen and hurts like heck to touch. sitting up is uncomfortable for long periods but I can do it though it tends to make the swelling worse. They were worried about my blood pressur at first because it was high, but it returned to what is normal for me, which is a little low once I got calmed down and more comfortable. They also were worried about my blood sugar but that's been normal except for the first time they tested.


Wishing mHB the best.

in hospital

I'm in the hospital OSF st jo in bloomington, the catheter they put in at ST james didn't work from the moment I left there. Went back the next day. tehy found out there was some brick wall up in there that was blocking it and that it actually wasn't in the bladder in the first place. They sent me down here, where urologist tried to clear block but couldn't, my urethra is simply to diseased and in such bad shape. I have two choices, wear a pubical catheter for the rest of my life or have major surgery that few people do. I would have to go to a big city for that.

the hospital tv's have a kind of webtv thing that's letting me post to blogger but mHB is blocked. So if any mHBers see this, let everyone know, okay.

I don't know how long I'm going to be here, turns out the UTI that st james thought I had was wrong, it was a different one that needed a different antibiotic.. I also found out my potassium level is a little low, just like mom's. I feel like crappe, sore, because of what the urologist tried to do to my penis something leaked into my scrotum and it's swollen and hurts like heck to touch. sitting up is uncomfortable for long periods but I can do it though it tends to make the swelling worse. They were worried about my blood pressur at first because it was high, but it returned to what is normal for me, which is a little low once I got calmed down and more comfortable. They also were worried about my blood sugar but that's been normal except for the first time they tested.


Wishing mHB the best.

LOLelection

I just had to do it. I used this ImageMagick based perl script to caption the images

YES!

Yes We Can!

Obama wins, and I am very happy.

The Glade Lady

Ahh the Glade Lady in those commercials. I know you've seen them.

Friends are coming over and she wants her house to smell nice, so she pulls out a Glade candle. But oh, her friends mustn't know she uses Glade candles rather than overpriced candles from Bath and Body Works, White Barn Candles, those Yankee Candles, or whatever overpriced Candles of the week those upper-middle class wannabe's crowds tell them to buy. So she pulls of the label and throws it away, but it sticks to her LBD without her knowing. It's a nice LBD by the way, she's wearing pearls with it, it appears to be before 5pm. Her friends ring the doorbell, she lets them in. Her very casually dressed sweaters n' dockers clad friends. They enjoy the smell and ask if she baked, (I remember the older version where she used the candle to disguise the fact that she was serving a pre-cooked purchased pie), this time she says no it's a candle...from france. But then one of her friends sees the sticker and says, "Haven't you ever heard of Glah-day".

Then there's the one where she's in her tub at home and a friend calls and she says she's at the spa with some wonderful spa fragrance blissing her out, and then her husband knocks on the door and her friend asks, who's that and she says, "my aromatherapist"

Don't forget the suburban Yoga one. What's suburban yoga? That's Yoga for women who aren't really interested in the spiritual aspects, just in bonding with their friends, wearing cute yoga wear, using it as excercise so they can still fit in their size 6's, and basically doing yoga as a status symbol.

Well at least Glade lady is doing the class at home. Her house smells nice and her friends ask what it is and she says it's a boutique fragrance that helps her plug in to her karma. and one of her friends says, "Yeah, Glade plug in"

The Glade lady symbolizes one of the things that's wrong with America. A heavy focus on appearing affluent even when you're not. Glade lady can't admit she uses glade, that would be declasse, just like people like her don't like admitting they shop at Target and would die before shopping at JC Penny or worse, Sears. (Which led to other people inventing the Tar-zhay thing to make fun of them). Ladies like her can't comparison shop for hair care and get a cheap blowout from some nice lady who's been doing hair for years, they always go to the overpriced pretentious "salon" that the other desperate housewife cougar wannabe's go to. Glade lady does yoga and pilates and says she goes to spas because she wants to appear more affluent than she is.

Bleah.

Glade lady should say, "Like my candle, it's glade, smells great doesn't it, only $2.99. Do you really want to spend money in those pretentious candle shops in the mall in these economic times?" "Like my dress? Got it at JC Penny on sale, $49 bucks. Pearls, K-Mart. pretty aren't they. Makeup? Walgreens. And that aint no miracle $20 mascara I'm wearing, I've got fake lashes, look great don't they. $2.99 Andrealash #33's. Where's the big SUV? We sold it, because it was stupid for us to buy it in the first place, we only got 1 kid and we never go off road. We're selling this big 2500 square foot MChouse in this subdivision and moving back to the city, no more wasting time and money on long commutes."

Like that will happen.

Oh, by the way, the name of the pretty redheaded glade lady actress is Dori Kelly

Trans blogs for Obama

I know, it's been a looong time, but this is important. Trans people getting together and showing political enthusiasm as a community.

Trans for Obama page on ActBlue

As Caprice Bellefleur says

a number of trans and allied bloggers are renewing our plea to help the campaign of Barack Obama for president. Back in June a group of us sent out a request for donations to the Obama campaign through a specific page on Act Blue, the online clearinghouse for Democratic action, which was set up with the help of the Stonewall Democrats. The purpose of this effort was to demonstrate to the Obama campaign that we trans people and our allies are a significant group supporting him.

I"m from Illinois and when I saw his speach at the 2004 DNC I said out loud, "He's going to be president someday."

New pspvc version out. Cool!

There's a new version of pspvc, the PSP video encoding tool for Linux out.

http://pspvc.sourceforge.net

It now supports compiling with more versions of GCC
It now has a display of Elapsed time and estimated time to completion.
It now supports choosing the thumbnail image and you can see the thumbnail, and choose another via a new gui tool.

Here is what it looks like when you start it up. Note that the default encoding is H.264/AVC.

The GUI is simple but very effective and not annoying like PSP Video 9 for Windows UI is.

Gere I've selected the video to convert (an older episode of GeekBrief that I hadn't converted yet), format (MP4 SP) and bitrates.

Here is the conversion status window, with status bars and the new elapsed and estimaed time remaining indicators. Notice how long it thinks it's going to take. It seems to over estimate, but the box pspvc is running on only has a 294 MHz CPU. And it probably is better to be conservative in estimates.

Ahh, it's finally done, and here is the choose a thumbnail feature. There's Cali Lewis of GeekBrief in the thumbnail that's visible. You select a point in the video using that seconds widget and choose create and then you see the thumbnail. If you don't like it you can choose a different time point and hit the button again until you get the one you want. Very handy. I don't think any of the other PSP video encoding tools on any platforms has this feature.

Thanks to the developers of pspvc for a well designed and useful application that does what it's supposed to do and does it well. If you want a pspvc video encoding tool on Linux, look no further than pspvc.

I wonder if it's possible to port it to Windows, because PSP Video 9's UI is majorly annoying. I'd rather have a more pspvc like UI that doesn't get in my way. The OSX FFMPEGX is similar (but they're having problems with H.264 AVC created with it on 2.70+ firmware right now)

Keepvid

http://keepvid.com

Thanks to geekbrief.tv vodcast #18 for clueing me on this.
Know all those flash videos on youtube, myspace, grouper, etc,
(Like say this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv_wGcSURw :-) ) and how you
can't save them for later? Or if you're running a non x86 Linux
without a flash plugin that you can't see them at all?

Keepvid is an online tool that works in a similarly to sites
like tinyurl. But instead of shortening a URL it gives you a
link to the real flv video, that you can actually save and play,
watch, or convert at ones leisure.

Geekbrief.tv

http://geekbrief.podshow.com

Geekbrief.tv is a geeky and informative vodcast hosted by Cali
Lewis aka Luria Petrucci, who rivals Paige Davis of the classic
Trading Spaces on the Adorably Cute and Perky scale.

You can subscribe to the cast via iTunes, it's free. It's in
iPod format, watch it via Quicktime or in iTunes itself.
Mplayer, ffplay, etc should do the trick in Linux.

PSPVC, a graphical PSP video conversion tool for Linux

http://pspvc.sourceforge.net

I've been envying Mac OSX users their FFMPEGX software for a
long time. Although standard command line ffmpeg works, it can
be difficult to get it working properly, sometimes it required
patching with not-ready-for-primetime patches, or required
finding somebody's altered version of the code. It was also
very difficult to get H.264/AVC encoding to work. And then you
had command line options to deal with which have changeds with
various releases of the source. Sometimes a ffmpeg binary that
did create working videos wouldn't do so when you upgraded the
PSP's firmware. Or if they did work, perhaps titles weren't
displayed correctly in the PSP file browser.

PSPVC changes that. It's basically ffmpeg sources with specific
patches, and x264 code, plus a GTK 2 graphical interface. To
get it compiled and installed you just run the install script.

The GUI is simple and I wish there were a few more options in it
(you still pretty much have to create the .THM thumbnails from
the command line and perhaps output choices for iPod video too
would be good), but it works

VNC

http://www.tightvnc.com/

VNC lets one control their computer remotely as if they were
sitting in front of it. You see what's on the screen and can
operate the computer the same way. Sure WinXP has remote
assistance but it's not the same thing. In WinXP home Ican
request assistance but cannot control another machine with it.

VNC is also cross platform, meaning you can run the server on a
windows machine and control it from a Linux box, or vice versa.

Everyone should have VNC installed on their computer, that way
if you're having computer problems, instead of trying to tell
your friendly computer geek friend what you see on your screen,
she can actually see the screen and directly help you fix your
problem.

--
Makeup, it takes believing in. Like a magic carpet, it's belief
that makes it fly. Otherwise, it's just a rug.
If you believe in it, makeup has a magic all it's own.
Of course, makeup is only dime-store magic. But it works well
enough, when it's used properly.", the makeup artist, from the
book Sooner or Later, based on the 1978 TV movie of the same
name.

Immigration

Well gee, instead of complaining about Mexicans sneaking across
our border and building a wall and militarizing it, why not work
on making living conditions inside Mexico more like that of the
U.S. Then they wouldn't want to sneak

But with Mexico overpopulated as it is, and with corrupt
police/government (when the tourist books tell you how bad it is,
it's bad), and your typical Latin American socio economic system
where you have a few European descended folks who own and
control virtually everything and a whole bunch of dirt poor
folks of mostly Native American descent, who wouldn't want to
leave.

Another part of the problem is that US business and government
wants Mexico to stay that way so we can take advantage of their
natural resources and labor for our own benefit.

--
Makeup, it takes believing in. Like a magic carpet, it's belief
that makes it fly. Otherwise, it's just a rug.
If you believe in it, makeup has a magic all it's own.
Of course, makeup is only dime-store magic. But it works well
enough, when it's used properly.", the makeup artist, from the
book Sooner or Later, based on the 1978 TV movie of the same
name.

Friday Cat Blog: Kittoi Bites Vettoi

I told you she was evil.


My sister took the kittoi to the V E T today (Yes, we say it like that, just in case), to check her over and to give us results of some tests. Apparently her kidneys are doing good, thanks to the special food, but there may be something going on with her liver. :-( She's had ear problems now and then and the vet worked on her ears. This vet does not have owners back in the examination/treatment rooms. With Ki Ki the Evil One, that is not a good idea. He must have did something to really tick her off because she bit him. Bit him good my sister says, she saw some gauze on his hand. He wants to see her back in 10 days. :-(

In a strange way, I'm proud of the kittoi for showing her fierce prowess even at her advanced age.. I bet the vet won't underestimate the power of The Evil One again. She may not be as ummm fat, I mean pleasantly fluffy, as she used to be but she still is a good sized cat with large paws and mouth.

I've given her another nickname: Vetbiter, in honor of Bettoi's kittoi, Ms. Aurora Crankpants Thunderfist Quickbiter.

All Hail the Mighty, "Three Socks and a Slipper Ki Ki Kitty McGruff the Magnificent Vetbiter"!