Science Fiction Double Feature -Tuesday, July 13, 2004 -5:29 am-
A couple of people pointed out that I forgot to mention why I was in the ER. I was waiting on Michelle. She'd been stung by a bee in the inside of the wrist and wasn't reacting well to it. 10 hours after the sting she was still swelling and getting redder. Michele mentioned that this is what Terry does when she's stung and it leads to cellulitis. I was a bit worried that she was swelling enough to cause the same dangers that compartment hemorrhages do. So we went to the ER. We waited 2.5 hours and then they took her into the Triage station. They talked to her, didn't even look at her arm, and sent her on her way with a prescription for massive doses of steroids. The next afternoon, more than 24 hours from the sting, the swelling was still increasing, her color in her arm was terrible, her finger tips were getting cold, and the back of her hand was cold. I called Mom, who called Dr. Melvin, who called Dr. Vaquero, and we were off to the races. After flying across town in the car and nearly jogging across campus to the med center, we got to the office of Dr. Vaquero. By office I mean a place with a desk and filing cabinets and such, not a office with a examination room. He looked at Michelle for a while in the hallway. He had another passing doctor look at her as well. He asked if we'd seen anyone about it. We told him we'd gone to the ER the night before but that the attention he'd just paid to her arm was far in excess of everything the ER had done. He and the other doctor looked at each other in a amazed and displeased manner and made some comment about only being in a hallway. He asked what ER we had visited. When he found out it was OSU, he got a bit stony faced and didn't say anything. In the end, he had her stay on the steroids, though at a much lower and tapering dose, added a script for antibiotics, and recommended that she keep taking advil and benedryl. About 5 days later the swelling and redness began to disappear.
I nearly had a trip to the ER myself last night. I think I've mentioned that I've started making chainmail. One aspect that really interests me is the tooling. This is partly because one of the people I'm teaching has little hand strength and coiling is difficult for her. Two nights ago I woke up knowing how to make a little jig that would slide over the mandrel and force the wire to coil tightly against the mandrel. The angle of the coil would force the jig resulting is a quick and perfect coil. The best part was that it would require very little human intervention, just a fingertip's worth of pressure to keep the jig from spinning around the mandrel. Last night I built the jig. The first test went wonderful with the drill in low gear. I should mention that I don't have some pansy-assed drill from the Harder Side of Sears. I've got a top of the line DeWalt contractors drill that will turn 6500 RPM in high gear and has enough torque to roll me across the floor in low gear. I started a new coil and switched the drill into high. Everything was going along swimmingly until the wire feeding into the jig fouled, caught my hand, and pulled it into the mandrel. My fingers were coiled tightly around the mandrel under several wraps of wire before I could get my finger off the trigger. I ended up having to go find the snips with a mandrel and drill attached to my right hand. After cutting myself free, I realized how lucky it is that I'm a safety freak. When I coil I wear heavy leather gauntlets and a full face shield. Looking at my gloves (heavily grooved from the wire) and at my seriously bruised fingers, I've little doubt that since the wire was running as it tightened over my fingers, that I would have lost the ring and pinky fingers of my right hand. The wire to be taken up now is coiled around something so it can't foul. I can consistently turn 40 feet of wire into a coil in between 6 and 7 seconds now, which is a hell of a lot faster than by hand. My next adventure is to modify Wiss M3 snips to work with coil sizes 1/8" and smaller, as well as modify the snips to prevent them from closing far enough to cause C shaped rings. I love having a project.
I joined my first RPG last night. Yes, yes, I know I said I didn't like gaming, but this one is perfect for me. I've joined IdleRPG on darkmyst.org. It's great. All games should be this easy to learn and play. I'm so good at it.
Due to a recent photoshoot, I've once again been living in Photoshop. The machine I do my graphics work on has 1.38GB of RAM in it. Tonight I was swapping like mad. That kind of impresses me since I'm on an OS with masterful memory management. I also need a second video card to support a 3rd and 4th monitor. Yes, a 3rd and 4th, I've already got two. Tonight I had work sprawled out across the two monitors on the workstation and the laptop (I've got a thing so one mouse and one kbd just float across the computers [no, not a KVM, it's all software and relies on the computers autodetecting each other]). I need more screen real estate badly. When I was done with the images and ready to export them for web use, I was disappointed, as usual, with the resultant jpgs. I finally realized that if I was having a problem, other's were too, so I googled it. Turns out that nobody respects color profile information and so the images were being crashed from AdobeRGB to sRGB (the evilest of all color spaces) by the display programs. Converting from AdobeRGB to sRGB before jpeg compressing the files solved much of this dilemma. This also means I should go back and re-export every bit of content I've done for the web. Ever. Oh. Joy. However, I also found a annoying trend. No two display programs interpret the jpeg standard exactly the same. This image shows what I am talking about (WARNING: This image is large, dialup beware!). This is the same file, displayed on the same machine in three different programs. Note the variance. Basically this means I've no chance of actually showing you all what I want you to see. Wheee.
After fixing the jpegs I had to create a gallery of them for the website. I've got a little program that largely automates this process for me. However, it wasn't working quite right. It kept making bits of the page disappear. After cussing at it for some time, and finally setting display: inline; for every class, id, and tag I noticed that my very first rule in the stylesheet read span { display: none; }. I've no idea what I was trying to test months ago with at, but by god that line met a fiery death. Blarg.
6am. I go bed now.
