90% excitement 10% nerves



well, i got a call from neurosurgery today and was surprised to learn that they've scheduled me for surgery on Monday Aug 11 9am. that was quite a shocker since i was expecting late august at the very earliest. this gives me roughly 3 weeks after surgery to recover to celebrate my birthday so this is all good news. all i can hope for now is a successful operation and a quick recovery after surgery. i'm going to have a minimally invasive microsurgical discectomy. basically involves a small incision and removal of herniated part of the disc. a minor operation but then again, we're talking about the spine here. 90% chance of success, 1% chance of complication, 1% chance of infection. numbers look really good.



monday was an absolute shitty day for my group at work. i noticed that one of our servers stopped working right before midnight on sunday, and nguyen and erik had to be called out of a conference. here is the list of events. after the server crash, i just put my pain aside, drove and limped my ass to the machine room at around midnight to discover something was really serious. (when i was there, i wanted to take a quick peek at my desk, but i didn't really want to subject myself to anything i missed but couldn't do anything about)....anyways...nguyen and erik had car pooled and were at irvine, and nguyen had to drive back in erik's car shortly after midnight. nguyen continued to work on the server till 4pm, then erik came back by train. then i think they worked on it together from there, got it back up at 10:30pm. so it was down roughly 23 hours. much longer than we had ever thought it would be down. we probably weren't prepared for such a catastrophy, but i don't think we could have ever anticipated things going this bad severely. plus i was at home. but then again, if i wasn't at home, maybe i would have never detected the problem when it happened. only too late probably as late as the afternoon on monday. so who knows, me being injured could have cut the downtime significantly. i did all i could with my injury, but compared to what nguyen and erik had gone through, i only gave a fraction of effort. good thing i'll be returning to work in a few weeks. if all goes well, i should be returning to work some time around 25th of august. i'll probably not work the week right after surgery. then work from home for a week after that, check with my doctors, and getting the papers signed so that i can return to work. can't wait. hopefully it will be the best early birthday present ever.



casey was nice enough to lend me his tivo while he wasn't using for the summer. so i have it recording all the tv i have ever wanted to watch. and i have already picked up 2 shows: real world and road rules. for the stuff that road rules does, to me, there is nothing greater than what they do on the show. meet new friends and experiencing new things every day. billionaires don't have as much fun. unfortunately they've added a sick twist to it by voting people off, and have tained the show. plus the tasks that they assign them seem like they've been assigned to exploit the crew, not challenge them. for example, they'll be given a task where there is probably no way one person is going to be able to make it. that does bring 10x the drama (because they have to end up voting someone off), so you can't really blame the show creators for not doing their jobs, but i preferred it when no one was voted off and people did missions for adventure, not exploitation. well, now that i know my back really shouldn't be tested to its limits, i know that stuff like that in my future to that extreme is not that great for me. but then there is the real world. to me, that reminds me a lot of the college dorm life. i would love to go live in a house with a bunch of strangers as long as they've been screened by someone of course. even though i'm not perfect myself, i think i would be a good mediator in those situations, and it would be an excellent learning enviornment for everyone including myself. saying that, i wonder if there are any programs like that out there. sign up for some kind of off campus post college "the real world" kind of experience. if anyone knows, let me know. i'm seriously interested. i know i can easily find new roommates, but i'm looking for an actual program. because in these programs (if they do exist) in those enviroments, people are prepped to meet new people, and more open minded than they normally are, without having it seem like they're breaching out of their bubble when they try something new.