1-23-2024

Upright MRIs are very difficult to get in my region, so unless someone NEEDs one, they usually just make do with what they've got available locally. (There are only 2-3 machines in the entire Pacific Northwest 2x1.5 thousand mile region.) And they say one of the machines is so old the pictures are nearly unusable for normal MRI reading info.

Luck in finding care! I stopped seeking care about 15 years ago, just gave up and stopped trying for a few years. When I nearly went completely blind my opthalmologist panicked (which really means I hadn't entirely given up, because I was still going to see him instead of the family optometrist). Anyway, he stuck me back on meds (that almost did me in, but he was actually doing his very best to save me) and got the neurosurgeons to take me seriously again, and the new "riskier" VP shunting improved life for me (despite a thousand complications) enough that I felt generally better than I had since a decade ago in my 20s. That excellent neurosurgeon then bounced me to the state research hospital after about 5 years of revisions, but still... it's been worth it.

I have written more words in the years since then than I had in my entire life previously (school included) to share silly little web novel stories to warm other lives.

And it's still an ongoing fight to stay well enough to do anything, a life long battle that won't end until it's over I guess, but at least now my doctors are helping instead of obstructing. And they still guess wrong sometimes. They are just humans too. But they are trying, and that counts for so much.

So they are out there. People who will try their best to help you. 🍀🍀🍀

01-07-2024

If you're trying to use Google Docs on iOS, and having search crash all the time, search for the least common letter or symbol you've used, wait until the result is found, and then you can usually edit the search without immediately crashing, and it will function normally.

01-07-2024

Over a year ago now, I got my spine sealed up successfully. Unfortunately, this lead to a year of nearly monthly pressure setting adjustments, as we frantically tried to adjust my current VP shunt to a functional setting for me, as it had apparently been installed after I had begun leaking. We went all the way down to below where they tried to set it originally, and then came back up a notch. I lost nearly all executive function and tracking in the meantime, and I'm very slowly recovering again, finally. The server.. um.. lets call it a downgrade, in the middle of the severe leakage, is still beyond my ability to fix at once. But at least I've finally got python reading files again successfully (they dropped file in favor of open, simple I guess, but annoying.) There are a few dozen commands and variables that were changed in the upgrades, in addition to all of the Apache changes. .py will now show in my site addresses because I haven't been able to learn exactly what got broken about ModPython, which is no longer supported. Anyway, fun. But.. I live! So, success. Of a sort.

10-01-2022

I seem to keep repeating this, but not have posted it everywhere, so:

I have Pseudotumor Cerebri / Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension. I developed it when I was 25. One of the earliest treatments was a shunt set into my spine to drain off excess fluid.
(There has a been a LOT of stuff since, including shunts set into my brain, but anyway...) A few years ago I seemed to have developed a leak but we couldn't find it right away. It turned out the original shunt system's plastics had decayed and it was what was leaking. When they tried to go in and just tie it off, it shattered when they touched it. So now I'm leaking worse, and they are going to try to remove it.
I'm still in "scheduling" but I've completed one pre-op appointment and I've got another soon.

03-09-2021

I've come down with Covid-19 apparently. Darn it.

11-15-2019

amazon.com/author/gusdefrog
and
amazon.com/author/kahd

01-24-2019

Eh.. I really don't communicate often enough. So... the last 3+ months I've been writing a webnovel called Data Dragon Danika, I've entered my Mark of London Regency Romance scribbles in some competitions on WebNovel.com, and I've started a Patreon page... with dubious success. Searching for gusdefrog on Patreon doesn't find me, and neither does Kathi Day. =_= haha. Anyway, plans for this year: don't go completely blind, rebuild the old ebooks with many corrections and some reformatting, and build new ebooks for my little Data Dragon tale... wish me luck?

05-21-2018

I see it's been almost a year since I wrote here. I'm off to my next adventure in Neurosurgery mid June. I haven't really produced anything this past year, but I continue to exist.

07-06-2017

I guess I haven't posted anything for ages. Still alive! And I can see except for double shadows and blind spots. Reading is great. The stuff I've written since I just put in the library page. And I haven't resumed drawing or flute yet.

05-16-2016

05-16-2016

05-11-2016

09-15-2015

A brain surgery and a revision later, I can see well enough to read again. I expect I'll get back to updating and drawing in time. Right now, just healing up, best I can.

05-28-2015

If you came around to my page looking for a local artist for a graphic design, sorry, I'm out of commission still. But you might look here: http://bend.craigslist.org/med/5045070504.html (until it expires.)

05-06-2015

Surviving along. In some desultory fashion. Dreaming life away.

09-30-2014

Went to Seattle Steamposium. 'Twas fun. 'Twas far. 'Twas music, dancing, mechanical devices, electricity, robots, fantasy, fiction... wishes.

01-17-2014

So, going blind sucks. But maybe the medications that stop it suck worse. At the moment I can't decide. I'm just really sick... of being unwell. Ha ha. *wave*

12-09-2013

The nearest park is covered in cross country ski tracks. I'm glad to live where snow is considered a feature, instead of a bug, by other people too.

11-13-2013

The frost this morning is pretty.

For those of you joining our program in progress: *little hat twirl*

ICH is my abbreviation for Intercranial Hypertension, a diagnosis formerly known as Pseudotumor Cerebri. It is a pressure problem in the shared brain and spinal fluid. It usually has a slow onset apparently, but for me, I felt like I had a stroke one day when I was 25, that was medically declared not to be one, but figuring out why I was losing my memory and had a constant pressure headache thereafter took more than a year, unnecessary depression medications, and lots and lots of tests.

I have had medications, shunts, and finally, part of my skull removed to give more flex room. Since nobody knows what causes it, all they can do is try to keep the pressure from becoming lethal or blinding. I do have some optical scarring. but my vision's ok, just some tiny spots, that only annoy me excessively occasionally.

On my good days, I'm pretty much normal. On really bad days I have pressure headache, patches of numbness or electric shock feelings, memory loss, coordination loss, and general disorientation. I rarely have these times of excessive sleepiness and personally suspect they are times that are when that unknown broken spot in my brain is either trying to heal or getting worse.

Only the headache and spinal stiffness are an officially recognized symptom of ICH by the neurologists I've had, so everything else is always recorded as "patient reports". However other people who share the condition frequently complain of memory loss, disorientation and coordination problems, so I'm not alone. I am however having endless trouble trying to find a permanent employer who can deal with me randomly being absent up to 1/3 of the time, and doing art shows and fairs and the like is a losing proposition when you not only lose your table fee, but get on the banned list if you fail to show up. Strange, no?

Anyway, every year I fill out a thick questionnaire for these guys: http://www.ihrfoundation.org/ via OHSU, where there's an ongoing tracking and study program.

10-22-2013

Joined an RPG game, space opera, have managed to attend a couple times. They've been real nice about me not attending the other times >_> ... it may be the most fun I've had in years! :D

08-02-2013

Lately I've been doing almost all my painting in GIMP as it's free, it works about the same on every operating system, and I wander between computers as availabilty permits.

I'm still hoping that someday an artist representative will take interest in my work. Hint, hint. I just need someone who can keep track of things. I've had mostly 'bad' days health-wise this summer, and I just can't keep things sorted. Experience not required, just motivation and skill with numbers and communicating.

07-28-2013

Ok, today, expect things to go boom! Moving folders and reorganizing in 10 9 8 ....

07-27-2013

I also deleted all the picture logs and modified my anti spam bot array. It's mostly a question of are you annoying me enough to work at it. And I'm lazy.

07-26-2013

I deleted all the users who weren't subscribed or family and friends. If I deleted you in error, please email. Thanks.

07-22-2013

I have spent two days at this now, and so far all I've done is put in error catching for when I move stuff later.

07-21-2013

So I'm messing with the website. Expect chaos, panic, disorder, confusion, errors.. yeah.. wheee postgresql how I hate you sometimes and love you others.

07-20-2013

Hey, you, be alive. Thanks.

08-29-2012

Hi Evan, if you ever see this? :)

08-05-2012

I return. There is no rejoicing. Life continues in it's latest fashion.

04-02-2012

So, I'm going to run away from home for awhile, give everyone a break from taking care of me. I'll take it easy and plan a lot of laying about so that I won't overload and need taken care of (I hope).

01-31-2012

FINALLY got Diggles / Wiggles - The Myth of Fenris, to run with sound in Wine under Ubuntu. Wound up using winetricks and choosing "all codecs" only that, other stuff makes wighelper.exe crash again. However, it still doesn't play the mp3s for the cut scenes. When I looked it up, sounds like wine has problems with mp3's and is supposed to be routing them to a linux driver... don't know.

01-19-2011

Obviously I haen't been drawing, nothing for public display anyway. Still breathing, surviving, barely. Thanks, I guess. Still working on being more independently mobile. Saying good bye to one friend too many, too often.

09-24-2010

Well.. summer came and went... I miss you. In a fit of "must do something about all the things I haven't done" I've been messing with the site. Sorry if I broke it again, please email. I wish it would snow.

12-08-2009

I love snow! Thank you whoever got the new steel rimmed shovel at our triplex. It's lovely. Wheeee... snow!

11-22-2009

Saw Kites and Crows at the Silvermoon Brewery tonight. It was a duo performance, but they went through a number of instruments, guitar, harmonica, banjo, accordian, xylaphone. Sweet voices. Very cool.

11-21-2009

Still alive. This year detected no pulsation in those nerve/veins whatever in the back of the eyes during the exam. So it was off to an MRI, and another spinal tap to check pressure coming up. Oh yay, oh yay. Apparrently I managed to skip a year on the eye exams, so since there's no new scarring, no way to tell how long it's been going on, so no panic and all.

08-30-2009

HP Pavilion tx2110 (2000 series) when run under Windows Vista has been driving me nuts with the mouse focus being grabbed and pulled down to the right corner of the screen. I've done, I don't know how many, tablet driver reinstalls, and every windows upgrade I could find, but could never stop it. I thought it was related to the "Tablet driver not loaded" error I often got. Finally I found a forum that said it was due to poor shielding over some sort of power contact or fan in that area, and that whatever it is was making it click there. Some people said they turned off their tablet drivers to deal with it. The solution or hack to controling both turns out to be both simple, and non obvious.

By running services.msc from the run command line, I was able to track down which tablet driver was controling that input. For me it's the one named tabletservicepen. By changing the start up type to delayed, I managed to pretty much get rid of the "Tablet driver not loaded" error. For the mouse pointer being pulled to the bottom of the screen, I've got two shortcuts on my desktop. One runs the command "net.exe stop tabletservicepen" and the other runs the command "net.exe start tabletservicepen". When the twitching is bothering me I stop the service by using the first shortcut, and I can always start it up again by using the other shortcut.

It's not an elegant solution, but it's working. That counts for something :). I don't seem to have much problem when I'm actually using the pen for navigation and painting, I assume because the real tracking of the pen overrides whatever glitch it recieves that's making it see those "ghost" clicks.

08-28-2009

Tracked down a 401 Unauthorized Access error caused by google friend connect. I wonder how many people have been unable to browse due to it? I almost deleted the google additions, but decided to let it go on for now. Also considering moving this blog page to the front page of artwork, not sure how, but need to get more text content up to attract search engines. I wish I were better at story writing, but doesn't everyone? :)

08-15-2009

Still alive.

05-24-2009

Trying out the Google Friend Connect services. Makes things ... fluffy.

11-09-2008

Alive. Been walking when I feel like drawing, been walking when I feel like watching, been walking. >_> Then I went to watch a band for a couple hours, because if I don't do something fun I'll go mad... er? A guy asked me what I do... walking wasn't a very exciting answer, so I took a couple days off and drew, and gave myself a killer headache. Can't win. Probably back to the dutiful walkingness next. Have a great winter, hope you see lots of snow.

08-20-2008

After yet more downtime I've canceled hosting at siteground and moved back to a home based server, so the site may not be online as much, but should be functional when it is. ^^; I hope.

06-13-2008

Slowly working my way through the site code to clean it up a bit. *croak* When I get done I hope that search by color will be available. Also I may stop paying for hosting and host from home again when the year rolls over.

05-29-2008

Some of my plants made it through the winter again, that's always nice. The rhubarb, blue berry, clematis, mint and strawberries. Slowly getting better with containers. They freeze hard so easily, and dry out during sudden thaws, it's the downside to apartment living.

05-22-2008

Bulk uploads of photos to be edited.

05-20-2008

It suddenly occured to me that I never really tout the wonderful programs that I use to create my digital artwork, so without further ado:

Pixia: Japanese | Translations :This is the program that I use the most to paint with. It has slick tablet support (you have to turn on under tablet settings what effect you want from it), layers, many kinds of transparency, and a lot of customizable tools. The basic tools feel intuitive to me, and it has many more complex ones that I haven't even learned yet after all this time. It's free, not just free to try, free. THANK YOU!!! *worship worship*

OpenCanvas: English :Heh, it seems my favorite software was all created in Japanese. I don't keep up on this one, I'm still using version 1.1, because what I use it for is sketching. It has the most pencil like feeling of all the software I've tried for it's basic drawing tool. It also has layer support and the newer versions have full ranges of painting tools. It's shareware instead of freeware.

Corel Photopaint 6: Well, back when I worked full time as a graphic artist oh so many years ago, I bought the CorelDraw suite to use at home too, and for a long time I used Photopaint for all my painting tasks. Time has rolled along, and now I mostly use it for resizing, filtering and cleaning up scans. I've heard that Corel Painter X is quite awesome, but poor Photopaint has about reached the end of it's useful lifespan I fear. It was a good run though.

03-22-2008

Well, they just switched target files, so, since I don't receive all that many comments anyway, I've removed commenting from the site for now, send me email :)

03-03-2008

I had to remove a picture I labeled "Sign" from my site from the sheer massive amounts of pornographic and generally offensive spam that was left in it's comments section. It's very strange, the picture was of a shield with a computer and a feather pen and ink. I doubt anyone even looked at it, from the page content. If anyone did leave any serious comments, I appologize, they're gone too. I wonder why though, just that one image too. The weirdness of spammers I guess.

12-05-2007

I'm still or again feeling quite sickly. Dug out a mix of bagpipes and steel guitars and generally songs that go thrumming through your body and played them too loud (poor neighbors.) I wish I were well enough to go see something performed live.

Since my thinking capacity and multitasking abilities have been reduced, music has been one of the things trimmed away from my life, not that I never listen to it, but it's now reduced to times when I only listen to music or watch something with music, instead of being something I listen to while I do other things.

I like all kinds of music, I think I'm a melody person, instead of rythymn or particular style. Except jazz.. I love live jazz, but recorded jazz makes my teeth hurt. Well.. I like softer things in general, I guess, there are some rap songs and some hard rock songs I love, but many others are too noisy for me to hear the tune if there is one.

Anyway, I love all of you musicians out there, the incredible or the mediocre, I can't imagine living without songs. I want to sing, or play, or listen.

11-11-2007

It does no good to email me asking about my artwork when the email address you've mailed me from can't accept a reply. I always wonder for weeks after one of those if it was a strange form of spam, or if they really had no idea I couldn't respond to their questions.

10-04-2007

I haven't been doing enough chatting or talking with people. Hopefully my friends are moving along through life happily.

Projects:

Set up hp pavilion dv6325us with Ubuntu 7.04 for 64bit AMD and Intel computers after contacting tech support about how it crashed so hard that sometimes even its Vista blue screens of death would crash to unreadability. After about 2 hours they had given me a series of tests to do and instructions on reseating the memory. (I won't go into the details of the preceding two hours, suffice to say, for once I was not impressed with HP support.) The tests all came back fine, Vista was still Vista, crashes sometimes if you close the lid during shutdown and it tries to go to sleep at the same time (even if you tell it not to) and other fun tricks, and they don't provide downgrades or upgrades for Windows, so... on to Linux based systems, I'll miss some of my games. That's about it.

The details: To boot the install cd I had to interupt the startup by pressing F6 and adding " noapic nolapic" which I got from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/hp_dv6000_series_(dv6116eu ) but my computer hasn't got quite all the fancy stuff they had. After that the install ran perfectly smoothly. On first boot I discovered that the wireless wasn't working, I spent a long time looking for the right set of drivers, finally these instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff worked. I had downloaded the driver onto another machine and copied it over, so I skipped that step. And I feel ZERO guilt about using a windows driver, least they can do for selling a system that crashes it's own crash catching system. Everything else seems to work fine, all the media buttons, and even most of the remote buttons. Card reader reads, usb detects. I haven't written a dvd yet. I had a bit of trouble figuring out dual monitors, I don't think the x driver it defaulted to was quite right, because it cloned just fine right up until the window manager started :p. I wound up using Envy http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html . I did install the restricted movie codecs https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats . Again, I read that it's possibly illegal to install them where I am, but I bought a computer with the software from these companies pre-installed to read dvds I have already purchased. It's not my fault they partnered with Microsoft.

Because of it's newfangled 64 instead of 86 based architecture I had a bit more trouble when I got to the internet. Well, when I wanted to get fancy and run java games and watch flash video :) https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/internet/C/web-plugins.html#web-plugins-java worked for Java, for flash I wound up using a script from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=476924 (the one that says flash only). I tried many other things for each, starting with the official documentation, but these are the ones that worked.

Oh yeah, and I told Gimp that my Wacom pen was a screen stylus so I can use all it's pressure sensitivy ;).

09-30-2007

Well, it's been awhile since I put up much new artwork again. I did recently finish a commission painting, I should probably have a special category for those. >_> But many of them I'll never post since they're owned by the people I made them for. I've been playing puzzlepirates.com alot, a fun social game for the mediocrely social? :p And I like to play simple puzzles that can get complex if you let them.

08-13-2007

Somebody asked me why I draw so many naked faeries instead of giving them clothes. I don't know, I don't think about it when I'm drawing one, I guess they're wild. Ever see a wild creature wearing clothes? Well.. maybe you have, I wouldn't know.

08-03-2007

Google base and google products are a tricksy tangle to navigate. Even though it doesn't say it anywhere, you almost have to have the ID tag in your bulk upload. Otherwise if it thinks something is similar to something else it apparently suspects you of spam and only posts one.

07-17-2007

Sickly again. I guess at least it makes me realize that for a little while I wasn't doing so bad. Website, artwork, projects, all are on kind of indefinite hold again.

06-27-2007

T-mobile, at least in Redmond, OR has lousy hiring policies. No students, apparently at all. My sister has been taking part time college classes. She's in her mid twenties and worked at her last customer service oriented job for five years. They didn't mention their policy until she reached the interview stage. Kind of disturbing to think that so many people are being denied education opportunities so that they can stay employed. :(

04-26-2007

Finally got my pixie net up. At one point I was considering having it exchangable with my painting frog border on all the pages of the site, but it seemed to grow more and more complicated as I worked on it, and then it got abandoned, so anyway, here it is. And also today I'm posting some of the rambling I've done about my artwork and stuff. It's rather fragmentary.

I draw faeries, but then again, I don't. I generally prefer the faerie spelling over the fairy. Wings taste of freedom. Wild growing things radiate life. Is it wonderful or is it deadly? Somewhere between I wind up with what seem like fae folk, fantastic creatures, reflections. I can't really explain where dragons and phoenix become tangled up with space ships or how a flower faerie and a hamster are similar in design. Perhaps I draw mythic, or elemental images? I usually wind up with something related to superstition, story or a picture play on words though.

Wondering what is, I wander off to what might have been, or what may be in the future. I am definitely a fan of speculative fiction, and love tales of curiosity. Mystifying, magic and science, and cultivation, and star gazing. I have to work hard to be practical sometimes, but then, like artwork, it's a matter of practice. I would like more practice at selling artwork. :p

Submission forms are always requesting an artist statement or bio. I never know what to fill in. Whenever I explain something I almost always wind up resorting to scribbles, drawings, sketches, color, sometimes even full paintings. What do they really want to know anyway? That I don't like drawing at a table, or that I always have at least a trace of pencil work underneath my paint, that digital work isn't easy either?

I spend too much time in the hospital or visiting doctors. If you're healthy, please enjoy it. I find it scary how many people I've met who understand my struggles all too well. Or worse, make my difficulties look like a papercut. Ah well, time is easy to spend, and hard to save.

04-26-2007

Words. This media is weighed and measured in words by all the search engines. It was created for words, not realizing how much else would later be transmitted. Probably because strangely enough, they are lighter than sounds or images when recorded. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to duplicate either sounds or images in words, and I am not comfortable with making the attempt.

Does a picture need words to be beautiful? Is it meaningless without a title to guide you? I don't think so, but I will grant that it is more complicated to ask "Which one were you looking at?" without any words attached. What I think of as "the blue painting with the light scribbles" you might be thinking of as "the sad fairy writing in the sand".

04-26-2007

I wonder if the artwork I create will outlast me?

04-08-2007

Starting out this log/blog thing. This alteration in the website with comment logs for every picture has been planned for a long time, 95% implemented for a long time, and then delayed for three times that. :p But here it is. It'll probably break, please email pix@techpixie.net when it does, thanks!