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Behold, another Monty video! He's much more active now, and trying to eat and drink on his own as well. As you can see in the video, he's back to his usual self (going as far as trying to work out how to get the collar off his head and tube out of his neck), so hopefully at tomorrow's checkup they'll do his bloodwork and decide to take the tube out for good. I sure hope so -- I'd much rather have him eating on his own than scowling at me while I push food through his feeding tube.

I don't think I've smiled this much in quite a long time, but I couldn't help it when I came home a couple of days ago, and Monty actually ran out from the bedroom when he heard me, meowing and trying to rub my leg (the collar makes that tough), and acting happy to see me. I started petting his poor tube-still-stitched-in head, and he leaned into my hand and gave that satisfied "cat grin" that they sometimes do. Then I noticed it -- for the first time in weeks, he was purring. My little guy has returned, and he's just about got this liver nonsense licked!

Yeah, I know, I'm only 32, and I've "only" got four cats, but we might as well face it -- I'm a crazy cat person. I must have that parasite thing cats carry that makes non-cat recipients' brains respond more favorably to cats. That or the little devils are just soft, cute, furry, and pleasant to be around.

Monty's latest checkup at the vet was this morning. He's been throwing up a bit more lately, so they've put him back on a medication that stops him vomiting but starts him drooling ... drool is much easier to get off a carpet and wipe off an angry cat's chin than vomit is.

But there's plenty of good news: he's ...

I think I see why "in-home care" for pets is considered such a risky proposition by veterinarians -- my first instinct when handling Monty is to avoid doing anything that might "hurt" him, or that might make him hold a grudge once it's all over with and he's healthy again.

Then I realized -- he's going to hold a grudge for awhile anyway (I'm the guy who, in his mind, "started it" by taking him to the animal hospital, leaving him there overnight, then taking him to a vet, leaving him there for a day, then ferrying him back and forth every few days while constantly fiddling with the tube on his head, making him feel full even when he hasn't eaten ...

After a scary snafu in the grading system (one of my classes had a final grade of "F" instead of the expected and earned "A," but fortunately this has been corrected and the update is trickling through the college's assorted systems), my actual final grades for the summer term have been posted. With Intermediate Algebra giving me a bit of a fight (that's some tough material ... sorry to disappoint, but there's a reason I'm not pursuing a mathematics degree), I earned a 3.7 GPA for the semester, planting me firmly on the Dean's list. Woohoo!

I'm hoping they actually update the page there to include my name after the grades get updated, but it might just be a ...

A couple weeks ago, my cat Monty ended up in an emergency animal hospital, for lethargy, lack of appetite, and jaundice. It's turned out he has feline hepatic lipidosis, a disease that brings big fun super happy time for his liver (for reasons unknown, the cat stops eating, then his body starts using up its fat reserves for energy ... unfortunately, the feline liver doesn't handle fat very well, and quickly deteriorates; anybody else think this sounds like a great counter-example to the stupid "intelligent design" nonsense?) and loads of discomfort for the afflicted cat.

Fortunately, it was caught early enough that with intense feeding (via a feeding tube, alas), antibiotics, and specialized liver medication, he'll be back up and running full blast ...

I'm still using my AspireRevo for assorted serving duties, but willfe.com has migrated to a VPS in a data center where it's safe from the ravages of consumer-grade broadband issues (note: this is hypothetical; I've had pretty good performance from my broadband provider), but more importantly, it's on a faster pipe so theoretically (heh) stuff should just "go faster."

Will it make any real difference? No friggin' clue. But I wanted a VPS anyway, and here's a good use for one. So n'yah! :)

I'll admit it -- the religious ones have me confused again. Not really confused, I guess -- I can already hear the myriad answers and handwaves in my head that I'll get in response to my impertinent questions -- more annoyed and irritated. The truth is these days we're running out of rational, reasonable ways to deal with the crazier religious people among us. Thankfully religion is slowly fading (very slowly), but for the next century or so, we have to deal with people whose thinking is broken enough to let them bend (or break) the rules of any civilized society.

What prompted this rant? Just a "the end is coming!" style flier being left on my car. Parked right out in front of my ...

Apologies for the ~10 minute downtime this afternoon; Willfe.com is on new hardware (an Acer AspireRevo 3610 to be exact). No more makeshift-server-from-a-laptop for me! Hehehe.

Everything should be behaving itself; I'll keep an eye on things over the next few days to make sure.

I've been added to the President's List at Valencia Community College for the Spring 2010 semester! I already knew what my grades were and that I'd make the list, but it's nice to see my name up in lights for the world to see. I'm still waiting to see if they send anything commemorative in the mail for this distinction, but I'll take what I've got right now and be happy with it!

Users of Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04 likely aren't affected by any of this, but the advice still applies anyway (i.e. this shouldn't hurt these newer installations either).

One of the nicest things about Ubuntu is its tendency to not ride the bleeding edge of development when it comes to packages that end up in the standard repositories. That is, when you install from a CD or USB flash drive, the system you get is built on stable, well-tested versions of everything that makes up Ubuntu. When you use the package manager to install updates or new packages that didn't come on the CD, again you get stable versions.

This yields a very stable system that's pretty hard to ...

Oscillating between loneliness ("this bed feels empty when it's just me in it") and exuberance ("I can put everything in this apartment exactly where I want it!") is a strange experience for me, though I'm happy to say that these days, I only really get that sunken "wish someone were here with me" feeling about once a week.

It always comes at bedtime, and the feeling of an empty bed doesn't stay with me for very long, because the cats always file into the bedroom a few minutes after I lay down for the night and pile onto the bed. Try to imagine a "full" sized futon, in "bed mode" and suitably appointed with sheets and comforter, with a grown man sleeping ...

It's been a whirlwind month (April, that is), with finals, new martial arts training, and a small helping of actually standing up for myself, but it seems I've made it through unscathed.

The best news came Tuesday afternoon this week, when my final grades for the Spring 2010 term at Valencia were posted. To my astonishment, I aced every class -- a 4.0. I've made the Dean's List and the President's List.

Given everything (good and bad) that's happened since the semester started, I'm just floored that I did so well in my classes this term. It's my first semester back in college, so they're admittedly "easy" courses (though they all had a whopping pile of ...

With the Spring 2010 semester finally behind me, I had some free time to devote to my photography hobby for the first time in weeks. I'm still getting used to depth-of-field now that I've got a lens that makes it easy to play with. I've shot quite a few pics, but I'm most proud of these two random bits of abstract pointlessness:

From Photography Tests

From Photography Tests

As always, click through for the full-size versions.

Heh! Well, obviously my desire to write a new post yesterday as my sleep study got started didn't result in an actual post -- it turns out when you've got 23 separate wires/probes attached to your head, face, neck, chest, arms, legs, and fingers, it's pretty damned hard to even type at all, much less concentrate on writing a good post.

Sorry about that. There should be more time by week's end for me to get some good writing in.

...and with a minimum of fuss, he returns...

Apologies for the protracted absence; I fell ill a couple of weeks ago, spent a "fun" 12 hours at a local emergency room, and have slowly been recuperating and getting caught up with an assortment of things. Because I missed two classes I fell pretty far behind in my coursework, but thanks to the patient understanding of my professors, the work's been made up. It turns out when you've been busting ass and getting high marks all semester long and have paperwork from the ER proving why you missed a class, your professors are downright eager to make sure one of their better students gets a helping hand to get caught up again.

Sadly the ...

This morning, I gave myself an unusual treat in the form of a trip to a local barber shop (typically, I just cut my own hair). I did this because about once every six months, I get tired of the frustrations involved in properly trimming the hair on the back of my head (and on my neck). The best electric trimmer in the world can't make that obnoxious trick any easier.

Usually when I want a haircut, I wander into whatever cheap-ass chop shop is available in the nearest mall or shopping center. I had occasion this morning to be near a bona-fide barber shop (near a Chinese buffet that I've discovered pretty close to my apartment), so I figured I'd drop ...

It's always funny to me how vacations are meant to be relaxing, unwinding affairs, meant to strip away the stresses of the daily grind and freshen up the brain for a triumphant return to work (and/or school), and yet it always ends up that you need a few days to "recuperate" after you get home from it.

I'm in that boat right now -- I'm exhausted, though I had a great time out there. I'll write up something more detailed tomorrow evening once I've gotten all caught up with domestic affairs and rested up a little. In the meantime, here's a few choice photographs from my trip. Click through any of them to view the full album.

Woke up this morning and encountered this scene on the back porch at my folks' place:

From Pahrump Trip

Sweet.

Well, that's better. I've updated the template to automatically truncate things for me on the main page, while still showing the real content on the full pages (along with a read more link to them). Disqus is more fully integrated now as well, showing the number of comments and reactions to each post.

It's starting to feel like a real website again :)