I’ve been in Pittsburgh since Wednesday. I’m such a lucky boy!!

The traffic is insane, they don’t sell beer in grocery stores, and my hotel room has some curious stains on the floor.

Sounds like the perfect combination to inspire some content!

I’m here to install a disaster recovery site for a customer. The servers are in the racks and the cabling is pretty much finished. Today we’re going to fire up the Oracle DB and do a test run of the processing to verify that all is good in the world.

On Monday, we’ll shut down the main production servers and switch it over to the DR system to verify that it does everything it’s supposed to.

I fly back home the following monday.

In the mean time, I’ve been eating steak like it’s going out of style. They give us $50 a day for food. Since I don’t eat breakfast and usually have a light lunch, that leaves about $45 a night for dinner. Can you say fillet mignon? I can (and do pretty much every night!).

I’ve also been trying out the local brews. A beer called Yuengling (or something close) is nice, another called Iton City is not.

We here at wwbd are trying to make your web experience as positive as possible.

Therefore, we’re pleased to announce that we’re upgrading our network to triple our connection speed. Pages load faster for you, porn loads faster for us (it’s a win-win situation!).

The only downside is that there will be an outage that will last approximately 1 week.

Beginning March 23rd and ending around the 30th, this website and all other sites on the pixelthugs server will be unreachable.

I’d apologize to the people I host, but those bastards don’t pay me a dime, so they’ll take it and like it.

News on the medical front: I saw my new doctor again yesterday and the test results are in. It’s exactly what I thought (one bad disc causing all the pain). I’ve now been referred to a new neurosurgeon for early next month. I sense closure to this whole damn thing coming soon.

Cross my fingers.

I’m also packing up today for the Great Pittsburgh Adventure^tm. My flight leaves tomorrow morning bright and early. I’ll make sure to pack the digital camera and get lots of pictures. Anything for content, baby!!

I spent most of Saturday shopping for clothes.

Apparently, I’ve gotten a little fat since I last flew out of town on business and needed to buy new slacks (it was either that or go on a crash diet). Normally, I wear jeans to work every day, but we have to dress nice when we go to our customers. So, I picked up 5 pairs of slacks, 3 dress shirts, 4 polo shirts, a few silk ties, a ton of socks, and a belt that will actually wrap around my big fat belly.

Sexy!!

I fly out early on Wednesday and don’t come back till the 29th or so… so contacting me will be hit and miss for a while.

While I’m excited to get out of the damn house for a bit, I’m a little bummed because I’ll miss my eldest son’s birthday. He gets to open his presents from me tomorrow though. I got him a nice Asus Geforce FX 5200 (128mb DDR) and a few fans for his case. He’ll be happy with that 🙂

Other news… I see my doctor today to go over the results of the discogram. Hopefully we’ll get the ball rolling soon on the whole fusion gig.

Finally… my iPaq is totally worthless. I don’t know why they decided I needed one, and I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do with it. Other than the game “Jawbreaker”, it has few redeeming qualities.

I had my discogram today.

My appointment was scheduled at 11:30, but being the guy I am, I showed up at 11:00. I figured there would be paperwork and such to fill out and wanted to get there early. I didn’t know that they already figured in the time to get everything done and my actual procedure wasn’t until 1:00.

They made me strip and put on an ever so lovely gown (open in the back) and hooked me up with an IV. Then I got to wait for an hour and a half.

Finally, my time came around and they put me on a gurney and wheeled me through the hospital. I don’t know what it is about riding around on a bed, going through door after door, but it makes me smile like a kid on a carnival ride. Perhaps I’ve seen too many movies and television shows where they wheel the patient around like this. I feel ridiculous. It would be easier just to walk, but they make you take the ride and it strikes me as insanely funny.

When they wheeled me to the pre-staging area, I met the doctor who would be performing the procedure. He explained what they were doing and why they were doing it (I guess some people don’t ask enough questions prior to the procedure and they have to fill them in at the last second).

Then they rolled my gurney into the operating room and transferred me, face down, onto a metal slab with a 1″ thick piece of foam on it to give the illusion of comfort. They injected a few items into my IV and got to work.

The doctor inserted 3 needles into my back along the left hand side of my spine, each needle piercing a disc. One by one, they did an injection of a dye and asked me “how does that feel”.

“A little pressure” I replied on the first disk. “It feels weird”

Then they did the next disk and repeated the question.

“About the same”

Finally, they did what could only be the bad disc in my back.

I’ve been hurting pretty for most of the last two years, but that pain didn’t prepare me for what I was about to experience. When they asked how I was doing on that disc, I honestly couldn’t answer them. It felt like my entire back had been ripped apart and the muscle fibers were exposed to an open flame.

I guess they figured out what I meant.

After they were done, the sent me off for a CAT Scan to look at the results. I had to have someone help me roll off my gurney and onto the machine, then back onto the gurney afterwards.

I spent the next two hours lying very still on the gurney until they decided it was time to go home. By then, things had gotten better… at least I could stand.

Of course, it’s been about 8 hours since they finished now, and my back is totally trashed. Tomorrow is gonna be a glorious day.

They say that which does not kill you only makes you stronger. I’m here to tell ya… you’d be amazed what you can live through.

Welcome to the wonderful land of Monday!

Yesterday was the ABSOLUTE BEST DAMN DAY I’ve had in quite some time.

I fixed the garage door to stop it from crushing any more of my cats (it’s dangerous), successfully disassembled and reassembled the dishwasher (no more annoying noise), and rotated the air in the tires of my baby!

Today isn’t too bad either. The weather is warm (currently 58° F, 14.5&deg C) and sunny.

We started the day with packing all the servers related to Disaster Recovery for our client in Pittsburg up in preparation to the trip out there next week(where we set them back up again).

Tomorrow is my discogram: where they stick needles into 3 of my discs and do injections to check their integrity (if a disc is bad, it hurts like a bitch). Oh boy… I can’t wait! I’ll let you know how that went and will hopefully have a picture or two from the procedure to post.

Oh… and here’s my baby:

My baby is a pretty girl! A pretty, pretty girl!! Sexy!!!