Today my son, Ben, received his Master of Engineering Management degree from Duke University. I am so impressed and in awe of his accomplishments! One year ago I posted about his graduation from The University of Tampa ...and 5 years ago (June 2003) I posted about his high school graduation. My gosh, where did these past 5 years go, and how is it that Ben is now 23 with a frickin' Masters degree! Wow.

I'm now running Ubuntu 8.04 on my main (personal) laptop ....in dual boot mode. The big news to me is that I can finally easily connect to my wireless router. I'd had a devil of a time getting it to work in earlier versions ...had to really muck with things before it was happy. But with this latest version, the config was a snap, and things just work. The only real tests remaining are to see if I can connect to our wireless printer, and to see if by some miracle the old scanner will work. The printer is the only real must-have.

Assuming the printer connection works, I'll then wipe the drive, and install Ubuntu as the OS for this machine. But not tonight. It's late :)

This is how I've been spending a couple of hours each Monday. I think today was the 8th treatment. I hadn't had any symptoms of lead or mercury poisoning, but some tests I'd had done just as part of my "half century tune up" (a year late) ...showed lead and mercury literally off the charts. My wife did not show similar levels. Weird.

The IVs are EDTA and glutathione, which together should be clearing out the toxins, and also having the rather nice side effect of helping clean out arterial plaque. There's been a lot of debate over the years about benefits vs risks of chelation. Obviously, I'm a believer in the positive benefits, but the real proof will be in test results. The next test for me will be after the 10th treatment in a couple of weeks. But others are most definitely interested in chelation. Here in the USA, the National Institues of Health is doing a current study of chelation at a number of sites throughout the country.

All I can say is that I feel 'clear' ...meaning that I've noticed even if I slack off on working out, it's much easier to get right back to it with no strain. I ran a few miles a week ago Saturday, did a milder workout on Sunday, and then was too busy to make the time to work out during the week. I did a few miles on the treadmill this evening, and I did not notice the sluggishness that I used to feel if I skipped even a couple of days of working out. Yes, it could be all in my head :)

So, like any good geek, I like the science aspect of it. My doc is definitely into evidence-based medicine. That's why there were hair, blood, and urine tests before starting the chelation program. The doc is an MD, board-certified in Internal Medicine, and has been for the past 25 years. I feel like I'm sitting back in a college lecture when I see him, as he gets into explaining things on the grease board :) ...not that I follow all of the biochemistry, but what I do understand is quite fascinating. So we'll see what the next weeks or months bring.

In the meantime, here's the lipid history for the past couple of years. The differences for these past months are pretty regular exercise (with occassional 'off' weeks like last week), a very low dose (10mg) of lovastatin - a US$4/month generic statin to soften the plaque and help the chelation remove it, and for many months now I've been off of cheese and generally going fairly light on milk products (and then it's only skim milk). I've been off of red meat for 30+ years.


So there's a ways to go, but optimal health is getting closer :)

So I've nuked my 7-yr old laptop to make it into a nice little loaner laptop for visitors. The drive is wiped, and it's now running the awesome gOS distro from Google. It's Ubuntu, with links for the Google suite (GMail, Google apps, etc). It also comes with OpenOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Pidgin ...so there was literally nothing else I needed to install.

I'm blogging (via Firefox) with it now.
Bootup screen:


Desktop:


Very, very cool!

So last Friday i went for my first chelation treatment. It's an IV - a needle with a couple of bags of stuff to help flush the lead and mercury and other nasty stuff from my system ...and clean out the plaque from my blood vessels. But as the poor phlebotomist (she was filling in for the normal nurse, and I think she was fresh out of school) ...tried one arm with no luck getting the needle into a vein ...and then tried the other arm, and then the 3rd try, and then finally found a vein (with a little 'spillage' - LOL) on the fourth try ....I was looking at my arms thinking I should be a Band-Aid advertisement ...and mainly thinking that I really wished poor Duffbert were there. I don't mind needles at all ...I go for acupuncture regularly, and in college would help other students when they were reluctant to get their own blood samples :) ... but Mr Duff's one fear in the world is needles. And I do love to give Duffbert a tough time. So it was rather unfortunate that he couldn't be there to experience the four attempts at proper insertion of the IV needle ...since I would have LOVED to have captured the reaction for YouTube posterity.

No, not 'Symphony' ...that's either music or a suite of office productivity applications available for free. Symfoni is an IBM business partner in Oslo, Norway (and also serving Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Germany). Trond from Symfoni has been kind enough to invite me to their Lotusphere dinner each of the past several years (along with some others from the community: Bruce, Gayle, Vince, Julian, John...)

Aside from meeting so many wonderful people from across the ocean (including getting to meet Norwegian Domino blogger Arne Nielsen!), I've also been struck by the dramatic growth that Symfoni has seen. A few years ago, it was a healthy-sized group at the dinner - all from Norway. Last year, the group was very definitely larger, and the Symfoni people and clients were from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. This year, the group was so large that the restaurant had to offer a buffet, stating that there was no way they could take individual orders from so many people.

The point? That my very UNscientific analysis indicates that Lotus software business is growing! ...and the hospitality of the good folks at Symfoni is truly wonderful. Many, many thanks to Trond and the Symfoni team for allowing me to share your evening.