OK I've added a new toy to the sidebar -- the BaBeLiZeR. It's still a little rough around the edges and it isn't a very original hack -- I'm sure you can find someplace on the web that does something very similar. It takes a phrase and translates it into 11 languages then translates the phrase back again. The last BaBeLiZeR use shows at the bottom of the BNL left sidebar.

I got the idea for doing this shortly after posting translation links for my wife's blog. The translations give just the barest idea of what her Chinese language posts are about -- current translation technology seems a very hard nut to crack even for big players like Google.com. My hack uses WorldLingo.com, so thanks WorldLingo for not blocking third party queries.

So anyway enjoy. If you're too lazy to think up a reasonable phrase to translate just leave the text area blank and the BaBeLiZeR will grab the current CNN.com headlines and babelize them.

I just had to waste around an hour implementing a "captcha" word verification system to discourage spamming on the Zen Image field at top. I've been hit by spammers 3 days in a row, so I assume my Zen Image comment field is on some sort of list. The first day you actually had to scroll down to see the first entry in my blog the spam was so bad. Today should be the last time we hear from Mr. Adipex.

The post comments are taken care of by blogger, but the general comment fields that have been in place for years on my other projects are starting to get hammered, so I guess I will have to go fix them as well.

No spammers have hit the Graffiti Board yet. Actually you spam punks can go hang out there for now if you wish, no one has used it for months now.

What better way to spend a day off for a Christian holiday than writing a harangue about abuse of non-Christian rights? I will likely offend some with this week's 1900 word (just couldn't stretch it to 2000 words) DumbSwede's Slashdot.org Journal Editorial entry -- but hey -- tis the season to be offending.

Without further ado I give you Christian Rights Tread Upon -- NOT

Here we are in traditional Chinese wedding gowns for the reception, with me learning the meaning of GOMBAY (bottoms up). Trust me, this is word I learned all too well.

More Wedding Photos

We have more photos on the way and I really need to get going on a good write up about the wedding and ceremony.
I'm always behind on something!

Well it has been a few months since I visited my wife's blog. Before you pass judgement on me as uncaring and insensitive spouse I should explain my wife's blog is in Chinese and I know all of about 3 words of Chinese and none of the Chinese pictograms.

I had submitted her blog way back when to a translation engine called WorldLingo which was the only translation engine listed on Langenberg.com (a collection of popular translation engines) that even worked at all at the time.

It's been about 4 months now, and it looks like WorldLingo has improved its algorithms. I also found Google's translation page Google Language Tools. To my surprise, WorldLingo seems to do a slightly better job, but Google is much faster. Also given the powerhouse Google is I expect Google to improve at a faster rate than WorldLingo and thus be better in the not too distant future.

So here are three links to my wife's blog:
comes suddenly happiness (original Chinese)
comes suddenly happiness (WorldLingo English Translation)
comes suddenly happiness (Google English Translation)
These are dynamic links with fresh translations each time, so expect a delay before the page shows.

It should be noted for the record that my wife (name purposely omitted for this blog entry) has a higher readership in China than I do here in America. I am a little jealous, but my recent essay on IP law on Slashdot.org has had numerous positive feedback comments, so I'm feeling almost like an author myself, at 2,700 words I'm surprised anyone read it, but evidently many did (BOO-YA!).

Hey honey, if you're reading this, you might notice my outdated "Larry's Bio" link on the left has gone away and your blog is now a permenant fixture on BNL.

Oh yeah, one more announcement for BNL, this is my 100th BNL post! Thanks to everybody that's stopped by in this last year, I promise twice as many posts of higher quality in the next. To this end a full refund to anyone dissatisfied with the quality of BNL's journalism.

I've noticed a curious neurological illusion in the wake of my recent lung surgery. Surgery that went well by the way and came up negative for lung cancer (mostly the surgery was unneeded). The approximately 6 inch incision just under the right side of my right pectoral muscle (breast) has resulted in a large numb region just above and below it and extending a little further down and to the left. Obviously some substantial amount of skin nerves where severed in the surgery and only time will tell to what degree they grow back and sensation returns.

OK this all sounds very dry and clinical, but what is unexpected is that when I drink cold fluids now I get a distinct feeling of cold fluid dripping down the inside of my right rib cage -- as if the drink were simpling splashing into some empty region and hitting the bones of my ribs directly. This sensation was so startling the first couple of days I actually wondered to myself if they had punctured something while operating on my lung.

Obviously there is more than just my deadened skin nerves causing this illusion, the cutting in and about the lung are also involved somehow, but it is still curious how the brain is reinterpreting this mangled information into a weird illusion of hollowness on my right side with drinks splashing directly on to my ribs.

Perhaps this might be of some interest to some neurologists. Sometimes these kind of observations provide useful clues as to how the brain and nervous system work. Then again I might just have an all too common post operative case of drinkus-spillingnus-againstus-innerus-ribcagenus.

OK, this one had been brewing for a while, but at four pages and 2,700 words I don't think BNL is the best place for my current essay on IP laws. Quite a while since I've posted a Slashdot.org DumbSwede Journal entry so that's where it goes. See Overhauling Intellectual Property Laws --or-- Balancing Capitalism and Communism for this week's economic opus.

It was my intention to make a really good online photo tour of Nian's and my wedding. I finally found the photo CD she had burned for me to take back to the states, but I'm not really happy with the variety of pictures it has, although some of them, especially the ones of our honeymoon are quite good. I may have to make a photo tour of our honeymoon first while I'm waiting for digital versions of the professional photos. I am especially unhappy that I don't have any pictures of Nian and myself in our traditional Chinese gowns later in the day during the reception. So instead I'm posting just one teaser pic of our wedding itself in traditional western wedding attire. Nian complained that I didn't smile enough during our actual wedding and sadly previewing the pictures shows this to be true. I'm pretty sure the pictures from the reception will be a different story as my smile became wider and wider as I became drunker and drunker.

Like so many things lately I'm slow getting around to this stuff, but it will get done -- I got married after all and that only took 47 years.

It's hard to know how to assess the quality of Google versus Yahoo, I had assumed Google was better and use it almost exclusively for research along with Froogle and Google-News. I can't use Google for my MEME Watch application in the left sidebar however because the Perl program gets blocked by Google.com from doing searches -- not so with Yahoo.com. As it turns out there are definite differences between what MEME-Watch would return if Google could be used versus Yahoo.

In wake of my recent "Milestones" post I decided to do a little vanity search for "Bare Naked Larry" and see what differences Yahoo might show over Google. Imagine my surprise when Yahoo returned 2,450 pages for "Bare Naked Larry" (and yes they are all related to my website) versus only 309 for Google.

One of the most interesting things I found out is that BNL is listed as an acronym for "Bare Naked Larry" at least by Acronymattic.com. In fact it comes in at #14 out of 27. I'm ranked exactly in the middle, right behind "Bangkok Netball League." I would have expected "Bare Naked Ladies" who inspired my web name to be at #1, but they're not even on the list (evidently they don't refer to themselves as BNL whereas I do). It seems unlikely I will ever outrank "Brookhaven National Laboratories" at number #3, but look out "Bangkok Netball League" I'm gunning for you!

Nian and I had a minor disagreement over the phone last night. I have been taking my Darvocet like clockwork since I have come home from the hospital and she expressed concern I should just stop taking it. With only a few pills left it seemed like a moot discussion, as I would have been taking my last pill this morning anyway. I was curious myself how much harder it would be to get along without the Darvocet so I didn't take it last night or in the middle of the night and am now trying to husband my last four pills. I had surmised and suspected that morning might be when I need the pill the most just to get going so to speak. I didn't feel any pangs or longing for the pills in the middle of the night, though resting was a little more uncomfortable, but now it is morning and YOW -- I'm glad I went with the save-the-last-four strategy. I took one pill just about fifteen minutes ago and now things are loosening up enough for me to get on with my day. I'm sure once I get going and keep moving things will stay loose and pain free enough, but boy am I glad I've saved a few pills back for the mornings.

Nian might want me to quit cold turkey, but I'm pretty sure I'm better off with this morning only weaning strategy. I wouldn't know how to get a hold of any more if I wanted. I suppose I could cry and cry to the doctor and probably get a refill, but I won't. It's still hard to imagine getting addicted to them, I don't think I have an addictive personality (but I won't gamble to find out) but it is certainly easy to see how people with money might tell themselves, "hell, just a few more pills won't hurt."

Maybe it is just the recovery process from surgery (hey have I mentioned anywhere in my blog I've had surgery recently?) but I must have been a little confused yesterday when I posted Milestones Part I. I thought I was just shy of 5000 visits when I wrote the entry, but when I posted it I see I had 200 yet to go.... So I am about a week early commenting on the odometer turning over another digit.

More important though is what I would like to say now about differences and diversity. I had mentioned liking people with a tendency to polarize. When I got serious about blogging I did a lot of random surfing to see a lot of examples and get a feel for what blogging was all about. I visited hundreds and hundreds of sites and I found just a few that really struck me as a little out of the ordinary and wrote about them and listed them in my Links Mentioned section. At quite a few sites I dropped a comment or two and they in turn wrote back. For those that I found both engaging and who wrote back to me, I added them to the Friends of BNL section. I'm hardly the first to do this, and I know a lot of people do nothing but expand their presence on the web by getting into as many web-rings as they can. After I had my few friends I just stopped. At first it was about gaining exposure and I could have continued on in that vain, I might pick it up again in a limited way, but my point is I still visit my first few set of web friends from time to time. They are nothing like me, they often hold positions 180 degrees opposed to my own, but I respect them anyway because what they say is less important than the honesty with which they say it. I think a lot of people on the web and in life in general gather people around them of a like mind, but I say this is absolutely the wrong way to gather friends. It's OK to have friends that have the same interests as you, but when you like, respect, and have friends with whom you have little in common then you enlighten and broaden both yourself and them.

Pick friends of good character to be sure, but having a wide variety of friends is what helps connect the world and make it a better place. My own wife Nian and I come from completely different cultural backgrounds, but oh God I love her so. We argue politics and public policy all the time. We just got off the phone tonight arguing about how funds should be spent preventing airline tragedies in wake of the recent Midway accident in Chicago. Boy did the sparks fly, and boy did we have differing opinions, but we are both better off for hearing the other's views all the way through. My point is I could have married someone who likes all the same things I like and agrees with all my positions on all the issues, but then I would never grow as a person. I love Nian MORE because we don't agree on everything.

And so a shout out to Shimona and Frisky and Blasianlotus and KJ and FGL and all my other friends on the web, and to Brian and Mike and Apollo and all my other friends out in the real world and especially a shout out to my wife Nian. I am an agnostic and yet I feel there is some reason the universe has brought you all into my life, some lesson you all have to teach me. And I think this is why we stick by our friends, because if it isn't all just chance (and as an agnostic I have to allow that it is) then your are all in my life for a reason and aren't just interchangeable pieces. And that's really my biggest point of all. If all your friends where the same, then they would be interchangeable pieces, they would all just be Pawns when what you might really need is a Knight or Bishop or a King to get through this game of Chess we call life.

It's 2am as I start to write this. I woke up at first thinking maybe it was time for my pain med, but now I have an hour and a half to go. I'm having a little trouble getting back to sleep however as some thoughts are swirling around in my head and I wanted to start to write them down while they were fresh. Already the ties the bind them together are starting to become ragged in my mind.

First is a comment about my about BNL coming up on its 5000th page view after close to two years of operation, though really only 10 months of consistent posting. I set foot on the web sometime around 1997 I think and while BNL may not have had consistent posting until the last ten months there was always something somewhere getting tweaked for viewing. Originally it was my music collection as a DJ, and then it was a small collection of jokes that I called Larry's Original Humor Page(s). Eventually that expanded to include my writing projects as well. I started a Journal on Slashdot.org for more serious entries in November 1999 and called it a blog, jumping on the blog bandwagon a bit earlier than most, but a year later than really early starters, though my humor pages could in some sense be considered a blog as they grew pretty continuously over time. My journalling on Slashdot.org has slowed as I have ramped up on BNL, but there are over 40 journal entries and 481 comments I have posted to Slashdot.org. Over 500 jokes in the humor pages and over 500 top ten entries (50 lists) between my old Larry's Top Tens and my new Larry's Top Tens. In 2000 I become webmaster for the Canopy Club and created the layout and automatic update for the upcoming calendar it shows. It's not very clean Perl code, but it's still in use almost 5 full years latter, and the look hasn't changed all the much, which while it isn't the greatest on the planet, wasn't bad for a first attempt. I don't get paid for the webwork at the Canopy Club, or at least not much as compensation is in a pretty convoluted form in payment for equipment maintenance and band filming which really is way, way below the rate it should be for what I do. All this is to rationalize not overhauling the look in the last five years, which BTW this blog draws heavily from.

OK maybe I've lost what few readers I have today before getting this far with all my patting myself on the back and such, but when you look at my BlogHop.com ratings you will see 87 people have taken the time to rate my site and it is at a 60% popularity rating. My original goal for BNL was to be in the top 10% popularity wise, but I see I will never achieve that. More importantly I no longer want to because I noticed something far more important from my stats.

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Most people either LOVE ME or HATE ME! And that's a pretty nice place to be and I'll explain. All the interesting people I have ever known have been polarizing. I seem to like most people, but the people I tend to like most are liked and disliked by many and there doesn't seem to be a pattern as to what the overlap is. The point is if you have anything interesting enough to say then some are going to really like what you say and some are really going to hate what you say. Trying to sanitize what you have to say in order to gain popularity will just make the whole thing pabulum, so you might as well stay the course and that is what I intend to do here at BNL

There will be a part II to this post, with a shout out to some of my friends out there and a tribute to my wife and what this all means in terms of diversity and difference. For now good night BNL viewers, thanks for stopping by. Now if you'll forgive me it's time for my pain med and a date with unconsciousness as I recover from lung surgery.

Morning... well... noon really. Mornings are still a little rough, waking up after the pain pills have worn off. I've counted my remaining Darvocet pain pills. 13 left after I down my first one of the day. A little over two days worth if I take them every four hours, which I have like clockwork. I'm wondering if I should start to wean myself off of them and stretch them out, or just go cold turkey when they're out. I'm sure I'm not addicted, but at the rate my pain is improving on my right side I figure a day or two more supply wouldn't hurt. At the hospital I was actually scolded for not using my morphine drip enough, which as a patient you get to control with a button and a 10-minute time out. The morphine had given me a mild nausea the first day and I had been more worried about vomiting, which I had done once the first day after surgery. I was also worried about being able to pee without a catheter, which was also required the first day after surgery. Morphine was probably responsible for both side effects.

Propoxyphene-n/acetaminop is what the bottle reads as the actual chemical name for my Darvocet. If I lay still, after the pills wear off, there isn't too much pain -- hardly any at all really. Just like the morphine in the hospital. But boy does it take the edge off when I move. So much so that it is rare for me to sleep more than a few minutes time past the four-hour mark, at which point I wake up and medicate. Sleep is a two or three stage event each night, sometimes drifting back to sleep quickly and easily, sometimes not so much. Today was a three stage affair with a few hours spent try to get back to sleep after waking up to take pain pills, and so with a late bed time on top of that, I'm getting a slow start on the day.

Today is Sunday, and I still plan on trying to go back to work for at least a short amount of time tomorrow. I think I'm handling my recovery pretty well after lung surgery, but progress is slow, and I'm impatient for all this discomfort to become a thing of the past. I suppose I could live with this amount of pain if I had to. Fortunately I know that relatively quickly I will be my old self again.

I now have a new perspective on life for people with disabilities or who might have to live constantly with pain that is in my case only a short term partner. I don't look forward to future days when age and infirmity might rob me of the ability to do things easily for myself. I can't help but think that this must have been what life was like for my dad the last 10-15 years of his life with crippling rheumatoid arthritis.

Enough morose thoughts for now, I have a day to get on with. Time to grab the rope I've tied to a closet handle and pull myself out of bed. Life is full of little adaptations, especially when dealing with adversity. Lord knows I saw my dad make enough of them himself as he surrendered to life in a wheelchair.

That's it lazy head, pull, pull, time to get on with your day -- your life.

Wow, so much has happened in the last four weeks, it's hard to know where to start. I promised all sorts of details about my wedding to Nian, and while that is all very interesting it probably doesn't have the drama of events of the last week. I haven't updated my "Larry's Life" section since before I started dating Nian, chronicling a series of failed dating and clubbing experiences. I really need to go back and fill in the last half year with Nian was some first person narratives.

So here I am sitting in bed recovering from surgery so I guess it would be of most interest to whatever readers I have what that is all about. For those without the patience to wait for the months it may take me to fill in the Nian-Larry story or read my previous posts leading up to my surgery I have created my first new entry for "Larry's Life" in over half a year.

Today's "Larry's Life" mostly focuses on my surgery, but also gives a brief synopsis about Nian and I meeting and getting married. I hadn't really planned on the entry being so long, which is why it goes in my other blog area. But even condensed it took a while to tell in reasonable detail, and I really hope any visitors here to "Bare Naked Larry" will follow today's "Larry's Life" link "A New Life"

My next long post will be about the marriage ceremony itself and go in "Larry's Life" as well. This blog is my main touchstone and I need to publish more often with shorter entries about what is going on in my life. I've promised Nian now that I'm back home and getting better I would try to post daily.

No lung cancer! Day 3 in hospital recovering. Man my side hurts but at least I've still got both my lungs!

I'll be up and around soon. Love you Nian!