This is the fourth in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets. Click here for the beginning of the series.

As I mentioned earlier, my Toshiba VCR is probably my favorite. I really wanted to replace it with another Toshiba model. I went to BestBuy.com and HHGregg.com and eventually picked out a Toshiba model SD-V295 DVD/VCR combo that looked a lot like my existing Toshiba VCR with a DVD stuck on the side (image on right). They generally don’t have VCRs on display in the store where you can play with them or checkout features, so I just sent my dad over to H.H.Gregg to pick it up and bring it home. We took it out of the box and I looked at the back of unit. Here’s what I saw… or rather what I didn’t see!

I did not see any coaxial RF connectors! It meant that this VCR had no tuner. It would only work if you connected it to a cable box or satellite box. I couldn’t believe it! I usually look at the online photos, especially the detailed photos of the back like the one I’ve shown here. I think that I may have actually looked at this image at BestBuy.com to verify that the component video outputs were for the DVD portion only which was as I expected. I just didn’t realize that there was no cable connector for connecting analog cable or antenna.

I did a lot of head scratching trying to figure out if I could make it work with my set up. Eventually I concluded that I would lose too much functionality by giving up the ability to record from analog cable. I searched around a little bit more and found a really nice Sony SLV-D 370P DVD/VCR combo. I very carefully looked at the images of the back side and verified it really did have an RF coax input and output. We packed up the Toshiba, returned it, and purchased the Sony. It’s a really nice looking model with good features and all of the right connectors.

All of this occurred in mid-April 2007. There’s more to this story but I want to jump in briefly to early July 2007. The JVC VCR in my office started acting flaky. It takes about four attempts to get a tape to insert properly. It keeps trying to eject it and the VCR or even turn on at all without a tape in it. When you turn it on, it tries to load the tape on the heads and when there is no tape in the machine something jams and the machine shuts itself off. Since I’ve been having pretty good luck with my new Sony I decided to get another one for the office. Much to my surprise it wasn’t available anymore. The Sony model 370 had been replaced by model 380 which was virtually identical except it had no RF inputs or outputs and no tuner.

To further my shock and dismay none of the VCRs that were available had a tuner! I thought that the tunerless Toshiba was just some cheap model that they were putting out there because more and more people are using satellite which does not have analog cable capabilities like regular digital cable does. Satellite users have to have a separate box for every TV and every VCR (although some satellite boxes are dual tuner). I was now discovering that VCRs with tuners had been completely withdrawn from the market!

I did finally find a Sony 370 at Amazon.com for sale through a third-party reseller. Amazon itself did not have it.

In our next installment we will take a nostalgic look back at early TV tuners before we discuss the invention of the cable ready TV and VCR. Only then can we fully appreciate the mystery of the missing tuners!

This is the third in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets. Click here for the beginning of the series.

When Sony first introduced the Betamax video recorder I immediately began reading up everything I could about them and later about the competing VHS format introduced by JVC. It was very interesting to watch the battle between these two incompatible tape formats. Although VHS was of inferior quality, it became more widely accepted. Eventually VHS pushed Betamax out of the marketplace thanks to restrictive licensing policies by Sony and the porn industry’s acceptance of VHS. Check out this article about the rise and fall of Beta. The current a battle between incompatible competing Sony BluRay DVD and HD DVD formats is reminiscent of the old Betamax versus VHS battle.

I kept hoping that prices would come down so that I could someday afford one of these dream machines of either format. I remember talking to a salesman about a $450 Betamax and he assured me that never in my lifetime would I see a VCR cheaper than $400. “They are just too complicated a machine to be made any cheaper than that” he insisted. I had spent too much time working with computers and their ever falling prices and ever-increasing capabilities to know that that was a ridiculous assumption. As I said earlier, VCRs bottomed out at about $50-$60 before their untimely demise.

Thanks to a rather generous disability insurance policy from when I worked at IU Genetics Research, I managed to find myself with an unusual amount of disposable income and ended up paying about $1300 for my first VCR. It was an RCA SelectaVision convertible VCR model VFP-170. I’m not sure when I purchased it but here’s a press release dated February 1981. The image on the right is an advertisement for this model. It was called convertible because it was designed to be used as both a tabletop and a portable VCR to be used with a separate video camera. My friend Stu Byram (the one who recorded me singing ” I’m a little Teapot” as a toddler) also had been that same model VCR and had a camera to go with it On a couple of occasions he loaned me his camera to use with my portable recorder.

Amazingly this machine was so primitive that the remote-control was hardwired. That’s right… to work the remote-control you had to drape a 10 foot wire from your TV set to your easy chair. Below are some images of another almost identical model VGP 170 NR which did finally come with a wireless remote. This recently listed on eBay with a minimum bid of $19.95 and it include a camera but it had no bids! As I said earlier I paid $1300 for it.

In this image the piece on the right is the tuner which remained connected to your television and your antenna (this was pre-cable days). The piece on the left was the “portable” recorder which connected to the tuner by a thick cable in the back.

Note that the tuner section had a series of about a dozen buttons which were used to select the channel to record. If you opened a little access hatch on top they were a series of a dozen tiny little thumb wheels that you used to manually tune in your stations. There was a little tiny toggle switch to select VHF channels 2-13 or UHF channels 14-82. The concept of a “cable ready” device was still years off. You could program the device to record anything up to 14 days in advance and not only would it record in standard SP two-hour mode it would also record in four-hour LP mode but it also would use the new six-hour SLP recording mode!

A few years later my uncle Keith bought the RCA model VJP900 which is shown here.

Rather than connect the two pieces using a cable, this one had a sort of docking station that you used to connect the portable section. The model shown here sold on eBay recently for $1.75. Ironically Keith never did buy a camera to go with his “convertible” VCR.

Eventually I did buy an RCA camera of my own to go with it. Note in these days they didn’t call them camcorders because they were not camera and recorder all in one. Dad created a camera mount that allowed me to connect the camera to my wheelchair armrest. We would hang the recorder section on the back of my wheelchair in a bag and even supplanted the battery power of the recorder by plugging a cable into my wheelchair battery. We had to wire in three little buttons on the end of a cable so that I can use the pause/record, zoom in, and zoom out functions. I will have more on these famous the buttons in a later installment here.

I really liked my uncle’s VCR because it had stereo sound capability and you could audio dub to put in narration, music or sound effects. I borrowed his VCR one time so that I could do tape to tape editing of some video I shot in the garage area at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I put music in one stereo channel and did narration in the other channel.

I recently dug out that old edited videotape that I had shot at the Speedway which included in narration. Much to my surprise the narration was no longer there. That old stereo VCR used linear recording tracks instead of the flying heads that modern hi-fi stereo VCR’s used today. apparently current VCRs can’t handle that kind of stereo any more.

I don’t remember why or when I got rid of that VCR. At some point I replaced the camera with a new 8mm camcorder. I seem to recall my next big VCR was a very fancy model for which I paid about $900. Its claim to fame was something called “digital effects”. It had some sort of digital frame buffer that when you hit the pause button it would digitally capture the frame and display it perfectly clear from the buffer. It also had some other digital effects built in similar to the kinds of special effects you find built into today’s camcorders. I thought I would use these effects in editing videos but it turned out I never really did any more of that kind of thing.

Well that’s enough nostalgia for now… in the next installment we will talk about about my quest to replace my Toshiba VCR with a VCR/DVD combo even though I didn’t need the DVD section in my bedroom. I will discover it’s not as easy as I expected it to be.

This is the second in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets. Click here for the beginning of the series.

I’ve always been fascinated by tape recording ever since I was about four years old and our family friend Stu Byram recorded me singing “I’m a Little Teapot” on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. When I was about 8 or 9 years old I got a small 3-1/2″ reel-to-reel machine for my birthday. Being the pioneer that I am… I remember taking the tape recorder to the drive-in movie with me to record music from movies like “Mary Poppins” and “AHard Day’s Night“. I swear I’ve never taken a camcorder into a movie theater but I sure was ahead of my time when it came to bootleg soundtracks. It’s a shame that drive-in movies are so rare these days. It sure would be easy to sneak in your camcorder into a drive-in. However the sound quality sure would leave a lot to be desired.

When I was about 12 or 13 years old I moved up to a regular audio cassette player/recorder with a built-in AM/FM radio and my bootlegging ways continued. I would sit there listening to the FM radio waiting for my favorite songs to come on and I would flip it to record as the song started. In fact I would sit there for hours sometimes hitting record just as the DJ would stop talking in hopes that I could catch more of the beginning of the song. If it was a song I didn’t want or already had, I would simply stop the tape, backup little bit, and cue it up for the next song. I was very popular among the kids in the neighborhood because I had a great collection of the latest music and it didn’t cost me a dime.

Another favorite pastime I had was making comedy recordings in the form of a man-on-the-street interview where all the answers to my questions were a line out of a song. I had figured out how to wire into my record player so that I could directly connect it to my tape recorder even though the record player didn’t have a “line out” jack. I would use a microphone to ask a question like “What is your name Miss?” And then I would record a brief few seconds from the Beatles song “Elinor Rigby” from a 45 rpm record. I would then ask “How are you today?” And I would play few seconds of James Brown screaming “I feel good!” And the comedy would deteriorate from there.

I always figured if I was a little bit smarter I could figure out how to connect a television to a cassette recorder but of course if that was possible, somebody would have done it. Audio cassette recorders barely have enough capability to record decent audio let alone the amount of bandwidth you needed to do video.

It turns out that in 1987 Fisher Price did make a toy black-and-white camcorder that used a standard audio cassette for recording. It was called the PXL-2000 PixelVision KiddieCorder. I never owned one because by that time I already had a real camcorder. But I always thought it was great they figured out how to do it. One recently sold on eBay for about $50. Also check out this article from Wikipedia.

Later in high school my fascination with video recording led me to hangout briefly with the high school Audiovisual Club at Northwest High School even though it was the nerdiest group of people in the school. They had a black-and-white camera and video tape recorder that they used to tape basketball and football games for the coaches. Unfortunately all of the tape to place high in the bleachers or a press box so I couldn’t help out with that and I really didn’t have much time to participate in extracurricular activities because the bus would pick me up about 15 or 20 minutes after my last class.

It wasn’t until the early 1980s that my dream of video recording in the home would come through when I purchased my first VCR. Read all about that in our next installment.

This is the first in a series of articles about my recent quest to replace a broken VCR in this era of DVDs, DVRs, and other newfangled gadgets.

There are currently four VCRs in my home in addition to a DVR/cable box in my living room. You would think the loss of one VCR wouldn’t put a crimp in my style. After all there are still three other VCRs and the digital recorder in the cable box can record two different programs at once. The VCR in the living room we rarely use anymore because we have the DVR/cable box. The living room VCR is mostly used these days copy things off of the DVR on to tape so that I can watch them in my bedroom. The VCR in my office is used for transferring things from my computer to tape. It’s connected to the computer using a Pinnacle Studios Dazzle 150 analog video converter box. In my bedroom I watch a lot of tape in bed at night but sometimes there’s something I want to record while I’m watching so I really need two VCRs in the bedroom. It’s also nice to have two VCRs in the same room connected to each other so did you ever wonder copy something from one tape to another it is easy to do so. Also there have been times when I needed to record as many as four shows while watching a fifth one cy do really need several VCRs.

The living room, office, and one of the bedroom VCRs are all JVC which is really handy because my multifunction remote control can handle all of them using just one device on my a device remote. The other VCR in the bedroom was a Toshiba and it was probably my favorite one in the house. It seemed to handle old crinkly tapes or poorly recorded tapes better than any machine in the house. I liked the fact that every time you hit play, stop, rewind, or fast forward it would briefly display the tape counter onscreen. You did not have to hit a display button to get the tape counter to show. It was the VCR in the bedroom that I used while watching TV in bed and the JVC model was a backup.

So the other day it started making funny noises and it ate up a tape and refused to eject it. Dad tried to take apart and figure out what was wrong but it kept eating tapes and jamming the eject mechanism. So I decided to go online to BestBuy.com to pick out a new one.

They didn’t have any!

Neither did Circuit City… or H.H.Gregg… or anywhere else I looked.

I couldn’t believe it but nobody makes just plain VCRs anymore! You have to buy a DVD/VCR combination. In fact there are very few models that are just DVD/VCRs. Most of them nowadays are DVD recorders with a built-in VCR. It used to be you could get a really nice 4-head hi-fi stereo VCR for about $50. The VCR/DVD combos cost as much as $100 and the ones with DVD recorders are as much as twice that.

I think the signs are very clear that the VCRs days ar e numbered. That amazing old friend of ours the VHS VCR is going the way of BetaMax, and 8-track audio tapes… and come to think of it regular audiocassettes have pretty much disappeared as well. It’s not just good by VCR… it’s goodbye to tape in general!

This horrifying revelation has prompted me to reflect on my personal history of VCRs. In the next installments we’ll talk about my passion for recording and my first VCR. Then we will discover an even more amazing secret about VCRs and even DVD recorders that are losing one of their greatest features. Stay tuned as the mystery reveals itself!

I’m taking time out from talking about all of my medical problems to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and to share with them my computer-generated Christmas card.

Click image to enlarge
This card was designed, computer modeled and computer rendered by me.

Created using the Persistence of Vision™ Ray-Tracer POV-Ray™ version 3.6 freeware rendering program which I helped create. For details see http://www.povray.org/

The model contains over 120,000 objects. There are 139 light bulbs each of which contributes illumination to the scene. There are 249 branches consisting of 66,603 needles. There are 62 loops of garland created from 28,816 pieces of tinsel. There are 98 sphere ornaments. The angel and packages were adapted from previous card designs.

It took about 30 hours to design, test render and re-design. The final image was rendered at 1425 x 2325 (300 dpi) resolution. It took 21 hours 57 to render on a 3.2 ghz Pentium 4HT computer running Windows XP Home Edition.

For more information on my images and to purchase posters visit:
http://cyborg5.com/art

©2006 Chris Young, All rights reserved.

This is the eighth in a series of articles about my recent trip to the emergency room, my intestinal surgery, and my recovery afterwards. Here is an index to all of the articles in this series.

The last thing I remembered in the operating room was them sticking a cotton swab up my right nostril to numb it so that they could insert an intubation tube. The next thing I remember is waking up in a strange room with a variety of doctors and nurses standing around me. A tube was up by right nostril. I could feel something attached to the left side of my abdomen. I was pretty sure I had a catheter going up me into my bladder as well.

I tried to take a deep breath and found that I couldn’t. I could breathe very shallow and rapidly but that was very uncomfortable. I was unable to talk because of the intubation tube but I tried mouthing the words “I can’t breathe”. One person said “He says he can’t breathe.” Another person (I think it was perhaps Dr. Vohra) tried to reassure me that I was breathing OK. I still had a terrible sense that I wasn’t breathing properly. After a while it got a little better.

I tried to identify where I was. I thought perhaps it was a recovery room and I tried to mouth the question “recovery room?” They eventually explained to me I was in the ICU. The way my head was laying I couldn’t turn it far enough to see the distinctive glass doors that all ICU rooms seem to have.

Even though I didn’t like the way I was breathing, at least I was getting breath in OK for the time being. I faded off to sleep. I continued to fade in and out of consciousness for quite some time.

At one interval I distinctly remember the surgeon Dr. Davis explaining to me what he had done. I did indeed have a perforated intestine. The large intestine goes up the right side of your abdomen, goes right to left across the middle (called the transverse section), comes down the left side and out your rear. He said he had removed about 12 inches of my large intestine. He said the perforation was in the transverse section. He said much of the descending section on the left was diseased with diverticulitis, scar tissue inflammation etc. He pointed to my abdomen to indicate about what he had taken out. He pointed to a spot on the transverse section about two thirds of the way from the right or one third from the left depending upon your perspective. He had taken out from that spot to about three fourths or more down the left side.

The strange feeling I had on my lower left side was the colostomy. He also told me I had an incision from my navel about four or five inches straight down. I had a minor amount of pain and they told me I could have morphine as needed.

I continued to fade in and out with only brief flashes of memory of what happened.

At one point I remember seeing Mom and Dad. I also thought I had seen both of my sisters Carol and Karen.

Finally I remembered opening my eyes and seeing my friend Judy standing near the foot of my bed on the left side. Someone was asking her “Are you friend or family?” I frantically started mouthing the word “family, family”. Apparently that was good enough for the nurse because they let her stay a while. She came around the bed and stood on my right side. I think she held my hand. From time to time I would fade in and out and she would be standing there. At one point I mouthed the words “I love you”. It really gave me a lot of peace to have her there. It was good to know she’d gotten the message I left on her answering machine.

I continued to awaken for brief periods throughout the night and the only person there was a nurse. She was exceptionally gifted at reading lips. I don’t recall what things I would say to her but she seemed to understand me extremely well. I suppose if you work long enough in ICU, you get accustomed to reading lips.

Sometime the next morning Dr. Vohra returned and asked if I was ready to get off of the ventilator. Keep in mind that the scariest part of this entire situation was the possibility that I might not be able to get off the ventilator. You would think I would be very anxious to get off the vent but I told him I wasn’t ready. I felt like I was breathing very poorly and there was congestion and my lungs. He said he thought I was going to be OK to come off of it and that he would be back later to remove the vent.

A respiratory therapist came in at one point. She was able to suction some gunk out of my lungs. They have a suction tube that goes down inside the intubation tube and into your lungs. It’s a horrible feeling when they do it because you can’t breathe in while it’s going on and there is a little pain involved as well. However the suction really seemed to help.

The daytime nurse was a nice enough woman that she had absolutely zero skills when it came to reading lips. I had a terrible time trying to communicate with her. Here are some examples…

At home I don’t have a hospital bed so I’m accustomed to lying flat. Other times I’ve been in hospital they’re always surprised when I prefer to lie completely flat. In this circumstance it was even more important because if I try to sit up in bed it puts pressure on my abdomen which was sore. So I’m trying to mouth the words “bed flat” and she can’t understand me. She suggests I try to spell to her. Over the course of a couple of minutes I finally get her to understand the following sequence of letters…

B E D F L _ T

The girl really needs to watch more episodes of “Wheel of Fortune” because she couldn’t figure it out I was trying to say “bed flat”!

My Respironics Virtuoso CPAP

After I had been awake a while and had had some gunk sucked out of my lungs I was more confident about coming off of the ventilator but I knew I would need some help afterwards. Normally while in bed for long periods I use a device called a CPAP which stands for “Constant Positive Air Pressure”. I wear a mask on my nose that it’s held in place by some headgear straps. The device forces a constant amount of pressure into my nose to help keep my lungs inflated and to help me sleep at night. Many people use the device to help them with snoring or sleep apnea. Not only do I have apnea but it really helps me sort of like a noninvasive ventilator. I’ve been using it for several years and it’s really been a lifesaver.

CPAP Mask with Nose Pillows

Anyway I managed to explain to the respiratory therapist (who was as poor a lip reader as was the nurse) that I normally use a CPAP. There are lots of different kinds of masks that you can use with the device. The kind I use are called “nasal pillows” so I’m trying to tell her that if they bring me a CPAP, that’s the kind of mask I want. I would mouth the word CPAP which she understood. Then I would wiggle my nose. Then I would mouth the word “pillow”. She would understand CPAP and pillow but couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my nose. She didn’t understand the three words went together as a sentence. She kept asking me what’s wrong with your nose? What do you want done to your pillow? Finally she said “We’ll have to wait till your nurse gets back… maybe she can understand you.” This respiratory therapist was already understanding me better than the nurse had been!

A few minutes later while the nurse was there I tried the same three word se

ntence “CPAP nose pillow”. The nurse repeated those three words out loud even though she didn’t understand them and then the respiratory therapist finally got it. “Oh I understand now! He’s saying you see that uses nasal pillows!” She explained that even though she knew about nasal pillows are not many people use that kind of mask any more and she just didn’t make the connection. When telling the story to another respiratory therapist later on they explain to me that night shift respiratory people might have been more familiar with that kind of mask and day shift people might not be.

Somehow I communicated to them that my Mom would bring my CPAP machine. The respiratory lady said the only problem is we have to get someone from maintenance to inspect your machine to make sure it’s safe to use. I tried to suggest to them that we could use the hospital’s CPAP machine with my mask and would not need to call maintenance for an inspection. I don’t know what made me think I could communicate such a complex concept to them so it was no wonder I failed to make them understand. Actually the RT person had better idea… to hell with maintenance… we’ll just plug it in any way.

I tried to get the RT person to increase the volume on the ventilator or increase the pressure and although the she did make some adjustments that helped I never really did successfully communicate my opinion that I needed more volume.

Anyway I finally agreed that it was OK to remove the ventilator. They removed the tape from around my nose. She told me to take a good breath and exhale. When I did she pulled on the tube for what seemed like an eternity and eventually it was all the way out. It hurt like hell. It was very bloody and I coughed up a reasonable amount of bloody congestion that much to my delight once it was out I could breathe okay. They put in a regular oxygen cannula and gave me two liters of oxygen per minute. I actually felt like I was breathing better without the ventilator and I had been with it which only confirmed my opinion that I wasn’t getting enough volume through the machine.

Once I was breathing OK I began laughing and told the nurse and the RT lady and I had some very funny stories to tell them. I explained first and I didn’t want to sound sarcastic and I didn’t want to make fun of them that I just had to tell them all the things I tried to say to them that they couldn’t understand. I told them repeatedly I knew they were doing the best they could and I tried to reach all the stories to them in a lighthearted manner. I really did think it was very funny and they took it very well as I explained what I’d been trying to say to them all morning such as bed flat and CPAP nose pillows (the latter of which they had already finally figured out). They did laugh with me as we relived our little dilemma.

Me Wearing My CPAP Mask

It was only about 15 minutes later that Mom arrived with my CPAP and when we put it on I felt just fine. Mom and Dad were really happy to see me off the ventilator and I had lots of fun reliving my communications dilemmas with them.

In the next installment will talk about the rest of my blessedly uneventful ICU experience.

This is the seventh in a series of articles about my recent trip to the emergency room, my intestinal surgery, and my recovery afterwards. Here is an index to all of the articles in this series.

While awaiting a visit from the pulmonary doctor Dr. Vohra, I had some other last-minute details to attend to before my surgery. Mom called my sister Carol and sister Karen. She would later make phone calls to other members of the family. I needed to call a couple of friends. The first number I dialed was the Chapman family. Judy would be at work however Anne might be at home. She had just quit her job as a school secretary at a Jewish center.

I had already noted the irony that Anne was out of work right at the time when I might need her help. I might need Anne because there was a chance that my mom would end up in the hospital very soon with lung problems. A small spot on my Mom’s lung appeared over a year ago and the doctors have been watching it closely. When the most recent test showed a slight increase in size they tried a needle biopsy but it was inconclusive. She had an appointment with a surgeon in a couple of days to see about a more extensive surgical biopsy. A couple of years ago when Mom was in the hospital for over two months, Anne Chapman was also out of work and she was a real godsend for me. She would come over and spend a day with me while Dad would visit Mom in the hospital. I just don’t have what it takes to sit in a hospital doing nothing for hours on end. Anne kept me from going crazy. She was also a great help to me back in the early 90s when my Grandma Osterman was living with us and was very ill. Mom was preoccupied with caring for Grandma naturally and Anne would come over and help me with my paperwork. We would laugh and tell jokes. Even though she was just 14 years old she was a phenomenal friend to me.

When the phone rang several times, made a small clicking noise, and then rang once more I knew it was switching to voicemail. At least I got to hear Anne’s message “We’re sorry none of us can come to the phone…” Isn’t that the truth? I was very sorry they weren’t there. Oh well… I just prayed that she was on the Internet and would pick up the message soon. She still used dial-up and only had one phone line. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I told them I was in St. Vincent’s emergency room, that I had a perforated intestine, and I was headed for surgery. I asked her to call her mom (Judy) which was silly… of course she would call Judy at work with news this serious. I did also ask her to call Father Paul which she may or may not have done if I hadn’t mentioned it.

The next was call was to my friends Rich and Kathy Logan. They would both be at work but I didn’t know their work phone numbers. I managed to remember their home number by heart. Fortunately their teenage son Tony was at home and he answered the phone. I gave him a message to tell his folks I was in the hospital and having surgery. I just hoped he just got it right.

As I said before, Mom would call other family members later but there were two out-of-town friends she would have to e-mail. One was my friend Buz whom I mentioned earlier had just lost his son to cancer. Buz is a man of faith and I really count on his prayers. Mom had his e-mail address in her e-mail because I had been forwarding to her his messages about his son. The other out-of-town friend I needed to contact was Pamela Bowen. I met Pamela online on CompuServe in 1983 back in those days I described in the first installment of this blog. Even though we’ve only met in person one time she’s one of the most important friends I have. She’s not a religious person that she believes that everyone in the world is connected together and so whenever I ask for prayers she always says “I’ll send you good vibes in your direction”. That’s certainly good enough for me. I managed to remember her e-mail address by heart.

Mom also have the option of calling up my e-mail program on my computer if need be. she would have sent over using my computer because I use a small trackball mouse that is very peculiar and finicky. It is also mounted on my keyboard rotated 90° because it’s easier for me to use that way. However that means if you roll the mouse up , it goes left. Roll it left, it goes down etc. I’m used to using it that way and my brain just automatically adjusts however it’s next to impossible for anybody else to use.

Mom asked me if there was anything else she needed to do. As a joke I said “yeah if I die… erase all my hard drives.” Mom and Dad both said “What the hell have you got in there? We’ve got to go snooping around!” I just didn’t want my old computers to get donated somewhere with a bunch of porno in a secret folder on an unnamed drive. Actually that wasn’t really necessary because after I got back home from hospital I did some looking around and I realized I had forgotten I already cleaned out most of the really nasty stuff a few months before.

Soon Dr. Vohra came in and he began laying out the situation for me in great detail. The first question I asked him was could my lungs actually be the source of the air in my abdomen. I wear that CPAP every night and it puts lots of pressure in my lungs. If I had a punctured lung I thought perhaps the air could be leaking from there. He said it was extremely unlikely. He said if I had a leaking lung I would have chest pain and difficulty breathing because most of the air would escape into my chest cavity. He said the chances of leaking into my abdomen through my diaphragm were so rare that if that indeed was what has happened, my case would be “publishable” and he would be famous.

On many occasions I have discussed with him the risks of general anesthetic but this time he went through them in much more detail than ever before. He talked about the possibility of temporary tracheotomy and even permanent tracheotomy. He asked me flat out if I would agree to that and I said yes. He talked about the possibility that I could end up in a nursing home. I told them as long as my mind was working I wanted to keep going. I made brief mention of my thoughts about Stephen Hawking as I described before. Even went as far as to suggest that if I was on a ventilator, in a nursing home, bedsores over me etc. that months down the road I could decide to remove the vent. I told him I understood but I doubted that would happen.

I was incredibly impressed with how thorough yet sensitive the entire discussion had been. He certainly wasn’t pulling any punches but he wasn’t being completely cold and clinical about it either. Of course that’s measured against a cold and clinical person like me. A more centered person might have been devastated by the conversation but for the analytical me, I loved it when he covered all the bases in extreme detail.

In a few minutes the anesthesiologists and his partner arrived and told me they were ready to go. Final hugs and kisses from mom and I was on my way to surgery. The anesthesiologists pushed me there themselves. They said if you want something done right it’s best to do it yourself. I guess they’ve spent too much wasted time waiting on some minimum-wage orderly to deliver a patient so they were in the habit of just doing it themselves.

They transferred me over to the operating table. I already had an IV line in the back of my left hand that a nurse and put in earlier. They checked the flow on it and hooked me up to the anesthetic so it was ready to go. They took a large Q-tip soaked in some liquid and stuck it up my right nostril really far. The doctor said it was cocaine. He said I could tell people I had coke up my nose. I don’t know how much he was joking or if it really was a cocaine derivative. It was meant to numb my nose. It hurt like hell at first.

That was the last thing I remembered… fade to black.

In the next installment will find myself out of breath in the ICU.

I’m going to take a brief timeout from telling the story about my hospital visit to share a couple of interesting links with all of you. Click here for an index to all of the articles in this series. or click here for the next installment of the story.

Every year about this time when the new TV season is about to begin I try to make sense out of all of the new schedules. Each network has its own way of posting the new schedules on the web site and it’s hard to keep track of what shows got canceled, what shows got moved, and what’s new. So for my own use and to share with my friends I try to create an all in one handy dandy TV schedule. Things were complicated this year by the fact that The WB network and UPN network has closed and merged into a new network called CW (although don’t ask me what that stands for). Anyway here is a link to my handy dandy TV schedule.

I found a article in the New York Times online edition about an amazing video of a guy playing and rock ‘n roll version of Pachelbel’s Cannon on the electric guitar. The video was posted on YouTube.com but that guitarist wasn’t identified. The reporter from the New York Times finally tracked him down. Click here for the New York Times article. And click here for a link to the amazing guitar video. You will probably need broadband Internet to see the video.

(Addendum added in July 2012: Can you believe back in 2006 I did not presume that everyone had broadband. I actually did presume some people still had dial-up. Further note the guy first identified in this video was actually a hoax. They have subsequently identified the real guy. Here is his YouTube page with more videos. End of addendum.)

On a more personal note, my mother is having her surgical biopsy on her lung Friday, September 1 and my next surgery is scheduled for Friday, October 13. Prayers are much welcomed.

Click here for the next installment of my hospital story.

This is my first ever blog.

Then again… I was blogging before the term was even invented. Blogs are among the hottest things on the Internet these days. I’ve heard the term “blog” is probably short for “biographical log” or something like that. Like lots of computer and Internet terms I don’t think anyone really knows their exact origin. Many blogs are forums for political commentary by pundits who are looking for a free way to get their ideas out into the marketplace of ideas. People read these blogs and then flood the authors e-mail box with responses and counter commentary some of which the author generally posts for the public to see and for the author to debunk or agree. Sometimes the counter commentary is presented in someone else’s blog and a debate each other by cross-linking Internet pages from each other’s blogs. Other blogs are more along the lines of on the scene or behind-the-scenes commentary at big events like the Olympics, political conventions, or anywhere people might find it interesting to get firsthand, first-person accounts from an “insider” at an event they might have otherwise been able to attend.

The only blog I read consistently is http://www.pokerstarsblog.com/ especially their coverage from the annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. It is posted by staff from PokerStars.com where I play Internet poker on a regular basis. It not only provides interviews, behind-the-scenes essays, and general commentary about poker but during the event itself it provides a up-to-the-minute play-by-play account of what’s going on. Readers typically click on one of these live update pages and every few minutes hit the refresh button on their browser and the latest update appears at the top of the page.

And therein lies one of the biggest problems I see with traditional blogging. Sometimes it’s important for you to get to the most recently posted article in the blog and other times you want to read a series of blog articles in the order in which they were written because you aren’t necessarily reading them live.

Unless you’re someone famous or at some interesting event providing commentary you probably don’t get much attention to your blog but that doesn’t stop millions of people from doing it. They post random ramblings about their day-to-day lives musing about whatever amuses them at the moment. Even the so-called “professional bloggers” are really doing the same thing. Their lives are all about the events they’re covering, the political and world news issues they’re debating, the sites they are seeing, thoughts they’re thinking, feelings they’re feeling and wanting to share with others. Basically if you ask me to really define “What Is a Blog” I tend to think of it as a way for grown-ups to write a page in a book without having to write the words “Dear Diary…” at the top of the page like some 13-year-old schoolgirl.

There are dozens of free sites available that make it easy for anyone to create their own blog without any special software or technical knowledge. I debated whether or not to start a blog on one of those sites or to simply create individual web pages on my own cyborg5.com homepage. I really wanted to maintain control over how my readers access the blog when they’re looking for the latest article or trying to pick up in the middle somewhere or two-page back-and-forth easily between chronologically posted installments in my stories. In the end the features at blogger.com seemed to be pretty good. They will host the blog for you or allow you to host it on your own site which should give me quite a bit of control. If I don’t like it, I can always change.

I said earlier that in some ways this is my first official blog but I had been blogging for many many years before there were blogs and before there was even something called an Internet. Back in the dark ages called the 1980s before the Internet was invented by someone other than Al Gore, there was an online service called CompuServe. People met there and did most of the things that people do on the Internet today. The major difference was it was all strictly text at what we then considered the blazing speed of 300 baud. By comparison today’s fastest dial-up access to the Internet, which is considered by most people to be a snail’s pace in this broadband era is 56,000 baud. We had message boards, chat rooms, news services, online handles and personalities that may or may not have accurately reflected who we really were. The amazing thing is that many of us paid up to five dollars per hour to be connected at this snail’s pace.

I really miss CompuServe because their message forums with that readers pick up exactly where they left off last time and you weren’t necessarily forced to read the most recent message posted like you do with present-day message boards and blogs.

In order to cover the cost of this expensive online habit, many of us tried to obtain official positions on various CompuServe forums (which today you would call a message board). If you could become a discussion leader on a CompuServe forum you could get a coveted “free flag” which would give you free access to CompuServe as long as you were participating in that forum. In 1986 I was a discussion leader in the disability section of Human Sexuality Support Groups Forum and had a sort of online column or blog called “CY’s Eye on Life”. A series of articles I wrote there were later edited into in an award-winning article called “The Reunion” which was published in the September 1987 issue of Indianapolis Monthly Magazine.

I left the HSX Forums on CompuServe in 1990 to get more involved in computer graphics forums. A few years later as the Internet proliferated Caldwell I left CompuServe altogether. Although I continued to write blog-like e-mails to friends and family, I didn’t have any kind of a public blog. A recent weeklong stay in the hospital prompted me to jump into this “brand-new field of blogging” so I could share with friends and family my experiences and insights there.

In coming installments you will find a detailed account of my recent illness and recovery from intestinal surgery. I hope you find it entertaining and informative however be warned it may be too much information in some instances. I will try to put warning messages about the more graphic parts. You may not want to know all the gory details about life with your intestines temporarily hooked up to a bag.

After that story’s told I’m sure I’ll come up with something else to write about.