If I Was Dying Tomorrow...

If I was dying tomorrow and for some reason the entire world would listen to the last thing I ever said, it'd be, "it's OK to let other people think differently than you." If anyone reads this, what would yours be?

Cancer Sucks

Two weeks ago, my mother was diagnosed with stage II breast cancer. Last Friday, she went into surgery to have a double mastectomy with reconstruction. My wife and I joined her and my father in the waiting room while she was waiting to go into the operating room. She wasn't nervous. She was calm, collected, and prepared. She had so little time to prepare for this life-changing surgery and yet her determination to get rid of the cancer conquered any fear she had of the sacrifice to come.

Her doctors at MSKCC were fantastic. Everyone including the nurses were extremely friendly and caring. She was awake Saturday and feeling good despite nausea from the anesthesia. She said it felt like she worked out too much. She still had excellent mobility in her affected arm. We did whatever we could to help her back into the house on Sunday but she didn't really need any help. Her nausea subsided by Monday morning and she was eating a sandwich by lunchtime; in great spirits.

In the coming months, my mother will be subjected to chemotherapy and possibly radiation. It will obviously be very rough but I know that she will be just as brave going into it as she was with her surgery. She is looking forward to the final reconstructive surgery.

I truly admire my mother's strength and my father's steadfast support of his wife. It goes without saying that they are my heroes.

Lottery Customer Service Response

In August of 2008, I sent an email through Megamillions.com inquiring if they had an RSS feed of the winning numbers. I was developing a tool and a feed would have been really helpful for it. So I asked them using their online contact form, "Do you guys plan to have a feed of the winning numbers in RSS, XML, or any other format available?" I entered my state as NY and my regular contact info. I believe it routed my question to the lottery email address shown in the image below. This re-routing must've been the problem.

Four months later, in December, I received a rather cryptic response, "Megamillions.com is not a NY site. Write to Megamillions.com." Now the first problem was, I did. The second problem was, WTF? That's your response? It doesn't even make sense. You could've at least sent a LITTLE customer service smoke my way.

Whatever, I found the feed on the site and my app is working fine to this day. It's definitely the weirdest email response I've ever gotten.

The Fruit Cup Incident

This occurred about a year after I met my wife. I was living at my mom's house and I was really hungry one morning. All we had was a massive one gallon can of fruit cup in heavy syrup. For the purpose of this story, lets call the manufacturer "Mel Donte." My favorite!

Undeterred by my wife's prophetic advise, I ravenously gorged myself on fruit cup and drank what had to be a quart of the heavy syrup. I finished the entire gallon in the name of silencing the infernal rumbling in my stomach. It went away. Just as she predicted, over the next twenty minutes, a different rumbling returned only much lower and much stronger in intensity.

Before long, I was glued to the bowl with a steady flow of undigested fruit cup leaving my body. It took two days for my digestive tract to start functioning again. I tried to eat dinner that night. I never want to see undigested spaghetti in the toilet bowl again.

My wife will never let me forget The Fruit Cup Incident although she never once said "I told you so." To this day, I can't even so much as look at a fruit cup container without getting nauseous; just the words "fruit salad" sends shivers down my spine. I relearned many valuable lessons that day.

Survivor's Guilt

Four people got axed yesterday and today one front end web developer from my group got let go. There are also rumors of one manager quitting. It sucks to see friends go. I found out that my last job was just replaced with an unpaid internship too.

I hope there are no more layoffs.

Rumblings

There are rumblings of lay offs amidst the economic turmoil. Sales are down along with traffic to our properties. This may or may not really suck.