flu

So the other day I was talking about influenza with some of my relatives, and I realized, I don't know exactly HOW bird flu kills people. I just figured some sort of immune system overreaction. But what happens exactly? So i looked it up in wikipedia today, and it looks like this is the answer: Cytokine storm

From Wikipedia:

A cytokine storm is a potentially fatal immune reaction consisting of a positive feedback loop between cytokines and immune cells. When the immune system is fighting pathogens, cytokines signal immune cells such as T-cells and macrophages to travel to the site of infection. In addition, cytokines activate those cells, stimulating them to produce more cytokines. Normally this feedback loop is kept in check by the body. However, in some instances, the reaction becomes uncontrolled, and too many immune cells are activated in a single place. The precise reason for this is not entirely understood. Cytokine storms have potential to do significant damage to body tissues and organs. If a cytokine storm occurs in the lungs, for example, fluids and immune cells such as macrophages may accumulate and eventually block off the air passageways.

It's possible that a healthy immune system is more of a liability with bird flu. The idea being a less responsive immune system wouldn't get you into this feedback loop, at least not as badly. Or something.

grandpa richard

I went to Michigan last week to say goodbye to my grandpa. He passed away on March 18. I was glad that i could be there, and listen to great stories about Grandpa and Grandma. I also got to look through all of these wonderful photographs from the 30's and 40's of the family. My dad gave a really touching speech yesterday at the funeral and I'm proud of him. I'm also really glad that he decided to move to Michigan to spend more time with his parents. I think it is great he got to see his dad almost every day for the last four years, and spend time with him. Our family has lived out west for most of my life, so we never really got to see mom's, or dad's relatives very much.

Dad shared some stories about grandpa and played a great song he had written called Critical Mass. He really brought memories of grandpa to life - funny ones and noble ones. Grandpa as it turns out wasn't a staunch Republican like I always assumed. He wrote these amazing letters to Senator Romney in MI about civil rights in the 60's and was actually quite politically active in that way. But nobody knew it till dad found the letters. Grandpa was also passionate about trying to asve this great old tree, the Copper Beech, in downtown Plymouth. And Grandpa was stupid and silly sometimes too - like when he stuck this old-style bottle cap on his cheek and ended up with a perfectly formed bright red hickey. I like to imagine what he said the next day at work!

I don't have a whole lot of memories of grandpa. I always lived thousands of miles of away except for my first year of life, which of course I'm not going to be remembering.

I have a fond memory of visiting when I was a kid and helping Grandpa out with the yard, which was one of his pride and joys. He paid me one penny for each walnut thingy I picked up. Little capitalist Rachel was totally obsessed with gathering those things. The yard was beautiful - full of trees and with a beautiful stone wall running through it that Grandpa built to deal with the sloping yard. He was a meticulous craftsman.

Dad told this story of driving out to the house one day about a year or so ago. There was a walker in the bushes, and a ladder leaning up against the two-story house. He walked inside and found Grandpa taking a nap. When dad asked what grandpa had been up to, he said "Someone has to clean the gutterz!" Dad said Grandpa felt more comfortable on the ladder then the ground after he got Parkinson's disease. But everyone else worried!

I also am really proud of him for his accomplishments at Ford without ever getting a college degree. He was the resident engineer of multiple Ford plants simultaneously, and he was trained as an engineer at a Ford Trade school. I remember when I was still at the University of Washington I saw grandpa once. We talked about my math classes - the usual engineering mix of Diff Eq and the like. We got to bond over that - he had taken many of these courses himself while at Ford and had really liked taking them too.

I was also really glad for the chance to see many of my relatives, on both sides of my family - Grandma, Dad, Brooke (who flew out from WA), Aunt Nancy, Uncle Dave, Great-aunt Midge, my cousins Jeff & Eric & Danny & Betsy, my new second cousins (and the "old" ones, too :-), and Liz and Gary (first-cousin once removed i believe is the term).And everyone else. It was so nice to get to talk to everyone and try to help out a little. I'll miss you Grandpa.

little cuzns

I have tonz of cute little cousins now. And second cousins. Mom wuz going to kill Brooke & me if we didn't go see Uncle David and get lots of cute pix of our latest cousin Kerrigan. And Conor, and Campbell, and Kennedy. (They like alliteration, if u haven't noticed). Fortunately (not becuz our lives were spared, but because it was nice), we did get to visit them right before we left. And mom, here are Brooke & myself holding...gasp...a baby! Don't get 2 excited now.

First picture is of the Kivisto's.

Second picture is Brooke holding Kerrigan.

Last picture is me holding Kerrigan, and all of us cousins posing together.

United = Rat Bastards

Can i just say I hate United now? I had to change my flight so I can attend my grandpa's funeral. They don't offer bereavement fares anymore, so I had to pay 260 bucks to stay an extra day. However, as it turns out, I could have changed my flight free, because of snow storms in Denver. But they didn't offer this to me on the phone yesterday, oh no. Lets just charge her as much as we possibly can. I already said earlier today that I will always fly Southwest in the future if that is an option, and you know what - it would have been well, well worth the extra fifty dollars. They are the only decent airline that i know of these days.

from United's website

Dates and cities impacted

Traveling on March 19-20: (with tickets purchased on or before March 19)

To and from the following city/cities: Denver, CO

Summary of reaccomodation policy changes All United®, United Express®, TedSM and United code-share flights are covered under the policy. For customers currently en route who would like to adjust a return trip: Rules and restrictions regarding standard change fees, advance purchase, day or time applications, and/or minimum stay or Saturday night-stay requirements have been waived. For customers who have not begun travel: You may make one change to your travel plans without change fees or advance purchase requirement for the same itinerary. For a new itinerary, you may make one change without change fees. Rescheduled travel may be subject to higher fares if it does not meet original rule and booking codes restrictions or is a new itinerary.

new pic on blog

I took this pic with my cell a few weeks ago, not the most thrilling pic, I'm thinking of it as a my "emo" pic. If you RSS readers want to see it, you have to go here. But I'm sick of my Japanese lantern pic.

pioneer grrlz

I was in my beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder dress.

me, chubby cheeked

Well, i guess it's those same chubby cheeks that keep me lookin' young now. :-)

Form Assembly review 2

The people at FormAssembly wrote me in regards to my last blog entry on them, which I think is great. I was planning on emailing them, but I guess Google worked some indexing magic. And they've already made changes that fix some of my complaints.

Anyway, I want to say again how much I luv FormAssembly.com.

A wish: Since I am making so many forms with their site, I wish that I could save the Javascript and CSS files in separate folders. What I would like is to have the option to specify the path to the css and js: for example, to have them in a directory called "Spreadsheet-Generator" or perhaps even to have them named spreadsheet-generator.js instead of their standard wforms.js.

Right now I just move them into directories, but then I have to update the paths in the HTML myself.

Also that it would remember my preference to host the form myself would be nice - it looks like it always defaults to hosting at FormAssembly.

One bug: When I make pull-down lists with different options, if i choose that an option should be automatically-selected by default, all the future ones I make also are selected. So there are multiple things selected by default using radio buttons, which is telling me that each radio button has a different name. But mostly annoying cause you cannot UNSELECT an item in the list. Once it is selected, you are stuck with it. i've attached a picture which makes it clear what I am trying to say here.

Anyway, i must reiterate, if you need an HTML form for a web page, don't do it yourself, go try out formassembly.com. It is really great too for people who don't want to parse form results, because they let you view form responses on their web page or in RSS. Great entry-level form processing.

map

create your own visited country map

y combinator thoughts

I wrote this on the plane in between reading "Pirates! In an adventure with Scientists". Here is hte blog entry in it's overly long, stream of consciousness entirety.

We had our meeting with Y Combinator yesterday. We didn't end up getting seed funding from them, and the reason that PG stated was surprising to me, but makes sense, particularly from an investor's viewpoint.

Paul Graham mostly said one thing during the meeting. It was not auspicious - he said, "Who would buy you?" Admittedly, a good question for a potential investor to think about. Not as important for myself - after all, I'd be happy with some good revenue that lets me earn a decent living. But an investor is going to want a liquidity event to profit off of their investment.

I think i did charm them with my various anecdotes of how I use CrikeyGuru to do everything these days, and my imagining of what one can do with the service. But they really wanted us to do it ALL ourselves. And I just see that as taking away too much development time from the other stuff we would like to build. I'm fine building that later if it becomes necessary - say mturk shuts down shop. We could build it quite quickly. But why reinvent the wheel? Why not rewrite PayPal while I am at it? Why not rewrite Apache to serve the web pages?

I used to be the kind of coder who wanted to reinvent the wheel, rewrite everything. But at some point I become lazier. I'm not at that "if it ain't broke don't fix it" point exactly, but I've gotten a lot closer to that mentality. I've learned to make the most of my coding time by using frameworks, third-party modules, and third-party web services like mturk. MTurk let us get up and running so much faster than if I had said, "Oh Mechanical Turk, what a great idea. Let's write our own!"

One of the reasons I love coding in Perl is all the available code out there. CPAN, the archive of Perl modules (like libraries) is Perl's killer app. Aaron Swartz wrote web.py for Python. I would never do that. It is already available for Perl and is brilliant. I don't have to write all sorts of things, because soemone else wrote it already. IT saves me a LOT of time. I've thought about coding in Ruby because Ruby is clean and easier to read and more object-oriented. But Ruby doesn't have WWW::Mechanize, which lets me easily use code to surf the web, which i use all the time to test web pages or check bank account balances. Sure, a community has to start somewhere, someone has to write the first code. But I don't have time for that, and I see no reason to leave Perl. I will do that when I see a that something I really need is no longer being met by Perl, or that some other language solves some huge problem.

My best guesses are the following: eBay - if we focus on customer service, answering all those questions that people on ebay email (you know, to ask about a product, follow-up, etc). Another large company like Yahoo! or Google, who are implementing their own mechanical turk like product. They could use our stores idea as a showcase product for their new product. But is anyone thinking of doing this?

Also, we met a guy who used to work at Amazon, on the Mechanical Turk project. He got YC funding for the winter session, and was hacking in the office that day. He couldn't tell us much as it was obvious he was still under NDA with them. But it was interesting to talk to him some and work out some puzzle pieces.

Trevor Blackwell seemed quite interested in our idea, Robert Morris didn't say a single word, Jessica Livingston desperately needs our transcription services for her hours of audio tape, and Paul Graham mostly wanted us to reinvent MTurk.

I was joking last night that the problem is Nathan and I are lazy - we don't want to do everything ourselves. Hell, I outsource just about everything I can to MTurk these days - I outsourced customer service the other night, I outsource phone calls I need to make. My latest idea is to get some sort of organizational method that uses MTurk to figure out what the hell I need to do and prioritize my day for me.

Hmm i should wrap up this entry now. basically, i think we are better off working with Amazon then going it alone. They are offering us tons of great help - in many ways, help a lot like what YC would offer. But all free.

interesting

http://reubgr.livejournal.com/91366.html

Close but no cigar.

We didn't get it because "of our resistance to implementing mturk ourselves." And about how not good to depend on anything like that when you are a start up. Maybe i'm remembering wrong. I'll write up my recollection of today on the plane manana.

thor in a tree

just downloaded some photos from the camera today, this was on it.

conservatory

Pitcher plant (carnivorous little beast) Aquatic Room at the Conservatory.

at the de Young museum

It is this Andy Goldsworthy installation at the new museum in Golden Gate Park. There are these big slabs of rock, with cracks running through them . The crack continues along the rock floor as well as if it were a natural fissure in the earth. but of course each crack line was carefully cut to look natural, or perhaps, carefully cracked. Building is intersting, big rusty mesh cage look. Quite cool in fact despite my description.

california

So I am trying to remember the last time I was in Calfornia. I am pretty sure that the last time I was in San Francisco (ok, so i'm not there yet, later today) was 1997. I remembering visiting Daniella during her junior semester "abroad" in San Francisco. That was in the fall, junior year, so i believe that makes it 97. So I've never seen it in its dot-com expensive yuppy glory. So nine years ago.

I might have been in california the next year as well. Brooke came back from her year abroad in Finland -Brooke, can you help me out here - which I believe would be 1998. We drove down to California and did a big road trip to San Diego, as well as LA and Yosemite where we stole away my friend Liz and took her to the island. Drive back via Eureka and Eugene OR, where I dented the Silver Bullet.

Anyway, it's somewhat humid here, but it's also the lowlands! I miss mountains and high altitude, although I know that my blood oxygen levels are sky high here and I could probably go run some marathon or something. Ok, so probably not.

We're staying with John and Angie in San Mateo - it's fun to see them - John used to work with Nathan at "the cow" in ABQ. Now we get to see them in their native element, this "bay area" place we heard so much about from them. And their cat Sophia luvz me so so much - she gave me a big eskimo cat kiss.

Oh yeah, if by any chance any of you who live in the bay area read my blog, email me. I'm leave pretty late on Monday. This would be specifically directed at Kirstin, Rachel W (rather, Rachel L now), and Paula. And Suzie, and whoever else i know who lives here!!!