From the same guy that came up with Get Your War On, My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable is pure genius!

Aaach! My recovery from last saturday’s uvulectomy took an unpleasant turn this weekend, as the soluble stitches in the back of my throat started dissolving and a sizable length became detached at one end. Now it feels like I have a hair in the back of my throat all the time, and occasionally I get unexpected gag reflexes.

At one point I grabbed the end with a pair of tweezers and gave it a little tug, but then I chickened out.

There’s an interesting spat going on in the physics community over what in my view is the most exciting and potentially revolutionary area of science today — nanotechnology.

Apparently Richard Smalley, a Nobel prize winner and Rice University Professor, has responded to a challenge issued by nanotech pioneer and evangelist Dr Eric Drexler to defend current US policy on the goals of nanotechnology — specifically, the holy grail of building “molecular assemblers,” tools and processes that can precisely position individual atoms, and thereby construct useful nanoscale devices. Smalley insists that molecular assembly isn’t possible and should not be a priority for research funding, whereas Drexler insists that it’s not only possible, but that significant demonstrable research progress has already been made, and that significant funding should be provided at a national level.

The interesting aspect of this public scientific glove-slapping fest is that both protagonists are well-respected experts in the field; Smalley is apparently an expert in carbon nanotubes, another essential building block in molecular assembly. Details can be found in a Foresight Institute press release (note that Drexler chairs the Foresight Institute — expect it to be biased accordingly). Is this a scientific revolution of Kuhnian proportions in the making?

After a year of procrastinating, during which I wasted thousands of dollars on parking, insurance, registration and a miserable experience getting ripped off by a terrible and unscrupulous garage (Salamis Service Center in Long Island City, this means you, you scumbags!), I’ve finally decided to SELL MY CAR.

I’ve owned this 1969 Ford Mustang since I first moved to the United States in the summer of 1999, and not only did it transport me between my home in San Francisco’s Mission District and my job at RLG in Mountain View (most days) for 3 years, but it also got me to Las Vegas twice, North Lake Tahoe once, Big Sur once and across the continental U.S. once. It’s heartbreaking to get rid of it, but I just can’t justify the time and expense to keep a car that I don’t even slightly need in New York.

Drop me a line if you can give it a good home.

I had a very enjoyable dinner with Jim Michalko last week, and he cleverly suggested taking pre- and post-operative digital images of my uvula.

It’s actually quite difficult to keep your tongue out of the way long enough to get good shots, but I persevered, and here are the rather grisly results (only click the thumbnail if you have a strong stomach!):

No wonder I have a sore throat from hell!

So I’m back from the hospital, sans uvula and with a killer sore throat, but otherwise feeling surprisingly OK… It wasn’t so bad in the end, despite the linguistic barriers and apparent disorganization of the Manhattan Eye & Ear Infirmary (and how come I had throat surgery in an eye and ear hospital?). I’d made myself a little apprehensive by finding a few horror stories on the web, e.g. this one and this one, but hopefully they are the exception, not the rule.

After struggling through the snow to get there for 6:30am, and answering exactly the same set of questions with different people in at least four different waiting rooms over the course of about 3 hours, I finally reached the operating theatre, was hooked up to a drip and was unconscious within seconds.

Next thing I know, I’m waking up from an unremembered dream in the post-op area at around 10:30am — I was probably out for less than an hour. And I woke up fast, too: Instantly wide awake, alert, aware of a very sore throat but able to talk and ask questions (this is a far cry from my last surgery under general anaesthetic, a septoplasty in the UK back in 1998, when it took me many hours to come up through various strata of anaesthetic semi-consciousness, and they kept me in overnight to keep an eye on me).

Today, though, I was drinking (albeit with some pain) a little beaker of iced apple juice straight after waking up, and was dressed almost immediately after that. Then it was just a matter of waiting for my friend Scyld to come and pick me up (cheers mate!) and heading back to Brooklyn in a cab for a weekend of movies and soup!

This weekend I’m going into hospital to have an uvulectomy under general anaesthetic. Eeek. I’m a little nervous about it — first of all because I’m expecting there to be considerable pain and discomfort for several weeks afterwards, and secondly because being anaesthetised is about as close as I can imagine to being dead.

Still, I’m also kind of excited, because it will hopefully cure me of my (recently diagnosed) sleep apnea, and my (infamous) snoring.

I hosted Thanksgiving at my house for the first time this year, and it was a lot of fun! I was kind of stressed out about the cooking part, as I’m not a very proficient cook, but luckily I had very collaborative guests that brought some of the dishes, including a visitor from the U.K. who took charge of the trickier logistics. In the end, it all turned out fine.

The menu included a 11lb organic free-range turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes with cranberries, garlic mashed potatoes, broccoli, carrots, gravy and cranberry sauce, followed by pumpkin pie and ice cream. There was another pudding that we soaked in Remy Martin and ignited, but I can’t remember the name of it!

Sony Support may well have redeemed themselves — I got a call today saying they’d fixed my laptop, and would be sending it back by FedEx overnight after having it for just a single day! They replaced the hard drive and re-soldered some memory sockets to the motherboard.

I’m not very happy with Sony’s U.S. support operation. My burly Sony Vaio GRX-500K laptop, which is only about 6 months old and was bought to replace another defective Sony Vaio, developed an intermittent fault about a month ago where it would suddenly freeze up.

At first, these occasional system hangs were presaged by a too-brief-to-read “blue screen of death,” after which the screen would go black and the system would need to be rebooted.

Then, about a week ago it started dispensing with the nicety of the blue screen of death, and would just freeze up. Completely: No mouse, no cursor, no keyboard — nothing. And it started getting more and more frequent, until sometimes I couldn’t even log in to Windows before it had frozen up.

“OK,” I thought, “I’ve seen this kind of thing before. It looks like a hardware fault, because it happens instantly, and even Windows can usually fall over a little more gracefully than this. It’s probably a duff SDRAM or something.”

So I call Sony, and they tell me to defrag my hard drive. Now, I’m a little skeptical that disk fragmentation could cause the kind of spectacular system hangs that I’ve been experiencing, particularly with 40% space remaining, but the drive certainly needs to be defragged, so I play along. That’s one not very entertaining night wasted, and unsurprisingly, the problem has not been fixed.

Next day, I call Sony back. They’re still convinced it’s a software problem, and tell me to do a system restore, talking me through the process. This is a little more involved and time-consuming, since I have to be “escalated” to a more senior techie, but we get though it. Guess what — another fun night spent on the ‘phone with my new-found pals at Sony doesn’t resolve the problem.

At this point, they’re telling me the only option is to do a System Recovery. This means wiping drive C: and returning it to the state it was in when it left the factory. My work is all backed up to an external hard drive, so that’s not a problem, but all the Windows and network configurations, software installations, device driver updates and a bazillion Microsoft “critical updates” will be lost. I’ve done this before, on my previous Sony laptop, and it can be WEEKS before you’re back to having a functional system.

I plead with them, saying “Are you SURE this is the only way? It really looks like a hardware fault to me, do I really have to trash my hard drive before you’ll look at it?”

“I’m afraid so,” they say.

So guess what happens? I back up my work, insert the System Recovery CD, and reboot. It gets through the first CD, then the system hangs again, proving incontrovertibly that this is a HARDWARE problem, NOT a software problem.

So now they’re sending me a shipping carton, so I can send it back to them for warranty repair. SHAME I HAD TO TRASH MY HARD DRIVE BEFORE THEY’D BELIEVE ME!