[this]

I actually think I have better things to do, but still… 😎

I have now officially completed the third of four rounds of chemotherapy for the cancer.  The drips finished yesterday just before noon, and I had a couple of pills to take this morning after breakfast.

After the infusion yesterday, they stuck a small boxy thing on my abdomen that gave me more medication to stimulate the bone marrow, in particular to ward off a low white blood cell count, another possible side effect of chemo, giving an increased risk of infection.  I was instructed to take it off when the green light stopped flashing, which it did about 4:20pm; and I promptly took my first real shower in six days. 😎  (It was a little disconcerting the first time I woke up to see my stomach flashing green; but after a beat or two of cognitive improvement, I knew what it was and could laugh at myself.)

As before, I’ve been fortunate to experience none of the horrible side effect of chemo.  I expect my bowels to be all stopped up for two or three days, but that’s just an annoynance.

Next up is to get all ready for my trip to Hawaiʻi that starts on Wednesday.  That trip will get in the way of my fourth and final round of treatments which will be delayed a few days until the Monday through Wednesday before Thanksgiving; but I was adamant that I wanted to make the trip.  These ISO standards committee meetings are what’s keeping my brain exercised during retirement. 😎

I finished the second round of chemotherapy sessions on Friday, and once again, nothing bad happened that I could recognize.  The only side effect that I noticed was constipation, but I got moving again last night, so that was just a minor annoyance.

There was one side effect of my first round of treatments that had no symptom that I was aware of:  a blood test before the second round showed that I had a really low white blood cell count giving me a high risk of infection.  This time, after the last drip on Friday, the nurse taped a small box on my stomach that, I gather, gave me a trickle of some drug that would stimulate my bone marrow.  I was told to leave it on for a bit over 24 hours and then just take it off and throw it away in the regular trash.  Again, just a minor annoyance at worst; and most of the time, I didn’t even need to pay any attention to it.

They found a really good vein on Thursday and so were able to leave the IV in overnight; but I don’t think I’ll ask them to do that again:  given the really small needles they use these days, and the high skill level of all the nurses that I’ve had, getting stuck one more time is better than not being able to take a proper shower later and worrying about messing up the IV while I was sleeping.

I’ve been tremendously fortunate so far.  I’m just n=1, of course, so my experience isn’t significant; but so far this hasn’t been bad at all.  Indeed, once I found out that I could bring my computer and WiFi hotspot with me, there wasn’t even any boredom. 🙂

My next round of treatments will be Wednesday through Friday starting on the 25^th; and the doctor said that it would be OK for me to get my next COVID booster about a week before that.

On the first of November, I’ll begin my trip to Kailua-Kona, Hawaiʻi for some meetings; and I’ll get my final round of treatments probably a couple of weeks after I get home on the 15^th.

One of the possible side effects of my chemotherapy drugs is risk of infection, I had a blood test today in preparation for my second round of chemo on Wednesday which found a very low white blood cell count, and it’s not hard to connect the two in my mind.

The nurse called me on the phone and seemed concerned about that, to the point of moving the next chemo session back a week, and ordering another lab test before the first treatment.  We’ll see how it goes.  I don’t currently have any cold or flu-like symptoms; but I might need to take extra precautions against being around other folks who are sick just in case.

I’m hoping that it’s just a mistake at the lab.  (If I were a perfect person myself, I wouldn’t be able to imagine that; but…uh…)

Somebody posted a comment that wound up in my spam folder asking about an RSS feed, but I haven’t checked the spam in a couple of weeks because of a variety of distractions.  I approved the comment, but now I can’t find it.  In any event, what I’d respond is that I’m largly clueless about RSS, but PZ could probably give a good answer.

I promised in my last post to mention some open-source code that I’ve been working on, but I’ve been distracted.

If you’re interested in what it takes to host a meeting at a hotel and convention center, read on.

The way it usually works (YMMV) is that you contact a sales rep. for the hotel and say when the meeting will be, how many folks will likely attend, and what you’ll need for meeting rooms.  In our case, for example, the meeting will last five and a half days.  Monday morning and Saturday morning will be plenary sessions*, so we’ll need a room for 100+ persons for that; but the rest of the week we’ll break into subgroups where the real work gets done, and so we’ll need a bunch of breakout rooms.

The sales rep. responds with a description of meeting rooms that will be available for the dates of your meeting, the number of guestrooms that will be held for your group, and a group rate for the guestrooms.  In our case, we’ll have 100 guestrooms held for Sunday through Friday nights and 50 for Saturday night; and I’ll be responsible for 80% of that.  (If fewer than 520 room-nights actually get booked, I’ll have to pay for some myself.)

For the meeting rooms, the usual arrangement is that, if you meet some minimum amount for food and beverage service, you get the meeting rooms for no additional charge.  I won’t have any problem meeting the minimum because the guestroom rate doesn’t include breakfast, so I’ll provide a breakfast buffet for six days along with customary mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshments for five days.  Any A/V equipment you need for the meetings will be extra.

I still have some details to work out.  After my next round of chemo treatments next week, I’ll have a meeting with the hotel’s sale rep. on Tuesday, the 3^rd, where I’ll be shown the meeting room area and, I hope, get a few more questions answered.  The following week, I expect to actually sign the contract; then I’ll start working on the food and beverage requirements and the A/V requirements for the meeting rooms.

There’s a fellow in Germany who’s our logistics guru, so I’ll mostly defer to him re the A/V stuff.  We already have our own LCD projectors, audio mixers for the three larger rooms, and pretty much everything we need to allow folks to attend remotely via Zoom; but there are still things that we’ll need from the hotel (projection screens, microphones, WiFi for about 100 in-person attendees, stuff like that).  If, as in our case, everybody will have a laptop computer, or at least a tablet, you’ll need lots of power strips for which the hotel will charge an absurd amount.  It’s often cheaper to just buy your own power strips locally and then donate them to some educational or other non-profit institution when you’re done with them.

We also still need to decide how seating in the rooms will be arranged.  The rooms that the hotel had available for the week of the meeting all have load-bearing columns here and there (it’s an old, historic building…a good excuse) which pretty much eliminates the U-shape setup.  We’ll probably go with the classroom setup (rows of long tables facing the front of the room), although one or two of the smaller rooms might have a boardroom arrangement.

Details, details …

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*For some reason, we use “meeting” and “session” to mean the opposite of what they mean in Robert’s Rule of Order.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves [from room to room] at dawn looking for an [FtB] fix.

(apologies to Allen Ginsberg)

OK, it’s old news by now; but I didn’t find that Freethought Blogs was back up until I returned from a doctor’s appointment this afternoon, by which time this old fart needed to take a nap.

But I’ve finally gotten caught up on my FtB reading, so now I’m no longer depressed. 😎

I have a post in mind about some easy coding that I was doing to pass the time.  Maybe I’ll get to that after today’s TV news.

Just a quick test to see if I can capture a screenshot and play with it using IrfanView (which I’ve been miscalling InfanView for some reason).

Yeah, that works, and in the obvious way:   PrtSc, open IrfanView, create a new image, Ctrl-V, Resize/Resample, Save As a JPEG…no sweat.

There’s method to my madness:  on my train trip in November, I can do an occasional screenshot of my GPS display so that you too can see where I am. 😎

(I hope my newbie experiments aren’t boring y’all too badly.)