I was browsing through my website with the WordPress application on the iPad, and couldn’t help but notice that I am incredibly popular with spam bots. The unfortunate thing is that most of them say very nice things about the blog, which makes me want to just edit out the URLs and leave the nice comments. Whether or not this would be dishonest or otherwise bad, I don’t know.
The good news, though, is that the WordPress app for the iPad is really sweet.
One of the things I have been working with lately is putting things on my Tumblr blog. I have absolutely been appreciating the unique way that Tumblr does what it does. My favorite thing about it, possibly the biggest reason I have been using it, is that it lets you queue up posts and release them on a schedule. My schedule is that one post gets released every two hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day, which means that about six things get published each day. Right now, I have about 6 days’ worth of items in the queue, which means that I’m able to spend maybe a half an hour or an hour each day putting new things up as I see them, and then the momentum of my Tumblr site doesn’t decrease, in terms of having new content every day.
The Tumblr site is also useful for a lot of different things. One things being posted right now is the photos from my vacation with Megan to visit art schools in California. There were maybe 70 photos in that group, and one of the things I love about Tumblr, as compared to Flickr or Twitter or my regular blog here on stenoweb.net, which all tend to be well-suited to specific types of content, but not others. As an example, I can post photos to Flickr (although only a certain number of them at any given time) and they are presented in a very logical way. Similarly, I can post 140-character instant status updates to twitter, and those work out pretty well. And finally, I can put long-form things, essays and such, on my traditional blog web site, which also has good facilities for the management of static content on a collection of regular pages. And finally, I do have a site built out of static HTML pages, but there are just a bunch of disadvantages to that.
So, what’s the point of all of that? Well, the odd thing is that even though each of these many avenues for posting information is very effective for its area of specialty, none of them is necessarily a shining bastion of absolute perfection, Flickr I don’t even use as often as twitter and my blog, and both of those tend to get cross-updates with my Tumblr account as it is anyway. Although I haven’t yet considered exactly how or why, I have indeed considered that I may at some point want to move my main blogging experience to a site like Tumblr.
For now, however, most of my big project-style postings go onto the blog and smaller things get dumped to the end of the Tumblr queue, but we’ll see what happens as I move into the future and start defining what I really want to do with my blog. (Which you’d think after so many years I’d know, but ah well.)
This is pretty interesting. When the Nexus One first came out, one of the biggest questions was “What will the Nexus Two be?” for two reasons. Firstly, Google had initially indicated that they may produce devices of different form factors for different usages and needs, and secondly, what better way to welcome the first “superphone” by asking what its successor will be.
But, that was back when Google thought their business model for selling a phone exclusively unlocked and exclusively on the Internet was going to be successful. I’ll admit, I very seriously thought about getting one, but the question is “Why should I?” when I can run on down to my local carrier store and get a phone nearly as great (or better, for me, what with the TouchPro2 having a keyboard) for $150 on a contract, which works out since I intend to keep having phone service for awhile. (Although to be fair about the store thing, I knew I wanted the TouchPro2 after having used AT&T’s variant in their store, then I went over to the Verizon store where they weren’t carrying it, and had them order it up and deliver it to me.)
Of course, there are a lot of benefits to the idea of buying your phone unlocked, or at least off-contract, but those benefits are the most noticeable when you’re buying a device to use not as a phone but as a PDA, or if you’re in Europe and you’re going to be switching SIM chips between carriers in different countries. The benefits to buying off-contract involve being able to terminate that contract at will, and of course, being able to get a new device whenever it strikes your fancy. (Although that bit involves having the money for it too.)
I do wonder how long the Nexus One will be available in its current form, and whether or not there are any price reductions pending. As a media device, along with as a device to have just to fiddle with Android, the Nexus One doesn’t look completely terrible, and of course it has the advantages for me of being a) A google-experience device will receive updates far faster. (Because only Google controls the update process on it. Frequently, both the vendor of a mobile OS and the carrier the device is on will need to have their hands in software updates for devices, which slows down the process significantly, especially when you add in manufacturer enhancements such as HTC Sense or Samsung TouchWiz) B) The device is available for a set price, unlocked, willing to run wifi-only.
There are a few other Google Experience devices left. The HTC G1, which was the first shipping Android device is still available, and the Motorola Droid is also considered to be a Google Experience device, however those still have everybody’s hands on them when it’s software update time, meaning that Verizon Wireless has the capability (and frequently exercises this capability) to delay or put influence into a software update that Google and Motorola are working on. It’s annoying, and the Nexus One has been a great thing for people wanting the true, raw, most up-to-date Android experience.
I personally predict that there will be another Google-branded device at some point in time, because eventually the 1GHz Snapdragon will be considered old and slow even for phones and media playback devices. (Although when that’ll be is anyone’s guess: HTC continues to ship devices based on Ye Olde 528MHz Qualcomm 7200-series chips.)
What will be different about the next Google Phone is that it will probably be HTC or Motorola or Samsung branded, piece of hardware, with an agreement between Google, the manufacturer and the carriers that Google and only Google actually has its hand on maintaining the software for the device. And then the manufacturer and carriers will be responsible for marketing and distributing the device. But we’ll see.
Today Yesterday was great. I slept in a little bit, puttered around the apartment, got sushi, went and saw a movie with my good friend Deanna, then got some pizza and watched Argentina and Germany be very angry at each other during a world cup game, after which I came home to do laundry, putter some more along with watch the old live-action The Tick show on Netflix. I also needed some supplies and I have no concept of things being closed so I also thought it would be a good idea to head out and get some things at the nearby grocery store. It’s walking distance and I’d made the walk in the midday heat before, so I didn’t see that there would be a problem. Unfortunately, there was a little bit of a problem, and about halfway home, I started to feel fatigued and had to continuously readjust the distribution of everything I was carrying.
It has been awhile since I’ve felt this particular feeling and it (along with a few other things I drafted but never posted) has been quite jarring and has given me a sort of mini-wakeup of the fact that I do have myasthenia gravis, and that I’m either pumped pretty incredibly full of various medications, or I simply run out of puff at some point through the day.
This particular concept is difficult to explain to some people. I can wake up totally capable of hopping around and jumping into the shower and walking a few miles and speaking properly, even when I’m not on very much medication, but if I am not careful with what I do, I can pretty quickly become fatigued. Even with my medications as they currently stand, things like moving have been far more difficult, and I paid for several days after getting everything to my apartment, even with the help of all of my fantastic friends.
A fantastic read, about what this kind of thing feels like comes from “The Spoon Theory.” This woman and her best friend of several years were talking one day and the friend asks “What is it like, having Lupus?” The author was surprised and immediately started describing a bunch of the surface symptoms of lupus, general physical sickness, which is terrible. The friend pushed on and wanted to know more. What daily life is actually like with the disease, “what it felt like, not physically, but what it felt like to be me, to be sick.”
The result is that the author describes what she calls the spoon theory. Basically, in a chronic illness that involves fatiguing, you start your day with a certain number of “spoons.” These spoons, or any other counter, really, are a measure of what you can and can’t do on any given day. It’s extremely true. When I first got the disease, it was often the case that I could do normal things in the morning, either for a certain amount of time or just a certain level of activity, and then after a certain point, just be completely useless.
Although it has been better in the past several months, it’s still important for me to be aware of, especially as the levels for my medications get adjusted, or I need to do different things throughout the day. I have been trying to change my medication levels, so I can rely less on pyridostigmine throughout my day, and ultimately, I’d even love to be done with prednisone. So a few days ago I started to realize that my need for pyridostigmine has indeed reduced a little bit, but I took it to this extreme level that not only caused my grocery incident tonight, but also an incident a few days ago where I hadn’t equipped myself with enough time to get everywhere I needed to be, and therefore tried to rush over the cardiac hill on campus. Needless to say, it lived up to its name and about halfway up I definitely started to feel like I wouldn’t make it. Fortunately I did, but I had a few bad moments that day.
I have also been wanting to lay out what I think about comparing my disease to other diseases. I implied a comparison between myasthenia gravis and lupus earlier, but the truth is, based on what I’ve read Christine Miserandino, there just isn’t any comparison, Lupus is far worse.
Which brings me to something that happened with Glenn recently: he compared MG to another chronic disease, Crohn’s Disease. Crohn’s, my understanding has it, is a terrible terrible thing where your internal organs are all messed up. On the other hand, my understanding is that the the symproms of Crohn’s, from WebMD, happen to be the same as the symptoms I experience from just one of my medications: Headaches, feeling faint, stomach aches and sometimes, diarrhea and vomiting.
Although I want to think Glenn knows a lot about my condition, having lived with me and been kept up to date on it since it was diagnosed, I think I may be sorely wrong about his awareness of it. It starts in that he wouldn’t listen to my explaination of how MG is categorized between autoimmune disorders and neuromuscular diseases, and what those categorizations mean. It’s not like I haven’t been on Google quite frequently since late 2008, learning all of this stuff. At that point, his telling me that my disease was similar to this other disease was just adding to my frustration.
To put it simply… yes, I have miracle medication, but no, that doesn’t mean I’m without the disease or I don’t sometimes have to be conscious of it, and the comparison Glenn was making was that this other kid’s disease was as bad as mine.1 That’s simply untrue no matter how you slice it. His disease has visible symptoms as bad as simply one of my medications. If I weren’t on that medication, I could be falling over in crosswalks, choking and improperly swallowing bits of Taco Bell lettuce, and generally having a hard time at living life.
And so, I have the article that I now need to show to Glenn. A few of my friends have already become aware of it and from time to time even ask me about my spoons, a gesture which I appreciate more than I care to share. We’ll see how relevant it remains or becomes as the adjustments to my medications begin to take effect.
Footnotes!
1: That’s not to suggest that I’m unsympathetic to people with diseases other than MG. This is simply to suggest that when you’re perfectly healthy and you have a friend with a chronic disease, it is a bad idea to tell them “this other disease is worse” especially when that is factually false, and continue to insist that you’re correct.
I went home last night after work and thought to myself: “maybe the only thing I haven’t tried in awhile is putting some of my iTunes files on here.”
So, I went ahead and grabbed a few of the albums I’d most recently purchased from the iTunes Music Store and popped them onto my MicroSD chip. Lo and behold, they started playing immediately.
This includes both AAC files I have ripped from CDs I own, along with M4A files that I have purchased from the iTunes Store.
This has been one of the biggest points of contention between my phone and I, for a very long time. It has also been the biggest reason that I keep experimenting with alternative ways to play music, and between my Walkman, my old iPod, the old iPhone, and various means of streaming on the current phone, there are indeed plenty.
But sometimes, it’s nice to know that I can buy an album on iTunes, and dump it on my phone and listen to it while I’m walking around.
Right now, the phone has a 2GB memory card in it, and that’s definitely enough for average phone usage, I’m going to consider very carefully getting an 8, or maybe even a fantastic 16 or 32 gigabyte memory chip for the thing, so as to be able to fit more music on it.