More this & that, from Oldest Living Blogger....

I want a girl just like the girl that ruptured dear old dad.....

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Roof-repair rocket scientist in action! When they did the roof on this building, water leaked down through four floors above me to stain my recently-painted kitchen ceiling. This is my way of saying "Thanks a hell of a lot, guys!" 

Meanwhile, back in the garage, my car's now home from its visit to my nearby dealer's for their $50 Spring Special, and all it cost me was $491.89.... Gawd! I'm just delighted they weren't charging more for that Special... but the good news is, my 13-year-old Neon thinks it's only two. Could be worse.


Enjoy your weekend, Everyone!




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A little 'homework' on the costs of cancer treatment....

Yes, I'm a senior, and I have a B.C. CareCard that provides me with paid health care coverage - but that's not what I'm getting at here. I got curious earlier in the evening about what it costs our government health services to provide the care we get from our Cancer Agency here.

I didn't find any figures for Canadian services, but I did find some relating to American services, which would be somewhat different, but probably close enough for 'ballpark figuring'. These figures are from reports done in 2004 and 2005, so are not present prices. They're impressive, all the same.


A radical prostatectomy, which I think means complete removal of the prostate, and is used as a base-line to judge other procedures costs was then in the range of from $18,500 to $20,000 U.S., and the brachytherapy seed implants procedure was in the range of from $10,000 to $15,000 U.S. The Iodine I-125 seeds like I have at that time were priced at $45.00 each, and the average number of them per patient is approximately 100, or a total of $4,500.00 U.S. - I've been told that at today's prices that's now about $6,000.00 for the seeds.


So controlling prostate cancer is fast, effective, and relatively clean & painless, but it isn't cheap. Because they've done everything possible to make me comfortable and to solve my problem, and haven't mentioned what it was costing them to do it, except to answer my questions, I signed up to become a monthly donor so that I can at least partly repay them for their generosity and kindness. I figure that if I could support the tobacco industry for all those years before I finally quit that, then I can certainly find the money to help support the Cancer Agency which is doing its best to save my life.


While over there at their office, I was invited to join a support group of guys who have had prostate cancer treatments. I asked, "Who wants to sit around and chat about something that tried its best to kill me after I gave it free room and board for over 70 years?" The ladies in the office didn't have an answer for that one....



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It's a lovely day in Vancouver...

This is the view from KatKam a few minutes ago, looking from above the Burrard Street bridge toward Vanier Park and the Planetarium (white cone-shaped roof) and across English Bay. Those hills in the distance across on the horizon are parts of West Vancouver and Bowen Island in Howe Sound. On the left horizon is Point Grey, the home of the University of British Columbia.


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More weird news.....

Today's "Question Everything" is: "What the hell's wrong with the gene pool in Iran?"

"Why do you ask?" you say. Because: their puppet president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has a history of making wild and crazy statements that defy logic, common sense, and rational behavior, and now, like a bolt from the blue, comes this Iranian cleric, from a long line of Ding-Dongs and Twinkies, saying "the cause of earthquakes is women dressing immodestly." 

This from a guy who goes around dressed in an outfit like the Wicked Witch of The East, skirts dragging on his shoes. Once again, these merchants of myth are picking on women. That's probably because they haven't got the balls to pick on someone of their own sex, weight and vindictiveness. Once again, this serves to underline the fact that religions are full of crackpots and loony-tunes who think that anything at all which can come out of their mouths is something which is actually coming straight from God's lips to your ears. It just ain't so, Kiddies! 

When God wants to tell you something, it won't be delivered by some nitwit who thinks he's God's right hand. It will come to you as a realization of something that you might think you thought of yourself. It won't defy the laws of gravity, reason, common sense, nor sanity. It probably won't involve earthquakes, although right about now, something that might shake some sense and a healthy respect for the Almighty into those babbling idiots in Iran might be a blessing.

Enjoy your day, everyone.

It must have been a slow news weekend

Browsing some of the news items on the web, a couple caught my eye:-

The first was in an article by some semi-famous journalist who was babbling on about the environment and "densely populated cities". Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't that what cities do? They wouldn't be "cities" if they weren't also "densely populated".  If they were just sparsely populated, they'd still be called rural areas, and it would be ten or fifteen kilometres to the nearest bus stop.

The other thing that caught my eye was a story from Idonesia reporting that men who have had penis enlargement cannot become members of the police or military in Indonesia. Apparently, over there, they're looking for big men, not big pricks. There really ought to be more police and military organizations with the same requirements. God knows, it isn't a universal standard, but should be.

It isn't what you've got, it's how you use it, they say. "And who are 'they'?" you ask.... They are us legions of men with only poor to average endowments and a strong fear of enlargement procedures, whether or not approved by Good Housekeeping. Aren't you sorry you asked?

More things blooming nearby

Things blooming.....

Down the street, a Maple is blooming. Ah, sex! Isn't it wonderful? Even the trees do it.

Across the street in a neighbour's back yard, in a quiet corner, something else is blooming. I don't know what it is, but it's looking good.

 

As long as I'm up anyway -

As long as I'm up anyway to make sure the bathroom's still there, and maybe have a coffee to give me an excuse to visit it again soon, maybe I'll babble for a minute or so here....

Dear Mr. Google: Your new Blogger program has possibilities, but it's far from a done deal just yet. For example: What's with the font selections? Why can't I get a font that will stay chosen as my default font until I'm all done making corrections to the body of the post, instead of having it magically (and exasperatingly) revert to its own default during corrections for the various bloopers I'm always making here? Why is it so difficult to arrange for the font to stay set at whatever the user chooses until the user changes it to something else, or quits the program? As long as I'm bitching anyway, may I also add that your word-wrap doesn't seem to work worth a shit. Most of the time, if I want to have a finished result which looks like it was intended to be read, I have to go back through the whole written text, line by line, and at the ends of each of the lines, use the backspace/space trick to get the words at the end of the line to continue their correct spacing into the next line. If left alone, as first typed, these often end up with one line being a normal length, and another containing only a partial line's number of words. So the text looks like hell, and is difficult to read. Please fix this word wrap feature so that it actually results in a readable text, with each line a full column's width. Maybe I'm peculiar, but I'd like to concentrate on the writing, not on the formatting.

Moving right along here, (may we?) watching the old boob tube today I think maybe I've figured out what's been causing all this global warming we keep hearing so much about....

I think it's all that heat being released by the decomposing bullshit being generated everywhere by these advertising types, and in particular, the outrageous crap being fed to us by those car advertisers. Look at it this way: the Big Three recently went flat-assed broke - bankrupt - busted. Why? Because they were flogging fancy cream-puffs that nobody really needed and most of us would rather not afford. They were making gas-guzzlers that don't give us any better mileage than Grandpa got in the Dirty Thirties from his Hupmobile sedan. Now, magically, after a government bailout with massive amounts of taxpayer bucks suddenly these same gas-guzzlers are, with the change of a commercial, able to deliver fantastic mileage to the would-be purchaser. The hell they can! And if they really can, why couldn't they a few months ago? Have the oil companies suddenly decided they don't want to sell their oil and gas after all? Does bullshit really baffle brains? Or make the grass grow greener? Can pigs fly? Were you born yesterday? Do you believe everything you see in those fancy commercials? I fervently hope not! Lastly, why should a four-passenger car need an engine producing 300 horsepower? About 200 of that is probably being wasted, but it's guzzling fuel and making more pollution than we really need.

Progress report, cancer treatment -

Like a lot of things in life, I suppose, cancer's advanced publicity and the fear factor contribute to an aura which is very unpleasant indeed. Most of us are probably inclined to think of it in the same terms as a death sentence, and with today's modern medical science - and science is really the right word here - it's not quite as terrifying as many of us were led to believe. It's not exactly something anyone would rush out to get some of, but neither is it always the death sentence it once was.


It's now ten days since my brachytherapy procedure, during which radioactive pellets or 'seeds' were placed inside the prostate gland, to kill the cancerous spots in it, and friends have asked me how I'm doing now. I thought I'd write a bit on the blog about it, in case anyone else is interested in how these things go and what to expect from it. So really, how am I doing? Very well, thank you! As I've been explaining to my friends when asked about this, I know that different people may have different results, and perhaps I'm one of the lucky ones, but I haven't found this procedure to be nearly as messy nor as painful as the two prostate biopsies which preceded it several months ago. 

Those biopsies, using an ultrasound 'gun' with a needle-like snipping device for collecting the tiny little samples, is inserted into the anus, and it punctures the wall of the rectum as well as taking its 'bites' out of the prostate. During that, it isn't uncommon for the urethra, running though the middle of the prostate as it does, to also be damaged or nicked during the sampling, which usually involves taking eight samples - four on each side of the gland. So the end result of all that is that you're left bleeding from both the front and the rear during their normal emptying operations for several days afterward, until all those punctures heal over.

By contrast, these radioactive pellets are placed into the prostate using small hollow needles which go through a little grid-like guide, as directed by an ultrasound scanner placed inside the anus displaying the prostate on a screen. That screen also shows the placement grid, as well as indicating how far in to insert each needle, based on the locations of the cancerous material. Done by a skilled Radiation Oncologist, this needlework through the perineum is practically bloodless, and not even very painful, and it certainly isn't as bad, in my opinion, as a prostate biopsy. Afterward, there was no bleeding from it at all, except for small traces in the urine at the start of voidings. They give you a lot of cautionary tales beforehand, to prepare you for worst-case possibilities, but generally speaking, this isn't nearly as bad as its advanced publicity might lead you to believe. 

I'm doing much better than I thought I might, and I'm quite mobile, and not in any pain, and I would definitely recommend this procedure to anyone who has prostate cancer which is in its early stages, and who can therefore qualify for the procedure. It is a well-proven procedure with results comparable to or better than surgery, meaning its success rates in follow-up are in the range of between 93% and 96%, and you can't do much better than that. Putting that another way, my family doctor says "Well, now you can forget about dying from prostate cancer. We're going to have to find you something else to go from." I replied, "And I bet you're wondering why I don't come and see you more often, huh? Why don't you go ride your motorcycle to California with your pals, and let me enjoy my so-called life for a while?"

How's this done?

Looks like I've been neglecting the blog lately...

I have an excuse, too. For the past several days, I've been trying out a different email system that I'm not familiar with, and having some troubles getting it and the previous one working together, and delivering all the mail that comes to each one of them. 

All this stuff about POP3 and IMAP and HTML and webmail versus the kind that is done by a program on your own computer has left me confused. I'm easy to confuse these days, it seems.  But I think I've finally got everything co-operating with each other, and catching whatever is supposed to be caught.


I do have one complaint about Windows Live Mail however. It doesn't seem to be very good at handling Spam or junk mail, and it seems to need better filters for that. We ought to be able to specify, for example, that anything coming in which is from anyone not in our personal address book or contacts list as WLM likes to call it would get directly sent to the trash. Instead, there seems to be some elaborate routine that has to be performed, moving files from folder to folder, and then deleting something out of the Deleted folder - like the guys who planned all that were hoping that somewhere along that line, you'd get tired of all that horseshit, and just say the hell with it, and leave all that crap in the files somewhere, to clog up the system, and consume storage space, and make it look like there's a hell of a lot of serious activity on there, when it's really all just a pile of junk mail trying to sell you Viagra or one of its competitors from some fly-by-night operation you'd have to be nuts to deal with anyway. 


I'd like to suggest that the folks at Microsoft have another long hard look at Mozilla's Thunderbird, and observe how it uses filters for junk mail, and how it deletes unwanted stuff with one decisive act - not a whole series of bullshit repetitions, leaving you wondering if the shit is really gone now or not. If they could clean up Vasta Vista and turn it into Windows 7, with all its wonderful features, then why can't they have a go at their overly complicated mail programs and get something we can use without wasting half a day trying to figure out where to start looking for what we wanted, and why we can't dump the crap without a half-hour procedure? And here I was thinking that Microsoft had finally seen the light, and realized who is paying for all this stuff. If time is money, then we're paying too much.

From cameras to male enhancement products......

This is the unmagnified view toward Vancouver Island from my balcony here on the 16th floor.

This is looking at part of that same scene, but using the full 24x of optical zoom on the Pentax X70, advertised as a 'superzoom' camera. It does provide a lot of zoom, but at higher levels it is very grainy, with a lot of noise in it which isn't easily removed even by the best available noise-reduction software. The problem with noise-reduction software, of course, is that most of it works by deleting the worst patches of noise, and filling in those missing pixels by a process of averaging colours from surrounding pixels around the removed ones. So the result is a rather bland and indistinct patchwork where the original noisy pixels were, and the more areas of noisy pixels, the more of the overall image is a bland and indistinct patchwork. You get a choice: sharp, noisy images, or smooth, hazy ones. There's no free lunch.

I wish Google The Magnificent would wave his magic wand over these code-carvers who are presumably working like beavers to finish this experimental version of these Blogger pages, and specifically, fix the word-wrap features, which never have worked worth a shit, and also fix in this latest incarnation the tendency for the cursor to ignore instructions from the mouse and keyboard while those are frantically trying to get it to move down one line, instead of having it decide to take a leap up to the top of the last image inserted into the text, or go the other way and leap down two or three lines instead of just the one requested - or sometimes it just sits there, where the last word was typed, and dares you to make it move any way you can. I have a few choice and magical phrases of my own for times like this, but there may be innocent children and faint-hearted women among my several readers, and I wouldn't want to cause anyone any grief.  I await the finished version of this new format with great anticipation!

Anticipation being something the drug companies are taking advantage of with all these many ads and TV commercials for male enhancement products. I have a few thoughts on all that too. For starters, we've already tripled the total global population in my own lifetime, from about 2,480,000,000 in 1932 to about 7,000,000,000 now, without increasing the useful land areas by so much as one square foot. Just the opposite - we've trashed a lot of what once was productive land, and more of it has been paved over, 'to seal in the nutrients' as some wit said.

Secondly, and here's the kicker, Lovers - it doesn't matter a damn how 'enhanced' you can get if whatever it's attached to still looks and smells like shit, and there's no enhancement product made that can subtract one minute from your bent and wrinkled and toothless and hairless and shrivelled old carcass! You're being played like a violin, you nitwits!! Are we this stupid?

While you ponder that, enjoy your day!

Meet Ralph, my guard dog crow -

 Here's 'Ralph', my guard dog crow. He usually sits in this tree near my balcony where he can survey the whole neighbourhood, while keeping an eye for any flying slices of bread. He then calls the others and before you can say 'Airlift' the air's full of flying crows with chunks of bread in their beaks, heading for their personal favourite lunching spots or hideaways.
 

This and That, from 'Oldest Living Blogger' (that's me!)

There's always something going 'haywire' in life, isn't there? Just now, it's this style sheet for this blog page. Apparently, there's still a few untamed bugs in it.

(Dear Mr. Google: Please read!) - I'm trying to change the image behind the header text, and get it to resize to the same width as the text seems to insist on being, and it just won't do it. So in desperation, I settled for no image at all behind the header text - which isn't what I intended when I began that exercise in futility a half-hour ago! If it did it right when I upgraded to this format, then why can't it still do it right, and fit the text inside the image perimeter?


I had to go see my family doctor, the mild-mannered biker, yesterday for a renewal of a prescription originally from a cardiologist, and as usual, we got talking bikes, because I was at least partly responsible for getting him into them in the first place, many years ago now. He's still biking, and I'm not, these days.

He's preparing for a bike trip with friends from here to northern California in a few weeks, when the weather gets better. It sounds like a good run, and one that I might enjoy myself, if I still had a fast road bike. But at my age, that's probably not the greatest idea. I've had my turn, anyway. I'm probably lucky to still be alive after biking for about 25 years on some of the best-performing bikes of their day. Not, I might add, without leaving occasional slices of ass-cheeks on a couple of the more interesting corners in Beautiful British Columbia, and then limping away to tell about it. My theory being that any crash you can limp away from is a successful one.....even if the bike itself looks like a pancake in the shape of a motorcycle, or maybe a fold-up version of the original, and fits neatly in the back of a small truck for a trip to the shop.  Now you know why I usually had a new bike every spring during my wild days. 

Anyway, while we were talking at the doc's office yesterday, I told him about getting the radioactive implants for my prostate cancer, and he said, "Well, now you can forget about dying from that - we're going to have to find you something else to out on..." I fervently hope he doesn't rush into that, because I'm in no particular hurry at the moment. Especially now that I know
that booze, cigarettes, marriage, divorce, high blood pressure, prostate cancer, and lackanookie are all survivable with a little help from your friends!

Today's aircraft picture

I don't know what this might be, maybe an Airbus 380, but whatever, it's high.
This was taken with a Pentax X70 using maximum optical zoom of 24x.

Prostate Brachytherapy: It's not as bad as it sounds....

There won't be pictures with this one, but I'm a very happy man today.  I've got my implants, and I'm not in any real discomfort, and everything's working just like always, except that now, my cancer is being killed, even as I write this.

Dr. Mira Keyes, our head of the Brachytherapy Section at our local Cancer Clinic is a real genius, and she's both gentle and quick, and does perfect work. I can't say enough good things about her. If I was getting this done again, I wouldn't change a thing! You can't improve on a perfect result.

Turns out, my suspicions were correct - the anticipation was the most painful part.

Enjoy your day, everyone, and especially you, Dr. Keyes! A big warm hug to you!

These free email programs: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly....

Guess whose email program died during its last most-recent upgrading, and guess which one it was...... and that profane grumbling in the background? That's me practicing what I'd say to those hackers who love to improve the hell out of their prefabricated style sheets, while neglecting to ask themselves whether or not this goddamned thing is going to run when it's done!!!

I can replace my whole operating system from scratch including re-formatting the hard-drive, re-installing the operating system, and be back on the web in about 40 or maybe 45 minutes, but I haven't been able to get this mess going again in two days of installing, configuring, getting told "There is an error and the POP3 Server replies" - Replies what? That message terminates right where it ought to be informing me of what the error code is, or where from, or anything intelligent that might allow me to troubleshoot the installation until I find why it refuses to accept the same information with which it ran during its previous versions.

These guys have taken a perfectly-good email program - a world-class program, and improved it with fancy add-ons, until like the automotive industry lately they've forgotten how to make it go down the road - the only real reason we were interested in it in the first goddamned place. Forget those fancy bells and whistles, Kiddies - this isn't General Motors! This is a program for actually saying something intelligent to somebody else who isn't interested in impressing his peers with his skills as an interior decorator. We just want to exchange information sometime today - not next week, or only if the ISP isn't too busy, or your quota hasn't yet been exceeded. Doesn't ANYBODY know how to play this goddamned game???

The GOOD NEWS is - Gmail beats the living shit out of these creampuff programs that look tasty but can't get your birthday greetings to your poor old aunt Nellie until the old gal's 102 and has one foot in the grave and the other firmly planted on a banana skin.....Shame on you, and you know who you are!

Meanwhile, back on the lawn.....

A Robin looks for lunch among the early dandelions. Those dandelions are behind schedule due to this cooler weather and the snow in the high country recently. I'm so old, I can remember when we had normal Springs and Summers. Ones that arrived on schedule, and behaved politely.

More snow now than ......

.

......we've seen up there all winter. Is this the "real" winter now, or what???

It's clearing off, at last.....

......And this is today's sunrise. "Just another sunrise....", you say? Not when you're older than the discovery of nuclear fission or the invention of television, it isn't. As an old Swede used to say in the coffee shop in Brackendale years ago, "Any morning I wake up, it's a good day!"

I like clouds - little thin wind-blown ones, and great big puffy ones, especially pink ones, and particularly after a night when the wind has been thumping the sliding patio door to the balcony with its gusts every few minutes all night long. If I wasn't one of the best sleepers in this half of the galaxy, I'd be one red-eyed s.o.b. this morning, for sure! But I'm actually quite well-rested and looking forward to the day. I hope you are, too.

More Winter, Anyone?

The flowers are blooming, the leaves are coming out, but it's still Winter in the hills around us here. There's more of it up there now than we've had so far.

Here's a little cloud imitating the mountain peak below it, and doing nicely.
Stay warm, everyone....

Mail Programs: The Postman always rings twice, or three times....

I just can't help myself, trying out different programs. However, there are pitfalls sometimes, and I fell into one yesterday, from which I barely recovered today....

I've been using Thunderbird from Mozilla for several years, because it worked and the price was right, and I was familiar with it. But what about all these web applications now-a-days, I wondered. So I tried Gmail (because I blog on Google's 'Blogger') and while I was at it, and to be fair to the competition, also tried Windows Live Mail. Gmail has some nice features that I like, and Windows Live is a perfect fit in Windows 7 - and I love those Photo Emails with the nice layout of thumbs pointing to larger images stored on the web.  I give them both almost equal marks for spit, polish, convenience, and features.

Just don't try to cross-link three or four different incarnations of them together through your (old) Thunderbird program!!! Not unless you don't mind growing older while untangling the gawd-awful mess that will result when configuring for them gets at odds with whatever your original mail program and your I.S.P. think they should be seeing. 

Solution: (for us leap-before-you-look types!) - Dump Thunderbird, including its hidden bits in hidden folder AppData/local and its left-overs in its Program Files folder - then unlink the several webmail user accounts created to try that out, and get each of Windows Live Mail and Gmail functioning independently again, and peace will return to the valley.... If I hear you asking "How can I read my email files now, if I've thrown out the program which created those *.eml files? Good News, Kiddies - NotePad, WordPad, and Windows Live Mail can open those for you, if you select the proper extensions from the choices offered.

You don't need to spend an afternoon in those Forums reading dumb-assed babble, or surfing for help on Google or Bing. Trust me - would I lie to you?
 

Only 264 days until Christmas !

The winter we thought we'd lost out on a couple of months ago has finally got here, and the local ski hills are valiantly trying to recapture some lost income. The rest of us are wondering if the spring flowers will survive all this....

Merry Christmas, Everyone..... er, I mean.... Happy Easter, Bunnies!

A favourite fantasy......

Perhaps like a lot of other dreamers the world over, I've often imagined myself doing something like this gentleman did back in 1991 - get a beautifully restored old biplane, and just go anywhere I liked for as long as it felt right to me.

Of course, most of us can't do that for several obvious reasons, like our jobs, our families, our obligations to paying our debts, and all that. But it warms an old dreamer's heart to sometimes come across somebody who has actually lived that dream. Not just lived it, but wrote a hell of an interesting and readable book about it. Not his first book, either, and that's likely why he could afford to take the time and spend the money to live his dream, and take his great old plane to every state in the mainland U.S.A., except Alaska. He didn't go to Alaska with it, because, as he says in the book, "I don't go anywhere you have to chew your whiskey and cook your motor oil."

If you can still find this book, and you're yearning for a good read, you'll thoroughly enjoy it. 

More from Google about posting pictures....

Mr. Google says:-

Different Ways to Share: Using Picasa Web Albums with Blogger

Print

Any photos uploaded to a Blogger.com, Blogspot.com or a custom Blogger domain will automatically be included in a Picasa Web Albums album of the same name. Each blog that includes photos will have a corresponding online album for those photos, designated in Picasa Web Albums with a small Blogger icon. Blogger albums are unlisted by default and therefore aren't searchable on the Picasa Web Albums site. Here are some things to keep in mind when integrating photos between these sites:

• All photos posted to Blogger are included in the 1 GB of free storage allotted to Picasa Web Albums.
• Comments and captions added on either product will only be visible on that site.
• Photos deleted from your Blogger album in Picasa Web Albums will also be deleted from your blog.
• To delete a Blogger album in Picasa Web Albums, you must first delete all photos

Answering Tommy's question from March 29th....

Tommy asks a good question, and for him and any others who might be wondering about that, here's how to check your allotment's usage:-

* Log onto your blog, which puts you onto the Dashboard page of it. Instead of starting a new post, or the usual stuff, look up along the upper right in the dark blue area for some fairly small titles near its upper edge. One of those says 'My Account'.  Click on that one.

* On that page, look about a third of the way down, to where there's displayed some icons and descriptions of the various features or other Google programs that you are subscribed to, and you will see among them one for Picasa Web Albums. That's how Google handles all your pictures that are posted on your blog.  Click on that entry to go to its page.

* On Picasa Web Albums page, you'll see details of your collections of pictures, public and not, and another of the picture or icon you're using on your blog (if any). Now look away down at the bottom of the page, again in rather small print, for a line that says.........
"You are using 235 Mb (23.02%) of your 1024 Mb......" and they invite you to increase that with more storage space which you can purchase on a yearly basis, if you're getting near the limit.

And that's how you find your amount of storage already used, and what's left of it.

Windows 8 beta....

Why not be the first in your group to have the newest Windows 8 beta Welcome background? If you click on this image, and enlarge it, you can have your own copy - Enjoy !