Part of the preparation my surgeon requires pre-operation is a clear liquid diet the day before surgery.

My brother-in-law Brian is here this weekend because I hired him to put in laminate flooring.  The timing could be better, but the factory where he works is going to be closed the next two weeks, so Michelle and I decided to take advantage of her brother’s unwanted availability and at the same time help him out at a time when money is kind of tight.  He’s an absolute artist when it comes to handywork, so the floor is going to look fantastic.

Brian is a Mountain Dew fanatic, so while I was making a hardware store run this morning, I decided to stop by the grocery store and pick up some Mountain Dew for him.  If Dante had added another circle to hell, I’m pretty sure it would have consisted of being in a grocery store while on a clear liquid diet.    Being there in the grocery store was absolutely torturous.  I was mildly hungry when I went in.  Within a few minutes, I was famished.  I stocked up on South Beach Diet “Tide Me Over” drink mix, basically Crystal Light with extra protein to help you feel full.  And I bought a lot of sugar free Jello.  Also some pudding and protein shakes for Thursday, when I transition off my clear liquid diet to my “full” liquid diet.

I hope that Mountain Dew is the best Mountain Dew Brian has ever had.

As I've discussed this decision with my friends and family, I've gotten a lot of questions about it and encountered a few misperceptions.  My mom, for example, thought it was a much more extreme procedure, like gastric bypass.  The official Lap-Band website has a short animation about the procedure.  It's totally G-rated and is actually very informative.  If you have any questions about it, please take five minutes to watch this and I guarantee you'll have a much better understanding of what it is and what it does.

As the date draws closer, I'm a little nervous.  Make no mistake:  I'm not particularly crazy about this whole idea.  But as I consider my age and the long-term complications of type 2 diabetes, and the horrible health problems my dad suffered before he finally died at the relatively young age of 58, I see this as my best chance at maintaining a relatively normal life.  I actually compare my feelings on the subject to those who have to consider pre-emptive surgery because they are at high risk of cancer.  I'm not comparing diabetes to cancer; I'm just saying I feel like this is a pre-emptive action that will require short-term cost to provide the best long-term outcome.

Besides, as I told my friend Todd, it'll be nice to fit in my favorite suit again.  :)

I was already thinking of picking up a Dell Mini 9 when Scott Hanselman blogged about his, and I'd dropped hints to my dear wife that I would love one for Christmas.  She told me point-blank that she wasn't buying a computer for me, so I went to back to shopping on my own. 

Right about the time I was ready to click "buy" on Dell's website, my friend John Batdorf told me about his new Eee PC.  He was infinitely pleased with his, so I went to NewEgg and bought one of my own for far less than I was going to spend on the Dell.  It got here today.

It's slightly larger than I expected, having seen the previous generation of Eee PCs, but I suppose that's fine since it yields a slightly larger keyboard.  Upon unboxing it and booting into Windows XP Home, I fell in love.  It's a zippy little thing, easily as fast as my 1.8 Ghz Centrino laptop.  The keyboard layout is cramped,  but pretty easy to navigate, and Asus provides all the usual hotkeys, as well as some new ones (like a key for Taskman).

After taking the dime tour in XP, I installed a 2 GB DIMM.  For reference, here's the procedure I used:

1. Reboot, press F2 before Windows loads to go into the BIOS setup.
2. On the "boot" tab, disable Boot Boost (and LEAVE it disabled at least until Vista is installed and stable).  Save your changes, shut down the PC.
3. Unplug the PC and remove the batter. 
4. Remove the service panel on the bottom by removing two screws.  When you pry the service panel open, it will put up more resistance than you anticipate.  Be gentle, but persistent, and it will come off.
5. Remove the 1 GB DIMM.  Replace it with the 2 GB DIMM.
6. Replace the service panel, reboot, verify it worked.

At this point, I decided it was time to install Vista.  Using an ISO of Vista SP1, I created a bootable USB flash drive using this guy's procedure.  Then I started my Vista install.  Here are the steps you'll need to do the same:

1. Insert the USB drive with your Vista installation files, reboot, press Esc before Windows loads to bring up  the boot menu, and select the USB media (not F9, my bad, sorry John!).
2. Once in Vista setup, configure your partitions the way you want them.  My Eee had 4 partitions, two of which were NTFS and were obviously my C: and D: drives.  Partitions 3 and 4 were not NTFS, and looked suspiciously like restore partitions, so I left them alone.  I deleted partitions 1 and 2, however, and created a single primary NTFS partition for Vista.  Apply your own preferences as applicable.  45 minutes later, I booted into Vista for the first time.
3. The first thing you'll want to fix are the bad devices in Device Manager.  First, I updated the two "Network Adapter" items with drivers from the included support DVD, and they turned out to be the wireless and ethernet adapters.
4. Then I went to Intel's website and downloaded and installed the latest driver package for my chipset.
5. Finally, there was one additional bad entry in Device Manager.  I followed this procedure to download and install the ACPI driver, which corrected that last bad entry, as well as enabling all my hotkeys.
6. I went to the Asus download page and installed the Super Hybrid Engine utility, the Asus Instant Key utility, and the Asus Updater, which I used to update to the most recent BIOS.  For each of those,  the Asus installer will throw an error that Windows 6 isn't supported.  Sure it is.  Just don't use the Asus installer.  There will be another executable in the same directory as the Asus setup program.  You'll recognize it by its InstallShield icon.  Apparently, Asus' program is just a bootstrapper.  Go straight to the InstallShield installer.
7. After the BIOS update, the wireless network card  and the webcam were disabled by default.  The system tray utility that came with the ACPI driver can reactivate them.
8. At some point during my first few hours with my Vista-enabled Eee PC, sound quit working.  Since I was just using Vista's default drivers, I  downloaded and installed Asus' drivers, which appears to fix the issue.

And that's it!  My little Eee PC is running Vista happily with Aero and all the bells and whistles.  There's no serious degradation in performance over the default XP installation.  I noticed that the CPU appears to be dual-core.  It's not - it's hyperthreaded, so to Windows, it appears to be dual-core.

I installed Chrome, Firefox, Pidgin, Windows Live Writer, some miscellaneous other stuff, ran TweakUAC to get UAC to nag me less, cleaned up my start menu (I loathe messy start menus), and am now enjoying my Eee PC with Vista.

I've had several people ask what happened after my last post. 

Well, I did call them the next day and scheduled my surgery for late November.  However, due to my family's travel schedule around Thanksgiving, I rescheduled for early  December.  Then my surgeon had to cancel due to a conflict, so we rescheduled yet again.  I'm currently scheduled for surgery on 12/22. 

I guess something like bariatric surgery is something a lot of folks would consider personal information and might be a little wary of putting on a blog.  I do feel a little weird announcing this to the whole world.  I'm slightly embarrassed about it, too, because when you think about lap-band surgery,  you think of huge people who can't even get out of bed.  I'm far from that.  I'm overweight, sure, but I have lots of energy, I don't waddle when I walk, and I don't have to shop at big and tall stores.

That said, I look ahead to the future and I see diabetic complications.  This is something that has been proven to be extremely helpful for type-2 diabetics to avoid complications. So, in spite of a huge out-of-pocket expense, I'm doing it.  I'll blog my experience, so with any luck, I might be able to help persuade other people to take this step for their health.

Wow, it's been a while since I visited my own poor neglected blog.

I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2003 at the age of 25.  I don't think it phased me at the time.  My dad was diabetic, so I always expected it would happen sooner or later.  I was a little shocked that I was so young, but I dealt with it, I moved on.  I've been taking meds for it ever since, and basically maintaining effective control of my blood sugar.  That's a good thing, because the complications from mismanaged blood sugar are awfully scary:  Heart disease, blindness, hearing loss, kidney failure, neuropathy, impeded immune system, gum disease...  the list continues...

Well, over the past year, it became apparent that my original drug regimen was losing its effectiveness.  My past two A1C tests have been high.  My last urine test showed an elevated level of proteins in my urine, which is an indicator that my kidneys are definitely being damaged.  Not enough to be too concerned, but enough that they're not filtering as much protein as they should, which is a precursor for more serious kidney damage.  My doctor and I tweaked my meds, and I've got good control again, for now, at least.

The loss of my blood sugar control bothers me.  It bothers me quite a bit.  My new medication regimen will work for a while, but it'll probably lose effectiveness after a few years, and we'll tweak again.  Up and down.  Constantly fighting my diet, constantly living under the threat of complications.  Eventually suffering from some of those complications.  Very likely dying relatively young after years of being miserable.  I've seen it first hand in my father, and I don't look forward to it, nor do I particularly think my wife or kids deserve it. 

So...  I consider all that, my future, the drugs, the up and down battle, and the complications, and I desperately feel like I have to do something to get it under control.  The only thing that can put type 2 diabetes into remission is major weight loss, but I've fought that battle constantly my entire life, particularly since I became diabetic.  Diabetes meds make it very difficult to lose weight.  Believe me, I really, really tried. 

So what other options do I have?  Well, the one I've been considering, with the blessing of my wife and my doctor, is laproscopic gastric banding (aka Lap-Band).  This is a low-risk, completely reversible, outpatient laproscopic operation wherein a ring is placed around the upper part of the stomach, creating a very small stomach pouch.  The smaller stomach pouch helps the patient feel satiated very easily.  It successfully causes significant weight loss (generally a loss of around 20%) in almost all patients.  The really interesting thing is that a study in Australia last year showed that 70% of patients who were type 2 diabetic when they underwent the procedure went into complete remission within a year, while most of the rest had a far easier time controlling it.  It's generally thought that this is almost entirely attributable to the weight loss, although it could be tied to reduced nutrient intake, or some other unidentified cause.  The difficult part of it is that it's a complete lifestyle change:  The patient's stomach pouch can only hold 4-6 oz, so that nice big juicy porterhouse is out of the question.  In fact, there are a number of foods that are very difficult to eat, never mind the quantity.  It's also pricey, running around $17,000 in my area, and my employer's insurance plan specifically excludes it.

I've been wrestling with two factors:  The first is the cost.  We can afford it, but it'll have an impact on the family budget for a few years.  And something about having another monthly payment higher than my car payment is making it a little difficult for me to pull the trigger.

The other factor is fear.  I don't think I'm particular scared of the surgery itself (link is a YouTube video of the actual procedure, and is not safe for lunch).  Well, I guess I am maybe a bit scared of the surgery, but my rational mind knows there's nothing to be afraid of.  When I say Lap-Band is "scary," I mean it's scary like it was when I quit smoking - being afraid of a lifestyle change.  The first month will be a liquid diet of varying consistencies.  After that, when I'm back on solid foods, I'll have to completely re-learn how to eat my meals.  Compared to the prospect of diabetic complications, like losing a foot, or my eyesight, or a kidney, I suppose it should be an easy choice.

I've been to a local surgery center.  I've had my initial consult, and I cleared all my pre-op tests.  They called today to get my CareCredit (surgery financing) account number so we can schedule the surgery, and I chickened out.  I said I couldn't find my wallet with the CareCredit card, so I'd have to call them back.  The truth is, I'm trying to summon the courage to go through with it.  The thing I have to keep reminding myself is that my dad would have done it, had he the option when he was young and healthy.  And I don't want my kids to have to watch me suffer and die young like I witnessed with my dad.

Besides, I call myself a geek.  What could possibly be more geeky than having your own body's plumbing modded for improved efficiency?

I'll call the surgery center back in the morning.

As a former judoka who has not practiced Judo for ten years, I still have a love of the sport.  I was very disappointed to find out that NBC has chosen not to give Judo any airtime this year.  However, I have found the complete schedule of online Judo coverage.

Interestingly, NBC is using Silverlight for their online Olympics coverage.  Could this be the tipping point for Silverlight adoption?

It's a true story.  Slightly embellished by the editors, but the important facts are intact.

Update:  It made the front page of Fark.com!

My wife and I decided to trade in our 2005 Ford Explorer Sport Trac.

We loved our old 2005 Sport Trac.  We got it new for a song because it was a 4.0 liter V6 with no options to speak of, and we added a bunch of aftermarket accessories, including step bars, a bed cover, cruise control, remote keyless entry, and an MP3 player.  We used it to pull our camper (a 19' Jayco Jay Flight travel trailer) to many a campground.  I loved this truck, and trading it in was hard.

My wife had been wanting something with a little more room (thinking about growing the family a little more) so we were looking at trading in our 2006 Hyundai Sonata on a minivan of some kind.  The problem is, we owe way more on my car than it's worth.  We'd take a bath if we traded it in.  And then, while we were browsing the local Ford lot, inspiration struck.  They had a beautiful 2007 Ford Explorer Ironman XLT with only 17,000 miles on it, having been a Ford company car for the first year of its life.  It had third row seating, in-dash navigation, DVD entertainment center, and a bunch of other options the other truck didn't have.  For me, the selling point was the 4.6 liter V8 and class III/IV towing package.  That will make life a lot easier with the camper.  And since the trade-in value on the Sport Trac was more than we owed, it made sense to make that our trade-in.

So here's the new truck...

One of the benefits of the towing package is that it's supposedly pre-wired for a brake controller, which is a must when you're pulling a heavy trailer like our camper.  So one of the first things I looked for was the plug for hooking up my brake controller.  I stuck my head under the dash and looked and looked, but couldn't find it.  Some Internet forums suggested I look behind the glove compartment, and it wasn't there either.  So I finally ended up taking it to the dealer's service center, and, after having to look it up, they showed me how to find it.  So in the hope that this will help somebody Googling for it, allow me to illustrate...

Find the seam in the dash panels just to the left of the e-brake...

And then reach up directly behind that seam.  You're looking for a small gray plug clipped to the metal frame behind the dash.  Here's the view from under/behind the dash (between the e-brake and brake)...

So there you have it!  Hope you find it easier than I did!

I won't bother espousing the benefits of Twitter;  Scott Hanselman already has, and he did it far more eloquently than I would have. 

Let it suffice to say that, after some prodding from Alan Stevens, I got on Twitter, and I'm having a ball with it.  You can follow me via the "My Twitter Updates" column on the right, or, better yet, get on Twitter yourself and join the community!