Leaning Over Backwards (including color photos!)

Photographic truth:  if you take a photo of a building with a wide-angle lens and point that lens up a bit to "get all of it in" then your final photo will have the building look as if it's falling over backwards.

Not only that, but I, personally, have a problem wherein I tend to take photos with the left side of the camera down, i.e., my photos many times lean to the right.

I have wondered why a third of my photos lean to the right because I have the left side of the camera too low when I press the shutter.  All I can come up with is that I'm left-eyed.  Cameras are obviously made for right-handed people, and most right-handed people are right-eyed, BUT, I AM right-handed and LEFT-EYED.  My massive cranium is in a different position than a right-eyed person looking through the viewfinder.  I think this allows me to perceive that my horizons are level when they aren't.

All I can do about that is to continue to remind myself to watch my leveling when I take pictures.  (I've read that many real photographers hate the phrase "taking pictures" and prefer to say "making photographs," but that's how most people say it, and they know what you mean by "taking pictures"  and I feel pretentious when I make myself say "making photographs."  I blame my Louisiana public school upbringing. Rant over.)

 Anyway, back to the subject of wide angle photos of buildings resulting in the leaning-backwards look.

Here's a photo of mine from last week that exhibits both of the problems I've mentioned; the wide-angle leaning-back look, and also my personal issue of dropping the left side of the camera.

Historic Pritchard House, Titusville, Florida.

See?  The house leans back because of the wide angle lens pointed a bit upward, and leans to the right because I have trouble keeping my camera straight.  This how the photo looks just off of the camera, except for the border and copyright notice I added.

But most modern digital photo manipulation programs, I currently use Photoshop Elements 9 (thanks Big Sis!!), have a "perspective correction" set of tools to correct the leaning back issue, and I used these perspective correction tools to repair the back lean in this photograph.   I also used these tools in this case to level the photo from my leaning of the camera.  (There's an easier leveling tool to us in Elements, but since I was already using the perspective control tools, I chose to rotate and level the photo there instead of the other leveling tool. I use as few tools and steps as I can to fix any problems.)

Here is a screen capture of my work on this photograph within Photoshop Elements 9:

Adjusting the perspective (and leveling) to correct this image.

You'll notice that the photo itself is now all kinds of bent and twisted, no longer a neat rectangle.  But the grid lines, along with the various sliders there on the right allowed me to level and rotate the house and "tip the house toward me" so that the vertical lines on the edges of the home are straight up and down, correcting the leaning-back look.  Notice that the image now looks as if I had a print of it in front of me and leaned it toward me until the house no longer leaned back.

Then I just had to crop the photo back into a rectangle, losing a bit of the photo all the way around, put my border and copyright on it, and save it in it's new and improved (to me) form, here:

New and improved photo of the Pritchard House.

So along with getting into the habit of making sure all my photos are level, I need to learn to leave more room around my main subject to allow for a little cropping after using the perspective correction tool.

Making those two corrections in my photo taking, and getting better with my computer "darkroom" skills, will make life easier when wanting to corrects an age old problem in photography, the leaning-backwards building.

In all the years I shot photos on slide and print film, the leaning-backward building was just a part of life.

Yet another reason I love modern digital cameras and our digital darkrooms on our computers!

Nuts! Guitar Nuts, That Is

Warning!  Boring guitar information ahead.

Samick strat, nut making trial subject.

When you are on a budget, and want expensive things, you can save and save and buy that expensive, quality guitar, or you can also look to find less expensive guitars.

I have chosen the latter course over the years.

I have several cheap guitars that were made of quality woods.  The manufacturers cut costs by using cheap hardware such as the tuning keys, bridges, and electronics.

Over time, I have slowly bought a quality set of pickups here, a quality set of tuning keys there, etc., and upgraded these inexpensive guitars to where they are pretty close to first-rate in quality at every point.

One problem though.

One of THE most important parts of a guitar is the nut.  That's the little sliver of plastic (on cheap guitars) where the strings come from the headstock and the tuning keys and lay in slots cut into the nut.

New nut, after initial shaping, slotting.

Other than wanting your guitar to have great tone, you want it to "play" good.  To feel good in your hands and for the strings to be easy to press down to the frets, yet not be so close that they buzz on adjacent frets, a sign that the nut slots were cut too deep.

A guitar string is suspended from the nut, and doesn't touch anything until it is suspended at the other end at the bridge.  Between these two points, a guitar string can vibrate.

I have upgraded my several inexpensive guitars over the years with new pickups and wiring and other hardware, to the point where they all sound GREAT.

But that nagging problem of a cheap nut with hastily cut slots of improper depth kept my guitars from also FEELING great when I played them.

So, also over time, I bought a small set of files, a few pieces of cow bone that where pre-cut to just bigger than a guitar nut needs to be, and I also read how-to's on shaping and slotting guitar nuts over and over and over.

A few weeks ago I finally started with my cheapest guitar, a $50 purchase from a friend at work, a Samick super-strat style guitar.  Shaped and looks much like a Fender Stratocaster with higher output pickups, but is a cheap copy by someone else.

I loosened and moved the strings out of the way and took off the old nut.  (How isn't important)

Finished slotted, shaped nut, installed.

I roughly shaped the piece of bone I had to where it was as close to the same dimensions as the original nut, and also began the slots in the new nut.

I then installed the new nut onto the guitar, and using the techniques from all my repeated reading of nut making articles, carefully cut each slot to the correct width and correct depth for each string.

After resetting the strings and playing a bit to make sure all was well, I moved the strings again and sanded down the top of the nut to where the strings were actually partially out the the slots.

The slots and the pressure of the tight strings keep the strings in the slots, but having the strings about half way buried in the slot when in place helps keep the string from being snagged or caught in the slot, which creates tuning problems.

After the success of my first, cheapest guitar nut replacement, I was able to confidently make new nuts for my other guitars over the course of a week or so.  (I can only sit there doing this for short periods, and had to take frequent back relieving breaks.)

This was the final step in upgrading my cheap guitars, but every one of them now sounds and plays much like guitars costing many times what I paid for them, including new parts.

Good times, good times.

Ready for years of easy play!

Eugene Polley Died this Week! (May 23, 2012)

(Antonio Perez, Chicago Tribune / January 8, 2006)

Couch potatoes the world over engage in a moment of reverent silence to remember the inventor of the TV remote control, Eugene Polley.

He died at the age of 96 in Chicago a couple of days ago.

In 1935 Eugene Polley started work with Zenith as a stock clerk, and eventually his natural engineering genius led him to receive 18 (eighteen!!!!!) patents and rose to the level of assistant chief of their mechanical engineering group.

Awesome for a college drop-out.

R.I.P. Mr. Polley, ya done good.

(Here's an L.A. Times article about Mr. Polley if you want to know more...)

My World Has Gotten Small

Mr. Spike, miniature poodle, hoodie up.

(sprinkled throughout this post are some of the photos I took today, click to enlarge them)

I really haven't blogged in a while.

I keep trying to start again, but life keeps intervening and I slack off and then stop.

I loved blogging and keeping up with other's blogs, It's all done at the perfect pace for me.  Or at least the me of a few years ago.

Now even the blogger's pace is too fast for me to keep up.

Most of my life I have had a very high pain tolerance.  I could shake off mashing a finger, flat-out ignore stubbing a toe, calmly clean and bandage a cut, and put salve on a burn and go back to cooking or whatever.

So lately I've been really trying to fight harder to deal with my back pain like I do with a smashed finger, but it's much harder to just ignore and keep moving with the back pain.

There are levels of pain that can absolutely shut a person down, period.  Trying to ignore massive pain is like trying to tell a person in deep depression to "just snap out of it."  Those words are less than useless to a depressed person, likewise, even the most concentrated effort of will is not enough to override certain pain levels.

Arm out window paparazzi style shot.

I hope you never, ever, ever feel this kind of physical pain.

The past few years, my back pain had gotten to the point that it pretty much ruined my life in many ways.

A life-long love of photography and the simple joy of going to places and taking long, meandering walks with my camera came to a screeching halt.

Daily I count my blessing, and make no mistake, I am blessed with a great wife, kids, house, pets, family, etc., but daily chronic pain makes the entire experience of living like trying to do intricate, tedious work with a police siren in the room.

I can't sit at the computer to work in Photoshop Elements very long, and that's just as fun to me as taking the photos in the first place.  I was BORN to be a digital photographer, and the pain just "crimps my style" in almost every aspect of life.  All those years with print and slide film and darkroom work were fun, but I love the digital photography of today so much more.

I have a Facebook account, but don't find that very fun.  It's a blessing to keep up with long-lost friends from high school, or old work-mates that I hadn't seen in many years, but something about it doesn't get me excited.  Working on Facebook seems more like a chore than fun.  Mainly because the interface is so unintuitive to me that just adding photos to a particular photo album takes me long enough to want to just give up.

Mercury 7 Astronaut Memorial, Titusville, Florida

 Today, I had to get ready and Number Two Daughter took me to an appointment in Titusville, about a 40 minute drive from home.

Since I was up and out and heading to a place I don't go often, I took my camera.

After taking care of business, we went to Space View Park in Titusville, on the Indian River Lagoon, on the mainland directly across from Kennedy Space Center.

You can see the huge Vehicle Assembly Building across the waterway on the beachside island.

Gemini Astronaut Memorial. See NASA Vehicle Assembly. Building in distance (right side)?

At this park, which is in several sections, are monuments to the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs and the astronauts and workers that were involved.  The monument to the Space Shuttle program is presently under construction.

Apollo Astronaut Memorial. Earth and Moon represented on the A's cross.

The park is so spread out that, for me, it was a very hard but incredibly enjoyable time of taking photo and walking with my daughter.  By the end though, I kept noticing that I was walking stooped over like an elderly man.

It was fun, but it hurt.

That pretty much sums up my life right now.  I'm blessed and thank God for all my blessings daily, but to do a simple thing like get out and slowly walk around for an hour or so leaves me pleased but hurting.

I guess all I can do is get up tomorrow, and if the pain is just low enough, try my best to do something else that I want to do.

My world and my thoughts are much smaller than they used to be.

Vicks Melts Boogers Best

This Is A Public Service Announcement.

I have sleep apnea and sleep with a CPAP machine to aid breathing while sleeping. (CPAP=Continuous Positive Airway Pressure)

If one's nose is even the slightest bit stopped-up, the CPAP makes you feel as if someone is suffocating you.

So, gotta clear those nasal passages!

After trying Afrin, Flonase, and every major brand and every store brand nose spray, I can say with confidence that Vicks Sinex Ultra Fine Mist melts boogers best.  It's not even close.

If by some miracle some employee of Vicks sees this, feel free to use this statement in your advertisements.

It's flat-out better to sleep without the dang CPAP if you can't clear your nose.

Only one problem.  Vicks Sinex Ultra Fine Mist is the most expensive nose spray.  It works great but costs way too much for such a small bottle.

I know, dumb subject for a blog post, but if you EVER use a nose spray, Vicks Sinex Ultra Fine Mist is THE best.  Period.

If your nose starts stopping-up when you lay down, like mine does, just go buy the Vicks.  It lasts all night.

Picture Post, Sunday October 2, 2011

Been a long time since I've had a Sunday Picture Post.

I used to do this every Sunday, with no shortage of photos.  I was always shooting new photos and had the time and energy to re-size the images for the blog, so, no problem having new photos to show every Sunday.

Shows just how much chronic pain can take from a person.  I've barely posted on this blog in two years.

That's two hobbies down the drain because of my ruined back and always being in pain.

A person just doesn't feel up to doing much of anything.  I know I sound like a whiner here, but if I didn't mention the pain and the problems that result, I would have nothing to say.  It has pretty much been my life the past few years.  So bear with me.

This pain pump has helped the pain some, but right now I'm just at a point where the pain pump's pain relief is about equal to all the oral pain medicine I used to take's effects.  Pain Doc and I have a ways to go yet in getting the dosage adjustments ideal for me and my life.  You have to walk the edge between how much pain you can deal with and how much you can function with morphine in you.

There's a good thing though.  A pain pump literally puts into my spine on the order of 1/100th the amount of pain medicine I once took orally.  Same pain relief, less pills to take, easier on my liver and kidneys.

Lovely Wife and I went yesterday, October 1st, for an afternoon drive.

Visited a beautiful local park, the Atlantic Ocean, and walked for a little way along 5th Avenue in Indialantic, Florida.

I had my camera, and had the first photography excursion I've had in at least a year.

I enjoyed it so much, being with my wife and seeing this beautiful area up close for the first time in way too long.  Yeah, it made my back hurt like crazy and my left leg was hurting and ended up numb, and I could barely get out of the car on my own when we got home after only a couple of hours of mostly riding.  But then I kicked back in my recliner for a while and slowly the pain lessened somewhat.

Such is a life in pain.  Gotta get up and struggle like crazy just to have a short walk and a car ride with my wife and my camera.

It was worth it though.  I was going stir crazy in the house.

I've seen many, many AMAZING sunsets in fifteen years in Florida; yesterday's was certainly one of the most beautiful.

These photos are fresh!  Less than 24 hours old as of posting time.

A Gold Rolex Oyster (Thinking about my Dad)

(I've copied here, my most recent post from my photography blog. The photos are of my Dad's Rolex that I took this week. I was thinking about him a lot.)

My father worked on off-shore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico in his career.

He was born in 1934, growing up during difficult times in America, and in a poor part of Louisiana.

He was of what I consider to be the last generation that a man or woman would work for one company most of their lives.

Working off-shore, seven days on the drilling rig, and then seven days off, he ended up missing a lot of holidays and birthdays. He was there for a lot of them, but not for a lot of others too.

There were times, like working for any company, when he had to swallow his pride and keep his mouth shut to keep his job when the company would try to take advantage of him or others.

Then, when he had twenty-something years with this company, they called all the twenty-plus-year employees to a big banquet in New Orleans.

The company presented to him and all the other long-timers, a gold Rolex watch.

I don't know if it still is, but for decades, the official United States time was determined by an atomic clock at the US Naval Observatory.

So after he was given this watch, and I'd talk to him on the phone (from Dallas or Atlanta or wherever we were living during those years) I'd ask if the Naval Observatory has called yet that day to get the official time from him and his Rolex.

It wasn't something he left in a box, he wore the watch daily up until he died in 1994.

I took a few photos this week with my new/used macro lens.

You can see a few nicks and marks here and there.

Those nicks and marks are from him wearing one of the only tangible representations of all the years of hard work he put in, as well as not being with his family on some important days.

Some people would think he was being pretentious wearing a Gold Rolex, and sometimes complete strangers would say something like, "I wish I could afford to buy and wear a gold Rolex!"

He would always tell them, "I didn't have the money to buy one either. This was given to me by the company I worked so hard for, for so many years. I wear it because I EARNED IT."

That never failed to shut them up.

I don't wear it as much as I'd like to, mainly because my wrist is way bigger than his was, and even at the last notch, the watch is too tight to wear for more than just a few minutes.

One day I'll go ahead and plunk down the money to have an extra gold link or two put on the watch so I can wear it more.

But I look at this watch a lot, and suffer wearing it on important days for me and my family.

It helps me remember that he's with me in spirit on those important days to me and my family.

Guitar String Vibration

When I was in college, we had to do a couple of experiments in Physics lab class to study string vibrations.

Frequency, nodes, etc.

When a guitar string is pressed against a fret and that string is plucked, it sets off a pretty complex set of vibrations.

Since they are not plucked in the exact center of each string, guitar strings vibrate both at the fundamental note's frequency and also there are a whole host of harmonic vibrations at frequencies mathematically related to the frequency of the fundamental note.

The physical construction of the guitar influences the vibrations of the strings in response to the string's vibrations making the various pieces of the guitar vibrate. Even a solid body electric guitar can have it's tone greatly enhanced by being crafted of as few solid pieces of good wood as possible, and these tone woods will impart some harmonic influence back to the strings and out through the amplifier.

This is why guitars can be SO EXPENSIVE. The highest quality, large pieces of tone woods are as expensive to buy as they are resonant and beautiful to look at.

Yeah, there are a lot of cheap guitars in the world, and a surprising number of them sound good and play good too, but when a guitar is constructed from high quality pieces of properly dried woods, this wood can impart back to the strings even richer harmonic content resulting in a great sounding guitar whose tone is thick with harmonic content that is pleasing to the human ear.

For me this following very short video is mind blowing. I love this kind of stuff.

Although I knew the principles of string vibrations, I've never seen them in real-time action.

This video was simply shot with a camera with a high speed shutter, so that when the video is watched at the normal speed of the song, you can hear AND see the dramatic ways in which the strings vibrate.

Notice that the fingering and plucking of the strings are in time to the sound of the music. Although it almost looks like slow motion, it's not.



I wish we had been shown a video similar to this in Physics lab, studying string vibrations would have made a lot more sense, a picture (video) painting a thousand words and all that.

I Have A New Hard Drive, Sort Of

WARNING: Boring computer geek post ahead...

With all the photos that I have on my computer, I was really nervous about a hard drive failure robbing me of all my digital images.

So a couple of years ago I bought an external hard drive, a 500GB one. That was massively huge two or three years ago, but now you can get 2TB (TeraBytes) hard drives for a reasonable price.

Then, about six months ago, I became worried as my external hard drive was filling up with 35mm slide scans, digital photos, and print scans from the flatbed scanner.

I bought a second external hard drive, this time a 1TB one. Pretty huge.

Then about two months after getting the 1TB hard drive, the original 500GB external drive I had bought stopped working.

I was so glad that I had bought that second external drive. I lost no photos.

When we got some tax money earlier this year, I got a subscription to Carbonite, an online backup company that claims to have unlimited backup for a certain price per year.

They truly have unlimited backup, but if you are like me and want to back up a pretty massive amount of data somewhere other than your own home for the ultimate backup, then the backup takes a LONG time.

See, Carbonite works in the background on your computer and only can upload about 4 GibaBytes per 24 hours. But I let it do it's thing and haven't heard any complaints from Carbonite about me having too much stuff to back up.

Lately, as I have felt better after my surgery, I've been spending time at the computer here and there as pain levels permit, and have organized and thrown away a bunch of computer files so that my Carbonite backup will be as small and convenient as possible for both them and me.

But that 500GB hard drive dying on me bothered me a lot, so I began looking for web sites where folks mentioned the problem I had with this particular hard drive and it turns out that one major problem was a recent firmware upgrade release that I, and others apparently, put on our external hard drives.

This latest firmware (similar to software but used to program a particular chip on the circuit board that controls things, in my case how the hard drive operates) killed mine, and anyone else's who upgraded to the latest revision.

But I had noticed that even though I couldn't use that external hard drive any more, I COULD hear it spinning when power was applied to it.

I began to think that the hard drive itself wasn't dead, but just the control interface within the cover of the external hard drive case.

Now you know engineers LOVE taking things apart, so I broke out my tools and went to town and freed the hard drive from the enclosure. I have to say that Western Digital makes a first-class, rugged hard drive enclosure for their external drives.

I turned off and unplugged my desktop computer, opened the case, stole the SATA cable from my CD/DVD reader-writer (which I don't use much) and installed the "broken" 500GB hard drive into my desktop computer.

I turned the computer on and what do you know, I had a 500GB internal drive show up with all my old files still sitting there pretty as you please.

Now I have the original 250GB internal drive, another internal drive which used to be an external 500GB drive, and also a 1TB external drive.

I have all my files backed up at home, and many of them backed up on Carbonite too, in case something drastic disaster happens to my home computer.

I'm still sending stuff to Carbonite as it finishes each batch I sent it previously.

But I won't be through worrying until I have all of my digital images uploaded to them as well.

Since I have a copy of every file I have on that one external 1TB drive, if something happens while I'm at home, I can just grab that one external hard drive that's the same size as a hardback book, and skee-daddle.

P.S. I bought another SATA cable that allowed me to reattach my CD/DVD drive and now have my complete computer again. I know you were worried about that temporarily unconnected CD/DVD drive.

I Dodge Vicious Angry Killer Bird to Get Egg Photo!

Lovely Wife was out on our back patio yesterday evening reading a book on her much-loved Kindle.

We have a mockingbird out there that yells and squawks at us whenever anyone goes out in the back yard.

She noticed that the bird kept flying to our crepe myrtle bush, and realized that there's a nest in there.

She and Number One Daughter are too short to see into the nest to look for eggs. They called me out, and I could barely see over the edge and saw at least two eggs.

Lovely Wife's camera battery was dead so I got my camera and did a paparazzi style hold-the-camera-up-high-and-point-and-shoot-and-hope-you-get-a-good-shot impression.

The resulting egg pic came out OK, and as you can see, there are four of them.

Pretty cool. I hadn't seen real, wild bird eggs in many years. Probably since I was a kid.

Here's a pic of the Mom/Dad (don't know which) up on a wire right above and behind the crepe myrtle and nest.

I can hardly believe it's beak is closed in the photo, this rascal yammers on incessantly.

Don't Buy Expensive HDMI cables for Your TV

...or, Let Me Save Y'all Some Money

OK, there's lots of hyperbole out there about cables for computers, for TVs and whatnot.

But as a digital engineer, let me tell you a little secret that Best Buy, Target, or even Walmart won't tell you.

It's a fact, if you buy a TV at Best Buy or similar place, they'll try hard to sell you on buying a high dollar, high quality HDMI cable.

If you have bought or are about to buy a new television set, you will actually need to purchase a HDMI cable iffen you want to see high-definition programs and movies on your new TV.

H-D-M-I means high definition multimedia interface.

Here's the secret: Just buy a cheap HDMI cable that has the correct length for your needs. A cheap HDMI cable works EVERY BIT as good as a $100 Monster brand HDMI cable.

Why? How?

Glad you asked.

Here's a couple of simple truths about electronic signals traveling on a cable:
1. Digital signals, or pulses on an electric cable such as an HDMI one are either on, or off, there's no almost in digital. So, if the cable, no matter how cheap, actually carries the digital signal from the cable box to your TV, it will be presenting to your TV a signal every bit as good as a $100 Monster brand cable. One digital cable either works AS GOOD AS the next digital cable, or it isn't working at all. Period.
2. This wasn't necessarily true with analog cables. A better-built, nicely shielded from interference analog cable could possibly give your TV a clearer signal than a cheap cable, resulting in a better, less fuzzy picture on the screen.

The rationale they will throw at you at Best Buy is that you don't want to buy a cheap cable to go with your new $700 TV. But in the digital world, in which all new TV's firmly sit, if the cable works at all, it will give your TV as good a signal, and therefore screen picture, as any other cable, regardless of price.

When you buy that next TV, and you will need an HDMI cable to actually see programs in high definition, just buy that $14.99 cable and don't worry your pretty little head about it.

If your new HDMI cable happens to be faulty and not work, just exchange it for a working one just like you would with a new shirt you brought home and then found it was torn somewhere. (We do live in an imperfect world where you sometimes buy something that doesn't work, from the git-go.)

Now, go forth and buy a cheap HDMI cable of the correct length. Use the money you saved to buy a Blu-Ray DVD or three.

Color Photos of America's Depression Era

Kodak's Kodachrome 35mm slide film still is, in my opinion, one of the great inventions of man. (Photo is copyright Library of Congress)

The UK's Daily Mail has published a page of stunning color images from America's depression era (just after Kodachrome was invented). Please go see these photo's.

They offer a totally different perspective than the harsh-but-compelling black and white depression photos we've seen all our lives.

Kodachrome images look so "thick" and dense with color.

Lord I miss the look of Kodachrome, but I love and have totally embraced digital photography. (I spent many hours in Photoshop Elements one weekend to come up with my own process for making digital images have the look of Kodachrome.)

Note: I hate linking stuff from online newspapers, the link may be dead fairly quick. So take a minute to go look at these images.

Goodbye Mr. Surgeon

Had my second and last post operation visit with the surgeon who installed my pain pump.

Said my incisions (all three!) were looking healthy and that unless they somehow get infected or I start having some of the bad side effects some pain pump recipients get, that, well, it was nice knowing me.

I see Pain Doctor next week for my first visit with him since the surgery.

Pain Doctor will use a remote control device that communicates through my skin to the pain pump to adjust the dose. (That's a photo to the right, of the same pain pump and catheter I now have, and the gizmo Pain Doctor will use to program the rate of medicine release.)

Ready to crank this puppy up a bit.

I received a medic alert type card with my pain pump info on it in the mail a couple of weeks ago, but yesterday finally read all the material that came with it.

I had carefully inspected the card to ensure all was correct, but after reading the associated letter, I needed to change the doctor's name and number on the card from the surgeon's name to Pain Doctor's name and number.

The card needs to have the doctor's info for the doctor filling and adjusting the pain pump instead of the surgeon.

I got an email today telling me my new implant ID card is on the way.

I thought it might be a good idea to get a medic alert ID bracelet or necklace and put the fact that I'm diabetic and that I now have this pain pump on the necklace or bracelet.

On several sites they mentioned that most paramedics are trained to look for a medic alert necklace or bracelet, and don't look in people's wallets.

That's good to know. I guess I'll have to buy me some BLING in the near future.

So much for my spiffy medic alert card I put in my wallet, eh?

New Body Parts Installed or Been a Long Time Since I Posted

I can summarize my life pretty quickly since my last post in September of 2010.

Lots of back pain. Trying to work, sleep, live with lots of pain. I pretty much stunk at everything, work, relationships, life in general.

Last summer (2010) I did the trial for a "neurostimulator" or more simply, spinal cord stimulator, or what is basically a TENS unit where the electrodes that zap you are inserted in your back close to the spinal cord. This device is effective for some, but in me, they could never get the device to "buzz" in the areas where I hurt, lower back and outside left leg/butt. There are electrodes for the final two inches or so, and it's this section of the electrical cord which is implanted along the inside of the vertebrae close to the spinal cord. The Here's a brief run-down of these devices on Spine-Health.com, one of my most frequently visited sites (http://www.spine-health.com/treatment/back-surgery/spinal-cord-stimulation-chronic-pain).

So for me, the spinal cord stimulator trial was a failure, and my Pain Management Doctor and I started talking about one of the final tricks he had up his sleeve.

Intrathecal Pain Pump. Or just Pain Pump to many. Similar idea to the spinal cord stimulator, but with a pain pump, a catheter is inserted into the intrathecal space of the spine. This is the same protective sack where the spinal cord lies and in which our spinal fluid flows slowly from lower back, up to and around the brain, and back down the spine.

The idea is to deliver minute amounts of pain medication directly into the spinal fluid, allowing it to flow up and down with the spinal fluid and delivering some of the most powerful pain relief that can be given these days.

All along this path, work really sucked. I just hurt too much to be a great engineer, and I couldn't really take high enough doses of pain medicine to really cut the pain without drastically cutting my brain power, which is essential in the engineering world.

I've been on disability since earlier this year, and I have slowly gone through the process with my Pain Doctor to have a pain pump trial (it was deemed successful in me), visit a neurosurgeon he referred me to, get all the pre-surgery health checks done, and to have surgery to have the pain pump and catheter installed permanently.

First, the pain pump trial. in February, I went into a day-surgery center and Pain Doctor and crew sedated me a bit, and then using a fluoroscope, which is basically a live-action x-ray machine, gave me a tiny shot of morphine straight into the intrathecal space in my spine.

I've had so many shots and surgeries in my back that from the middle of my back down to almost my rear end is mostly scar tissue. But one of the beauties of the pain pump and the flow of spinal fluid up and down is that they can inject the medicine in any place along the spine and the medicine will flow with the spinal fluid, hopefully delivering sweet pain relief along the way.

I stayed at the surgery center for several hours for them to make sure that I wasn't having serious side effects from the bolus of morphine in my spine and during that time felt my pain levels really decrease. They sent me home and I was to keep a journal of sorts and to stay off oral pain meds as long as I could.

I lasted about 36 hours, but I left it too long before starting my oral medications again.

I got a good bit of pain relief for the first 24 hours and then the pain slowly started increasing again. When I took my first oral meds at the 36 hour mark I didn't know it, but the pain pendulum was swinging back to serious pain really, really fast.

It took me a couple of days to carefully dole out to myself doses of oral pain meds until the pain was back to where I could even sleep.

But the initial pain relief of the directly applied morphine was what they wanted to see, and after weeks of doctors visits and pre-surgery checks had my pain pump installed in late April at Sebastian River Medical Center in Sebastian, Florida. That's near the neurosurgeon's office and about 15-20 miles south of where we live in Palm Bay.

I had an incision along my spine for the surgeon to put the catheter tip into the intrathecal space push it up in there a couple of inches along my spinal cord.

Then they "tunneled" around my side to create a path for the flexible catheter to reach around to my front left side where another incision was made to implant the actual pain pump filled with morphine.

They also had to make a small incision on my left side to help continue the tunneling for the catheter to reach around from my back to my front.

Total, 3 incisions to heal from. Though I was able to get up easier than after my previous surgeries since they hadn't actually worked on or ground away bone, I've had a heckuva time with three incisions healing.

I'm still a week away from my first visit with Pain Doctor since my surgery, but the surgery incisions have healed enough that I can feel the pain pump having a little bit of positive effect on my pain level.

The surgeon filled the pain pump, but only set it at a super-low release rate, enough to make the pump work until Pain Doctor could see me and I had healed enough to start ramping up the the delivery rate of the pain pump.

As of today, I'm slow moving, but doing pretty well. The incisions have been slow to heal and are still pretty sore, even three weeks on.

I'm basically still in the same pain situation as before the surgery, but the fact that I can now feel the light effects of the pain pump helping gives me hope that in the coming months we can get the device adjusted to where I don't have to take much oral meds.

The initial goal is to stop taking my long acting pain meds and then only have to occasionally take a quick acting pain medicine for "breakthrough" pain as needed. Getting off the long acting stuff will be a big relief to my liver and kidneys from the years of daily oral pain medications.

The pain pump can possibly give as good relief as long acting oral pain medications, but at the rate of only 1/200 or so of what I would take orally.

In other words, you have to take a pretty big dose of oral pain medicine to help lower serious pain levels, but with the pain pump's direct delivery to the spinal fluid, many patients get the same pain relief with 1/200th of what they were taking orally.

Just tiny, tiny amounts are delivered by the pain pump in a 24 hour period but with the same effect as hefty doses of oral pain medications.

Anyway, if anyone is still out there, and you've read this far, I'll throw you a bone and stop here.

I'm still not out of the woods yet, but the pain pump system is successfully implanted in me. It seems to be giving a bit of help to my pain levels, and should help more and more as I resume visits with Pain Doctor who will fill the pump and adjust the release rate of it's medicines from here on out.

If you are interested, follow this link for a short video on the pain pump (http://www.spine-health.com/video/intrathecal-pump-implant-video). Just click on the "Play animation without narration" link in the frame, and then start clicking the "Next Step" button to continue the very short animated views of how the pain pump system is installed. It's only about a minute long. A picture will make all that I wrote here come clear with just a glance as to how the pieces are placed.

I seriously hope to resume blogging, I miss it very much. It's a great release valve for me.

Until next time...God bless you.

Picture Post, Sunday September 26, 2010

My Big Sis and her Number Two Son came to Florida and visited us in June. A HUGE blessing to us.

Here are a few photos from when they were here.

We took Big Sis and Nephew Number Two to a restaurant in Sebastian, Florida, that is called Squid Lips. We'd always wanted to eat there, but finally took the chance. Wow, the food was good! How could you not want to eat at a restaurant called Squid Lips?

Here's the fambly at our table in Squid Lips. It's open to the Indian River Lagoon. It was a hot day, but surprisingly comfortable in the restaurant.

Then we went to the beach. Here's a photo of Big Sis and Nephew Number Two.

This is looking north along the beach...

...and this is looking south along the beach.

As you can tell, the water was all turquoise like it is in photos of the Bahamas, and the beach had almost no one on there, except that one couple with their blue umbrella. We were so disgusted at this turn of events that we didn't stay long, and left in a huff.

You know I'm kidding, right? These photos were taken the second week of June, and this beach was deserted. IT WAS PERFECT!

Count Your Blessings Every Day

Seriously.

Count them every day.

I haven't posted much here over the past two years, coinciding with an increase in pain in my lower back and left leg. I didn't want to always be talking about it, because it seemed so selfish.

Even with back pain at a level that I've tried many strange (to me) but accepted medical procedures and untold numbers of pain shots directly into my back, and even with the stress of a demanding job, I KNOW that I am very blessed.

Lovely Wife of 26 years, two lovely daughters, family on both sides that love us and we love them.

A nice house, a job at a great company, dogs, a cat, a fish.

I keep waking up every day so far, and that in itself is the greatest blessing.

Counting my blessings, ie. thanking God every day for them in prayer, is one way that helps me keep from descending into a deep, dark pit of despair because of the grinding pain that never, ever lets up.

Counting my blessings reminds me that I have a good life and keeps both of my feet on the ground.

But today, I have to admit that things were getting to me a bit. Trying to perform my best at work. A training class and test, and the struggle of merely walking. (As I've said before, I literally have a finite number of steps I can take in a day before the pain in my left leg and back say, No More.)

My training class ended at lunchtime, so I came home to eat, and was just thankful for the nearly horizontal relief of my recliner for a few minutes with three dogs draped on me. (They're my Buds)

And on TV I saw a man who had been burned so bad when he was two in a gasoline can explosion that doctors didn't think he'd live. He has no real hands or feet, but he's grown now, a college graduate, thankful of his many gifts.

Oh, and he's an amazing drummer. He can grab one drum stick with the pincher-like claw that is his left hand, and uses a wrist sweat band with rubber bands to attach a stick to his right hand. Played an amazing drum solo.

I was sitting there, crying like I haven't in a long, long time, watching this man's joy, and you could truly see he was joyful, and begged God for forgiveness for allowing myself to have gotten down, hurting and tired by lunchtime.

The afternoon at work went OK, I made some progress on a self-guided training project at work, and I came home completely spent and really hurting, but I was not letting the pain get to me.

Then Lovely Wife gets an instant message from her first cousin's daughter, that the wife of another first cousin had died last night, Monday night.

Lovely Wife and I met while young and both living with our families in Monroe, Louisiana. A year or two after we had begun dating, her family took in one of Lovely Wife's first cousins, whose father had kicked him out.

Lovely Wife and I both were in college and working for a regional pizza chain when her cousin moved in with them in Monroe.

He later worked with me at the particular restaurant that I worked at, and eventually began dating a girl that worked there with us, a girl I had know from school in the Monroe area for five years or so.

They fell in love, and eventually moved back to J's hometown of Birmingham, Alabama.

The instant message that Lovely Wife received tonight (Tuesday) was that J's wife D had died on Monday night. She had a shortness of breath and died, they believe it was a heart attack at this point.

D was a pretty, sweet, and musically talented woman. As a teen she won two national singer/songwriter first place honors that I know of. Could sing and play guitar and sing as good as anyone I've ever heard.

I hadn't talked to D or J in years, time, distance and life in general took care of that.

But although I grieve for a lost friend who has passed, she was a year behind me in school, so that puts her at about age 45 or 46, I'm so glad that the last time I talked with her, she was beaming with happiness. She's become a Christian and tonight I praise God for touching her years ago, as no one could know she'd die so young.

My heart goes out to J, who is apparently crushed and despondent, from the sketchy news we got over the internet. I pray that he has found the comfort that becoming a Christian can provide, but last I saw him, he was not.

So I know that D is eating at the King's table in a place with no pain or sorrow.

I hope that if J hasn't found Jesus, that he might turn his heart over now.

And I've had two amazing reminders in this single day, that life is precious, it's short, and no matter what kind of pain, physical or mental, that we may be going through, every day of life is a gift, even in the middle of difficult times.

My older brother died at the age of 41, and with D's passing last night, I am reminded, yet again, that we are not guaranteed tomorrow, only the moment we're living in, so we must make the best of it, and choose to count our blessings every day and thank God for them.

We don't get a second chance at life, Every Day Is The Superbowl for all of us. We must try to make our lives count. To mean something every day.

Sarah Palin vs. Barack Obama - Holy Cow!

Fifty-two percent (52%) of Likely U.S. Voters say their own views are closer to Sarah Palin’s than they are to President Obama’s, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

The whole result was 52% with Sarah Palin and 40% identify more with President Obama's views.

This would be a pretty dramatic set of polling data if it were just taken from a random selection of Americans, but this poll is taken from LIKELY VOTERS, which is much more potentially damaging to the Democrats in near future elections.

Here's the whole article from Hot Air...

I personally don't think that Sarah Palin would win in a presidential election (she's just too polarizing), but there's no denying that she's a force to be reckoned with.

Her being gorgeous doesn't hurt either.

United States Politics - September 2010

Holy smokes, this is one screwed up country right now!

I follow what is going on in the world, and would even like to talk about some things on this blog, but it's like trying to eat a watermelon in one bite.

So I won't even really try.

I just want to say that the Obama administration is, in my opinion, ten times the disaster that George W. Bush's administration was. Bush spent ridiculous sums like a drunken sailor, but Obama makes W. Bush seem like a model of restraint and propriety.

Obama has already increased the US deficit more than all the US Presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan put together, according the the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. And this in only eighteen months!

That alone is simply unsustainable.

These are scary times.

And that's about all I can manage to say about politics right now without having to throw up.

Tears For Fears - Orlando - August 28, 2010

I seriously do very little in the way of getting out and doing anything fun because of my back.

I have to work, so I do that as best I can, though even the average day of an electrical engineer can elevate my pain levels to "Need to lay down, NOW" levels.

But a few weeks ago, one of my two all-time favorite musical groups, Tears For Fears, performed at a free concert in downtown Orlando, Florida. (That's Roland Orzabal, one of the two founders of Tears For Fears to the left.)

You just have NO IDEA how much their music has meant to me over the years (since 1983! How time flies).

In one instance, one of their songs quite literally helped to change my life. I would truly be living in a different state, doing a different job if not for them. (That's Curt Smith, the other founding band member on the right)

I have missed opportunities to see them in concert since the summer of 1990, and as late as 2005.

But this free concert, put on by WMMO 98.9 in Orlando, was on an off-Saturday and my daughters and I planned to go.

As the concert date arrived, I was getting scared that I would be unable to deal with attending an outside (HOT and HUMID) concert with my back pain and not knowing if we should/could bring chairs, etc.

But the night before the concert, I found on the radio station's web site that one could purchase a V.I.P ticket and be allowed to sit close into the stage in chairs they would set up. So I purchased three V.I.P. tickets for me and the girls, and rested a little easier that night.

Number One daughter drove us all over there; I don't drive when I'm taking my pain meds, and we were able to park a mere block from the concert site.

We got there before the opening bands even started, and stuck it out in the heat and the sun because I was determined to see TFF perform, or die trying.

No telling how much I spent on $1.25 bottled water.

Tears For Fears came out at 8pm, and performed an absolutely amazing concert. They played all of their hit songs, and other songs from all their CDs.

I had taken my D90 with the 18-200mm lens and set the camera to ISO 3200 when the sun went down, Shutter priority, and 1/200sec to stop most of their movements while performing.

So these four concert shots were taken at ISO3200! Do you see any distracting digital noise from using such a high ISO setting? No. You do not.

FINALLY seeing Tears For Fears in concert, and seeing them with my daughters was priceless. The TFF concert was Awesome. My D90 performed way beyond my expectations and we got lots of great concert pics.

Just the block walk from the car to the concert site and sitting through the three bands totally took my back beyond any pain level I've felt in months. I walked part of the way back to where the car was parked, and waited for the girls to get it and come pick me up.

But it was worth it in the end, even if I was bed ridden for a day or two afterward.

This final photo is of the Orlando city skyline as seen by standing and turning around at my chair shortly before TFF came on the stage.

About The Lack Of Posting...

I am alive, but still dealing with my lower back and left leg pain issues from an injury in 2003.

The lumbar fusion I had in my lower back in Oct, 2004 has given my back good stability; my back no longer feels as if it's precariously balanced on worn ball bearings.

That's a good thing, and made my two surgeries of 2004 worthwhile, but I have had chronic pain in an increasingly intense way in my lumbar back and left leg that has gotten almost unbearable since late 2009. This has basically put an end to my hobbies of bicycle riding and going for long walks with my camera. I quite literally have only a finite number of steps I can take in any given day before I MUST stop. So hardly any walks and no bike riding in a long time now.

My life, for the most part, consists of getting up way before I have to be at work, just to be able to get ready and get there. There is much pain involved and it takes me a long time. Then I work, and where I work has about 100 buildings, about the size of a small college, and I end up walking a lot and that uses up the aforementioned finite number of steps in any given day.

All of that is to say this, I give my all to simply making it through a work day and trying to make a living for me and Lovely Wife. My photography habit/walks are very few and very far between. Haven't ridden my bike in a couple of years now. Yeah, even the blogging suffers when it hurts to sit up and type.

But I really want to keep my blogs going, so I'm going to add posts and photos here as I can, and hope you'll be patient with me and check in from time to time to see if I have something new.

Thanks, John M. (Saturday, September 18, 2010)