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It’s funny how some people react when they learn I had (ok technically have) cancer. You have people who in general don’t mutter the word beyond a quiet whisper. Some people feel they are being insensitive if they discuss it, you’re not be the way. Then there are the ones that want to tell you about every person they’ve known who has, had, or have died from cancer. Those conversations can get a little depressing.

But I digress because that is not the reason of this post. No the reason for this quick little posting is to let my family and friends know that I am approaching 3 years of being “cancer free” and that in my appointment with my Oncologist today he informed me that my numbers where looking so good, I would not need to come back and see him for an entire year. On top of that, no more CAT scans.

All great news and I wanted to make sure to share it with everyone. I now return you back to your normal life already in progress.

I was asked to speak at a small event here is San Diego about a week ago. I quickly came to the realization that I am not much of a public speak, sober anyways. It’s not that I was nervous or anything, I just suck at speaking to large crowds.

Now, it’s typical for me to rant and rav and yap about myself here on my blog, but I was extremely surprised and honored when Michael Baum, the CEO of the company I did the speaking for (Splunk), gave me a generous write up on his blog. Check it out http://blogs.splunk.com/thebaum/2008/08/15/splunk-live-southwest-2008/

Sometimes it’s the simple things that amaze people and leave them thinking you are some type of computer genius. My daughters have grown up with computers, and I mean hardcore. Their first computer was a SUSE Linux machine; they’ve worked on Windows and OS X boxes and they know their way around them all. At 10 years old, they’ve taken over the IT tech support duties for my wife. Next, I am going to install a phone line in their room so other family members can call them when they need help. What I am trying to say is, their Dad’s vast knowledge of computers doesn’t impress them. Whenever I think I’m showing them something new and cool on the computer, they have an attitude of “huh, I just didn’t know how to do it, now I do and its not that cool”.

I myself get kind of like that too, I am pretty hardcore geek and bells and whistles on computers don’t really impress me. I typically look at things on a much deeper level. That’s why when I read an article sometime back called “Having fun with the SAY command in your Terminal” I thought to myself, “Cute” and filed it away in the back of my mind thinking I will never have a use for that command.

The SAY command on OS X is a Speech Synthesis Manager. If you own an OS X machine, open a terminal window and type “man say” (minus the quotes) for more information, or just type “say Hello. do you want to play a game” and start having fun with it.

One day, one of my daughters and I were having somewhat of a disagreement on if it was more important for her to clean her room or finish watching TV; guess which side I was on. As privileges started to get stripped away, right after “no more pool time” but before “no more Playstation3 time”, she stomps off into her room. Knowing she wasn’t in her room doing what was asked of her, and knowing I was probably too mad myself to try to talk to her, I sat at my laptop tapping the space bar. Then it dawned on me; I fired up a terminal session on my Ubuntu laptop and made a ssh connection to my daughter’s computer in her room and proceeded to test out that SAY command. It went something like this;

say Why are you so mad

I hear a deep synthetic voice mumble come from behind my daughters’ door followed by a somewhat confused sounding voice of a little girl.

say Didnt your dad ask you to clean your room? I like a clean room

Some more little girl mumbles. Is she arguing with the computer now?

say Your dad is probably the smartest man I know, and may be the smartest man on earth, you should listen to him

OK, that last one might have been too much and may have tipped her off. I hear her door open and she yells, “I don’t know how you are doing that but you better show me”

Anyways, SSH with SAY and you can have all sorts of fun with co-workers, family, and friends. Further more they will think you are truly 1337.

He’s BIG, he’s white, and he can dance

I recently attended a conference for work and a buddy of mine (now ex-buddy) got some video of me on stage dancing it up with Wyclef Jean. It was a blast!

Check it out, I am Radioactive again.
For those of you who follow my story, you might remember this is not this first time I’ve become radioactive but this time they gave me a cool card. This is so if I happen to set off a Geiger Counter (seriously). I totally want to go somewhere and set off a geiger counter. The key is in the timing, you have to say “What is that green ooze?” right before the alarm sounds. Where does a man have to go to set off a radiation leak alarm???

The girls had been asking me for horse riding lessons for a long time now. I finally broke down and hooked them up. They seem to really enjoy it. OK truth of the matter I wanted to see if I could actually embed a Flickr Slideshow into my blog. Whatever…

When I was going through treatment, the one place I would go when I had days off was Torrey Pines State Reserve and either walk the shore or hike to the edge of one of the cliffs. For my birthday today I decide to take my girls there and show them where their Dad would try and find his center.

I took Brenda down to TJ during her trip out here. First time I’ve been down there myself in years so you know I had to take advantage of the whole 3 tacos and 2 beers for 2 bucks.

Man March 1^st already. Where does the time fly? It’s been a long time since my last post and even longer since I’ve talked about my cancer. It’s not that I’ve been avoiding the conversation, just hasn’t been much to say. I do have a couple of updates now, nothing bad, just general updates.

So, if you recall one of my follow up treatments for the next several years is to have a CAT Scan and blood work done routinely every 3 months. The CT is not one of my favorite tests since they hook me up to this IV and pump something into me during the Scan. But hey, if that is the worse of it, I’m happy. Anyways, the first one was a big deal because it was the first time my body would have been normalized in months and the first opportunity to tell if chemo got all the cancer. I ended up doing that test at the beginning of January and everything came back normal; great news for me.

My oncologist introduced me to another of his patients, Paul, who was also diagnosed with testicular cancer only on a much more Lance Armstrong level than I. He actually has been back to a somewhat normal life for about 2 years I think. So we’ve been getting together for a beer about once a month and the good doctor has even joined us once. I asked the Good Doctor if I was in fact “cured” and the way he explained was that I am considered in remission for now. If I go the 3 (or so years) without the cancer coming back, then they kind of start saying I am “cancer free”. As an Oncologist, he rarely ever uses the term “cured” but from a more general public understanding I would be considered that.

I started playing baseball again which was a huge personal achievement for me. I do love playing baseball. It’s still taking a lot of out me but I’ve felt that had been happening more and more gradually over the years anyways. Probably has more to do with age than anything else. The girls and I have taken to walking to a local park pretty much every weekend which has been fun. Usually my sister, Theta, and I walk them there. I have taken to bringing a basketball with me and shooting around with her while the girls did their thing. It has been forever since I had picked up a basketball so that has been a lot of fun and one day I actually plan on getting good enough to beat my sister.

That’s about it for now. Take it easy.

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Well, I haven’t been back to work a full month yet but its already feeling like I never really left. Life is back to its crazy pace and I am back to feeling like I have no time anymore. I am trying to make sure I always take some time to reflex and keep things in perspective but besides that life is pretty normal again. It’s hard not to feel like I owe so many people so much where I just don’t know where to start. From work to family and friends, there have been so many people who have done so much for myself and my family.

OK, let’s not get started on that again. My sister has decided to hang out here for awhile and has gotten a job with Bek. It’s really nice having here around and she seems to enjoy being here which is nice. Since I was feeling better, I decided to go through some picture that I hadn’t gotten up on the website yet. I usually go through a process to up load pictures where I resize them all, optimize them for the web, run a small program to make the thumb nail and a few other steps. Well, I had been hearing so much about flickr.com accounts that I decided to give the free service a try and I must say it is working out pretty nicely. It seems very simple to use and I would probably recommend to any of you who would like to share pictures online. You don’t have to have a webpage, you can protect pictures if you don’t want them viewed by the world and a few other cool features. I would think even a pretty novice user would be able to use this. And the real reason I signed up was to get the cool flash badge you see to the right (assuming this article is still on the homepage). Most of the pictures are from before all the health events in my life, some are during and there are a few after (mostly the Disney ones). Hope everyone enjoys them.

While I’m on the topic on free online services, another one I have really gotten addicted to has been del.icio.us. This is a online/social bookmarking site. Being someone who works on many computers in a single day, it’s always been somewhat of a challenge to try and keep my bookmarks in sync. Switching to Firefox helped out to some degree because it offered a plug-in extensions that would sync bookmarks to a central server. (Quick side note, if you haven’t started using Firefox you really should look into it. It does everything Internet Explorer does and much, much more. And it if free. I won’t get too much on this soap box for this posting but will probably re-visit it later But even the Bookmark sync wasn’t a perfect solution. It had to talk to a central server, assuming you had one at your disposal, and sometime it just didn’t work that will.

At first I was a little leery about storing my bookmarks online. My first concerned was, what if I needed my bookmarks and couldn’t get online to get them. That was one of those slap on the forehead moments when I realized that if I couldn’t get online, the chances are I didn’t really need my bookmarks either because I had no internet connection to use them. Now if for some reason you do know of a reason why you might need your bookmarks offline,del.icio.us does offer the ability to export your bookmarks which you can then either keep as a standard HTML file or import them into another browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. And again, Firefox even has an extension which will go out to your del.icio.us account and sync up your local bookmarks with those stored on your del.icio.us account.

My other concern was the fact that the world can see your bookmarks. This freak me out for the longest time and was the biggest reason I was shying away from using the service. The more I thought about it, the more I was unsure why this concerned me. Bookmarks aren’t exactly secret documents, matter of fact more times than not they link to very public websites. So what did I care if someone was interested in what I considered “Bookmarkable”. As a matter of fact, you are more than welcome to check out my bookmarks on your own, just go to http://del.icio.us/Shocm. As you’ll see, most of them are pretty geek related but there are some other good ones in there. Now there are still those administrative links that I don’t bother to put on del.icio.us and just use the traditional bookmarks for. For the most part however, del.icio.us is the way to go for all my general bookmarking needs and now, as long as I am connected to the internet I will always have my bookmarks. I have found myself using this service everyday.