Archive for April, 2007

Wikis, hives, and cholinergic urticaria! Oh my!

April 28, 2007 at 3:47 pm · Filed under Online Health Care + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood

Along with my various allergies and mild asthma, several years ago, I was fortunate enough to start having hives mysteriously appear over my body. At first, I was kinda scared and then I realized it wasn’t dangerous just annoying and itchy. It took me a long while to figure out what was going on. Most urticaria (aka hives) is idiopathic and doctors tend not to know how to treat it. Mine mostly appeared during exercise and when my body was overworked, but it was kinda hard to really figure out.

At first, I tried limiting various things out of my diet, sugar, milk, etc.. This would seem to work for a bit and then stop working again. I tried candida cleansing treatments as I read on a forum that it helped. This too seemed to work for a while and then it stopped working. The fact that these worked even for a bit proves nothing though since, as I learned, urticaria sensitivity often goes through phases which can be seasonal or random.

I admit I never really bothered seeking a specialist for it because from my research no one seemed to get any real help from doctors. Treatment is basically only antihistamines and figure out your triggers. Well after reading more, I finally figured out my triggers and realized that my own case was mostly cholinergic urticaria. It’s basically a flawed thermoregulatory response — the body heats, initiates the sweat glands to cool the body down, and for some reason my body then freaks out produces histamines.

Nowadays, I know to just keep my body cool as much as possible and dose up antihistamines whenever it goes through a bad phase or when I know I’ll be overheating myself (ie. Burning Man). I also learned to stack Zantac (yeah the anti-acid med) on top of the normal antihistimines cause it has a synergistic effect that can often completely stop outbreaks. Of course, I had to read this online in various out of the reach corners. My life is better due to this knowledge combined with the fact that it seems to be fading away completely with only a bad phase here or there (yeah stupid fickle disease, for most people it just shows up out of the blue and tends to just disappear again several years later for no reason).

So today, I did what I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I compiled all my research into a solid wikipedia article so that the next person who has this happen to them can find info more readily. It probably needs a bit more editing, but that can wait. If you’re interested you can check it out: Cholinergic Urticaria.

Warning: Zantac or Tagamet can reduce the metabolization of alcohol and other products that are processed by the liver, thereby increasing it’s effects. Intermediate use of either of these medications should be fine, but as with any drug there may be additional side effects of long term constant use. Long term use of Zantac or Tagamet should not be done without first discussing with your doctor.

Comments (25)  |  Trackback url  | 

Buying the War

April 26, 2007 at 3:35 pm · Filed under uncategorized

Bill Moyers had a special last night called “Buying the War” about the press’s failure leading up to the Iraq war. I don’t watch TV like normal people do so luckliy they posted it, so you can watch the video online.

I started watching it during my lunch break, and it’s really good, detailed, and hard hitting. Of course, little of it surprises me and it’s several years too late, but still I highly recommend it.

p.s. since it’s mostly lots of talking you can also just treat it like radio and listen to it while you work like I’m doing.

Comments  |  Trackback url  | 

Ecto Test post… this time with pictures!

April 24, 2007 at 8:23 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood + Blogging about blogging

I’m still experimenting with blogging apps. This time posting with Ecto. It’s rather nice though a bit complicated possibly for the average user — especially since I had to troubleshoot it. I do like how much control you have over the image code, which makes using my wordpress lightbox plugin easy.

I tested MarsEdit too which is much cleaner, but really only good if you want to post text only as adding images takes waaaaay too many steps. MarsEdit’s live preview is great as long as you know your way around html/css to set it up (which is strangely complicated considering that the rest of the app seems set up for the average user). On the opposite end of the spectrum is Journler which seems just plan convoluted looking.

While Ecto is nice, personally, I think I’m still gonna recommend Flock just because of the easy Flickr interface. Ecto does have an app called 1001 which sounds great app but it was really really slow at loading anything. So Flock it is.

Actually, I’m also gonna start to use it at work as my blogging/social/lunch-break browser, and keep Firefox as my development/work only browser. I figure this will hopefully help me focus more on work and curb any procrastination.

p.s. that picture is one of my favs from Urban Golf.

Comments (5)  |  Trackback url  | 

The Great App Hunt Continues…

April 24, 2007 at 1:42 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood + Blogging about blogging

So I’m still trying to figure out which app combo works best for efficient blogging on the mac. Now that Nifer is on a new macbook, she needs something easy and efficent to use for blogging. I was looking at Ecto, which is pretty nice. However, now I’ve got my eye on just using the Flock browser with the wordpress new post page as the home url.

From my brief trial run this morning, Ecto seemed really nice and easy (once I fixed it to work with wordpress 2.1 and got tags going). I also need to test it’s photo integration a bit more to see how seemless it is.

I originally wasn’t thinking about using Flock since it is more a browser than a dedicated blogging app, but it might be a good choice anyway. It’s built-in blogging module really sucks, but the flicker photo bar is fabulous and you can just drag and drop images into the wordpress post interface (like I did on this post). With this and the drag and drop web snippets bar, it’s a really nice blogging environment. Also there is an added benefit to working directly in the wp admin in that you can check comments, blogroll, and whatnot while you are at it. The disadvantage here is that you can’t work offline, it’s slower to save, if WP stumbles while saving (which it rarely but sometimes does) you’ve just lost your post.

Comments (1)  |  Trackback url  | 

Productivity Safari, or the hunt for the perfect app combo

April 24, 2007 at 1:04 am · Filed under Design & Web Geekery

So I’ll just come out and say it: “I’m a app-oholic.”

I constantly am trying out new applications, which has if anything gotten worse in this web 2.0 world of web apps. Usually, I have a goal in mind of finding a better way of doing what I already do in some other application, but other times I’m just doing it for the geeky thrill.

Lately, my app hunt has been mostly centered around improving my web development environment, streamlining my blogging experience, and enhancing my productivity. The latter being the most ironic as I waste tons of time in the process.

Recently, I posted about the great little web app Todoist which I was using for this purpose. I have since abandoned that app for several reasons. Don’t get me wrong it’s a clean and fabulous tool, but it required yet another browser tab open, and most of all it just got intimidating to look at the more I added to do items.

Did Done List

To fix all this I’m taking a tip from a post off of lifehacker, Improve your productivity with a “did-do”list except I’m calling mine a “did done” list cause I think it sounds better and frankly just to be different. Of course, I still need to keep a running to do list or else I’d forget all the stuff I need to do, but now I only need to visit that occasionally. This way the thing I normally see is the stuff I’ve happily accomplished rather than the dreaded pile of stuff still yet on the horizon.

All of this is now just living off of my wiki that I set up for our household which makes it extensible, easy to use, and best of all mine—nothing like a sense of ownership to increase task stickiness. By the way, setting up the wiki was one of the best things I’ve ever done. It’s sooooo amazingly useful.

Successful hunting in app-land

I’m posting this from Ecto which so far is an excellent blog posting app. I had to make a couple tweaks to get it to work properly: 1) It doesn’t play nice with wordpress 2.1 but luckily someone figured out a fix for that. 2) I use Ultimate Tag Warrior and I needed an additional plugin to get ecto to play nicely with tags.

Speaking of cool apps, Coda. the all-in-one webdev app from Panic, looks incredible! I haven’t had a chance to play with the demo yet but wow—wish it came for the PC. I use Topstyle on my windows laptop at work, which is decent, but it’s a bit clunky as most windows apps are, and it has no internal FTP. Arg!

Comments  |  Trackback url  | 

AJAX $&!% that is the core technology of the Web 2.0 failure-farm

April 20, 2007 at 2:20 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Blogging about blogging

I gotta give props to UnCov which has to be the best new thing to hit the web 2.0 bloggeratti since… oh I don’t know since maybe this or maybe this or how about this?

Actually UnCov is better than all those since it’s actually funny in a regularly updating way. Just go read their latest review of the new web 2.0 startup Graphica:

According to TechCrunch Graphita is a new web service that lets you put icons and shit on your pictures. Talk about innovative. They’re not taking open signups now, so we’ll have to just take TC’s word for it. Of course, they softballed the review, so I’ll just talk trash on Graphita that’s completely ubsubstantiated by real experience. By the way: it’s not even worth your time to read TechCrunch’s review. I don’t know about you guys, but every time I read a TechCrunch article, I get an itch on the roof of my mouth that can only be scratched by the icy cold steel of a gun barrel.

Read the whole shebang…Graphita: Now Taking Bets

Comments  |  Trackback url  |