I’m pretty sure that anyone who wants to be a physical therapist does so out of a drive to cause pain to others. Sure… they could have become dentists, but that takes too long. Physical therapy is the quick path to legal torture.

I had my weekly “We will bend this until you beg for mercy” session today. It started like it always does, some friendly chit-chat, the “oh… why don’t you ride the stationary bike for a while” and then they coyly tell you to get out of your clothes and to put on those gym shorts.

Let the games begin!

They began with the ultrasonic massage… that’s not too bad. Then the deep tissue hand massage… again, not too bad. Then, when I was all relaxed and feeling pretty good about myself, she grabs my damn leg and hoists it to the sky.

AAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! *tear*

Hoist one leg until I scream… hold it there until you can see the veins in my forehead pulse like a rabid weasel, then relax it! When the first leg goes numb, grab the other one! Repeat until you make me pass out.

I seriously doubt that I’ll be able to get out of bed tomorrow.

By the order of my doctor and my physical therapist, I have to get my cubicle converted to a “Sit-Stand” configuration.

Basically… they need to raise my desk so that I can stand and type. They took measurements today and figured out they’d have to raise my desk 20″. This also means that I’ll need a taller chair for when I want to sit.

I’m 6′ 4″ barefoot… taller when I wear my shoes (Doc Martin Airwalks), so things have to go up quite a bit. The woman who runs facilities said they may have to relocate me in the building as well because I’m the first cube by the door (and my being so high might seem overbearing to the other employees).

Um… how about “hell no!”

I’m also located right next to the NOC I manage. Moving me away would separate me from the rest of my team and the room that I spend quite a bit of my day in.

No worries though… I already went to my manager and she’s in total agreement with me. She says they can rip apart my cube (and the cubes that touch mine) and install 8′ walls (instead of the 5′ ones I have now).

I did try to get her to buy me this though. It looks like fun!

It’s monday, and I don’t have to go to work.

Neener, needer, neeeeener!!

I took the day off to drive my eldest son down to the college so he can buy books. Well… I’m actually buying the books, but they’re for him. He got accepted in the Running Start program at his high school, so he’ll do his last two years at the community college instead. It’s a pretty good deal… two years of tuition free college, and he’ll graduate with an A.A. when his friends graduate with a high school diploma.

If he screws this up, I’ll kill him.

I’ve mentioned before how spiffy Ubuntu linux is. I’ve now found a great use for the live CD (the CD you can boot from to try the OS without installing it): recovering data from a toasty NTFS hard drive.

My friend, Brian, has a HP laptop and his hard drive gave up the ghost. I could view the drive using NTFS Reader, but it would blow up when I attempted to copy the files to another drive. I tried a number of data recovery software packages but got no love.

The data was there, but the partition was toast. You couldn’t even fdisk the damn thing because the sectors where the partition info lives were hosed. I tried to repair the partition using some MS tools, but that didn’t work either.

Finally, I put his drive in an external USB enclosure, added another external USB drive formatted with FAT32, and booted up my laptop using the Ubuntu Live CD. Ubuntu saw both the damaged drive and the FAT32 drive, and I was able to copy the files from the GUI (Gnome) by simply doing drag and drop (I needed a FAT drive to write to… linux can read NTFS, but not write to it).

After recoving my friends 7.5GB of digital photos and a few media files, I burned them off to DVD and then attempted to fix the partition, but that was a big ol’ no-go. My friend is very damn happy, and I learned something new.

Life is once again sweet.

Dear Pat Robertson,

SHUT YOUR FUCKING YAP, YOU SELF ABSORBED IDIOT PUSSBAG!!!

Respectfully,

-Tone Parsons
whitewomanblackdog.com

This is, of course, in response to his comments toward Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

And we wonder why the rest of the world looks at America as a threat. Of course, this is coming from the same man who said that feminism encourages women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

Thanks for helping improve our international appeal, ass munch!