TheMacJedi

Starting on Monday, June 23rd, I was feeling bad. The best description is flu-like symptoms. As each day passed, I felt a little worse. By Friday, my sore throat was bad enough that I could only drink things (mostly sweet tea) that didn’t burn. By Saturday, I sent Karen to the store to get me some throat sprays and anything that would make the pain go away. I thought Sunday would be my recover day, but it turned out to be the worst. I was up late (no surprise there) so Monday I didn’t wake up until noon. Shortly after getting up, I had a headache (pain level 1) and noticed a pressure in my chest. Then I vomited for the first time and a little blood came out of my nose. I called Karen and told her I think I need to see a doctor.

Once Karen got home, we headed over to the Urgent Care Center, where of course Urgent doesn’t actually mean Urgent. They called me back after around 30 minutes. The nurse weighed me and took my blood pressure (187 over 131). Then she took my blood pressure on the other arm (190 over 131). The nurse said my blood pressure was super high and I need to go to the Emergency Room at the hospital right away. A doctor came in and said my blood pressure was super high (which made me laugh) and that I need to go to the Emergency Room at the hospital right away. An aide came in with a baby aspirin for me and I said, “What’s this for?” Karen responded with, “They don’t want you to pass out here!” and we all laughed because it was funny.

We headed over to the hospital but dropped Allyson off at a friend’s house first. We arrived at the hospital Emergency Room and signed in, where of course Emergency doesn’t actually mean Emergency. They called me back after around 30 minutes. A nurse took my blood pressure (167 over 124) and asked if I had a history of high blood pressure, to which I answered, “I don’t know because I haven’t seen a doctor for a decade.” I do know that when in the Army, one of their nurses told my I had high blood pressure but said it was probably a soda I had recently. Then I was wheeled back to an actual emergency room.

It wasn’t long before they started to bring me stuff like this beautiful hospital gown.

They took my blood pressure again (181 over 121). It seems to be all over the place. Then they provided me with an awesome IV. Have I mentioned how much I dislike needles? Just writing about them makes me quiver. There on the floor, that appears to be my blood.

You can see from the following video Karen was enjoying herself a little too much, maybe not.

Even while I was laying there I couldn’t help but use my new iPhone 3GS to check my email, take some photos, shoot some video, provide support to a client (seriously), and Tweet. I’m addicted to technology and the iPhone allows me to do so many things on a single device. Since I was sick, I had a reduced appetite and hadn’t eaten in 15 hours. Les, an ER person, brought me some apple sauce and a fruit cup. No Jell-O because I’m a vegetarian. Neither was organic and the main ingredient in the fruit cup was high fructose corn syrup. Les put a nitroglycerin patch on my chest. I made a joke about being a stick of dynamite.

Still residing in the Emergency Room, they take me for my first chest X-RAY. Karen and I sat for a while. They made Karen leave because they were changing the person who was in the next area. I checked my email, did some web surfing. The doctor came in and talked with me. I figured he wanted to talk about my flu symptoms (which is why I went to the Urgent Health Center) or my high blood pressure (which everyone else seemed to be worried about). Nope. He wanted to talk about the pressure in my chest. He wasn’t convinced it was related to the my sickness and said I should stay the night for observation and have a heart stress test done in the morning. After asking a few questions, I agreed I would stay.

It’s important that you realize the only reason I went to the hospital was for Karen and Allyson. Had I been alone when told about the high blood pressure I would have asked for some antibiotics and went home. However, it wouldn’t have been right to make them worry, so I did it for them. Which is why I also chose to stay the night and have the test.

Karen was still in a waiting room waiting for me to tell her when she could come back in. She sent me this picture of what food was available to her. In my naivety I would have thought a hospital would be a shining beacon of proper nutrition. It turns out that I may have been mistaken about that. As an up and coming food snob this was very disappointing. A short time later I told Karen she could return to the emergency room. She came back and visited for a little while and then said she was going to get Allyson so she could see me before the day was over. I was moved to a room while she was gone.

An aide came into my new room and took my blood pressure (120 over 80) and attached a wireless heart monitor. Karen and Allyson returned and brought me a few things I asked for – iPhone adapter, iPhone cable, USB extension cable, organic snack bars and Allyson thought it would be funny to bring my gnome. The doctor came in and asked how I was doing. I mentioned my headache and a shooting pain down the right side of my neck. He got a little more information and said he would see me tomorrow. Karen, Allyson and I visited for a little while longer before they left. Around midnight I started watching Tokyo Drift but couldn’t remain focused, so I tried to sleep. The nurse came in almost immediately and said she needed to get some throat and nose swabs. It ended up being 2am before I could fall asleep. Unfortunately, I had a headache (pain level 3). At 4am I was awoken up by some young guy who said he needed to take some blood, so I extended my arm with the IV. He said, “I can’t take it from there. I’m going to have to get it from the other arm.” I said, “WHAT?” Just the idea of another needle going in me was enough to make queasy. I extended my right arm and lied there just trying not to think about it. By the time he was done and left, my headache (pain level 4) was keeping me awake. I called the nurse and the aide showed and asked what I needed. I said I had a headache and couldn’t go to sleep. She said she would tell the nurse. The nurse came in about 20 minutes later and removed my nitro patch and left before I realized she never mentioned my headache. Apparently, a side effect of the nitro patch was headaches. I waited about 5 minutes and called the nurse again. The aide returned and I explained that the nurse never mentioned my headache and I couldn’t go to sleep. The nurse returned 5 minutes later and said the doctor didn’t leave a prescription order so they didn’t know what they were allowed to give me. They were waiting for a return call from the doctor before giving me anything. About 10 minutes later I couldn’t lie in bed anymore so I sat in the chair for a few minutes. Then I walked out in the hall and leaned against the wall. The nurse came around the corner with two Tylonol and a little water. I took them and they were gross (uncoated). Then I asked the nurse if I could pace the hall while I waited for the headache to go down. She didn’t have a problem with it.

I spent the next 20 minutes pacing the halls as my headache went down. At the opposite end of the hall was one of those little maps that says, “You are here.” 18 years ago I worked for an architecture firm and one of my jobs was to measure this hospital and put it into the computer. I recognized the map and was quite certain that I had drawn it 18 years ago. While pacing I also ran into Starbucks Debbie. That’s what I call her because she manages the Starbucks in Target and saw me many times a week before I gave up specialty coffees. Do you know how weird it is to run into someone you know while pacing the hall of a hospital at 5am?

At 6:30am I was awoken by a lady who was going to take me to get a CAT scan. I got the CAT scan and was returned to my room. I proceeded to fall asleep many times in between aides bringing things in the room like a fresh gown, bathroom stuff, changing trash bags and checking other miscellaneous stuff.

At around 8am they brought me some breakfast. I took the lid off of it and thought to myself, “You have got to be joking?” At no point did anyone document that I was a vegetarian but even the non-meat products weren’t food I would eat. I very reluctantly ate half of the eggs, most of the biscuit and had a drink of milk. There was no real butter, just butter spread and the jelly was high fructose corn syrup. The milk wasn’t organic which meant it was BGH milk. Are you telling me that hospitals have no idea that this crap is bad for people?

From this point forward, I mostly remained in a sleepy state, where I would sleep for 30 minutes, wake up and sleep for another 30 minutes. My chest pressure had not returned.

At around 1:30pm someone came to take me to get my heart stress test. Once we got in that area, I saw a woman get something from a room that was labeled, Radioactive, and exit that room with some for me. She said she was going to insert it thorough my IV and let it circulate for the heart X-RAYs. Before that started I was taken to a woman who gave me an echocardiogram.

Then I was returned to the room where they were to start the heart stress test which started with me explaining to the person there why he should get the new iPhone 3GS. He put me into a machine that took X-RAYs of my heart. Then I was moved into the next room where I was hooked up to a 12 lead monitor for the treadmill part of the test. That guy got out a needle and injected something into my IV which required me to lie down for 5 minutes because it made me queasy. A doctor came in and got me started on the treadmill. The needle guy said he was going to to have to inject me again and to not look. The treadmill test lasted for about 8 minutes. It winded me but wasn’t hard. Then I was returned to the previous room where they took more X-RAYs to compare to the previous X-RAYs.

I was returned to my room around 3pm and surprised to see Karen and Allyson there with a delicious organic sweet iced tea from Coffee Crossing. The doctor came in a little later to see how I was doing and I said I was ready to get out of there. He said he was waiting on some test results and would release me when everything turned out negative. So Karen, Allyson and I waited for 3 hours before they told me all my tests were negative and I was being released, which is good because I was getting agitated.

An aide came in 10 minutes later and removed my heart monitor. The nurse came in 10 minutes after that and removed my IV and had me sign some papers and gave me prescriptions for blood pressure, antibiotics and stomach pain. They told me to wait until the transporter got to my room so they could wheel me out. After 5 minutes I told Karen and Allyson to go on down. 5 minutes later the nurse said the transporter should be there soon even though she looked surprised to still see me in the room. After waiting another 5 minutes I just got up and walked out. I met Karen in the lobby and we left.

I fell asleep around 11pm and slept 13 hours uninterrupted. I got up, took a shower, drank some tea and Karen returned with the antibiotics which is the only one I was going to take to help get rid of my flu-like symptoms. I took my first antibiotic around 1:30pm. As of the writing of this article I still have flu-like symptoms. Most noticeably is my cough. I’m glad my sore throat is gone.

In April of 2006 one of my clients was married and they were transferring their wedding photos and videos to their laptop as often as they could. Shortly after the wedding she called me and said her PC laptop wouldn’t boot. I picked up the laptop and did my best to get it to boot but it wouldn’t. I had determined that the hard drive had failed on some level and wouldn’t mount. I reluctantly informed my client of the bad news.

She decided to buy MacBook which I helped her setup and I recovered her iTunes Library from her iPod to her MacBook.

A few months later I decided to try again. I put the drive into a laptop and attempted to run Check Disk. This time the drive simply clicked over and over again never getting anywhere in the boot process.

On December 20th 2007 I purchased SpinRite, a new utility that I thought might repair her hard drive, unfortunately when booting the PC the utility couldn’t see that the drive was connected. And again I shelved the drive.

This month (May 2009) I borrowed a friends PC tower to run SpinRite on my TiVo hard drive because my TiVo was crashing every hour. SpinRite ran for less that 12 hours and repaired some sector problems on the drive. After reassembling my TiVo and putting it back into use I haven’t had a single problem with it. This made me think it was time again to try SpinRite on my clients hard drive.

On Saturday morning May the 16th 2009 I was in my work area and decided to put the hard drive in a laptop and run SpinRite. You can imagine my surprise when SpinRite saw the drive even though it was clicking repeatedly. I told SpinRite to Recover the data. I was quite excited to see that SpinRite was trying to repair the drive. I kept going to my work area to check it’s progress.

After 12 hours it had finally gotten through about 4 areas of damage or less than 1% of the drive. On Sunday I was excited to tell my wife that it was at 54% and it was actually repairing some of the drive while marking other areas unrecoverable. I was thinking that by Monday I would be able to try and recover the data from the drive after the repair.

However, Monday came and went still at 54%. Tuesday got us to 58%. Wednesday was an all 64% day as was Thursday. Friday came and moved us to 65%. One week later, on Saturday we saw 68%. Sunday was the day we saw 69%. Monday came and went without a single change. Tuesday, well Tuesday was the JackPot.

I checked on the progress of the drive repair Tuesday morning May 26th 2009. To my surprise SpinRite was finished. Some areas were marked in Red (red is bad) and some areas were marked in Green (green is good) while most areas were undamaged. I removed the drive from the PC laptop and mounted it on my MacBook. And there it was. It would occasionally click when covering a bad area but it would get over it and report an error. Then I was able to move on.

I meticulously went through every photo and video attempting to copy them over to my drive. There were the important wedding photos and videos as well as hundreds of other photo and videos. Many times the hard drive would start clicking, I had to wait until it was done about a minute later then move on. After several hours of grabbing hundreds of images and dozens of videos one by one I recovered all but a couple videos a few pictures because they were corrupt.

Now I’m going to publish this article and send my client a link so she can read that I recovered her wedding photos and videos from the laptop drive she gave me 3 years ago.

Response from Amie, “Yeah Rob it’s Amie, just checked my email and I think That’s pretty incredible.”

As my Twitter posts increase my blog posts decrease. After you spend time posting little things all week long on Twitter it zaps your need to make a post on your blog. I’ve seen this among other geeks as well. Blogs require time to compose and edit your articles. Twitter is so quick and easy to use it really does eat up your desire to post something new.

I’m still surprised to hear that kids I know don’t know what Twitter is. I stay on the bleeding edge of technology but these are kids that don’t know what the hottest service is.

This site is a combination of personal and business information. So my articles can be about anything and so can my Tweets http://twitter.com/themacjedi

So have you other Twitter users noticed that your blog posts have been reduced due to your Twitter use?

As a result of recent communications with clients and with third parties I have taken another look at my rates. What I have confirmed is that my Tech Support rate is inline with this area and my expertise.

However, I’ve discovered that with the market down turn many web designers have reduced their design and programming rates to increase their clientele or to allow their clientele to keep web design in the budget. I have not lost any clients since my web design rates increased. The economy has kept me from gaining any new clients as ad budgets have been slashed or eliminated.

My position has always been to provide my clients with the best service I’m capable of while keeping the invoices efficient. With all things being considered I’ve decided it’s in the best interest of TheMacJedi – Rob Jones Tech Support and my clients to reduce my web design rates. While this is obviously not something that I have to do, it is something that I want to do. I’m comfortable with the reduced profit so my clients may receive an affordable rate in this economy.

Effective April 1st 2009 all Web Design work will be done at a rate of $125 per hour. This rate matches my rates for training and tech support.

Existing clients will notice an immediate reduction in web design invoice totals. I will continue to provide invoice discounts when appropriate.

Thank you for your continued business. If you ever have questions or problems please do not hesitate to contact me. I will do my best to satisfy you.

Apple gave a preview today of the iPhone OS 3 which will be available this summer. Based on everything in the Keynote this is the best update yet. More features than I expected and each of those features contain options than anyone expected.

You can read all about it everywhere but I suggest you watch the video.

I remember the day (Sep, 15th 2000) Karen called me and said, “Since you don’t want a Dog can Allyson have a cat?” I said yes and they brought her home. She was sickly and Karen nursed her and bathed her daily until she was better. Franna was considered a mean cat and only like Allyson and Karen. If I tried to pet her more than 2 times in a row she would growl and start to hiss. But Allyson, could pick her up, flip her upside down, dress her up, whatever she wanted.

Yesterday Franna was sick and acting very weird so we took her to the Vet. They said she was indeed very sick and put her on an I.V. We called before they closed to check on her and they said she had sat up which was good because she couldn’t hours earlier. On Karen and Allyson’s way to check on her this morning (Feb. 18th 2009) the Vet called and said Franna died at 10am.

Most of these photos were taken in 2006 by Allyson after dressing up Franna. They loved each other.

This is the fastest recorded internet speed I’ve ever had, ever. I don’t know what’s causing these crazy speeds but I like it.

Download 32165 kb/s

Upload 1320 kb/s

Ping 78 ms

This is the fastest recorded internet speed I’ve ever had. This is slightly faster than before my internet went out.

Download 24291 kb/s

Upload 1241 kb/s

Ping 95 ms

This is the slowest recorded internet speed I’ve ever had with InsightBB. On this day my internet speed continued to degrade as it got colder and colder. I called Insight and they couldn’t find anything wrong. But they were kind enough to sit on the phone with me for nearly an hour while we determined it wasn’t my equipment. I went ahead and scheduled an appointment just in case. Once the temperature reached 8 degrees I had completely lost my internet connection. I hate the cold.

Download 1003 kb/s

Upload 854 kb/s

Ping 115 ms

I ended up canceling my appointment with Insight because my internet came back the following day without anything changing on my end. I saw one of the Insight trucks in my neighborhood repairing a problem. My following posts shows that I was back to normal speeds. I’m quite happy with the support and service from Insight. Of course I never like being without internet.

While I spent a lot of time trying to find the best desktop and demoing all the available ones I’ve made my choice.

I’ve decided that with the release WordPress 2.7 I have no need for a desktop client. The new layout and look of the interface is very pleasing. I’m willing to only post when i have an internet connection or from my iPhone.

This is the fastest recorded internet speed I’ve ever had.

Download 23731 kb/s

Upload 1296 kb/s

Ping 110 ms

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7, of course this was before all of the plug-ins and themes I’m using have been listed as compatible. Hopefully I won’t see too many problems but I expect a few. What can I say, I’m a bleeding edge kind of guy.

I’m looking for comments from both MarsEdit and Ecto users.

I would like to be able to pick one or the other for full time WordPress blogging. Make sure when making comments you indicate what service (WordPress) you use with either of these two apps.

They both have good looking interfaces and functionality appears to be similar. So you power users let me and everyone else know what you think.

Please be clear about which app you speak of and if you have comparison stories share those as well.

I’m trying to figure out which is the best WordPress client, Ecto or MarsEdit. This post is being made by Ecto.

As you can see from the pick above my internet is an OK speed.

As I edit this post I see that Ecto is very clever. I like the way it works.

I’m trying to figure out which is the best WordPress client, Ecto or MarsEdit. This post is being made by MarsEdit.

As you can see from the pick above my internet is an OK speed.

As I edit this post I see that MarsEdit is very clever. I like the way it works.

Save $50 on each new Drobo and Drobo Bundle (FireWire Only) by using code “TheMacJedi” at the Drobo Store

When NetShare became available on the App Store (the second time 8/1/2008) I bought it and downloaded it. I hadn’t even tried to set it up or use it. Within an hour of downloading it the apps on my iPhone stopped opening. So I did a restore to my iPhone which took more than an hour. Everything looked good but when I went to open an app on my iPhone it wouldn’t. So I went into iTunes and told it to not sync apps, therefore removing them. Then I syncing again to reinstall them. It didn’t work, the apps on my iPhone still wouldn’t open. I decided to delete all of the apps from iTunes, re-download them and then reinstall them on my iPhone.

Hours later I had re-downloaded all my apps except one, NetShare, why? Because it wasn’t available anymore. Apple had for the second time pulled the app from the store. Only they removed my ability to download it even though I bought it.

After sending iTunes Support a message that I was unable to re-download NetShare they sent me this reply on 8/4/2008.

Dear Rob,

Eric
iTunes Store Customer Support

Their reply being completely unacceptable I replied back with this message today (8/16/2008 8:09 PM).

Your reply is unacceptable. The reply is basically saying “Thank you for buying from the App Store but you can’t have what you paid for.”

Thanks

Within 5 minutes of sending that message I received this email (8/16/2008 8:14 PM).

Dear Rob Jones,

Amount: $10.69 USD

At first I didn’t think that I could have received a refund that quickly from a message that was 5 minutes old until I received this message from Apple (8/16/2008 8:31 PM)

Dear Rob,

Eric
iTunes Store Customer Support

Wow, his analogy is so wrong I don’t even know where to begin. Apple did exactly what I said I didn’t want which was give me a refund and didn’t do what I asked for which was re-download NetShare.

This morning my client was telling me that their dog Sterling, who had been left alone overnight peed on the telephone that was on the floor. Even more funny than that, it really was an IP Telephone.

I transferred about 30 to 50 posts per day and topped that off with the comments and now my previous RapidWeaver site is running on WordPress.

I’m still learning my way around WordPress but I’m very impressed.

Now I can get back to making regular posts.