On Wednesday, while taking a cab to one of the shows we saw (at The Bellagio, I think), the cab driver asked us where we were from. When we said Toronto, he asked if we’d had any snow yet. We laughed, and told him it was only October, and we don’t generally get snow until December, maybe late November.
It’s snowing right now.
Gail and I are back from our 5-day trip to Las Vegas, celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary. I never really had any interest in going to Vegas, since I don’t gamble, but Jeff and Kerri went last year, and had a ball, and after they told us all the cool things they did, we decided to check it out as well. It was well worth it.
We stayed at The Mirage, with a great view of the Strip (well, we started off on the 4th floor, with a great view of the roof of the parking lot, but we asked to be moved to a room with a better view, and the next morning, we were given a room on the 21st floor. Much better). We saw a celebrity-impersonator show called Legends in Concert (very good), a typical Las Vegas revue-type show called Jubilee (not so good), and “O” by Cirque du Soleil, which was amazing. Jubilee was topless, which was a first for both of us, and was quite disappointing. The dancers were all lovely and great performers and everything, but the fact that they were topless certainly didn’t add anything to the show – it made Gail uncomfortable, and I have to say, didn’t do much for me either. The weird thing was that some of the dancers were topless while others weren’t. One of the words used to describe the show was “sexy”, but I didn’t find it sexy at all — seems like a paradox, but I think it would have been sexier had all of the dancers been covered up.
The size and scope of things (note that I’m no longer talking about the topless show :-) ) along the Strip was just unbelievable. Caesar’s Palace is FOUR separate buildings, at least two of which look like they’re 20+ floors, and takes up a full city block, and it’s not the biggest hotel there — that would be the MGM Grand. It seems weird that you can forget about places like the Flamingo, Imperial Palace, Monte Carlo, Aladdin, and Harrah’s, all of which are multi-hundred-million dollar hotels with over 1000 rooms and numerous restaurants and casinos and shows, and would be the largest hotel in just about any city in the world — but along the Strip, they pale in comparison with the MGM Grand, Mirage, Caesar’s, New York New York, Venetian, and Bellagio.
Anyway, I could sit here all day and compose pages and pages of stuff about our trip, but I think I’ll break it up into smaller entries. For now, suffice it to say that we had a great time. We took something like 12 rolls of film and an hour of video – once we get the rolls developed (Gail still refuses to be dragged kicking and screaming into the world of digital photography), I’ll scan a bunch of them and add a Las Vegas page to our web site.
We had to have Figgy put down this afternoon. He seemed to be getting better for a while, and then worse. His vet’s appointment yesterday morning showed that his liver enzyme numbers were elevated again — not as bad as the first appointment, but still 4-5 times higher than they should be. They gave him an ultrasound yesterday afternoon, where they found cancer in the lining of his liver. Perhaps he had fatty liver disease as previously thought and perhaps not, but either way, the cancer was there too, and so there was nothing that could be done.
Obviously this was a very difficult decision to make, but at the same time, it was a very easy decision. At best, Fig’s uncomfortable and unhappy, and at worst, already suffering in pain. Either way, the suffering would get worse, and there is no chance of recovery, so ending the suffering was the only choice we had. Anything else would be prolonging his pain.
The weird thing is that once we found out about the cancer, and brought him home for the night, he acted differently, almost back to normal. He even ate some dry food this morning, which he hasn’t eaten in 2 weeks. He slept beside Gail last night, and purred when we pet him, and didn’t try to hide under or behind things. It’s almost as if he understood what was happening and had accepted it.
Sleep well, Figgy. You will be greatly missed.
I discovered a cool music web site the other day (again, through wilwheaton.net) called Pandora.com. It allows you to set up “stations” which play a variety of music. The cool thing is that you can give it a band or song and it will choose songs from its huge catalogue that are musically similar to the one you chose. By “musically similar”, I mean it ignores the “style” of band or the popularity of the band, and just goes by the song itself. It even tells you why it chose a song — one such description was “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features mild rhythmic syncopation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, minor key tonality, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, and many other similarities identified in the music genome project.” Several were chosen at least partially because they contained “a dirty electric guitar solo”. :-)
My first station started off with Dream Theater, and it chose bands like Dio, Chris Cornell, Korn, Anthrax, Three Days Grace, Triumph, Tool, Obituary, Ozzy, Sevendust, and a few bands I’d never heard of like Angra, Shadows Fall, Avenged Sevenfold, Further Seems Forever, and Soak. Some of them were a little heavier than I like (Dio, Ozzy, Korn, Anthrax — the Obituary song (Dying) was very cool musically, but the vocalist was a little too death metal for my tastes), but in general, they were all similar. I just added Rush to the station, so it should start choosing songs that are similar to both Dream Theater and Rush, and perhaps get a little further away from the death metal stuff.
It’s free for 10 hours, and then you pay $36/year. I’ve been listening to this all day, and I think I may subscribe.
If C-3P0 is fluent in over six million forms of communications, why can’t he teach R2-D2 one that isn’t the vocal equivalent of assembly language?
A band out of Seattle called Harvey Danger has released their latest album “Little by Little” on the internet as a free download. I’ve never heard of the band at all, but I downloaded it anyway because (a) I can, without feeling guilty, (b) if the band is keeping track of how many people do this, higher numbers might push other bands to do the same thing, and (c) maybe they don’t suck.
Turns out that they don’t suck. I’ve only listened to it once, and I don’t know if I actually like it yet, it’ll take a few more listens. But they’re competent musicians, the singer has a pretty good voice, and the production is pretty good (i.e. it doesn’t sound like it was recorded in someone’s basement).
I read about this on wilwheaton.net. Actually, it was on Wil’s temporary blog site, since his main site is experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.
I saw an article today on the 100 best (computer-related) products of 2005, so I thought I’d come up with my own list of products that I can’t live without. Well, OK, maybe “can’t live without” is a little strong, but here are some products that I really like.
One more item that’s on the very cool list, though I’ve never really used it, is Mac OS X. I’ve never been a Mac guy at all, but I did work at a company that did NeXTStep development. NeXTStep was the best development environment I’ve ever worked in. Once NeXT was bought by Apple, they kind of based OS X on NeXTStep, and made it even cooler. I’ve only seen it a couple of times at work when John (a faithful reader of this blog, and quite possibly the only reader of this blog) shows me the cool stuff his Mac can do. It’s basically your standard Unix system, but the GUI is far cooler than any other Unix GUI I’ve seen. It does cool things like being able to temporarily tile all of the windows, allowing you to pick one, and them moving all the windows back to where they were. The Windows UI team could learn a thing or two from OS X.
Heard from the vet today – Figgy’s going to be fine. He’s been eating pretty well, and his liver enzyme numbers are way down (one of them is supposed to be under 120 — his was up over 940 on Friday, and down to about 240 today), so the doctor said he’d be happier in his own home environment. Gail’s going to pick him up this afternoon. You can be damn sure that we’re going to pay closer attention to the amount of food he eats from now on!
Had a bit of a scary day on Friday. I went to the dentist in the morning and when I came back, my cat Figaro was sitting on the kitchen chair, looking at me. I noticed that his ears and nose seemed a little yellow, instead of the usual pink. Upon closer inspection, I found that they were quite yellow, as were his nose, lips, and the whites of his eyes. Gail and I had noticed the day before that he hadn’t been himself for a day or two. I immediately called the vet and brought him in. She examined him and told me that he had liver disease. She said that most of the time, this is caused by cats simply not eating. After a while, their body starts to process their body fat, and sometimes the liver gets overwhelmed and shuts down. Then this causes nausea, which makes the cat even less likely to eat, so the whole thing spirals. He’s lost a pound (i.e. 10% of his body weight) since his last checkup a month ago (at which time he seemed in perfect health). She told me that they’d have to keep him there for the weekend.
The type of liver disease that she thinks he has is very treatable – as long as he starts eating again, his liver will start to regenerate itself, and he’ll be fine. They started him on anti-nausea medication, and managed to get him to eat something, though he threw everything up Friday night. We went to see him Saturday morning, and he did seem a little less yellow, and a little less lethargic as well. We tried to go again Saturday afternoon, but they were just starting a procedure on a dog, so we couldn’t go through to where Figgy was, and they were about to close. The doctor called me a little while later, saying that he hadn’t thrown up all day, and was eating some more, and was even more bright than the morning, so this is good news. We heard nothing today (vet’s office was closed)- she’s going to call with an update tomorrow, and hopefully he can come home.
Figgy’s been with Gail and I almost as long as we’ve been together — we started dating in February of 1992, and we found Fig (he was a stray) in November of ’92. I know that he’s not going to live forever, and I know that at 14, he’s already lived longer than most house cats. If anything were to happen, Nicholas is too young to understand, and likely won’t remember Fig for long, but Ryan seemed genuinely upset on Saturday, and said a number of times that he hopes Figgy gets better. Gail would be devastated, and I’m not sure I’d be much better. C’mon, Figster, you can beat this.
On another topic, we all walked in the CIBC Run for the Cure this morning. It’s a 5k run/walk to raise money for breast cancer research. My mother and Gail’s mother are both breast cancer survivors, as was Gail’s late grandmother, so this is a cause that’s important to us. We raised $325 ourselves, and the event, held at over 40 different locations across Canada, raised over $21 million. Last year, the four of us plus my parents walked the 2k leg, but we decided to walk the full 5k this year. We knew the boys wouldn’t walk the full 5k, so we brought the wagon — good thing too, since they both stayed in the wagon the entire walk. Gail and I split pulling the wagon, so we each walked 5k, 2 1/2 of which was pulling a wagon holding 80 pounds of Perrow kids.
At work, we use the services of SpamShark to filter our email spam. Every now and again, I log in to their web site and peruse the spam I’ve received, on the off-chance that some useful piece of email was accidentally marked as spam. The top four types of spam I receive seem to be:
The first three I can understand – sex, drugs and money – but watches? Who the fuck cares? For me, a watch is a tool that tells you the time. If it’s got the date too, alarms, stopwatches, etc. that’s great, but the time is the important thing. My watch is a cheap Timex Expedition – $40 at Wal-Mart, and I’ve had it for years. If I were in a different line of work where I had to deal with customers face-to-face, and wear suits and stuff, then sure, I’d probably get myself a nicer watch. But are there really that many people who are dying for a Rolex or a Rolex clone? If I see someone wearing a Rolex, I think that either (a) he bought a cheap knock-off to try to impress people, or (b) he’s got more money than brains. Either way, I’m not terribly impressed.
It’s the same with wheels on cars – when I was picking out stuff for my car, upgrading the wheels is about the last thing I’d spend money on. I simply do not care one iota what the wheels on my car look like.
Cut The Chatter, Red Two 