Snow

It snowed this evening. It has been 183 days since the last snowfall in Ottawa.

I put the snow tires on my car on Friday and on Rosa’s car earlier this morning.

Sushi at Printemps

I had a craving for sushi today. I remembered the delicious sushi I had in Paris in July at Printemps.

I looked up all the sushi places in Ottawa and found two on Merivale. I chose the try MHK Sushi mostly because I knew the location. It was only the third or fourth time in my life I have tried sushi.

It was good and satisfied my craving.

I think Let It Be is much maligned for the tensions in the group, but aside from one not-very-big spat between Paul and George, it’s really not as bad as others have made it out to be. And the Beatles (with Billy Preston) actually seem to enjoy themselves at times when they are playing some classics or during the famous rooftop concert.

My thoughts while watching Magical Mystery Tour? “This is unwatchable.”

So I pulled up every video I could find on the internet. However, I found it very confusing. I tried to mime the motions while watching the video, but I just couldn’t quite figure out the motion in three dimensions (and while the perspective rotates with the kayak).

After an hour of watching videos and practicing in my basement, I loaded up my kayak drove over to the Rideau River and went for a paddle. This time, I also brought my GoPro Motorsports Hero HD camera, formerly used for our Team00 in-car racing footage. It came with a suction cup that allowed me to mount it on the front of the kayak, pointing back at myself. I wanted to see what kind of footage I could get and also to record the roll I would attempt later.

I wanted to try the roll at the end of the tour, as the water was cold and I didn’t want to get wet and cold in the strong wind – that is a recipe for hypothermia. I paddled downstream for a little while, then returned back upstream to the dock where I departed.

It was windy and the water was cold. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to try this. I also didn’t want to freak out any bystanders, so I waited until there was no one standing on the dock.

After about 30 minutes of thinking about it and working up the courage, I gave it a try.

My first (and only) attempt was a complete failure. I rolled the kayak then, while upside down, I leaned forward, and quickly rotated myself and the paddle to try to flip the kayak back upright. This didn’t work so I exited the kayak instead of trying again. My day was done.

Kayak-Eskimo roll from Richard Muise on Vimeo.

The water wasn’t as cold as I thought it would be, but I immediately got out of the water and brought the kayak and all my gear back to the car to dry off and get warm.

I will have to take a more advanced kayak course to see how to do this, because I cannot figure it out by myself.

Rosa has told me that I sometimes stop breathing when I sleep, which is a characteristic of sleep apnea. I am often tired (but functional) during the day, and always assumed that this was because of my long work hours. I am frequently working late into the evening – I have conference calls twice a week with the team in Beijing that last until 11:30pm.

I called my doctor to see what can be done. He set up an appointment with the Sleep Clinic at the Queensway Carleton Hospital (QCH). The appointment took a little over a week before I went in to the clinic.

I arrived at 9:30pm, checked in and filled out the required forms. Around 10pm, I was led into a room with a bed and lots of equipment and wires.  Once I change into my sleep clothes, two technicians started applying the wires. I had two wires on each leg, one on each shoulder, one behind each ear, one on the top of my head, two on my forehead and one on each check. These would pick up the electrical activity from my muscles moving.  They secured a strap around my chest and one around my stomach to check my breathing. They put a heart rate monitor on my finger. Lastly, they added a tube with two projections that fit below my nose that measures if I am breathing. In one corner by the ceiling was a video camera that presumably would see in the dark.

Once wired up, I was helped into the bed to go to sleep. It was hard to sleep. The bed was hard, especially under my shoulders. It was surprisingly cold, and I had to ask for another blanket – the A/C was blasting out full! The noise of the fan was also distracting. On top of all of that, I was worried about accidentally pulling out all of the wires, so I could not move around to get comfortable. Normally, I’ll turn on one side and then the other and finally on my back before I fall asleep.

I woke up a number of times during the night. Three times there were balloons that popped just outside my room, as one of the staff had had a birthday earlier in the day shift. During the night, I could feel my headache from the previous day returning. This was partly because I was stiff from not moving, and because the bed under my shoulders felt very hard.

By the time morning arrived, I had a migraine. Wake up was just before 6:00am.

The technicians came back in the room to remove the wires and other measuring devices. I got dressed and walked to the bathroom. I had considered going in to work after the sleep study, but I decided against it before coming to the QCH. I’m grateful for that, because when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, I discovered that the wires had been attached to my scalp with this horrible, gooey soft-wax-like substance. My hair (what little I have) was matted and stuck out – I looked like a crazy homeless person in dress slacks.

I tried to pull as much of the goo out by hand, but it made little difference. I just wanted to get enough out that I could walk out to my car without everyone staring at me.

I drove home, took a hot shower to wash my hair and went to bed to get about 30 minutes of sleep before the alarm went off.

I hope that the technicians will find something. They said that they are only there to count the data points (such as survey my breathing rate, count how many times I toss and turn, etc). They send that data to a sleep specialist who will sent a report to my doctor in a few weeks.

Thinking about the night, I don’t think I slept well enough to be able to see some of the issues that Rosa was reporting to me.

Iron Man 2 is a fun movie. Lots of action, great costume design, great special effects and so forth. Scarlett Johansson is gorgeous.

But, just like the first Iron Man, the dialog is awful. Cring-inducing. Tony Stark’s character needs to be over-the-top, but the dialog doesn’t sound crisp for that purpose. It sounds like it was written by a 14-year-old.

When we got home from the theatre, there was a police helicopter flying circles around a local field. A police car showed up, but it did not have the light bar on. I’m not sure what is happening, but it is obvious that they are watching something.

So I’m watching the detectives.

This is the live entertainment I don’t get to see living in Canada.

Snow on the Bimmer

Snow at the end of April? What the hell? At least there was no accumulation on the roads, since I had already mounted my Bridgestone Potenza RE-11 tires. There is minimal tread, just enough to channel out the water on the road, but useless in any amount of snow.

Today, I went in for an ultra-sound of the area. The examination took about 30 minutes, longer than I expected. The room lights were very low so I just lay there with my eyes closed basically ignoring what was going on, except for when I was asked to breath-in deeply and hold my breath. I asked the ultra-sound technician what which frequency the ultra-sound operates – he replied that it’s about 12. I asked 12Khz? No, he replied, 12Mhz.

The results will be reviewed by a radiologist and sent back to my doctor to give me the diagnosis, but it is possible that it is not cancer but rather just a blood clot. That would seem to fit the evidence, as the tenderness that triggered this adventure only lasted 2 days instead of persisting. I hope that is the case. I am hopeful of a simple explanation. If it is bad news, then at least there is a very high (>98%) survival rate when caught early.

Once the migraine was reduced to a reoccurring pounding headache (Tylenol 3), I hoped I would get over the other symptoms. I even started feeling pretty good for a few hours on Friday.

My condition did not improve over the weekend. I had much difficulty sleeping due to my lungs being filled and continued muscle aches. Sometimes the fever would come back.

So this morning, instead of going to the doctor, I went straight to the emergency room. The theory was that if I would need chest x-rays or blood work, then they could all be done at once, instead of seeing a doctor, then going somewhere else for the tests, then back to the doctor.

Once I signed in, I was put into a separate waiting room with a sign outside indicating that it was an isolation room and only people who were asked to sit there should even enter the room. I was given a mask to wear.

Mask

I waited about 2.5 hours, catching a nap, and doing some light reading. Around noon, I was finally admitted into one of the examination rooms. There was a sign posted on the outside indicating “droplet warning” and that anyone entering the room had to wear a full face guard. Upon later reflection, this was likely because of the H1H1 flu policies.

The doctor came in and briefly checked me out and then sent me for chest x-rays to confirm the suspicion that it was pneumonia. I was beginning to suspect that might be the diagnosis because a chest cold does usually include a fever.

After the x-ray, the blood work was taken, and I was hooked up to an IV system. I wasn’t expecting the IV, but was interested in how it all worked. I could feel it when it started as my arm started getting cooler – the IV would be room temperature (say 25) but body temperature is about 37. I later heard the doctor outside my room indicating that she ordered the IV because my heart rate was 115 bpm. I didn’t realize it was so high. Adding saline solution will dilute the blood and lower the body temperature and bring down the heart rate (which it did).

The final diagnosis confirmed pneumonia. I was possibly still contagious, so I was told not to go to work for the rest of this week. I finally left the hospital about 7.5 hours after checking-in.

Overheard from the sign-in desk next to the waiting room:

1. “I have an infection on my (elbow/leg) and I am on antibotics. I was told to come to the emergency room if it got worse in case I needed IV antibotics.” I heard this twice in 2.5 hours. Is it really that common?

2. “I just returned from Cuba, where I was raped. Do you have a rape kit? Is a rape kit useful after 24-hours?” The woman left immediately after. It really got me thinking about what a terrible time she must be having. Can you imagine flying home with that on your mind? And I can’t understand why some men are so awful. I just don’t understand people.

3. “My father was in earlier and was sent to go get an MRI. I just wanted to let you know that they found a 5-centimeter growth in his brain. I wasn’t sure if you needed to know that for your records.” Again, another tragic story told in three sentences.

Next, I boot to an external WD My Book, using the firewire interface. I have installed a bootable copy of Snow Leopard on the disk. I have also installed TechTool Pro 5, so once I have rebooted to the external hard drive, I will use TechTool to do a hardware and software check of the system, and then perform a file system check or repair of the internal MBP drive.

Finally, just before going to bed, I will launch Disk Utility and make a disk image of the internal drive. I keep the last 2 images, plus I might keep an image from before any particularly important change (such as upgrading from 10.5 to 10.6 or upgrading the internal hard drive). I create the image as a read-only image. This backup image creation will take a few hours, which is why I start just before I go to bed. Should I require information from that image (such as when I needed to grab files when my machine died), I just double-click the image file to mount the image. I can then just grab any file I need.
Between these monthly images, I will also copy any updated files to two external drives. I keep one drive at work and one drive at home. I also keep a large number of files on these two external drives that I do not need to keep on the laptop. This would include all my race videos, as they take up a lot of space. For these videos, I also burn a DVD copy – meaning I have three copies of all my race videos
The most important files are my photos. I use Apple’s Aperture software to manage my photo library. I use the built-in vault function to keep backups. I have created a vault on both external drives (plus the original on the internal drive). Meaning I keep three copies of my photos, which are stored in two different locations so that a fire will not destroy all the copies.
I also own a PC with Windows XP. There is very little valuable data on that machine. In the past, I have just burned it all to a single DVD. However, with the various external drives I have been collecting, I think I will start doing backups to a small external drive over USB. I will do this once a month too, as I am not regularly doing a backup on the PC now. However, the backup tools I have for Windows XP are far from ideal. I will be moving to Windows 7 x64 Professional in the next month, so perhaps there are better backup tools I can use.
One last backup I do for both machines is to keep the most recent copy of the installers for all the software I use. Should a machine fail, I should have all of the latest installers ready to start restoring the software. This only really impacts me if I need to perform a clean installation of the OS. This has happened three times on my Mac in the last 20 years but I’ve needed it many times on the PC. I keep local copies in case I am not able to connect to the internet when performing the restore.
In summary, for most of the important files, I keep two or three backups in two physically different locations. Once a month, I will also perform a cleanup of the system and then a full-system backup. I will keep multiple backup copies.