Tuesday, February 07, 2006

A friend of mine emailed me yesterday. She has a MySQL database and is looking to provide a web front end to it. She asked which engine would be the best to use. Tomcat, of course! It is free, open source, Java based and one of the best and easiest ways to webify an application.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Continuing my thought process from my Nov 2 posting... What if the probes we send into space and leave our solar system have some effect on the universe? The probe could be a good thing like a white blood cell off to repair some damage or it could be a virus that is then battled by other organisms in the universe. Where we are pushing probes out of our solar system there must be other civilizations pushing out their own probes that are looking for our probes. Maybe what we need to focus on are probes that have more intelligence and can do some scouting for other probes on their own.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Tomorrow will be our 1st year anniversary in the house. A few days later is the anniversary of me trying to run 3 blocks and having my lungs burn up before I could get 2 blocks in. It was my test "run" to see how badly off my lungs were from asthma as I was just starting on Singulair. I needed to have a test run to see what progress I would make.

Now, a year later, I'm running 5k distances 5 times a week for 25k a week! I will finish my 3rd 25k week tomorrow (it rained today). And 4 weeks ago I did a 20k week. Does anyone realize how significant this is for me? It is the first time in my life I've been able to sustain exercise long enough to make a difference in my life. Steroids haven't done much to control my asthma in a useful way. Sure I had good days but then I also had bad days/weeks where I could not exercise.

Now, after a year on Singulair I've been able to run EVERY week since June 1 of last year. Granted when I first started running I wasn't going very far because the body needed to recover. But now I'm well in shape. I still have a lot of weight to lose, 100 pounds in fact before I feel I will be at a good weight. However, with the advent of doing 25k weekly runs I'm losing weight like never before. I bought a new belt 4 weeks ago that was too small on purpose and did not fit. Today I am on the 2nd notch of the belt. That is easily an inch or two lost around the belly in 4 weeks.

One additional drug I started a couple of months ago is Spiriva. While I don't think it has made much difference in my life I do think I am snoring less. At least Sandra says she doesn't notice it as much as she used to.

What I really like is the two drugs that have helped me a lot are non-steroidal. That is really nice and I hope as I get closer to my weight goal that I'll be able to drop the steroids and just stay on Singulair and Spiriva.