All the crap that doesn't belong on my real blog.

I finally got my cast off today! Bone density tests came back good, so I bought myself a 24 of Labatt Blue and a 40 of Olde English cause I’m black like that :3

It’s going to be a couple weeks of physio before I’m walking like a normal person again but I’m thrilled that shit is working out. I have to move in a month so it’s about damn time. Now I have an excuse to get a wicked pimp-ass cane!

Got my second cast on Friday, had another 3 x-rays and went in today to get my bone density checked (I’m a certified alkie). While I was on the table getting my spine scanned the technician went oop! you have a piercing! Cue awkward belly-button ring removal. Not the most masculine thing I’ve ever done in front of a woman. I asked if my prince albert might be a problem, apparently not. Cue awkward divulgence of unrequired information.

According to the doc I’m in “normal” shape for 6 weeks in, the two middle bones are broken in such a way that if I exert too much pressure on them before they heal there is a risk of my arch collapsing. Then they tell me “go ahead and put a little weight on it.” Thanks but I think I’ll stick to the wheelchair until the cast comes off. Three weeks, I hope.

And now my favourite part, the ionizing radiation exposure tally!

X-Rays: 12
Cat scans: 3
Bone density (weak, scanner-like X-rays): 3

I finally got my solid cast today. Scored another 60 T3s (though how I’ll make them last three weeks when I went through all 50 last week I do not know). I was offered a choice between a plaster or fibreglass cast, the former being covered by OHIP and the latter costing $75. I said “I’ll take the one I’ve already paid for.”

I don’t get the fibreglass cast thing. It can’t make you heal faster and I’d still be in a wheelchair; which is really all that’s bothering me about this whole situation. The pain is mostly gone and even at its most agonizing it did not compare to the frustration I feel every day I am without the use of my legs. So what’s the point of paying $75 for a hunk of fibreglass that you can’t even turn into a boat or something useful when it comes off? I just don’t get it.

Anyway the latest X-Rays show no change (that’s good) and like I said, 60 T3s so woo.

I’m going to start an irradiation count because they act as though they win a hundred bucks every time they hit the X-Ray button.

X-Rays: 9
CT (cat scans = 3D x-rays): 3

With my lifestyle radiation is the last thing I expect to give me cancer, I just think it sounds neat when I say they irradiated my leg. Like it has superpowers now or something.

When we last met I told you how I heroically broke a bone in my foot walking home from the pub. Today I went in for new X-rays and what was supposed to be my “permanent” cast (good lord I hope not) but the swelling was still high so they simply reinforced it. Then herr doktor told me it was two bones broken, not just one. He continued, telling me he wanted to send me for a CT scan to make sure I didn’t need pins and surgery to ensure the bones fused properly. I pooped a little.

I wheeled my ass down to the radiography wing to get my leg irradiated again, got imaged pretty damned fast by a cute 30-something gay sweedish technician and after sneaking away for a smoke got back to the fracture clinic whereupon I was told the death toll had risen to four bones thanks to the higher resolution imaging. The specialist says this is serious stuff. The good news is my bones seem to be aligned properly to heal (I think the term he used was “no displacement”) so I don’t need the pins. Thank christ; I’m only starting my tenure in a wheelchair and it has already gone on far too long – surgery would just be fucking icing.

Anyway I finally got a script for 50 more T3s, the exchange went something as follows:

“They only gave me 20 T3s, don’t I win a prize?”

“Yeah, I can get you a few more – for four bones I think you deserve it”

Thanks doc. They’re just T3s but you’re a pal.

The bill this time around was $13something, which means the difference between 20 T3s and 50 T3s is about $2. What a country

After about two weeks of fucking with it I finally have one of four physical servers running Xen 4. With the new virtualization platform comes new VMs too, I woke up at around 5am this morning and shut down our old firewall, taking all the sites with it, and started the migration. It was bumpy and the sites were offline for about a half hour but the heroic ending was just after I had hit the last required “enter” to boot up the finished router my office internet connection went down for a solid half hour, so I was sitting here with no way to know if it had worked or not.

It did. Hip hip hooray!

The new VM seems to perform a lot better than its predecessor too, it went through a sustained 90mbit/s test and didn’t break a sweat. The next step will be migrating the rest of the servers to Xen 4, then I can finally set my sights on adding new features.

I was walking home from the pub a few nights ago when I suddenly felt a wet snap in the middle of my left foot. I immediately made a twirl to the ground, having apparently lost the foot for a moment. As soon as I hit the ground the searing pain hit. A few asian broads walking by covered their faces and laughed while they picked up pace. Thanks asian broads. Mind you I was ambling like a drunk and they probably thought I was just overreacting to a misstep.

Were I not so shitface drunk (the tail end of a typical 5-day dusk-til-dawn bender) I probably would not have made it home, and had I slightly more common sense I would have called for an amberlamps. Turns out I have what the specialist called a “break to be respected” in my G2 or somethingorother bone. It’s one of the ones where the fore-arch of your foot makes contact with the ground. Not pain, agony.

This week has seen a heat wave just about everywhere and Toronto has not been spared in the slightest. I had to make it to the car the next morning in 30 degree humid weather, with a massive hangover and a wee hair of the dog, hopping on one foot, having had only one broken cigarette that morning, in my heavy trench coat because my clothes are falling apart (anything else was dirty or covered in puke), holding on to my poor friend for dear life with my giant balloon-foot in a queer mix of searing and throbbing pain – you have never seen a man drip more sweat or make more strange faces trying to cover a mere hundred metres or so than me on that day.

All of my ID including my OHIP and any means to get a new card were stolen when I was a wee lad, and I was told by the registration nurse in ER that had it been reported stolen I would not have been covered. Thank god I’ve had more important shit to do all these years. For those of you not from these parts, OHIP is the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, Ontario’s universal health insurance. For those of you from America, universal healthcare is a system in which if you’re a citizen, you’re cared for – and if you have money you can be cared for more (that’s called Two-Tier). Plain OHIP covered my X-rays, casts, and crutches. My prescription came to $11something.

I got all that with a flimsy blue card from a different hospital in the 90s. God bless Canada.

Anyway a hospital ID card from when I was a kid did the trick and away I went for a 3 hour wait to see the X-Ray tech and get a temporary splint. Now don’t get me wrong, it was a 3 hour wait because my fracture was low man on the totem pole, it had already been broken for over 12 hours and there were people with real problems in there. This was also Victoria Day, a civic holiday, so these folks were understaffed as hell and the fracture clinic wasn’t open. So I was given the splint, a prescription for 20 T3s and was sent packing with a set of crutches, told to come back early next morning to see the specialist and get a better cast.

You shoulda seen the bruise my foot developed into – o yes, da whole ting me bais! Trippy assed band of dark blue and purple with cloudy arms stretching onto a magenta and yellow background. It was really quite pretty looking, despite my foot being the shape of a small football. This cast will last two weeks when another, hopefully last cast will be put on because the foot was (still is) so swollen it will eventually become ineffective at immobilizing the foot. I’m not sure how long this is really going to take because smokers are apparently cursed with extremely long heal times and increased chances of complications. Fuck cancer, now I have a real reason to quit.

By now I’ve found out that I’m completely useless on crutches, after taking about 20 minutes of start-stop action down to the cab I had to dry heave a few solid times before I could get in. Cue wheelchair rental. It turns out Shoppers Drug Mart Home Health Care has a wheelchair rental service and it’s a fucking bargain as far as I’m concerned: $50 a month. $50 a month to go from crawling to my bathroom and back and nearly puking to wheeling out to the shop to pick up fags and milk. Sweet, limited freedom.

I will say this however, despite there being ramps for this building and the one in which my fags are bought there are no ramps in the curbs, requiring one to either dismount onto one’s ass and drag the chair over the curb or wheel all the way down to the driveway of one building, all the way down the road to the next, up that driveway and on to the other’s ramp – a ramp so steep I had to drag myself up by the nice, rusted rail. I honestly can empathize with the handicapped now; while my cast will probably only last 6 weeks and their disabilities may last until death or science heals them I will certainly have ‘walked’ a mile in their wheels

This is easily the worst thing that’s happened to me, after my ex leaving – but I’m coping and now that I can make my own food and pick up my own fags I feel a lot better. The throbbing pain is way down and it mostly only hurts if there’s pressure put on it so there’s not much to complain about now – but I’ll be damned if I don’t kick and scream and bitch and moan about it like a little girl.

I’m a gimp, I’m allowed. ^.^

Every now and then our firewall locks up its physical server, which takes web services and administrative access down with it. Before installing the ERA/0s (DRACs) in the old servers (there’s embedded iLO on the new ones) I used to have to send someone (which involves waiting forever and/or lots of money) to the datacentre to give the thing a hard boot, but thanks to the console redirection and virtual power management capabilities we have now I was able to spin up a VPN serving VM, log in to the network, bring up the physical display on the downed server and with the click of a button hard reset it. Total time, including preparing the back-channel VPN: 30 minutes. Now that a VM has been configured it will simply be a matter of booting it and logging on in the future.

The ERA/0s were $25 a piece; if you use them just once they’ve already paid for themselves.

I just smoked this big stanky roach and got to recalling a funny story from my youth that I thought I might share. It’s all about these here roaches, see?

The trained eye may have observed that there is a sophisticated containment system for the specimens and clear hazardous materials labeling.

Once upon a time, many years ago, in a galaxy far far away one of my dealers offered me the bag you see above, though it was half full at the time. I was pretty poor at the time so naturally I couldn’t turn it down, what a godsend, amirite?! What I failed to take into account was he was pretty fucking sick. There was a nasty winter bug going down around town and he and his buddies (who had contributed) were all sick as dogs, and of course their goobers were all over the shit. I only put two and two together two days too late: the roomate and I were out of commish for the next two weeks – but we kept hitting them in the bong cause we figured even if burning the paper didn’t kill the little troopers we’d be immune eventually anyway.

Things eventually picked up again and I stashed the toxic waste for a few years until another desperate spell with the ex-before-last. That’s around when that picture was taken, we ended up smoking them all. I’m pretty sure that after a few years in a ziplock bag with that sad of a face on it anything that was left in there had died.

The moral of the story is… don’t be poor – because you might resort to doing regrettable things. Like smoking your buddy’s goobers. Or something like that. And that’s just not sanitary.

It’s just not sanitary.

The simple version is great if you need to use huge thumbnails since it generates its own set based on the dimensions you provide and the full sized image. Unfortunately this takes more resources and slightly longer to do than simply embedding the already-generated thumbnails on the main site.

The thumbnail URLs of each image are in the GUID field of your gallery’s RSS feed, we’ll use the KB Advanced RSS widget to grab and display it – but it’s going to take some knowledge of HTML:

1. Log into your dashboard and go to the plugins panel.
2. Activate the KB Advanced RSS plugin and go to Widgets under the Appearance Menu.
3. Drag the widget onto your layout and set the number of items you would like listed.
4. Go to your 420furs Gallery (i.e. http://420furs.org/gallery/karma/)
5. Click on the RSS icon next to your username and copy the URL you’re sent to
6. Supply that URL in the widget’s configuration box
7. Take a look at how I configured one below and play around with the settings until you get what’s just right for you. If you want to scale the thumbnail add a style attribute to the img tag that only contains a width property:

To list the latest posts on your 420furs gallery in your blog:

1. Log into your dashboard and go to the plugins panel.
2. Activate the RSS Image plugin and go to Widgets under the Appearance Menu.
3. Drag the widget onto your layout and configure the size and number of thumbnails you want to appear. This plugin makes completely new thumbnails from the full sized image so it is safe to use a large value for the dimensions, it won’t appear warped.
4. Go to your 420furs Gallery (i.e. http://420furs.org/gallery/karma/)
5. Click on the RSS icon next to your username and copy the URL you’re sent to
6. Supply that URL in the RSS Images widget’s configuration box and you’re all set!