Friday....

05.10.2002

I don't know why it's been such a long week, but it has. Today has been my day for catching up and doing those things I've been putting off. I updated the DVD list with the last couple of movies I've gotten. For anybody that's curious, I'm now up to 300 movies.

What am I doing with 300 movies? I've got to be insane!

I've also spent most of the day searching job websites and submitting my resume to a couple of places. It seems a lotof sites are now following the monster method of filling in a lot of forms to create a "customized" resume instead of just emailing your resume as an attachment. It's probably more efficient for the employer, but it makes for a lot of typing if you're the one applying.

I've also been teaching myself Macromedia Flash (version 6). I've gone through the included tutorials and think I've got the basics of animation. Now I've got to learn about ActionScripting (which they describe as being a lot like JavaScript... but different) so I can do super cool things on the website. I'm limited now to pretty much rotating logos. I've downloaded some extra tutorials from FlashKit to try out, so I've got a basis to work from.

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Pictures From 6 Floors Up

05.08.2002

Just for fun, I've posted some of the pictures I took at the beach last week. Granted, I don't think there's a grain of sand in any of the pictures, but did I go to the beach to see sand? No! I went to see women working on their tan! Tans. Whichever.

And just to keep Ying from worrying, there's nothing here you couldn't see on Baywatch. Just not as much slow motion running in the waves.

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Back From The Doctor

05.07.2002

My trip to the doctor turned out to be 2 trips to the doctor. Doctor #1 ended up saying "That's going to need to be sewed up, and I don't do that." At that point I was reffered to doctor #2 (A general surgeon) who said "That's going to need to be sewed up. We can do that in the office. You want to do it today?" Duh! I've gone through 3 office visits trying to get this stupid thing finished up. Well, long story short, or at least as short as I'm going to make it, is that all of my mole/nevus is now cut out and I've got 6 stitches to show for it. And stiches itch. A lot. Along with a little throbbing occassionally, but that I can handle. The hard part is not to scratch. Don't even think about scratching. That's hard to do when I'm sitting here typing about it.

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Goin' To The Doctor

05.02.2002

I've got about an hour before I go off to the doctor to get the rest of my nevus surgically removed (see last entry for all the gruesome details!), so I've snuck over to the international headquarters of bitHalo to grab a bite of lunch. Sweet, carb-loaded McDonalds. I'm glad Gina doesn't read this.

The other night Jerry and I helped JD and Matt unload video game cabinets for the MAME machines they're building. I found 2 important things from that experience:

• The cabinets are really cool
• They're also @$#%ing heavy

I also got to see one in the early stages of working. It's amazing how different a video game looks going from a regular pc to looking at it in a game cabinet on a 27 (I think) inch screen. I've gotta go find more wrestling games!

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Pathology to English Dictionary

04.30.2002

Last week I went and had a mole removed, and last night I got a call from the doctor's office to which about the only thing I understood was "test results". The results weren't supposedto get back until Wednesday, so them calling this early couldn't be good. I went in and found that the tests they ran resulted in "Probable Desmoplastic Spits Nevus". After a lot of searching, the closest match I could find was "benign juvenile melanoma". Just to findout what was going on, I sent the crux of the report to Doug Ross, PhD/MD/Super Medical Know It All!. Below is the report, with his explanations included in parenthesis:

The shave biopsy shows a hyperplastic epidermis (growing skin) with no appreciable junctional melanocytic activity (just skin). The dermis contains abundant thick collagen bundles admixed with epitheloid appearing cells which have abundant cytoplasm and large vesicular nuclei (I like using bigwords to describe skin). Intranuclear inclusion are also seen. Hyperchromasia or miotic activity is not identified (You're not growing and neither whatever the "lesion" is ... that is good). The atypical cells extend through the full thickness of the biopsy (It goes deep ... IF ... remember I said IF .... it was a bad lesion that would be bad ....). Immunohystochemical stain S100 protein stains the cells diffusely positive with focal positivity seen in Hmb45. The tumor cells are negative for HAM56 a monocytic marker. (This is what you would expect for melanocytes .. he was worried about he "hyperplastic" part but this made him feel better). These features would support a melanocytic proliferation of which the differential diagnosis would include desmoplastic intradermal Spitz nevus (not a problem) and desmoplastic melanoma (not good). While I favor the former the later cannot be totally excluded (I'm covering my ass in this litiginous environment and so should you) due to the focal atypia cells, perivascular inflammatory infiltrate that is present deep, and the fact that the lesion is incompletely excised and thus the deep aspect of the proliferation cannot be evaluated. (Better take it all out to make sure it doesn't look more like Melanoma in the parts we cannot see ... plus you get to bill another procedure).

So, basicaly I'm going to live, and I haveto go back to a dermatologist Thursday where they're going to scoop the rest of the mole out and double check it for sure.

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