Aren Cambre’s Blog

The worst news: it’s not good when the nurse says “oh my gosh” when tallying up your bill! This vet visit set me back way more Benjamins than I ever wanted to spend on a pet. X-rays, lab tests, prescriptions, IVs, and 2 days of “hospitalization” aren’t cheap.

The best news: Amelia is home:

And everything in between: Ameila has a reasonable shot at recovery. The lab tests and X-rays didn’t find anything startling except markers typical of a cat whose liver isn’t working right. The blood test suggested somewhere around 20% liver function, and the X-ray didn’t find that her liver extended past her ribcage boundary, which is what the vet wanted to see.

Amelia is on oral antibiotics and Denosyl for several more days.

Here’s what her ear looks like:

Lovely yellow tint. The vet says this will stick around for at least 2 weeks because it doesn’t immediately flush out.

She seems a little off kilter: sleeping more and unsteady on her feet. Hopefully she’ll return to her normal geriatric (12 year old) self soon.

Last night, I was unanimously* elected to a third term as president of Lake Park Estates Neighborhood Association, Inc.

That quarterly meeting went well: I did little talking. I had people lined up for each of these tasks:

• Community policing representative from our local police substation (arranged by our crime watch chair)
• Discussion of Volunteers In Patrol program initiative by our crime watch chair
• Discussion of a nascent crime camera committee by its chair
• Report on our membership drive by our treasurer (we’re at 33% of the neighborhood, the highest I have ever seen it since I lived here!)
• Running the election (two people I appointed at the last minute)
• Room arrangements made by our VP
• Snacks arranged by our Welcome Committee chairwoman

It was a well oiled machine for a small neighborhood association.

I know that the “textbook answer” to leadership is to help people be motivated to take on projects. However, when talking about small volunteer organizations, translating that into practice is an art. Small nonprofits have scarce resources and limited zones of success (too many parties to please), and we compete for volunteer attention. In other words, you have to provide an unusual amount of motivation and direction to achieve success.

I wrote “art” because leadership techniques vary wildly depending on personalities, the organization’s mission, community support, etc.

I really appreciate people who are given direction and take off with it. At the meeting, I recognized three people who did a fantastic job:

• A lady who started a pet watch program from scratch.
• A lady who revived a defunct welcome committee.
• Our treasurer who provided exceptional support for our membership drive.

The award is sincere but has a farscial title: YOU WILL RESPECT MY AUTHORITY. Here’s what it looked like:

The reference is from a South Park episode named Chickenlover. I did a bad imitation of Cartman’s “authority” line, making a fool of myself. The attendees enjoyed it even though most didn’t get it.

*One person wrote in Cartman for president but scratched it out and voted for me. Oh, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I was the only nominee for president.

Just got a call from the vet. The bloodwork shows that Amelia probably has hepatic lipidosis. Fortunately, FIV and FeLV are ruled out.

Since the liver is screwed up, she has a lot of toxins in her blood, including but not limited to bilirubin. In addition to antibiotics, the vet is also administering a drug to help work that junk out of her blood.

Amelia’s biggest problem is a lack of appetite. Unless she starts eating soon, there will be no other available options besides unacceptably expensive interventions like tube feeding directly into the stomach.

The vet was not able to change the 50/50 prognosis yet since he does not have a firm diagnosis.

I took Amelia, our 12 year old Himalayan cat, to the vet today for her annual checkup. This is her:

Her inner ears are normally this healthy pink-tinged color:

Today that skin was yellow. This apparently means her liver is not filtering normal red blood cell breakdown products.

She also lost 2 lbs since her last checkup.

The vet said there’s a 50% chance this can be fixed. The problem could range from a treatable infection to terminal illnesses like FIV.

Shortly after the vet found the problem, he whisked her to get a blood sample and put her on an IV.

Alec is a little upset that we had to leave Amelia at the vet’s office. She’s the only kitty that gets along with him.

I should find out more on Friday.

I am becoming increasingly convinvced that this FLDS raid was a fraud to begin with.

Predictably, the mainstream media appears to be as lost as the west Texas justice system.

A good analysis is at http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2008/04/phone-call-alleging-abuse-at-yfz-was.html.

I’m getting a funny feeling about what Texas has done with the FLDS people in Eldorado.

Sure, the FLDS church is very, very weird. Their theology is heretical. Sometimes they have done bad things. E.g., their previous dictator, Warren Jeffs, is in jail for various sex-related crimes.

But the Texas clan, why the extremes? Where’s this 16 year old complainant? If they have such a good case, why did they not have grounds to arrest the supposed perp? (Yes, they met with him.) Why are most the captured children forcibly separated from mothers who are accused of no crimes? Why are no facts coming out? Why the delays?

Is something up? Does Texas have a real case? Are Texas taxpayers about to be soaked in a major civil suit?

Is weird now illegal?

While our floors were being redone, I stayed with inlaws. (Hence the commuting piece.)

3:00 AM Thursday morning, an unusually severe storm hit Plano. The next morning, we found that my inlaws’ street had a lot of vegetation damage. Leaves and branches were everywhere.

The most stark damage was right next door where this medium-sized tree fell over:

My bedroom was on the corner of the house closest to this tree. I never heard it tip over, probably because of the pounding horizontal rain and the multiple lightning strikes each second.

Here’s what astounded me. Well after I drove away from their house, I saw this:

Yes, the wind turned my folding mirror against the car and pulled the mirror out! I have no idea how this happened; that mirror takes some force to move!

Fortunately, the inlaws found the mirror. It was on the pavement below the car. I am lucky I didn’t run it over!

The car is overdue for inspection, and this will unfortunately delay it further.

Ta daaa!

The new floor color is amazing.

I host all my sites at 1and1.com using its Linux “Beginner” hosting. Even though it’s called “beginner,” I am barely using my package’s limits. My disk utilization is about 15% of max, and my monthly bandwidth utilization is at 0.5%. At $4 per month, this package is a steal.

It still has several downsides:

• No announce or discussion lists. Only 1and1’s $10/month and $20/month packages support these but are arbitrarily limited to 5 lists.
• Arbitrary limits on some resources such as subdomains (25) or MySql databases (10).
• Slooooooooooooooow. Sometimes pages on my blog or other sites take several seconds to load. It’s probably because of overwhelmed MySql servers.
• Incompetent support. Level 1 is outsourced to foreigners who barely know what they are doing.
• Intransigent support. Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth to convince level 1 support that, yes, I really do know what I am talking about. I’ve lost email thanks to this.
• Missing features. For example, no SSH shell access or Image Magick.

Can I improve by going with another shared hosting service?

Probably not. All inexpensive shared hosts operate on the overselling model, meaning they intentionally overbook resources, sometimes badly. All the major overseller-model hosts, including Dreamhost, AN Host, Hostgator, GoDaddy, Bluehost, etc., all have plenty of “x sucks” Google results. E.g., dreamhost sucks.

If you are going with a shared host, just go with the cheapest one that doesn’t suck too badly. 1and1.com foots that bill for now.

The next step from shared hosting are virtual private servers (VPS). This is where a powerful machine emulates many complete computers, and you rent one of those virtualized computers. We use this at SMU for a growing percentage of our servers.

Several of the shared hosts offer VPS. However, how can I trust these hosts not to oversell VPS, too? Plus, the resource allocation is pitiful. You can’t get 512MB RAM on 1on1’s VPS until you pony up almost $60 per month.

The next step up is dedicated hosting. This is even less price efficient, understandable since you are renting actual physical machines. And since these are physical machines, you get the added complexity of discrete machine management, a real pain during hardware problems.

CoreNetworks.net has apparently inexpensive dedicated hosting by a long shot, but you know what they say about the lowest bidder…

Suppose I was to get a dedicated or VPS hosting plan? I know enough to hack together a Ubuntu server, but I would have trouble being a true server administrator. I need a trusted individual who can administer it for me.

Amazon.com’s Elastic Cloud Computing could be a solution. It goes back to the VPS model, but Amazon’s reputation for reliability and (relative) inexpensiveness is enticing. They just a feature called elastic IP, which mimics a static IP.

My mind is spinning on alternatives. I know a guy who has CoreNetworks.net’s $50/month midrange MR28 package. I’m willing to pay him much higher than $4/month if he can host my sites. The biggest limitation is only a 120 GB hard drive. However, since I am only using 1.5 GB right now, would that ever really be a problem? But Amazon.com’s Elastic Cloud Computing sure is tempting…

Likely outcome? Analysis paralysis, meaning I’ll do nothing!

For a few days this week, I’ve commuted 20.8 miles from work to Plano.

We had to vacate our home because the wood floors are being refinished; this is the last step of the restoration from the ceiling collapse. A long wood-floored hallway connects all rooms, so there’s no way we could avoid walking on it.

Commuting is for the birds. Even though this commute is moderate by modern standards, it was 220% more miles and 150% more time than my regular drive to work. And because it is on a freeway, I get to experience maddening random slowdowns as traffic unpredictably oscillates between freeflow and congestion. And yes, this happens even with good following distances and right lane travel, Steve Blow! (link)

So let’s see, I could commute and get a larger house and lower crime in exchange for:

• No scenery.
• No trees.
• Maddening daily commute.
• Loss of an hour of my awake time every workday.
• Boring neighborhood.
• No character.

No, thank you.