Category Archives: my health

Bikes and stuff

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di090722

I already have this so I can sweat without getting anywhere.  Now how about the other way around?

During lunch break today I went to the local bicycle shop and looked for an electric bike.  By this I mean an ordinary bicycle with electrical assist.  They don’t require any special license or anything such, as their maximum speed is no larger than an ordinary bike, and their size, weight, steering and brakes are within normal range as well.  (Though they tend to be a little heavier than modern non-motorized bikes.) The main difference is simply that you can pedal comfortably up long hills rather than sweat and pant like an animal.  Seeing how the main challenge to biking to and from the city are exactly the excessively long hill slopes both ways, this sounds suspiciously ideal.  Well, actually the bus is far more ideal most of the year, if you don’t get swine flu on it.  But that is pretty optimistic, I’m afraid.

Anyway, the bike costs NOK 20 000, or approximately $3 200.  I think that is pretty steep, even if it includes the infamous 25% sales tax we have in Scandinavia. I happen to have that kind of cash floating around at the moment, but unlike most of my expenses, I would notice this one.  My income is pretty meager by Norwegian standards, I do this well because my expenses are pretty moderate too.  I generally don’t have a lot of things I want.  I am not sure how much I want this either.  It’s more like “it’s better than swine flu”, but I suppose even that depends on how severe the flu is.

Electric bikes is also another of those products I might buy in part because I want them to exist in the future.  But I would rather like them to be cheaper in that future.

Speaking of bikes, I guess there is a certain symmetry in having a bike that takes me places without sweating, since I already have one that makes me sweat without going anywhere. I am talking about my stationary bike, of course.  I was using it a bit today too, and that’s a story in itself.  It started before I even came to the house.  Out by the road, I picked up today’s mail, yet another letter from Centerpointe Research Institute. They were, as so often, trying to sell a friend’s product, in this case a supposedly supercharged version of qigong. It can treat all kinds of illnesses, such as cancer, by removing energy blockages in the body, they say.  There are of course several paragraphs in there about how one must avoid the words “diagnose”, “treat” etc because it is Not A Medical Treatment (despite all the people whose cancer and heart conditions disappeared as if by magic). Heh.

Not that there is anything wrong with qigong, probably.  It is a combination of breathing techniques and stretching exercises, similar to tai chi but slower and gentler and accompanied by mental imagery (visualization).  I like to think of tai chi as a love child of martial arts and meditation, and qigong as a love child of tai chi and meditation… wait, that’s just wrong! Uhm, let us just assume it was another meditation.  Anyway! Qi (known in Japanese as Ki) is a kind of life force that flows through the body keeping it alive. Or so most Asians believe.  This flow through a network of meridians is also the basis for acupuncture and acupressure.  Western medicine knows that stimulating nerves in one part of the body can have effects in a different part of the body, and we assume that this is how the theory of qi originated.

Anyway! The brochure contained a small demonstration exercise that I tried, but did not practice for long.  I may include something similar in The Teacher Appears (yes, I have decided in favor of that name now) but it just felt wrong for me, because of its focus on the breath.  Because of my childhood asthma, I prefer to think as little as possible about my breathing for the most part. If it works, don’t fix it!  Because it did not always work.

Despite my supposed “Lassie-fair” (pardon my French*) attitude to breathing, I actually found myself breathing strangely now and then while biking on my exercise bike later.  It has its own pulse meter, and quite precise too.  I found that breathing deeply in and then slowly out caused my pulse to go way down when I was biking on a fairly easy level.  Then I biked it back up and did it again. It was kind of fascinating, but creepy.  I really should not mess with my heart, even less than with my breathing.  The body knows a lot better than I do what my heart rate should be.  (It is generally quite a bit lower than what is common for my age, but it does not seem to lead to any symptoms.)  When I took a walk after the indoors biking, I found myself doing the strange breathing thing again and felt very uncomfortable.  I went back home and played Sims 3 until I had forgotten the weirdness.  And then it was already this late.

(*By the way, laissez-faire is not actually spelled “Lassie-fair”, but searching for that phrase on Google will reveal a good number of people with very strong opinions on economics. Sometimes Google is stranger than fiction.)

Not dead yet

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Although I am sure I am moving in that direction, at a speed of about 24 hours a day… Well, 19 hours a day in a manner of speaking, since the average life expectancy is still rising by 5 hours a day even in the developed country.  If only it were 25!  Life is too awesome to just end without a really, really good reason.

I am still here, but I am shrinking.  I don’t check my weight every week – it would just get cluttered by random things like whether I have been drinking lots of water – but several times a year.  This was one of them.  It is the lightest I have been in a couple years.  (As regular readers will know, I lost weight involuntarily for nine months after the mysterious illness in Easter 2005, then regained it over about the same length of time after I moved here.  It has been very stable since, at a moderately lower level than before (probably because I still can’t eat more than traces of fat).

I will probably be checking more frequently for a while.  But it is less likely to be an undiscovered cancer and more likely to be just forgetting to eat while I play Sims 3, I think.  After all, if I can forget to update the Chaos Node, I can forget pretty much anything!

Pulse vs pain

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My pulse is telling me that I am in amazing health, and should probably go train for a marathon or something.  The pain in my upper jaw is telling me that I’ve got some kind of infection again (you will remember that I wrote about these 10 years ago too on a regular basis. I still don’t know what it is.)

It is Saturday again, so I stayed up an hour longer and overslept by two hours. The sun was back after a mostly gray week with scattered showers.  Before it could get too hot, I decided to mow the lawn in the early afternoon.  I put on my pulse watch, as I do for such occasions.  To me, mowing the lawn is exercise.  That said, I think I need a new lawnmower. I have failed to sharpen the blades on this one; I am just not a do-it-yourself type I guess.  As it is now, it flattens far more grass than it cuts, so I have to go over the same stretch repeatedly to actually get it cut.  Even then some straws will rise again when I have left.

Anyway, I put on the pulse watch. It showed 65 beats per minute when I was just standing there.  That may not sound strange, but it is.  I have a resting pulse of 55 when I don’t have any infections and haven’t exercised the last day or two.  (Either one of these will evidently set off some internal work in the body that requires extra energy, presumably millions of tiny nanomachines repairing and restocking the broken or depleted parts.) That’s a pretty comfortable number, 55.  There is a good chance that most health personnel will have a noticeably higher pulse than that.  For the most part, only athletes and the occasional mutant will have much lower.  But that’s while lying flat on my back and thinking of silence.

Getting up requires a lot more work for the heart since suddenly the blood has to fight against gravity, almost 190 centimeters of uphill from ground level.  Also, you don’t notice but some pretty big muscles are hard at work keeping you upright and in balance.  So my standing pulse is normally more like 80.  I honestly have no idea why it was so low today, especially since I clearly have an infection in my face.  Infections should normally get the immune system to roll out, requiring more energy and therefore more oxygen.  But evidently my immune system is a lot less worried than I am about this inflammation. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, time will show.

The slow pulse does not seem to be brachycardia/ bradycardia,  since it rises in response to exercise. After a few minutes of mowing, my pulse was within the usual training range, and stayed there.  A doctor will normally not diagnose bradycardia unless there is fatigue, dizziness, fainting or heart conditions apart from the slow beat.  I have such symptoms very rarely, about once a year, and not the same symptom every year either.  So despite having been hospitalized twice with heart monitor after fainting for no good reason (some years ago), nobody has ever hinted that I needed any kind of treatment.  I guess being symptom-free 364 days a year is pretty good for a human.

Now if I could do that well against the perennial infections of my jaws, it would be right peachy.

Bout of sickness

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Well, I ended up only being at work for an hour longer than usual, a pleasant surprise.  But before I got that far, I had a less pleasant surprise that made me wonder whether I could work at all.

On my way through the city, I started to feel bad.  I was short of breath and got a dry cough. Going up the stairs to my office, my heart was hammering much harder than it usually does for such a modest exertion.  And after I arrived, I kept getting rapidly worse.  I started to shiver and feel queasy and out of it, not exactly dizzy but kind of foggy. My heart was beating as if I were running, even though I just stood there.  It was as if all major parts of my body were starting to malfunction at the same time.  I must admit I thought that was what happened, that I had somehow fallen victim to sepsis, “blood poisoning”, an infection spreading throughout the body.  But how?  The loose tooth does harbor a disgusting mix of bacteria, but they have no obvious entryway into the bloodstream, and I have no infected sores that I can see.  I was confused.  But as I kept rapidly getting worse, I thought about going to the emergency room.  (You know what happens if I do that, or even go to a doctor – somehow when it is finally my turn, I am healthier than the doctor and nurses.  I really should get myself a job at a hospital, since I seem to absorb the healing aura of the place in some mystical way!)

Before I came that far, however, I had some sudden and uncomfortable bowel movements to take care of. After this, I felt very tired and spent 10-30 minutes in something between meditation and sleep in my chair, doing nothing but letting the nanomachines repair my body. Which evidently they did.  After some earlier episode, I carry an electronic fever thermometer with me, and according to it my temperature peaked at 37.5 C before that rest, and fell back afterwards.  That is about one degree C higher than my usual morning temperature, but well within normal human range.  Most children and many young women are naturally that warm.

I still don’t feel perfectly well, so no mowing today.  (Besides, the sun was already setting and that means the mosquitos are out.)  As midnight approaches, I have trace of headache, but my heartbeat is back to normal.  It was a bit of a scare, though. I still don’t know what caused it, which is the worst part of it.  Will it be back tomorrow?  Or in the middle of the night?  I have no idea.

One other thing bears mention today.  As I went to the bus stop, there stood a car parked there, a small pickup.  There was no one in it or nearby.  This is unusual, but I just observed it.  The bus had to stop out in the street, but I got on alright.  Two bus stops later, we picked up a couple more people.  This time there stood a lorry (truck) in the bus stop.  I did not see if anyone was in it, but it is not that unnatural.  We drove on, and I spent the time thinking about other things, if at all.  But as we were approaching the city, we stopped again, to let someone off I think.  I noticed that there stood a large car parked in the bus stop.  Then I looked out the window to the other side, and there stood a small passenger car parked on the shoulder of the road, not even at a stop.  It was completely empty and there was no one around.

I decided to check the Internet for clues as to whether the Rapture had occured during the night or morning.  It certainly looked as if a number of drivers had just had a few seconds notice to park their cars…

But whatever it was, I really doubt the Rapture will be a local phenomenon to the Kristiansand area, although some of the small churches here might be less surprised if it were.  The south coast is Norway’s “Bible belt”, although the religion is dying out even here eventually.

(I don’t know for sure whether the Rapture will be a literal, physical event, but I don’t see why not.  It will probably seem very natural though. I mean, the Jews returning to their lands flying like doves was a literal, physical event that must have sounded utterly magical and unrealistic for most of the time it was written in the Bible, likewise the prophecy that they would make the desert bloom. All of this came to pass and hardly anyone lifted an eyebrow.)

But if there is a literal, physical “alien abduction” of Christians at some future point, I think it is pretty sure that I won’t be among those disappearing.  I no longer have that kind of simple, childish faith. Whether that realization was part of what made me feel sick to the bone, I don’t know. “One event following after another does not always mean that the first event was the cause of the second.”

A game that heals?

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di090529

I’m not talking about my imaginary girlfriend today, but her imaginary sister. Not that it makes much difference, I suppose.

I came home from work and was about to mow a part of the lawn again. I try to do this for a while each day when it is not raining (and rainy days are few here on the south coast of Norway). I do it as exercise as much as I do it for the lawn. So I strapped on the pulse clock and belt, so I can keep track on how hard I work. I try to keep my manual lawn mowing in the range of 120-140 beats per minute, whereas my resting pulse is around 60 (55 on a good day, up to 70 if I have worked hard the day before or if I have a cold.) Well, to my surprise my pulse was much faster than usual. Whether standing, sitting or walking, it was nearly 20 bpm faster than the baseline. That is about as much as it gets without breaking out in actual fever.

Since I had recently walked home from work, it might be some delayed reaction to the walk home or the stress of the workday. I sat down and meditated for about 40 minutes. This had barely any effect at all. So I gave up on the mowing and went online. Soon I was playing City of Heroes, duoing my Fire/Willpower scrapper with the Gravity/Kinetics controller of my imaginary girlfriend’s imaginary younger sister.

After a bit over an hour, I logged off. I checked my pulse again to see if it had grown worse. When it is 15 bpm over baseline, it is usually either because I exercised hard enough yesterday or because I am catching a cold. And this was higher than that again. So I expected a nasty infection, that’s why I checked up again. And the pulse was down to normal levels. Not the very lowest I’ve seen, but normal for a workday.

What’s up with that? Games can be relaxing, but not in the same league as meditation, I dare say. And a fast-paced combat-oriented superhero game is not exactly the most relaxing of the bunch, I suspect.

In the game there are various sources of healing, including the “transfusion” power of kinetics. She used that a few times, though mostly for herself. My character is more robust, and has an innate rapid healing. Not quite Wolverine-level (there is a movie about Wolverine now, right?) but still pretty nifty.

But this should not extend out of the game and into real life, right? I mean, I have been flying since shortly after City of Heroes was released, but gravity has the same grip on me in real life as it had then, 5 years ago. OK, I’ve lost a few pounds, but that’s because I lost the fat on my backside during the Months of Starvation. (If you did not know, men are the opposite of women in this regard. If we lose the fat there, it is almost impossible to get back on. Or perhaps that’s just me. Probably not though.)

There are some things in games that carry over to real life though. Primary emotions like anger or sexual excitement acquired in games can have visible physical effects in real life. (Not that this is why I play CoH, of course. And in any case, both my imaginary girlfriend and her imaginary sister tends toward dressing as Japanese schoolgirls, which are actually not very distracting compared to the skimpy or skin tight uniforms of classic superheroines (complete with gravity-defying breasts of doom). So yeah since hovering is the signature movement mode of Levity Lass, you could theoretically look up under those short schoolgirl skirts and see her light blue panties, but why would you do that with an imaginary character?)

Anyway, I think we can’t credit the in-game healing, except possibly by a slight amount of placebo effect. And even then we would have to factor in all the times one gets wounded over the course of the fight against evil, wouldn’t that too feed back into real life if the health did?

One more explanation I can think of is the social aspect, even if imaginary. Humans are social creatures and in general health is strongly correlated with social involvement. Then again, causality is a two-way street. It could be that sick people have less ability to socialize, because they are, you know, sick. And in any case very few humans make my heart beat slower – the number is down to zero, I would say, these days. Subjectively at least I find it easier to relax alone. That is not to say that I hate humans. Relaxing is not the only goal in life. If it was, I would not be playing CoH in the first place, would I? I would sleep and meditate and wait for my final rest. That is pretty far from my average day, I assure you.

Perhaps it took some time for the meditation to kick in. Or perhaps the body really was fighting some invader, but was already winning by the time I noticed, and the lymphocytes had packed up and gone home later in the evening. What do I know. More experiments are in order! Especially since the experiments involve computer games.

Short health update

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I refer you to my entry from Thursday, in which I had sudden and inexplicable stomach pain.  Today I have “stomach pain” too, but it feels completely different.  Actually it feels more like muscle pain tham for instance gut pain, while the pain on Thursday felt a lot like gut pain, only much higher up and hitting a larger area at once (especially in the beginning).

I had a more local pain above the navel yesterday, but that too felt more like muscle pain even though it was in the exact spot where I use to feel stomach pain from too much acid.  I thought it was perhaps because my doctor prodded me there the night before.  (Then again I also had a bad flare of haemorrhoids, and he did not prod me there. So who knows.)

Today the area that hurts is much larger, and feels sore as if I got punched in my lower stomach. Which actually to some small degree happened today when I was handmowing the lawn. I suddenly ran into a small hole in the lawn and ran into the handle of the mower, but not at high speed luckily.  Those things can be dangerous!  But when they don’t kill you, they make you stronger. At my age, that is a pretty compelling excuse. Or so I thought.

Anyway, I don’t have fever and the pain is like most of them, an inconvenience only.  So unlike something new happens, I will mostly ignore it.  It is soon bedtime anyway. I slept for like 9 hours last night, but that was only barely enough to pay off the sleep debt from Thursday when I spent much of the night visiting the ER instead of my bed.

Intense stomach pain

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Intense stomach pain for about an hour now. Weak, sweating. Normally I am quite resistant to pain, but this is something new.  Called taxi to emergency room.  Probably overkill. If so, you will hear from me again.

3 hours later:

Another black star in my hypochondria book, no doubt. I have really tried to avoid going to doctors to let my reputation cool off, but I’ve never felt this kind of stomach pain in my life. So I called the emergency room and they said to stop by. I took a taxi to the other side of the city where they are, near the hospital. And of course, the pain faded during the taxi trip, and while I waited at the emergency room, it disappeared entirely. (I did “finally” become queasy though, but still haven’t thrown up.) The doctor kneaded my stomach and surrounding areas but found nothing. This happens as regularly as clockwork: No matter how acutely ill I am, when I meet the doctor I am in perfect health, better than most healthy people. There must be something about the aura of those places that supernaturally buoys my health while there, or something. I KNEW this would happen, but it does not happen while I stay at home. I have to actually go destroy my credibility to get healed.

The doctor wrote a letter to my regular doctor. He did not have an explanation for the pain at all, but wanted me to get checked for “cholelithiasis” and for some discoloration of my skin that cannot possibly have anything to do with stomach pains. On the bright side, I walked briskly for half an hour from the hospital to the city, something I feel pretty sure I would not have done with a ruptured stomach. Or indeed any medical condition worth its Latin name. So apart from wasting a measly $250 or so, and further making sure nobody will take me seriously when I finally come down with Death, it was worth the trip.

Sick day

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Late last night, not long before bedtime, I started getting pain in my lower right side.  Now, I am not overly worried that it be eppendicitis. First, it started right there in my right side, not migrating from the middle or front or spread around the lower guts.  Also the pain was merely distracting, not incapacitating. I had no fever – actually, my temperature was lower than normal, and I had to warm up for 20 minutes before I stopped shivering.  And I was not vomiting (actually still am not). Still, unlike common gas pains, it did not change or move when I lay down on my side.  I did get some sleep, but less than I would want and of poor quality; I woke up very tired.

Since then, my guts have been running wild for a while, but the pain is fading. So most likely it was some kind of local irritation.  By then I had already taken the day off though.

One nifty thing about having a sick day is that I can see what happens around the house when I am supposed to not be here.  Today, two cars arrived, one with a lot of planks, and a couple people are replacing the old fence between this house and the neighbor.  (I have only one neighbor within fencing distance, so to speak.) I am not sure if this is an initiative by my landlord or my neighbor.

Fat chance

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Today I had a chance to test a hypothesis. Based on one data point, I’d say the hypothesis failed. Hypothesis: Brainwave entrainment may counteract fat poisoning.

Regular readers will know that I get fat poisoning if I eat more than a few grams of fat in a single meal (about six hours). I start feeling cold regardless of the temperature in the room, a cold that comes from inside. (A thermometer, when I can be still long enough, confirms that my body temperature usually is lower than normal, not higher, so it is not fever shaking.) I start shivering and then shaking. My body goes stiffer than usual, so intense exercise to heat me up is out of the question – it would tear my muscles as it is basically the opposite of warming up. Finally come the worst symptoms, fear and diarrhea as the muscles in my digestive tract join in the dance to keep me warm. Queasiness, gut pain, violent bowel movements and in extreme cases the beginning of a rectal prolapse. Not a pretty sight, but you can see it many places on the Internet if you are curious. The final symptom is irresistible drowsiness and deep sleep, regardless of the time of day.

Since some of the symptoms are neurological, I have wondered if brainwave entrainment could have an effect. So when I got the first symptoms, this came to mind. I also put up the heat in the bathroom to max, it has a radiating space heater. Walking in place in front of the heater, I played an alpha wave entrainment track with my eyes closed for about 20 minutes. Luckily it was only a small attack. I had not expected one at all, since I haven’t eaten all that much fat. I have eaten more rice chocolate than usual lately – usually I only eat one 1-2 wafers of thin mint dark chocolate a day, exactly because even a small bite of chocolate takes a big bite out of my fat ration. A lot of the tastes we enjoy through the day are fat soluble, so I tend to be very protective of my fat rations.

On the bright side, I did not feel serious fear. But this is explained by the fact that I did not have colon spasms. This again probably comes from the heat and activity that I set in early, and the fact that it was a very small attack. So the total attempt at treating the attack was a success. But the brainwave entrainment part was not: There was no noticeable different in my body’s reactions either as I began entrainment or after 8 minute, the time at which entrainment should normally be complete.

So at best entrainment may be attempted to minimize the risk of panic, but not the things that would cause the panic in the first place.

Perhaps a better idea would be to get the brain to look for less fat in the first place?  Although I have become pretty good at this, I could still do fine with half the fat I now eat.  We need only very small amounts of fat in our diet, less than 10% of our daily energy expenditure. Even I eat more than double that, and most people in the western world double that again.  (Fat is twice as rich in energy as either sugar, starches or proteins. It is also very compact, so we tend to grossly under-estimate it in our diet.)

Dentist day again

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di090318

Extremely important!  Hmm, then why did I not expect it?

Totally slice of life today. Well, I am glad to have a life to slice. Let’s hope it continues that way.

The big event of the day was going to the dentist again. If not, the big event would have been the visit from our supreme boss – I believe he is the boss of the boss of my boss’ boss, but I am not really a hierarchical person at heart so I may have missed someone. Probably not though. I believe over this guy there is just one more, at most two, before the King. Yes, we have a King here in Norway, although he is mostly for show. Anyway, synchronicity strikes again! The guy was slated to appear in our department at the same time I already had my dentist appointment. Since I had nothing unspoken with Big Boss, I went to the dentist instead.

It was a minor thing, as I saw it. Remember how I lose a tooth each time I buy a laptop? The last time I went to the dentist, he put in a temporary tooth (or “crown”, as the root is still there and (surprisingly) still alive. Still alive…

As for me, I am also still alive as of writing this (not ghost writer!) but my tooth hurts. This was not expected. I mean, all the preparations were done last time. All he did was pull out the temporary tooth, clean out the place where it had stood (it smelled death, it is kind of hard to clean UNDER a tooth after all), try the new on for size, drill off a tiny bit of the corresponding tooth in the upper jaw because it hurt biting, pull out the tooth, rinse again and dry, add some kind of glue, and press the new tooth down in the glue for a few minutes. That’s it. So why does it hurt almost as much six hours later?

Needleprick pain is one of our most precise senses, but inflammation pain is not. I can feel that the broken tooth is in pain, but I cannot say whether it is the gums (which were once again harshly treated) or the root canal (which is perforated by a needle, but hasn’t reacted to it for the last couple weeks). If it is just an inflammation caused by mechanical stress (kind of like your skin turns red if you scratch it hard) I am not worried. Moderate pain does not stop me from living my life as normal (although agony does – I just have a high pain tolerance, I am still human, despite my prior aspirations to the contrary). But an infection is an actual health risk. So much more so since these days, we are almost back to a century ago before penicillin was discovered. A big “NO-thanks” to all who use antibiotics against virus (where it has no effect) or “just to be sure”, allowing a wide range of bacteria to become immune to a wide range of antibiotics. Way to go to send us back to the dark ages guys!

So if this is my last entry ever, I was probably eaten by flesh-eating bacteria. Or perhaps I stumbled in the stairs and broke my neck. There is no way you’ll ever know. But you will know that using antibiotics as candy is bad, and that’s something.

***

But it would be a small day if it only had room for a dentist appointment and the consequent pain, right? So how about more HoloSync stuff, it being my current fad and all. (I have a meta entry about my fads lying around in case I should end up without a fresh entry one day, but it won’t be today.)

This morning I continued the tradition from the last two mornings to wake up earlier (or rather less late) and spend half an hour listening to the Dive, the basic soundtrack of the HoloSync Awakening Prologue. I had slept around 6 hours this time, in other words almost enough. (Not considering any sleep debt.) According to not only Centerpointe but relatively independent users, an hour of HoloSync in the morning is better than an extra hour of sleep. This is not to say you can completely replace sleep with HoloSync. I am not sure why not, but I haven’t heard of anyone doing it. The same goes for meditation. You can substitute one for another up to a certain point, but gradually the value of one will shrink and the value of the other will grow.

Anyway, this morning was the first time I stayed pretty much awake all the way through, even through the last minutes which are supposed to be delta waves. And I realized that sleeping through HoloSync is the easy part. Staying with it when you’re not sleeping and with the world’s best computer games only inches away from your hand is going to be the hard part.

I had another micro-dream this time. I almost opened my eyes, enough that I sensed brightness, and in the brightness I saw the street where I walk from work to the commute bus. It was an ordinary day and I was walking down the street as usual, but I was aware that I was actually sitting in my chair with my eyes just barely closed and seeing all this. Woo. It did not last long though. Not as much fun as Sims 2 or City of Heroes, but hey, take what you can get.

You’d think that would be enough HoloSync for one day, but then you would have counted out Bill Harris too early. (Founder and director of Centerpointe Research Institute, but I feel I have said this so often that I should abbreviate it or something.) I may have misjudged the man. He cannot be as greedy as I estimated from his slick salesman verbiage and the exaggerated claims for his product. If he was greedy – or even had a strong economic sense – he would not send me a bunch more CDs with NEXT DAY PRIORITY EXPRESS mail from across the Atlantic Ocean. That set him back $8.65, not counting the content, for stuff I had not ordered and would never have missed if he hadn’t sent it. And the price of the whole thing was pretty squeezed from the start. He really can’t be making much money from me. Although there is a chance that he thinks this will make me more likely to buy other stuff from Centerpointe, perhaps. Or perhaps he is more philanthropic than I thought.

So yeah, I came home from work and there was this thick envelope with CDs and a couple letters from Centerpointe. And an even thicker envelope with socks. I subscribe to socks by mail, and have done so for many, many years. It may end now, however.

Over the last couple weeks, I have had this crazy itch at random times on my feet. It usually starts on the ankle of one foot, and spreads to all of the sock-covered area except the soles of my feet. This happens several times a day, and I have taken to spending my time at home without socks because of it. The skin is now full of red dots and some larger cracks. Rashes? Something like that. I suspect the socks. I mean, it matches almost exactly with where the socks touch my skin. I don’t know if they have added something to the socks recently, or if there is a change in my skin instead. But I think it is time to try another brand of socks. That’s a shame, because they have served me very well for a couple decades now at least.

***

My gums are not the only thing hurting after going to the dentist. (Actually feeling a bit better now, thank you.) There is also the pain in my wallet. I paid my bills yesterday, and the dentist bill was the size of my new netbook and neural impulse actuator put together! This time was only about half that. Still, it is a remarkable place to live, where medical bills are merely symbolic, but where dental insurance does not exist at all (or perhaps it does for movie stars).

This month’s bill was overall remarkable for being more than my monthly income after tax. That is a rare thing these days, thank the Light. Of course, it is not every month I buy a computer, although it may seem so to the casual reader. Or break a tooth. Actually there was so much money in my account that I had to go back and check that there were no erroneous incoming payments, and that I had remembered paying my rent lately. No, there is not even remotely enough to begin thinking of buying a house; it is more the size of a decent used car. But given my socioeconomic status by Norwegian standards, and my attitude to money in general, that is still baffling.

Oh, and since this is all slice of life anyway, let me tell you about Symantec Norton 360, the antivirus and overall computer security program I use on my main computer. This is the computer that is connected to the Internet through a direct connection to the router (although the router itself uses a firewall that has only a few holes in it for basic services). Every some months there will be worms trying to get in through the ports, and Norton will catch them before they can hurt anything. It is kind of expensive for being useful so rarely, but money is not exactly a big concern in Norway. Also, it is very unobtrusive, unlike Norman, which I could get for free but which constantly whines and nags and boasts and interferes with normal computer use.

My 1 year license expired yesterday. For all of that day and all of today, the Symantec renewal service have tried in vain to connect to their server. Perhaps there is no such renewal, perhaps you have to buy it again, I don’t know. Neither does Symantec, evidently. It is kind of sad to see it strive so earnestly to call home, and nobody answers, for two days now.

It does not really inspire confidence in them, though, at least not enough for me to go out of my way to buy them again. I really only need the direct connection for BitTorrent, where I exchange Japanese TV programs that are not available outside Japan in any other way. I guess I should use Linux for that. I wish I had not lost the power supply for the old, old HP laptop. It is plenty good enough to run a BT client under Linux.

OK, that was slice of life, but not life as you know it. Very nerdy life. I guess this is a good place to stop. I’ve been reading about the causal body too, but I think this is verging on geek overload already. But if you think you could do it better, it takes 5 minutes tops to get an online blog. Come on, I’m all (movable) ears.