Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!

So last night at about 23:30 I had this sore feeling in my lower tummy. At first I thought it was just how my laptop was sitting on me and poking into my abdomen. If only.

The pain quickly became excruciating, as if I were being stabbed in back in the kidney area, and the most unbearable spikes the knife being twisted. So around 01:30, with no end in site and the brief respites really only five to ten minutes of slightly less excruciatingness, I called a cab to haul my butt downtown to Cambridge Memorial Hospital.

To cut a long story short, after several shots of morphine and a CT scan of my lower torso, I found out that I have a nice 2.9mm kidney stone working it's way from my right kidney, down the ureter and into the bladder. According to both emerg docs (I was there from about 01:45 to 10:15, across two shifts) and the nurses, that is the painful part.

Thank God! I am no stranger to pain, having had morphine a few times in the past for severe abdominal distress, ultimately related to the intussusception I suffered at age ten. This, however, has got to be the absolute worst physical pain I have ever experienced.

So just before I was discharged they gave me a final shot of morphine, a scrip a whole bunch of medications and the doctor showed me the picture series of my CT. And now I am going to bed since I have been up for a little over 27 hours. :-)

A Canticle for Leibowitz by William M. Miller Jr.

This is a good book and, in spite of the fact that it was written in the late 50s it does not come across as out of place. I'm sure you've read that sci-fi book from decades ago that has the characters talk in awe about a closet-sized computer that is light years in advance of the typical room-sized, vacuum-tubed behemoth. That's typical of “hard” sci-fi which is almost as much driven by describing the science as it is by the plot.

Canticle is more character-driven. In each of it's three sections it focuses on a specific individual and tells the story from their perspective, albeit in third person style. It's much more of a literary sci-fi and, as such, more suitable to the non-geeky. If there's somebody whom you're trying to get to read sci-fi but they're resisting, thinking that sci-fi is still the crappy pulp fiction stuff from the 50s and 60s, give them this book. They'll like it (and understand it!) a lot better than they would something outré like cyberpunk.

I give it a 3 out of 5 stars.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthonly

The third novel of the Cluster series, it is still readable by itself without demanding that one has read the previous two. It takes place two thousand years after the first novel and one thousand after the second.

While I liked the novel, I do find the biologies of some of the various alien species to be a bit hard to believe and occasionally this would “bump me out” if the willing suspension of disbelief required for most science fiction stories. Like many of Anthony's novels there is a lot of exposition that goes on inside the primary character's head and at points the plot can go very slowly.

I've never thought that Anthony was a fully A-list writer like Asimov, Niven or Gibson, but neither have I considered him a hack like so many others do. He can be a trifle formulaic but I have enjoyed virtually all of his books that I have read.

I give this book 3.25 out of 5 stars.

Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven

Definitely a good book, though it starts out rather slowly. It doesn't really pick up until the Pak Protectors are mentioned and Louis Wu realizes that they built the Ringworld and humanity are descendants of normal Pak colonists on Earth millions of years ago whose Protectors died off.

Because it took so long to get to that point and thus to find the Ringworld control centre, the actual fixing of the Ringworld's orbit seems a little too pat and deus ex machina to me.

I give it 3.5 out of 5.

Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin

This is a book that I have had on my bookshelf for decades, but I have never gone back and re-read it like I have so many other books in my personal library. So a couple of days decided that now was the time. Unfortunately, it just wasn't as good as I remembered.

Yes, I know that this book and its two sequels were written for as younger age group, but so were the Harry Potter novels, and those are awesome. So Ged meets this one dragon and uses his magic to sail around the islands of Earthsea, but beyond that there isn't much more than narrative. It gets rather boring, actually. Even the encounter with the shadow creature was anti-climactic.

I give it a measly 1 star out of 5.

Hunh? Wha's wrong with the intarweb?

This past week, on and off, I've noticed somebody hammering at my wi-fi trying to get acess. And it's not like they are trying anything overly intelligent to get in, just request after request after request for a DHCP address. Now I have things limited to a handful of specific MAC addresses so they aren't getting in, so I'm not terribly worried about them stealing my bandwidth. But then I remembered this website: Upside-Down-Ternet

So, I thought, why don't I try to do that to them, too? Then all I have to do is figure out who in my apartment building is trying to get free high-speed intenet access. :-)

How cool was I? Ummm...

This is only really interesting if you're sufficiently over age 18. Go to Pop Culture Madness: Pop Music and select the year you turned 18. Take the first 50 songs and paste them into a word processor, then mark up each song as follows:

• If you liked it, make it bold
• If you disliked it, make it striked out
• If you neither liked it nor hated it it, make it italicized
• If you don't remember it, leave it alone

Well, I turned 18 in 1988, so here is my list:

1. What A Wonderful World* - Louis Armstrong
2. It Takes Two - Rob Base & E-Z Rock
3. Da Butt - EU
4. Hot Hot Hot - Buster Poindexter
5. I'll Always Love You - Taylor Dayne
6. Man In The Mirror - Michael Jackson
7. Sweet Child Of Mine - Guns N Roses
8. Red Red Wine - UB40
9. Just Got Paid - Johnny Kemp
10. Don't Worry, Be Happy - Bobby McFerrin
11. Pour Some Sugar On Me - Def Leppard
12. Every Rose Has Its Thorn - Poison
13. Welcome To The Jungle - Guns N Roses
14. Paradise - Sade
15. The Flame - Cheap Trick
16. 1 2 3 - Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine
17. Kokomo - Beach Boys
18. Need You Tonight - INXS
19. Pump Up The Volume - M/A/R/R/S
20. Roll With It - Steve Winwood
21. Baby I Love Your Way/Freebird (Medley) - Will To Power
22. Power Of Love - Laura Branigan
23. Push It - Salt N Pepa
24. One More Try - George Michael
25. Can't Stay Away From You - Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine
26. Wild, Wild West - Kool Moe Dee
27. One Moment In Time - Whitney Houston
28. Hot Hot Hot!!! - The Cure
29. The Promise - When In Rome
30. The Way You Make Me Feel - Micheal Jackson
31. Chains Of Love - Erasure
32. What's On Your Mind (Pure Energy) - Information Society
33. Honestly - Stryper
34. Don't Be Cruel - Bobby Brown
35. Bad Medicine - Bon Jovi
36. Strangelove - Depeche Mode
37. Nothin' But A Good Time - Poison
38. Angel - Aerosmith
39. Candle In The Wind - Elton John
40. Forever Young - Alphaville
41. Pink Cadillac - Natalie Cole
42. Always On My Mind - Pet Shop Boys
43. Tall Cool One - Robert Plant
44. Forever Young - Rod Stewart
45. Beds Are Burning - Midnight Oil
46. Tomorrow People - Ziggy Marley & The Melody Makers
47. I Know You're Out There Somewhere - Moody Blues
48. Just Like Heaven - The Cure
49. Wild Wild West - The Escape Club
50. In God's Country - U2

So how cool were you?