Author: Wil

A year and a half ago, Wil and I participated in the Avon 3 day breast cancer walk. We didn’t know anyone with breast cancer. We just wanted to help raise money for research and be part of the walk-a thon. It was by far the most incredible experience of our lives. Between the two of us, we raised over $17,000. We always knew we’d do something like this again.
What I didn’t realize, was that I would be doing something like this because one of my very close friends, Kris, would be diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. My 45 year old friend, a wife, a mother of two, an active, loved member of the community, was just diagnosed with a life threatening disease.
Kris went to the doctor just before Labor Day weekend to pick up some antibiotics before heading out of town with her family. She hadn’t been feeling well and just assumed it was some kind of infection. The doctor wanted to do a blood test just to make sure everything was alright. After the weekend, she was called by her doctor to come in immediately, and to bring her husband because something was wrong with her blood. A bone marrow test confirmed the doctor’s suspicion. Leukemia. She received the news and was told to be at the hospital by the end of the day to spend a month doing chemotherapy.
After the month of treatment, and two separate week long treatments, along with several blood and platelet transfusions, Kris is in remission. Her doctor at City of Hope Cancer Hospital wants to do a stem cell transplant on her now because she’s doing so well. This gives her a better chance of the leukemia not returning.
For the week prior to her stay at City of Hope, Kris was taking anti-seizure medication and going to her doctor to do chemotherapy tests before beginning her intensive treatment. When she begins her stay on February 13, she will be doing several days of chemotherapy followed by several days of full body radiation therapy. Then they will transplant the stem cells they harvested from her (she was not a match with her brother, children, or the National Donor Registry). This option gives her a better chance of her body not rejecting the transplant. Then the slow recovery begins.
It has been the most difficult thing in the world to see Kris go through this. She is a very strong person and I have no doubt this will just be another one of life’s obstacles she hurdles right over. But to feel so helpless at doing anything for her has been the hardest part.
Which is why Wil and I decided we would be part of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s marathon. We will be walking 26.2 miles in San Diego this June to help raise money for a cure. Since we can’t donate our blood (not the right type) we can at least donate our feet. Our goal is to raise $25,000. A very small percentage of the daily funding needed for research.
Kris is so happy we are doing this in her honor. She already plans on being at the finish line with us so we can all celebrate this huge victory.
Here’s a link to our Team In Training Homepage. Please visit it, and help us reach our goal. Kris, along with thousands of other people dealing with this disease, need our help and encouragement.
Wil here, with a final thought: We kicked massive ass in the Avon 3 Day, and raised over 17,000 dollars in about six months. My stats tell me that about half a million different people read this site each month. Even more read it through various forms of syndication. Can you imagine how much we could do if you all kicked in a dollar, or two dollars? If every person who visits this site were to collect change and stuff for a day, and sponsor us for that amount, we would, together, contribute over ONE MILLION DOLLARS to help fund research that could save Kris’s life.
Think about the power you have. Isn’t it wonderful?

I occasionally contribute to this fantastic online magazine called “The Cult of the One Eyed Cat.” It’s named after a real cat, who only has one eye, who once gave me half a look that chills me to this day.
This month’s issue is all about Valentine’s Day, so I wrote a snarky piece wherein I get frank about my true feelings for this annual tradition.
Here’s a little bit to get you started:

Valentine’s Day is upon us yet again, and husbands and boyfriends all over the country are trying to solve a fiendishly complex puzzle: what do we get our wives and girlfriends? If you’re dating, are you dating long enough for roses? What if you’re dating too long for roses? And what color? Should you get chocolates, because she’s so sweet, or should you stay away from chocolates because she will freak about how it’s going to make her fat?
The stakes are incredibly high. If we work out the Rube Goldberg machine that is the female psyche, we may just get that once-a-year blowjob . . . but if we fail to read the tea leaves correctly, we end up spending the evening alone in the bedroom with ESPN Classics while she watches Lifetime in the living room and talks on the phone with her bitter single friend who hates us.

You can read the rest of my story, and some other stories that are much better than mine, at The Cult of the One Eyed Cat

A messenger just dropped off a script for Teen Titans! I get to be Aqualad again on Friday!! Yes!
\m/
If you feel a great disturbance in The Force Friday afternoon, don’t worry. It’s just me geeking out so hard, I turn into some sort of Galaxy Being. Everything will be back to normal on Saturday.

Public Service Announcement, Nerd-style:
The Wizards of the Coast stores, called The Gamekeeper here in Los Angeles, are all going out of business. Their stock is still pretty good, and everything is at least 40% off the cover.
So, if you’re like me and you were waiting to get the D&D 3.5 corebooks, now would be a good time. If you’re a poker nerd, you can also get clay chips there on the cheap, and if you’ve ever wanted to venture into games like Settlers of Catan or Diplomacy, they’ve got those as well. All 40% off.
Personally, I think most games are overpriced to begin with, so 40% off brings them right down to a very affordable and reasonable level.
Now go forth, and nerd-ify!

OK Computer plays from my CDRW drive as I write this. I’m using Windowmaker, which I haven’t touched since Red Hat 5.2. I ::heart:: wmaker. I forgot just how amazingly wonderful it is. I’ve got my iBook on my desk to my right, and I check it every 30 minutes or so for new e-mail.
I’m sure I paint a lovely image of computer geekery . . . but I’m booted into Knoppix 3.3, because somehow I hosed my login thingy (gdm, I think?) over the weekend. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the kde 3.2 install I did, but I’m not exactly sure. All I know right now is that my /home partition is safe, as are all the Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot files within said partition. I’m pretty confident that I can boot into runlevel 2 and fix it . . . but holy shit, man, I’ve been running Knoppix for . . .
knoppix@ttyp0[knoppix]$ uptime
23:05:52 up 11:05, 0 users, load average: 0.11, 0.30, 0.25
twenty-three hours eleven hours. (Yes, I realize what a total lameass I am. Here’s my cap, my pocket protector, and my sliderule. But you can have my polyhedral dice when you pry them from my cold, dead hands . . . provided I fail my saving throw, of course), and it’s awesome. Because I’m running Knoppix out of RAM, it’s moving at transwarp speed. If you’ve even shown the tiniest hint of geekery in your life, you owe it to yourself to give Knoppix (or any LiveCD, really) a go.
So the burning question is: do I get to a free spin on my propeller cap because I’m doing this from a live CD, using my CDRW drive to play an audio CD, and seriously looking at Gentoo, (The idea of a linux distro that’s optimized just for my machine is so alluring to me, and I’ve spent several hours looking at Gentoo’s site tonight) or do I lose 5d12+10 nerd points for not spending the last 23 11 hours tracking down the problem and fixing it?