Greatly exaggerated, as someone once said.

As some of you got wind of from Camille’s facebook post, yes I did go to the hospital on Friday night and stayed there about 20hr. Xray, CT scans, blood work, and a stress test later and they say I (internally) look much better than the average for my age. Despite my best attempts to consume large quantities of Five Guys burgers (there is one open in Ithaca too!), even my cholesterol levels are good.

My stay at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital was a pleasant one. The nursing staff and doctors were all pleasant to talk to. The place was clean and fairly quiet. I have only very tiny dots on both arms from the needles, so they do a very good job drawing blood. Alas, I did not have the ability to experience the hospital food as I needed to fast the whole time due to the constant blood samples that were being drawn. I must say though, it smelled really good.

I am doing better. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong so either the timing of the tests was too late or they are unable to pick up what my body is trying to say. I can’t complain about that even though I still have an occasional chest pain. I don’t think this was stress related (though I am under a very large amount of stress) because the symptoms don’t match my previous experiences with stress and panic. It isn’t heartburn either. I know what that feels like too. Neither of those would also explain why my lips would turn blue.

So, this is one of life’s mysteries, and my family is very glad to have me back in the house. Thank you everyone for your prayers.

Just got back from SFO and MacWorld 2011 yesterday. I happened to catch one of the very last flights out of Baltimore before the storm hit last Wednesday. While I flew, my wife spent an equal 5 hours driving home in the snow.

Before the conference started, Jeff and I went for a hike to Pier 14 where I made the above panoramic. It was the only nice day there with clear skies and a high of 54F. The rest of the time was cold and wet. Unfortunately my tendonitis flared up in both knees and my right hip, reducing our ability to explore SF.
It was a good time to hang out with my brother and continue our plans of world domination. Gravett Island was solidy under our control by the end. Unfortunately, we had less time than I had hoped. He had to man the Shedworx booth a good portion of the time, and I went to some of the seminars. The other developers at his company were fun to get to know. There was one Greg and two Craigs, all from Australia, making conversations confusing at times.

All in all I felt that MacWorldExpo was not worthwhile for a web application developer like myself. Most events focused on audio & video. One of the key conference talks I went for was cancelled. I counted 13 expo booths selling iPhone cases. There was very little free stuff, unlike OSCON, ZendCon, and phpTek. On the bright side, CultofMac featured my brother and I at the top of their MacWorld Day 3 post. Their managing editor, Traci, was very nice to talk to, albeit briefly. Next year Shedworx should pay us to come out and be Booth Studs.

As a note: I do not work for Shedworx, I just happened to be hanging out at their booth because I had already wandered the expo hall five times.

On January 16th I was honored to be able to present a sermon on evangelism and how Christians do a better job telling others about Apple products than the Savior of their souls. If I take stock, I am usually more excited about some new tech gadget, or a sports team, or a movie. How about you? The sermon was modeled on the previous weeks sermon by Pastor Paul Jeon on how our prayer life is reflective of our relationship with God.

And yes, I am going to MacWorld.

At long last I am on another publication for the years of slave grad work I completed. TAG published A Universal Core Genetic Map for Rice last month in their online edition. Hopefully it will make it into a print copy at some point. I identified the 18k+ SSR loci and built a system for making automated primers for them. The lab who published this used a defined subset of those 18k+ primers for verification and publication. Hopefully this will help the world produce better rice.

On August 30, 2009 I had the privilege of giving the weekly sermon for CCPC. I used the book of Galatians, chapter 1 for my text to get across the point that, just like the believers in Galatia, we try to “augment” or “upgrade” the Gospel by inserting our own righteousness. Our friends, kids, and the the watching world see this and rightly want little part of it. Here is a link to the mp3 if you want to listen. I could not get everything in that I wanted, but I trust that God will use it for His glory. Drop me a comment if you have thoughts or questions.

I made a random plot/scenario generator based on an article over at IBM. I hope you have fun playing with it. If you wind up writing a book as a result make sure to name the protagonist after me.

Well, I had my first dermatologist appointment in over three years last week. He did not like what one of the moles on my hip looked like, so he shaved it off and sent it to the lab for analysis. It came back as a “3″ on a one (normal mole) to five (skin cancer). So I went in today and they excised the area. Ugh. Been a while since I had stitches. Maybe I should post a gruesome picture… Nah.

The sermon series right now at CCPC is on the Armor of God. I had the opportunity to not only give the sermon on the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit and how it relates to our union with Christ (listen: mp3) , but I also go to give a little children’s sermon (not recorded). I hope you are blessed and challenged by it.

I wrote a program to generate random limericks. Here are two example results:

 There once was a man in crowded
 Who thought they were quite shambled.
 They had their observation's,
 And some abbreviations,
 But could not really unheeded.

 There once was a lady from miserably,
 Who thought they were quite fashionably.
 They had their coupon,
 And some hellion,
 But could not really provably.

Ok, so I created a facebook profile. I do not actually plan to use it much though. I created it because a friend mentioned a job opportunity (before switching to S3) writing FB apps, so I decided to check it out.