The Envelope Please

I got my PET scan results today, and they're good. Remission is still holding - there's been no real change since the last scan. The disturbed nodes are still scarred and oversized, but not growing and not particularly active in a metabolic sense. And nothing's cropped up elsewhere. I am, for the moment at least, not afflicted with cancer.

Some people might celebrate this by going to Disneyland. Others might pop a beer. I believe I might dig out an old Monogram X-15A2 and convert it to a delta-winged X-15A5. Or maybe dig my Special Hobby 1/32nd X-15 out from under the bed and build it. Either way, I strongly suspect an X-15 is going to be involved.

Scanxiety

Tomorrow I get the results of my PET scan. It'll probably be good news, but I suspect that cancer is going to leave as many scars on my mind as it did on my body. One of them is going to be a chronic nagging - not fear, really, more like irrational dread - that it's coming back, even when it isn't.

So.

I haven't watched the Food Network in a while, but I started to tune in again last week. I see that little has changed in my absence. There are a few new competition shows, but by and large, it's the same bunch of people. I'm a little surprised to see that Chopped is still on - I figured that culinary clinker was doomed to sink of its own unappetizing weight - and this new "Neurotic Chefs of Beverly Hills" appeals to me about as much as a good-sized slug of dacarbazine. But there's Ina Garten, and that's a relief. I'm also glad to see Bobby Flay is still gainfully employed. And Michael Symon grows on me; maybe he's growing into the job. And there's a new Iron Chef, I see. Pretty soon there'll be enough of them to play basketball, and won't that be fun, watching Masaharu Morimoto drive the baseline and dunk over Mario Batali. "In your FACE, Pasta-Man!"

Ace of Cakes is still on, and that's good. But it doesn't seem to have much to do with cakes any more; it's mostly the madcap antics of the quirky folk at the bakery. As long as you make that switch and don't expect anything technical, it's still fun. And Dinner: Impossible, starring Robert Irvine's Gigantic Arms. That seems only right and proper. And Paula Deen is still ya'lling and deep-frying butter, just as she should.

I watched the Cooking Channel the other day, but was rapidly driven away by the sheer smugness of it all. It doesn't seem to have much to do with cooking; it's mostly about status and style, and every time I switched to it, my Smug-O-Meter began to beep. The show where some numbskull insists that real hamburgers are fried on a slab of black iron was the coup de grace. I'll have my hamburgers done on a grill in the back yard, with lettuce and tomato and mustard, and if this stylish nabob doesn't like it, well, I'll fetch the stepladder... I live in Arizona. I was born in Arizona. And I don't necessarily accept the Received Wisdom that the New York City interpretation of a hamburger is the only valid one. (Michael J. Nelson once wrote that New York City is fine as long as you don't mind warm blasts of urine-scented air coming up out of gratings in the streets. And I find that I DO mind them.)

And the commercials! I like wine as much as the next person, but come on, at some point I have to throw a flag and call Excessive Smugness on the commercials (ten yards and loss of down). "This wine is fruity and round, but with hints of flint and tinder, and subtle tones of uranium hexaflouride that drape on the palate like the Golden Fleece." And what they really mean is "Won't your friends be shocked at your eliteness when they see you quaffing this shit!"

Of course, I'm drinking a glass of Spicy Hot V-8 juice, so I'm obviously a Philistine.

A possible exception is "Food(ography)", now with 100% more Mo Rocca than before. It has an Alton Brown-esque flavor, though without Alton's penchant for tedious amateur thespianism, and Mo himself doesn't bother me. So we'll see. The episode I watched was mostly about Julia Child, which seems like a good first step to me - if you're going to do a geek show about cooking, you'd best start by honoring the giants, in the same way that science shows on the Science Channel had best start out with a healthy amount of smooching on Albert Einstein's backside.

Thanksgiving

Well, it turns out that dining out on Thanksgiving isn't the same experience as having it at home. It wasn't bad, it just didn't really feel like Thanksgiving to me. Just another family dinner - not that there's anything wrong with that. That's easy for me to say, though, since I'm not the one who roasts the turkey, or for that matter paid for lunch today.

I was hoping I'd have my PET scan results by now, but I probably won't hear anything until the 29th. I have no reason to believe that the results will be unfavorable, but still, I'd like to know. There's a theory that if the oncologist doesn't call you in a mild panic that they didn't find anything distressing, but my oncologist has not always been particularly efficient at returning phone calls and it is possible to hypothesize that he prefers to give bad news in person.

And I'm not going to think about that. I wanted to be thankful for still being alive, but now I'm starting to wear myself down. So it could be time for a cup of Earl Grey and a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, a combination that always makes me feel better.

A CNN Thing

I read a thing on CNN today - I call it a "thing" because it certainly wasn't news.

Anyway, apparently someone has decided that some email domain names are "more awesome" and some are "less awesome." Myname@gmail.com is more awesome than Myname@yahoo.com. Having your own domain name is the most awesome, and having an AOL domain is the least awesome.

How interesting. Smug hipsters, no longer content with merely turning clothes and gadgets into status totems, have now made email domains into a minefield of angst and inadequacy. According to their resident expert, having an AOL email account means that you're probably seventy years old and haven't changed your email address since 1997. Well, I'm not seventy, but I haven't changed my email address in years - since everyone knows this one, it seems easier to keep it than to change it just to fit in with a bunch of idiotic techno-hipsters. And somehow I really don't think that getting my own domain name will make me a different person in the morning.

What fun it must be to live in a world where everything, literally everything, is some kind of status struggle, where lives and reputations hinge on having the right email address, listening to the right kind of music, or driving the right kind of car.

They go to the store to buy paper plates, and it's all so damned elite. "These paper plates are made from the finest Canadian boreal fir trees, and are processed without bleach in a carbon-neutral plant employing dispossessed Cambodian smallholders." Or, "These paper plates are hand-made by soulful artists in Brooklyn, with whom I've gotten severely gassed on crappy American beer." Geez. How can I possibly compete with that, when my main criteria for buying paper plates is finding ones thick enough that the hot food doesn't fry my genitals when I eat dinner in front of the TV?

There are, I believe, certain experiences one goes through in life that put things like that into proper perspective. Once, when I was going through chemo, my innards were so devastated I had diarrhea and I had to throw up at the same time. As distasteful as it sounds, I had to decide (and right sharply at that) which spurting end of me was most profitably aimed at the toilet. Do that a few times and you realize that all your hipster pretensions, all your yuppie status displays, all your elite stances don't make any difference at all.

Ultimately, all that matters is which end you aim at the toilet.

PET Scan

I have another PET scan Monday morning - at least I think I do. The oncology clinic called back and confirmed the scan, so I guess it's really going to happen this time. Scheduling PET scans is more ticklish than most medical procedures because of the brief half-life of the radioactive materials involved - in this case, a radioactive isotope of fluorine masquerading as oxygen, I believe. It doesn't exist in nature and has to be whipped up in a cyclotron, which I find endlessly interesting. In fact, I find the whole notion of beta decay endlessly interesting. How does it do that? And why??

I guess if we knew why beta decay happened, we'd all be wiser.

Anyway, I have no symptoms of cancer, so I expect the PET scan to be something of a formality. My leg is still somewhat swollen and sullenly uncooperative, but I think that's just a fact of life. I don't seem to have any bumps, lumps, night sweats, unexplained itches or that odd subliminal feeling that my body is up to something stupid.

But you never know, and if it's all right with everyone, I think I'll "go ahead on" (as Joe Don Baker said) and worry about it anyway, just in case. I personally find PET scans painless and restful, but I also find the business of waiting for the results quite stressful. I remember once I was waiting for a biopsy result to come back. I knew I still had cancer - I could feel the nodes in my neck and groin - so there wasn't that much stress. I knew I still had cancer; all the test could do was confirm what I already knew. But when you think you don't have cancer, the tests become even more stressful. You want good news so bad you can taste it, but at the same time, cancer has a weird inevitability that preys on the mind. It's like trying to keep Bermuda grass out of the garden - sure, there's no Bermuda in there now, but all it takes is one itty-bitty little Bermuda seed floating on the breeze and you've got real work on your hands. And all it takes is one mutant B lymphocyte to get a wild hair, and it all starts over again.

Back when I was going through chemo I used to listen to the song "Step Up" by Drowning Pool. I'm not a fan of the Drowning Pool ouerve, but that song had a certain accessibility, and it served as well as any other as a chemo fight song. But then I made the mistake of viewing the music video for it a few weeks ago. Oh dear. What is that thing on that guy's chin? And they're all so noodley!

I'm tempted to declare "Runes To My Memory" by Amon Amarth as the new fight song, because I happen to really like that song, and at least the guys in the band are fairly big and tough-looking. But I'm not sure the message of the song is one that I want sent down to my immune system. I want those little T-cells and whatnot to go around and kick the crap out of my mutant B lymphocytes, not sit around lamenting the fact that they're dying next to a river deep in the land of the Rus and they'll never make it home.

"Gods Of War Arise" by Amon Amarth might be a better choice. (In case you haven't noticed, I've been listening to Amon Amarth a good deal lately. Normally I just pick and choose the one or two Amon Amarth songs that I like, but I was fiddling with one of those gadgets that broadcasts your iPod on an unused FM radio station, and inasmuch as I was going about 70 miles per hour on the freeway, I didn't think that screwing around with the iPod was such a hot idea. So I just let it play, and the song "Asator" came on. I'd never really listened to it all the way through, and it really isn't that good, but about halfway through they drop into a thrashy sort of riff that kind of reminds me of "Dark Transmission" by Vader (or "Trans Dark Mission" as they say more than once). And yes, that's a good thing. So I've been listening to that Amon Amarth album ever since, trying to see what other good things I've missed.)

Getting Ready for Thanksgiving

It occurs to me that this is the first Thanksgiving in a long time when I haven't felt bad for one reason or another. Thanksgiving 2008 was ruined because I had advanced cancer and didn't know it; I only knew I was a wreck. Thanksgiving 2009 was ruined because I was rushing back and forth from the hospital getting ready for the first bone marrow transplant. Or actually having it, I don't really remember.

So I intend to celebrate this year in a way that makes up for the last two years. I may eat the whole goddamned pie, just because.

Table Finis

The table project is at an end. Not bad for just goofing around. Professionals and experts will no doubt spot a million things wrong with it, but if they'd seen it in the "before" state, even they'd have to say it was an improvement.

Unless they like gloss black furniture.

Not Such A Bummer

My wife's table-thing, after being stripped, sanded, stained, and given one coat of varnish. Tomorrow I'll sand the varnish lightly and give it another dose, and will repeat that until nausea sets in or she demands that I give it back. Lots better than the old gloss black paint, if I do say so myself.

Bummer

Bummer. It doesn't look too bad in this picture, but that tire is roont, as they say. There's a rip in the sidewall and the valve stem actually sucked back in through the hole in the rim and vanished (yes, it's so old it isn't tubeless). Drat.

Restart

I haven't done much around the house in the last few years. It's hard to attend to various jobs, tasks and chores when your sternum has just been sawed apart, or when you're so messed up from ESHAP chemotherapy you hallucinate that all your skin has fallen off, or when the tandem bone marrow transplant renders you so weak you can't walk twenty feet without stopping.

But I'm feeling much better these days, and I'm starting to do more things. I still get pretty tired if I do too much, and I still have occasional outbreaks of the blackest sort of depression - a gift of chemo, I'm sure. But I try to work through these things, and by and large I succeed. There are still things I can't do very well because my leg is uncooperative, and I don't have a whole lot of cardiopulmonary reserve yet. But I try.

I'm trying to emulate our neighbor, Doug. I'm not sure where Doug is from. Oklahoma, judging from his accent. But wherever he's from, he's tough. He isn't a big man by any means, but he's tough and he just won't quit. Something happened to his shoulder and he's basically lost the use of one arm completely, but he still goes up ladders and drags bales of hay off the top of his haystack with only one functional arm. I'm not sure I could do that. Not because bales of hay are too heavy, but because I have acrophobia and find the experience of being on top of a tall ladder most unpleasant.

As Justin McKee would say, "He's tougher than boiled owl."

I'm not as tough as boiled owl. But I'm trying.

X-15

And now, just because, a photograph of an X-15 high speed research aircraft, taken just at the moment of release from its NB-52 carrier aircraft, probably somewhere over southwestern Nevada. The photograph was probably taken in the early 1960s. Note the white astronaut helmet of the pilot barely visible through the window - yes, there's really a guy in there, and he's about to light the fire on a rocket engine with a thrust of about 60,000 pounds, and in a scant few moments he's going to leave that shiny F-104 Starfighter in the background behind like a dog leashed to a fireplug.

The X-15 has a long and distinguished record, racking up many "firsts" and a very solid body of research data in its 199 flights. Until the first flight of the Space Shuttle, it was the fastest and highest-flying manned winged aircraft ever flown, and most of its pilots are today considered astronauts even though for policy reasons NASA and the US Air Force didn't seem to give X-15 pilots astronaut wings.

Back when I was in elementary school, NASA used to send packages of photographic prints and data sheets to elementary schools. Whatever else could be said for NASA back then, they took excellent photographs, and their shiny prints were highly prized. All us kids were squabbling over the photographs in the NASA school kit, most of them color stuff from the later Gemini missions, but suddenly I saw a photograph of this strange black airplane. Back then I knew nothing about hypersonic flight, rocket engines, thermal issues in high speed flight, or much of anything else. I just knew that when I saw that picture of that airplane, I went oh... my... God...

I am still an X-15 junkie. Though I am widely quoted as saying that the Saturn V is the most impressive machine ever made by mere humans, the X-15 is still my favorite airplane. We just don't seem to do things like this any more. We (meaning NASA) seem to have gotten so caught up in PowerPoint presentations, program management mumbo-jumbo and political wrangling we just don't seem build things like the X-15 any more, or ask men like Pete Knight or Neil Armstrong to take them out see what they'll do.

What, No NDA?

I don't want to go into too much detail on who I work for, or what exactly I do. I don't necessarily have an NDA with my employer or contractor; suffice it to say that I'm a freelance contract test engineer and the fewer names I spill, the better.

Mainly I work in the area of airliner collision avoidance systems, known generally as "TCAS", which I think stands for "Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System". As an oversimplification, it's a two-part system, with each aircraft being equipped with a transponder and a TCAS interrogator. There are a bunch of different modes and sub-modes, but fundamentally an interrogator transmits an encoded signal that basically reads "Who are you and how high are you?" The transponder receivers the interrogation and transmits a reply that basically reads "This is me, and I'm at 15,000 feet."

The TCAS interrogator then works out the approximate range by which whisper-shout step triggered the reply and the approximate bearing by differential signal strength and phase as seen by four directional antennae. It then does some spooky math on all this and determines if the "intruder" (as the replying airplane is known) is too close or likely to get too close in the near future (and if so, it has what I like to think of as a "conniption fit" and instructs the flight crew to take evasive action - when the voice advisory system is working, you get all sorts of interesting voice messages, like CLIMB! CLIMB NOW! CLIMB, CROSSING, CLIMB! And then, at the very end, the meek little Clear of conflict... Voice advisory is a whole 'nuther subject. One of the voice messages you can get is the mysterious word "MINIMUM", which I believe is announced as the aircraft is nearing its decision height in an instrument approach, or perhaps decelerating toward its minimum safe flight speed, I'm not sure, though I think that one gets you "AIRSPEED". Anyway, a woman at work once asked me "Why does that thing keep saying enema, enema?")

It's more complicated than it sounds, especially when everything is working in full Mode-S mode and transferring data back and forth by means of DPSK modulation (I've always had this odd "wouldn't it be a fun world" fantasy where women are more impressed by the fact that I know that DPSK stands for differential phase shift keying than by some guy's fancy-shmancy Corvette, and where they say "Is that a long Mode-S interrogation you have there, or are you just happy to me?").

Anyway, among other things I design the hardware used to test and calibrate all this stuff, and write the software that runs the tests themselves. It's fun, except that the airways are now so crowded that there's a constant barrage of interrogations and replies flying back and forth. All of this traffic makes it hard to perform certain tests - when you're trying to get the unit to reply to a single interrogation while everyone else on the planet is transmitting away, well, it can be a mess. Synchronous garble is fun. Weird FRUIT is even more fun. I'm not exactly sure what FRUIT stands for - I've seen at least two different versions, but I prefer False Reply Uncorrelated In Time, meaning a reply that comes at a time when one is not expected...

The short version of all this hoohah is that to get a quiet enough environment (from a radio frequency point of view) it is sometimes necessary to set up your equipment and run your tests in a screen room. A screen room is just a metal room, almost always copper, usually either solid or what looks like window screen made out of copper. The power feeds have special filters, and even the air conditioning ducts have special traps in them that in some cases look like metal honeycombs, specially sized to reject radio signals at a particular frequency (in my line of work, the frequencies of interest are 1030 MHz and 1090 MHz). The doors are usually solid metal, and are secured with mammoth latches that wouldn't seem out of place on a battleship.

The point is that these screen rooms are like submarines. Once you're in and the door is latched, you're in your own private world. You can't see the outside world. You can't hear the outside world. Your cell phone doesn't have any bars at all. Wireless network devices don't work. And for some reason, such screen rooms are always either insufferably hot or bone-chillingly cold. I've worked in both. The hot ones are like being in a sauna; at the end of the day you're sweaty and kind of ripe, and all you really want to do is go home and take a shower. The cold ones are worse, if anything - your body takes on a deep, persistent chill that's very hard to break. You know your screen room is too cold when you go outside in a Phoenix summer just to warm up. And I note that ever since chemo, I'm much more sensitive to cold, though I tend to blame everything on chemo. "I dropped a hammer on my toe; damn I hate chemo!"

I've been working nights lately, meaning for the last couple of months. There are two real reasons for this. The first is that there's only one test station, and two different groups of people want to use it (Production, so they can test and ship boxes and make money, and me, so I can develop the remainder of the tests). The second is that there's less air traffic in general at night. In particular, the VFR traffic at the nearby airport stops, so there's just less of a mess in the airwaves. Though I don't think you need a transponder for strict VFR operation, they always do, and they're always a-squittering away in Mode-A or Mode-C, either of which can cause synchronous garble with Mode-S ("Crap! It missed three replies! I wish those flight students would turn off their transponders!") (One of the unsolved mysteries in this whole ATCRBS (Air Traffic Control Radar Beacon System) business is why an unsolicited reply is called a "squitter". But sometimes when someone tells me something I didn't want to know about, I catch myself thinking "Oh great, he's squittering again.")

My point, really, is that working nights in a copper screen room is doubly isolating. I hardly see anyone at all in the span of any given week. There are a few people loitering around the place in the late afternoon when I get there, but otherwise, it's just me, the cleaning crew, and the night guard. And since they are not typically fluent in English and I am not fluent in Spanish, there isn't much opportunity for conversation beyond the occasional friendly nod. It's just me and my Finnish and Polish death metal.

So those are my workdays lately: bone-chilling cold and levels of isolation that probably rival those of a nuclear submarine on patrol. But hey, at least the traffic is pretty light going home.

So the next time you're on approach to some airport and you sense that your airplane suddenly stops descending and climbs a little bit, look over at the passenger next to you and say "DPSK, you know..."

Sound Infidelity

I dislike my new headphones. I have trouble with "ear buds", frankly, and I prefer not to use them. They fall out, mainly. Either I have enormous ear canals that one could fit a squash into, or I have really tiny ear canals and the ear buds won't go in, but either way, they won't stay in.

So I normally listen to music using headphones. But the other day the right channel in my old headphones went out. Listening to music with one ear makes me constantly feel like I'm turning to the left, like some kind of 1960s NASA "nausea chair" experiment. So I got some new ones. They're bigger than the old ones. Beefier. And better at sealing out ambient noise. But man, they sound awful. The low end is gone. Just gone. The midrange is gone. All there is is treble, and a whole lot of overly bright, clashy treble at that. You know your bottom end is gone when you can't hear the double bass drum in an Amon Amarth song. And my old headphones were way loud - with everything turned up, they were loud enough to hear across the room, loud enough to probably cause me permanent loss. But these new ones are like a carpeted library - even with all the amps spun wide open and pumping out all the Joules they can, everything has a curiously hushed quality.*

It's a little like hearing the world as though it had been mixed by early primitive black metal bands. Everything sounds wiry, abraded, muddy...

So I tinkered with the various equalizer settings, hunting for something that would make the new headphones sound tolerable. Only one did: Spoken Word. Is it just me, or is there something fundamentally wrong with that?

* Back in my youth I had a component stereo system that included, among other things, an audio power amplifier that would pump about 2KWrms. It was so ugly I kept it in a closet all by itself, and its heat sinks were so heavy they caused a measurable perturbation in the orbit of Neptune. I spun it wide open one day because I really wanted to hear the shit out of the cellos in the opening part of Saturn by Holst. I don't know what the wavelength of the fundamental tone was (I read somewhere it was 32 feet), but it seemed to cause my whole house to resonate and the air conditioning vent fell clean out of the wall, screws and all.

Proposition 203

We've been getting a lot of phone calls from various groups trying to get us to vote against Proposition 203, which if passed would permit medically-supervised use of marijuana. I'm not here to debate the fine points of the Proposition itself, since it is my general belief that ballot propositions are so closely-worded you need to be a lawyer or a specialist to make sense of them.

But I do wish to make two points.

The first is that one of the phone calls against Prop 203 was funded by the Arizona Cardinals football team. Wait a second. You guys get the taxpayers to build you a new stadium, and then you turn into an advocacy group? Am I the only one who thinks that a commercial enterprise that was bankrolled in part by the taxpayers ought to have the good grace to keep its mouth firmly shut? And I ask you this - how many Cardinals fans have a brewski at the game? If you're going to piss and moan about destructive drugs, you may as well drop the hypocrisy and add alcohol to the list. Oh, but that might eat into the Cardinals bottom line! Can't have that.

The second is that when I was going through my many chemo treatments, if my oncologist (the inestimable Dr. Sarkodee-Adoo) had permitted me to smoke a little marijuana to help with the daunting side-effects of chemotherapy, I would have. In the words of Captain Willard from the movie Apocalypse Now, "Absolutely goddamn right." I'd probably have tried to eat a hash brownie, though it probably wouldn't have stayed down long enough to do any good.

And I'm hardly a stoner.

The pro-marijuana groups make me chuckle though. They always have some frail bald woman who is undergoing savage chemo and asks "Please, if it'll help me get through this hell, can I please smoke a little marijuana?" And right next to her are a bunch of stoners with scraggly hair and seed burns on their shirts saying "Like, it's totally natural, dude." Get your message in order here. Middle America, whose votes you need to pass things like this, sees only the stoners and thinks "Well, I'm not in favor of that." And so the frail bald woman continues to suffer.

It's like the gay rights advocacy groups. All Middle America remembers are the guys in tiny leather shorts dry-humping one another in the gay pride parades, and thus the message is lost. I suppose as a general proposition I accept the notion that people have the right to wear tiny leather shorts and dry-hump one another, but it isn't a question of what's right or not; it's a question of how you manage your message so you don't alienate people who are not generally committed to your cause in the first place.

And in closing, I offer this thought. The "War on Drugs" has failed. Prohibition failed. All of these attempts to legislate morality inevitably fail. At what point does one accept the inevitable - and tax it appropriately? Personally, I'd rather marijuana be legal, regulated and taxed than see all that money flow into the hands of drug cartels and smugglers. Since it is obvious that marijuana use cannot ever be stopped by passing ever more draconian laws, the choice (it seems to me) is who you want the money to go to: your local municipality, or the drug cartels. I know which way I lean.