Monday afternoon I arrived at the hospital and was placed into a little room where I disrobed and allowed three different nurses to attempt to attach an IV to me before the third one succeeded. While their failures were uncomfortable I wasn’t in pain. I really felt bad for the two that failed. I know they must have been embarrassed.

After the IV was in place I was rolled back into an area in the surgury suite where a nerve block was administered. This rendered my entire right arm numb and paralyzed. This paralysis remained with me until 5:30 AM the following morning. It’s a really strange feeling willing your arm to move the way you always have and nothing happening.

I was then rolled on back to where they were to operate on me and I don’t remember another thing until I was rolled back to the room where I disrobed with my wife waiting for me. I was in no pain. I got dressed and my wife drove me back home.

Remember a couple of paragraphs back when I mentioned the paralysis leaving at 5:30 AM? That’s when the pain arrived. It stayed with me for most of the day Tuesday, through the night and lessening on Wednesday, coming back at night.

By Thursday morning I felt well enough to be driven to Chattanooga for Thanksgiving. I had lunch with my in-laws and dinner with my father and step-mother. My step-sister was in from Guatemala and her daughter and a friend had been visiting for about a month.

I spent the night with my in-laws and came back to home to Lawerenceville around noon on Friday.

I drove around town a little yesterday and it wasn’t too bad. I plan to drive my wife to work Monday so I’ll have a car with an automatic transmission at my disposal while she’s away.

I’m getting more range of motion in my right arm each day. I still can’t raise my right arm all the way out to my right side but I can raise it out in front of me. Using my arm behind my back is completely out of the question and there are still some manuevers that requires my helping with the left arm to get my arm where I need it. Figuring out the rules has been interesting.

While I have a decent range of motion I have no strength in that arm at all. I guess I’ll start working on that when I begin physical therapy.

I go in for my shoulder surgery in a couple of hours. I woke up this morning to a Good Morning America report about a young lady going into the hospital to have a knot removed from her neck only to die a few days later from an anesthesiologist’s error.

I don’t know when I’ll be up to typing but as soon as I am I’ll let y’all know how things turned out.

I love it when people run the numbers for me. Josh Norton over at strip mining for whimsy did his own analysis of the Forida vote and has come to the conclusion that there was no voter fraud. I just wish he had published the spreadsheet he used to come to that conclusion.

Oh, and just so you know, Josh was a fierce supporter of John Kerry, or at least a fierce detractor of George W. Bush.

There has been some controversy going on this week about drug companies using RFID technology to combat drug conterfeiting. The controversy isn’t over combating drug conterfeiting, it’s the fact that people belive that this is just an excuse to track the drugs to one’s home. RFID doesn’t work like that.

RFID tags can be either active or passive. Active tags contain their own power source and are good for only as long as the power source is active. Passive RFID tags do not have their own power supply. They are powered by a current induced into their antenna during the incoming radio-frequency scan.

Because of the differences in the way they are powered passive RFID tags can only transmit a limited amount of data for a very limited range while active RFID tags can transmit much more data over a much larger range. Also due to the way they are powered there is a pretty large gap between the manufacturing costs and physical size of passive and active RFID tags.

The differences in range is something important to understand. When I’m saying that active RFID tags can transmit over a much larger range we are talking yards as opposed to inches. While there are active RFID tags that can transmit to a receiver miles away these are way too expensive to used in manufacturing supply chain logistics. Active RFID tags used in manufacturing have only the range to be located only within a building at most and usually only within an aisle.

Passive RFID tags have a short range of at most a couple of feet. Their advantages of being small and cheap (under 50¢ a piece and getting cheaper) make them very attractive for identifying individual pieces and makes up for their lack of range. These things can be made into paper labels and applied to packaging with little alterations to current packaging equipment. Still they are currently only readable from at most a few feet away.

The worry about tracking these passive RFID tags after leaving the store is unfounded. In order for this to happen you are going to have to have a tag reader in your house and car that monitors your doors. This reader would have to be able to send the data it receives back to a central monitoring site for this to be of any good to anyone.

I was playing volleyball this past summer at the office picnic. The ball was on our side of the court and I extended way back to try to keep the ball in bounds. I felt a twinge and that night I couldn’t use my right arm. Ice packs and copious amounts of ibuprofen proved to be of little help so I went to the doctor.

The doctor put me on Naproxen and after just one day my arm was usable again. The problem was that something still wasn’t feeling quite right. After a month of this drug therapy I went back to the doc and was referred to an orthopaedic surgeon.

I have a torn rotator cuff. I go in for surgery on Monday.

I may have my comment spam problem resolved thanks to a plugin written by Kitty. I don’t know how ‘greedy’ this plugin might be so marking and copying your comment to the clipboard before submitting it might not be a bad idea. I’m testing now so any comments will be welcome.

I just shut down comments until I can figure out a way to keep some zombies from hitting my comment system. It seems that some online gambling websites have the comment URL for this system programmed into a virus somewhere that is sending comment spam to this weblog from all over the place.

I’ll try to have comments re-enabled shortly. I just got tired of deleteing so much stuff.

I’ve heard so many different people giving analysis on why the Democrats lost in the election. It seems they are all missing the obvious. They picked the wrong man to be their candidate. Kerry has not a drop of charisma and never gave a strong reason to vote for him other than he wasn’t George W. Bush.

They also used a strategy that cost Bob Dole the election in ‘96. Like the Republicans in ‘96 they depended on people voting against the incumbant more so than people voting for the challenger. That won’t ever work. People want a reason to vote for someone and the Republicans gave them one while the Democrats kept trying to give reasons to not return Bush to the White House.

I hope the Democrats get a clue from this and put someone up against the Republicans who is electable in 2008.

It appears that I could have been wrong yesterday. Regardless of the electoral college count Bush’s lead with the popular vote reported this morning is standing at 3.5 million Bush has garnered more public support than Kerry.

I’m going to be stuck inside a customer’s site all day. I’ll be interested in what the news says when I return this evening.

Here I sit in ATL once again awaiting a flight out to Austin, Texas. I got in line at 6:15 this morning to vote. The polls opened at 7:00 and I was out by 7:39. In that hour and twenty-four minutes my mind changed again on my vote. A couple of weeks back I said I was going to vote for Bush because I was so aghast that the Kerry/Edwards campaign would resort to pulling Mary Cheney’s sexuality into the campaign.

I’m still horrified that the man who will probably be running the country for the next four years would stoop to that level in his campaign but my decision to vote for Bush was made in haste. I still couldn’t vote for Kerry. I voted for Badnarik. During my time standing in line I overheard someone talking about wasted votes and it reminded me about how I feel about that stupid, stupid concept.

You see, I look at it this way, I’m either going to vote for a winner or a loser. If I’m voting my conscious, as I should be, the winning and losing won’t come into play in my decison of who to vote for. I’m going to vote for who I want to put in office. If it comes down to no one running that I want to put in office then I have to make my decision based on ideology alone. I will not vote against anyone.

No vote is wasted except for the vote you place against someone. It’s a neat marketing ploy that people use to elect otherwise unelectable politicians to pull the “wasted vote” argument. You build a team and pit one team against the other team, if they can persuade you that you are against the other team then they can use the polls to rationalize your need to vote for their politician because their politician is “electable” while yours isn’t. Voting for your politician instead of theirs just throws away your vote and is like voting for the “other team”.

I tend to believe that voting for anyone other than my own politician is throwing my vote away because it ensures that my politician will not stand a chance. I want my politician to at least have a chance whether or not I’m a winner or a loser. At least I’ll be true to myself.

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I’ve still about thirty minutes before my flight starts boarding so I thought I’d throw in a little more.

I’m almost certain that John Kerry will be our next president. I’m not too happy about this but I wouldn’t be too happy about another four years of George W. Bush so I guess it doesn’t matter. This nation will survive regardless.

For my Republican friends who are thinking that a Kerry presidency will mean the end of the free world I’m going to tell you to relax. The tax-cuts that you are enjoying are not automatically at risk. The president can only introduce legislation, sign it once it’s passed or veto it. Doing away with the Bush tax-cuts will require congress’ approval. You will still control both the House and the Senate.

For my Kerry supporting friends don’t think that there is going to be any major change in foreign policy, especially regarding Iraq. There will be some changes but they will be insignificant for the most part and won’t mean a thing in your or my day to day living. If there is to be a draft is is even more likely to take place with a Democrat in the White House than with a Republican.

Whoever is in the White House we will still be subject to removing our shoes in airports, random searches of our luggage, the FBI checking out our reading list at the library and inadequate intelligence telling us what is going on in the minds of the third world. Our economy will either grow fast or it will grow slow but it will still grow because people will make that happen, not the government.

When you get right down to it, it isn’t that big a deal.