A visit to the Emergency Room...

Omaha woke up this morning with severe abdominal pains, and when I asked her if she wanted to go to the ER, she said we should go without any hesitation. When that, I know the pain has to be nigh unto crippling for her, because she has a pain tolerance a mile high.

We arrived to find the place deserted. By the time I'd parked the car they'd gone through initial intake. I arrived just in time to hear, "Do you take any drugs? Does anyone hit you or hurt you?" I know, they have to ask those questions. I held my tongue rather than say, "Sigh Not recently. Does consensual sadomasochism count, anyway?"

The old lobby was straight out of the 70s, but the hospital had recently undergone a refit and the ER lobby was in that beautiful 21st-century woodtone paneling. Even better, the old ER, last visited when Kouryou-chan put a bead up her nose five years ago, was a cramped narrow set of hallways that branched without much rhyme or reason. The new ER was beautiful: A big open rectangle with four semi-private bays along each wall, and in the center a ringed command center with a glassed-in quiet area for physicians and staff. It was a heck of an admirable design.

I hepled Omaha get dressed before the nurse finally asked, "Are you her husband." Uh, yeah. They took samples from Omaha, then gave her a steroid, a muscle relaxer, and an opiate. She rested while we waited. They wheeled her over to an unspecified scanner, then wheeled her back. There wasn't much to do, I'm glad I brought a book.

While I was there, though, there was a voice screaming from down the hall. And while it wasn't a pleasant screaming, it didn't sound right to me. It sounded... practiced. Hollywood. It was the kind of sound you hear in B-movies as the zombies gnaw into a victim's intestines. Later, as I was waiting for Omaha to come back from the scanner, I heard the doctor talking to a nurse, and they were pointing in the direction the screaming had been coming from: a second section of ER, set off from the first. From the snippets of conversation I got, the screamer had been in the ER before, complaining of severe hip pain and barking like a dog. The physician said he suspected the guy was just here to score some free drugs. Later, I saw police officers roaming that hallway.

The final diagnosis was of a relatively small kidney stone that had gotten trapped at the end of the ureter, and would pass on its own in a matter of days, or so he said. A long list of long-genericized drugs was prescribed: an opiate, a steroidal anti-inflammatory, a smooth muscle relaxer, and an antibiotic in case the stone was struvite, which indicates an infection.

We got home four hours later. Omaha went straight to bed and I ran to the pharmacy to get her meds. She's sleeping now, and doing all right. I need coffee.

Unrealistic Expectations

I don't know why I do this to myself.

I had a brainstorm yesterday morning, and set aside about four hours to figuring it out. The idea was simple: I wanted an RSS reader like Liferea, which is my reader of choice, but which had not just the generic GTK-based front end, but a standard REST-based front-end. I also wanted better performance; Liferea is nicely written and multi-threaded, but I thought that if I separated the front-end from the back-end, and changed the back-end to an event-driven model, then I could make both work independently.

And then I thought, if I did that, then I could write a pubsub handler whereby front-ends could receive messages, and multiple front-ends would receive all feed and subscription updates as they happened.

After four hours of straight programming, I had a working script for loading the feedlist in OPML-XML format. I grumped. That was it? After four hours, all I had was a single intake handler? Where was the event loop, and the feed handler?

And then I realized: I'm working with a technology I haven't seen in 12 years (SAX) and a low level I don't usually indulge in, and because it's all the rage in event-driven programming, I was writing the OPML wrapper in language I've never actually written in before, Node. SAX has matured a lot, and when used with the enclosured callbacks of Node makes for a very viable technology. It took me a while to figure out how to express the DTD in SAX, and then how to write the closure properly so that I could get the data back out. By the end of the session I was deriving and successfully walking a JSON tree of objects, looking at each object's respective title and so forth.

There was a lot left to do: error handling for corrupt OPML for one. Distinguishing between standard OPML, Livejournal and AmphetaDesk's broken but survivable OPML (yo, LJ, AD: XML is cAsE sEnSiTiVe), that kind of thing. Exporting the document. Eventually, transferring the document to an internal feed/subscription and running that damned feed.

And that's just the OPML handler. Eventually, I have to write RSS, Atom, CDF, and PIE parsers, but I have the DTDs for those already. Once I write one, it's a template for the rest. Once I have all of them, a couple of output handlers for JSON and a generic RSS format should be trivial.

But mastering even that much is pretty damned impressive. Why do I have such unrealistic expectations of my output?