Month: December 2004

Dad wound up in the hospital at the start of the week. Despite the fact

that his donor kidney failed earlier this year, he still has to take

immunospuppresant drugs to keep from rejecting it (I’m told it’s bad to

remove it even though it no longer works). Unfortunately, that leaves

him open to a number of germs that most of us would shrug off. He

contracted some kind of lung infection and showed really bad fever

symptoms, which led to his being taken to the hospital.

Back in 1999, a few months before my sister’s wedding, Dad got very

ill, and a good chunk of what kept the ol’ warhorse going was my sister

saying “I’ll be very sad if you’re not at my wedding.” Following the

same tack, when I visited him in the coronary care unit last night, I

got him sitting up and conversing lively with talk about

how Chanukah with Wendy’s family went (the latkes were delicious, they really made me feel like part of the family and I

made out like a bandit, present-wise) and various wedding plans.

The silver lining in the could is that Dad’s condition inspires me to keep working out and eating right.

I’m going to drop by this afternoon and leave him his favourite light reading: People and US magazine. Dad’s a great guy, but his taste in reading material is atrocious.

Once again, if you have any prayers, good thoughts (or if any of you Feng Shui types want to move the coffee table a couple of inches for his sake), they’d be appreciated.

I’ve been spending the day at the Internet + Society 2004 Conference, and it’s been pretty good. I’ve taken lots of notes, but I have to clean them up and format them before I can post. Cool presentations all ’round, and I got to see some old friends and get plenty of congratulations for getting engaged to Wendy.

More later!

I’m going to Boston tonight, which means that it’s time to pull out my traditional “going to Boston” photo:

“Pahhk the cahh in Hahhvahhd Yahhd and get me some frahhhd dough. It’s wicked frahhhd.”

More accurately, I’m going to be in the People’s Republic of Cambridge — this evening, catching up with my lovely fiancee and catching the opening debate between a Republican campaigner and Democrat campainger (more details in the second half of this post) at Harvard’s Internet + Society 2004 Conference: “Votes, Bits and Bytes”.

This conference, where the intersection of the internet, civics and

politics will be discussed in depth, and I expect the level of

discourse to be better than this:

Click the comic to see it at full size.

Last night, Toronto 1’s Mark

McAllister came by the office with a cameraman and interviewed me about

blogs in general. The interview, which was fun and went well, might air

tomorrow night. As luck would have it, I’ll be out of town.

My thanks to Mark and Carmen the cameraman for the fun!