It is currently 7:25AM. At 11:00AM, I will be standing at the altar, watching my beautiful bride approach. By 12:00PM I will be married to the most beautiful and wonderful woman whom God has provisioned for me.

I will be out of reach from the point I click the "Submit" button to post this entry until sometime after July 19th. I will do my best to post some sort of update after that (if not sneaking it in sometime before) and share with you the joy of my new married life.

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Mr. Mosquito,

I would like to thank you for finding refuge in my eye socket. I know that the world can be a harsh place, and it gives me a sense of self-worth to know that my eye can be a secure location for you. I hope you enjoyed your stay. Come back any time.

-Me

That's right, engaged.

Emily and I have been dating since June 4, 2009, and with each day that goes by I know with greater clarity that we were meant for each other.

Sometime a couple of months ago, we got to talking about wedding stuff, and she asked me if she and her mom could start planning for a wedding. Even thought I hadn't yet bought a ring and there wasn't an official announcement, I told her they could. I did this knowing that I would soon make it official and ask her to marry me.

Even before that, I began shopping around for rings. She didn't know it, but I was using my limited free time to get around to various shops and inquire about rings, educating myself of the different cuts and grades of diamonds, and finding that one ring that was just right. She had given me some direction before, pointing out ring styles she liked, and I took these into consideration.

Finally, I was able to find the ring that I wanted for her. It wasn't extravagant by any means, but it was definitely something I knew she'd like. This just happened to transpire just before her birthday, so I used the opportunity to make it a very special birthday that she will (hopefully) never forget.

I organized a birthday party for her last night with a group of people from the church. Before we went to dinner though, I had to find a parking space. We got to one space, but I wasn't sure about the cost, so Emily jumped out to check the meter for me. While she did that, I pulled out this little box wrapped in silver paper with a large bow on it, and I gave it to her when she came back to the car.

I wanted her to open it and I would have said a few words then asked her to marry me. But with the frustration of trying to unwrap the box, I lost track of what I was going to say. So when she opened it up and marveled at it, I just asked her a question consisting of the 5 most important words of what I was going to say, "Emily, will you marry me?" Her response was confident; "Of course," she said. This set the mood for the evening and the rest of the weekend though, and she has been on cloud nine ever since.

Thus, I am proud to announce that I will be marrying my lovely girlfriend fiancée, Emily, this summer.

Well, I had the CT scan yesterday and got the call about the results today. Apparently everything is normal and looking good, so I'm supposed to take "NuLev" as I feel the "attacks" coming on.

Can anyone say "blargh"?

I have just returned from seeing a gastroenterologist for my stomach issues I've mentioned repeatedly before.

After explaining the happenings of the last 10 years to her, along with all the symptoms, she was able to get an idea of where to start looking. She said that if I didn't have the back pain that usually accompanies the mass exodus, it would probably just be IBS. But since there's more than just IBS-like symptoms, and because of where the back pain is, she's thinking it's something to do with the pancreas.

Thus, I am being scheduled for another CT scan next week, this time of my abdominal area. She said that it would involve being injected with and drinking some dye, the latter of which I'm not exactly looking forward to. However, after talking with her, I am feeling pretty good about finding a solution.

For the last 2 or 3 weeks I have noticed a massive rash of stupidity in the environments in which I have immersed myself. The biggest factor to this stupidity is the inability of others to use common sense and logic, but there are other issues such as selfishness that come into play.

When you're doing anything, use your brain and think. Make sure that the decisions you're making actually make sense in the realm of reality, and that they help more people than just yourself. In fact, if option A helps more people than option B, option A is clearly the better candidate.

Now, that having been said, STOP BEING STUPID!

This concludes this episode of Quick Rant(tm).

It's been a long while since I've posted any new content, and that's because I've been incredibly busy with work, church, and a wonderful girlfriend. I really wish I could take the time to post more about those, but I just wanted to take a quick moment to let everyone know that I'm finally going to see a doctor about this stomach stuff.

Last August, my doctor gave me a referral to a gastroenterologist, but I had been in a bit of a roller coaster situation with it: When it was bad, I would think "I need to call that doctor." But when it was good, I didn't even consider it.

Well, last night when I was leaving the office, I barely made it to my car before one of the "attacks" hit, and I had to make a mad dash back to the office. I was able to make it home before the next wave of it hit, but just barely.

After I had exhausted myself (in a couple different senses of the word), I found the referral that my doctor had given me and finally scheduled an appointment with the GI doctor.

I have a full blood panel coming up in a couple of weeks, which is just to mainly check on my cholesterol and such, but I opted for the full panel because I want to be able to rule out any other issues.

Beyond that, I have an appointment with the GI doctor on April 1st, at which point I hope to get a lot more answers than what I currently have, and get on the road to treatment.

If I get some time over the next few weeks, I'll post some more updates about the rest of what's going on in life. Until then, this is what you get. :P

Sometime earlier today I was alerted by a colleague that one of the servers I'm responsible for began sending a large amount of e-mails.

I logged into the server to find that the load had risen to a rather unacceptable level, so I looked to see what the source of it was. It turns out that the exim mail queue was quickly growing, and that exim was attempting to deliver all those messages at once. The number of messages in the queue when I logged in was somewhere around 60,000, but by the time I realized what was really happening and stopped all the mail services, the queue grew to 144,000 messages in size.

So off to the exim logs I went, and I found out exactly which account on the server was responsible for the resource abuse. Further investigation showed that they were sending out phishing messages though.

After I made my way to the user's now-disabled account, I found that they were using a version of Joomla dated 2006-12-18.

While I was at it, I decided to see how many of the primary accounts on the server were running old, outdated versions of Joomla or Mambo. Turns out, it was a large enough number that I am now in the process of building reports and notification systems to make sure the account holders keep their applications updated.

So why am I going to all this work just for "some stupid Joomla sites", you wonder. Joomla is actually pretty popular, and this blog entry alone will probably increase my Google page rank for searches involving the name of the product, just for the few times I've used it in this entry.

But now that I have the attention of anyone who would care, I want to make sure that each and every one knows that these old versions of Joomla and Mambo (especially Mambo) are very insecure.

The vendors update their applications for reasons greater than just adding new features. They fix holes in the code that allow a malicious user to tarnish the reputation of a server, such as what I am still cleaning up.

Do the world a favor and update your applications. I'm tired of cleaning up after you.

As I previously mentioned, here is a video of my popping foot:

I got a call from the doctor's office today, and they said that I would have to pay $312 for the foot surgery, plus 20% of the anesthesia and facility costs issued by the hospital. This means I'm probably looking at about $600-$800 for the surgery, if not more.

I don't know what's more painful, the foot, or the violent ripping of money from my wallet.

This morning at about 10:00, I got a call from the doctor's office. They wanted to know if I would be able to reschedule for 2:00 this afternoon instead of 9:00 tomorrow morning. I told them that was fine, so I left work at 1:00 to get to the hospital in time.

At about 1:45, I made it to the check-in desk and within a couple of minutes was back in the exam room. I had to wait a little bit to see the doctor, but he came in within 10 minutes to tell me what the CT scan showed.

He said that the scan really didn't show anything, but he was certain it was a bone spur and that he would like to proceed with surgically removing it. After getting a couple of general questions answered, he had me talk to the nurse about scheduling the operation. He said that they really only do it on Friday mornings, such that the patient only has to be off work for 1 day. He said that I would be on crutches for the first few days, but that I could get back to work as soon as that following Monday.

After the nurse came in, I told her that I would really need to talk with my transportation (Read: Emily) to figure out when would be the best. The nurse said that I could schedule it for as soon as this Friday, or as late as March 5th. Anything after that would be too cloudy to nail down unless we wait until closer to then.

So right now I'm waiting on the financial side of today's information to come through before I schedule. I'll probably shoot for March 5th, but possibly even March 12th since Emily is on spring break that following week anyhow.

Right now I'm waiting on Youtube to quit being in read-only mode so I can upload a video of the popping. It's kinda gross, but it puts it into perspective. I'll add a commentary to it when it's uploaded.

I really don't remember how much I shared previously about this whole foot thing, and I don't really feel like reading over it and trying to tie it into more recent happenings. Thus, I am just going to start at the top and paint the full picture from start to present.

Sometime when I was somewhere around 16 years old, I joined a basketball team for the local group of home schoolers. I was never very athletic, but since I was tall for my age, I held the defense pretty well.

On night during a game, I had the opportunity to jump and catch a missed shot. After I caught it and began my descent to the floor, I landed wrong and rolled my ankle. I was able to pass the ball to one of my teammates, but I was hurting for the rest of the game. After a couple days of taking it easy, the sprain seemed to heal up pretty well... or so I thought.

A couple of years passed and I noticed a very distinct popping in my ankle. It never really hurt at first, but as time progressed it got painful. It was bad enough that it was affecting my sleep, and thereby impacting my day-to-day life. One day, I let it get the best of me and had a bit of an emotional breakdown. My mom saw this and decided that I needed to get my foot x-rayed, so she took me to the doctor.

The doctor there said that it looked like I had an infarction of some sort down towards my toes, but that there was no sign of anything causing the popping. He told me to just take some over-the-counter painkillers and use ice, and that seemed to take care of the pain. However, the popping never went away.

I saw other doctors for it and got a good dose of radiation from the X-rays, MRI, and bone scan. None of them came to any conclusion other than I had bone spurs up by my toes, and one said that I just had tendonitis and that it would go away after a few days (he apparently didn't understand me when I said it had been going on for a couple of years). I did receive cortisone treatments for the bone spurs, but they didn't really do any good; they actually caused me more pain for quite a while.

When the doctors said that the only thing left to do was exploratory surgery, I thanked them for their time and moved on with life.

The popping has continued since then and has had chronic pain spells along with it, but I've been able to deal. That was, until a couple of weeks ago when I decided to go for a bike ride.

This bike ride was by no means my first, not even over an extended period of time, but it did seem to be the one to drive me to seek further treatment. After a little less than 6 miles, I noticed my foot was aching, so I called it quits. For the rest of that evening I was pretty sore still and decided to hit up the ibuprofen and ice packs.

By the next day, I was unable to walk worth anything. Putting weight on that foot was pretty painful (I'd rank it an 8 or 9 on the 1-10 scale that doctors use), and the pain radiated all the way up to my knee. I continued the ice and ibuprofen, and decided that if I was still hurting on Monday I would go see a doctor.

Monday came around and I was still hurting, so I got an appointment for that afternoon with my primary care doctor. Unfortunately, I got the last appointment for the day, and by the time I got to see the doctor, she really didn't seem to care at all. Any time I would try to talk, she would interrupt me, and her attitude was less than professional. All my previous visits though were very pleasant, so I just attributed it to the end of a long Monday. She did tell me to continue with the ice and ibuprofen and just to stay off my foot for a couple of weeks as much as possible. She said that if after a week or so I was still in pain, I should go see an orthopedic specialist (for whom she gave me a referral).

A week passed and I was still hurting, so I called the specialist. I was able to get in the next day to see him, which was a bit of a relief to me.

After examining my foot, bending and twisting it every which way, he was finally able to find the motion that made it pop, and the popping was quite painful. He said that he was pretty certain it was a bone spur, scar tissue, or a torn ligament, and that to correct any of these issues would be pretty straightforward and require simple outpatient surgery. However, before committing to such, he ordered a CT scan.

The CT scan was this morning at 7:20AM (which meant I had to be awake at 5:00AM and out the door at 5:30 to be to the hospital no later than 6:30). After fumbling around with finding the right parking garage (it looks much different in the dark than it does in the daylight), I made my way up to the 10th floor of the hospital to the radiology department. After checking in, receiving my armband, and waiting for another 20 minutes to be called back by a technician, I was on the table with my feet in the middle of a tubular-looking machine, not dissimilar to that of an MRI. Another 10 or 15 minutes elapsed while the table moved me about in the machine and the images were taken, and I was on my way to the office.

Now I'm waiting until Tuesday to meet with the specialist again to go over the results of the CT scan (and get copies of the images, which I plan on sharing). While I am eagerly awaiting a diagnosis and treatment plan, I am not looking forward to surgery of any sort. I have never had any surgical procedures since my infancy, so I really don't know how to feel about them, other than scared. The other thing that freaks me out is the whole bit that the specialist said about "chiseling" the bone spur off my foot. [insert shudder here] It just sounds painful, especially given the fact that I have broken bone spurs off my fingers before, and even though I've broken bones including vertebrae, I have yet to experience a pain like breaking that bone spur off.

Luckily though, my lovely girlfriend, Emily, has said she would be able to take care of me the day of any surgery, and I know several others who would be able to help in some form, so there is some comfort in the midst of the turmoil.

I appreciate all the prayers and support that I have received to date. I'll try my best to keep everyone up to date on the situation as it progresses.

I'm really tired so this is going to be short and to the point.

I hurt my foot playing basketball when I was about 16. It gave me problems after that and I went to see a doctor when I was 17, but they didn't find anything. I let it slide.

I went for a bike ride a couple of weeks ago and I've been in so much pain since that my sleep schedule has suffered. Over the last couple of days, I've only had 6 hours of sleep.

I went to see a specialist today, and he believes it to be a bone spur causing me pain. I am going for a CT scan on Friday, and I'll go back to see the specialist next week to discuss the CT scan and further treatment. He said that it'll probably be outpatient surgery and that they'll chip the bone spur off. He said it would only be a couple of days that I would be unable to walk, and that recovery would be 6 to 8 weeks.

If I'm not as freakin' exhausted as I am now, I'll share more after I see the doctor again. For now, I'm going to try to (not) sleep.

Tonight after Emily and I got back from dinner, I stopped the car next to the mailbox to get the mail. In the mail was a white card from Houston Police Department, notifying me that my car had been towed and that I was responsible for the fees to release it.

On the card was listed a blue 2009 Mitsubishi Lancer, the associated VIN, and the license plate number. If you've been keeping up with my life much, you'll know that I did recently buy a 2009 Lancer.

Now, my car is not blue as you'll see in the pictures on the link above, but everything else about that notification matches my car. People have suggested that maybe the police officer who filed the report or whatever took and took down the VIN, made a typo in doing so. See, I would agree with that, but the fact that the license plate number matches the number on the temporary tags from when I got the car is just weird.

I'm going to be calling the police department first thing tomorrow morning to find out what's really going on here. My worst fear with it is that somehow my VIN and everything was copied and that either I have an illegitimate car, or someone else does with my same information.

Earlier this year when I went to the doctor for my blood pressure, she noticed that I was shaking a fair amount. At the time, we both attributed it to the blood pressure being high, and we moved on.

Later in the year, when I went in for my initial consult about my back, the other doctor I saw noticed I was shaking. I didn't notice it, but she thought it was from the pain I was in with my back, so we didn't really labor over it any.

Well, my back has been pretty much better (though not 100%) for a couple of months, I've experimented with removing caffeine from my diet, and there has really been no improvement for the tremors.

I have mentioned it to my doctor again since then, and she hasn't really put any focus on it other than an "oh". I'm really starting to get tired of it though, because it's starting to affect my day to day living. For example, I haven't been able to type very well today because I keep hitting extra keys, hitting intended keys multiple times, or missing the keys all together.

Also, I've noticed that my legs are really weak and I have a bit of a "bobbing" in my head when I'm at rest. It's really starting to frustrate me to the point that I'm taking it out on others, which I really hate to do and by no means intend.

I have an appointment for blood work and a follow up next week, so I'm going to talk with the doctor about it then. I really don't want to find out that it's something serious like Parkinson's, Peripheral Neuropathy, or Multiple Sclerosis, but I need to find out what it is and get it taken care of.

In other news, I'm looking to trade my body for one in better shape. If you have any leads, please let me know.

Well, now that the dust is settling, I think it's high time I clue everyone in on what I've been up to this week.

Some of you may have seen my Facebook status updates about moving, but have no clue where or why. For that, you need a little back story.

Sometime a couple of months ago, my buddy Efren mentioned that he was looking to get an apartment and was asking me for recommendations. I pointed him towards a couple of different places, but after thinking about it and talking with Emily, I decided to offer splitting a 2 bedroom with Efren, thereby saving us both some cash. He was excited at the offer, and we started the process shortly after that.

Sometime in the middle of November, we took a visit to The Bordeaux and looked at the one unit they had open (2 bed/2 bath). We were both pleased with the apartment and with the terms, so we ended up applying. This last Monday, we met at the leasing office here and signed our lease and started the move-in right away. I had scheduled Wednesday through Friday off to handle moving out of my old place and cleaning it to avoid losing my deposit, but I ended up working Monday evening and Tuesday evening to get the primary necessities (is that redundant?) moved.

During the move, I had to terminate my internet service at the old place and schedule an installation of it at the new place. Luckily, I was able to get AT&T's uVerse service for $20 less than I was paying for the same speed DSL each month. The installation was scheduled for sometime between 1:00PM and 3:00PM on the 3rd, which was Thursday, but the installer didn't call to say he was on the way until sometime after 6:00PM. I had a lot of packing and moving and cleaning stuff to get done at the old place and had planned to head back over there to do just that after 3:00PM, since the internet would have been installed. But no, I didn't get back over there until sometime after 7:00PM. Grr.

Well, the kinks have all been worked out and Efren and I have moved in to the new place. I still have about 4 Rubbermaid tubs to unpack yet, but after spending all of today cleaning I just have no motivation to touch it. I told Emily that I would get it all done tomorrow morning, but I don't know that I'll get all of it done. We'll see.

So yeah, that's it in a nutshell. I'll get some pictures of this new place after I get everything unpacked. If you're in Houston and would like to see the place though, let me know.