James's Weblog

My dad passed away yesterday morning. He was 58 years old.

Almost exactly one month ago, coincidentally when I had surgery for my broken fibula, my dad felt unusually weak and checked himself in to Washington Hospital in Fremont. After spending a week there and another week at Stanford Hospital, doctors diagnosed him with advanced liver cancer.

They speculated that the tumor in his liver had been developing for two years, and whatever symptoms he had went by unnoticed or were misattributed to stress, to overwork, or to simply getting older. This past year was particularly rough for him; his father’s brother passed away from brain cancer early in the year, his own father died in July, and his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

The doctors said my dad’s cancer was untreatable and sent him home, where he wanted to be. He spent the past two weeks in his bed, too weak to stand on his own. All of my uncles and aunts flew in from the east coast to help take care of him as he grew progressively weaker with each passing day. He spent the past several days drifting in and out of consciousness. On Thursday evening, he went into a deep sleep, and when I when I awoke Friday morning, his breathing had become rapid and shallow. I left his room for several minutes, and by the time I returned, his breathing had stopped.

It all happened in such a short amount of time, and it all feels very surreal.

I miss him a lot.

I saw two other orthopedists who think I should have surgery and have a metal plate screwed in to straighten my fibula. After that, I’ll be in a cast for three months. Hooray.

Without the surgery, they say that the bone might not be aligned properly at my ankle, which could lead to arthritis later. Even worse, once the swelling goes down, the bone might actually poke through my skin, which of course would be very, very bad.

Bah.

I shouldn’t even have been playing in that volleyball game. We’d already finished (and lost) both of our league games for the day, but I felt unsatisfied, was already bummed out from earlier events that day, and played a third game for fun. Strangely, nobody seems to know exactly how the accident happened (though everybody remembers the sound of the crack), but the best I can figure is that when I landed, I must have slipped on the grass, and my legs managed to go under the net, where the other guy landed on them.

Ironically I didn’t want to play in that part of the field because of the slippery grass, but the other part of the field had some holes and was considered more dangerous.

Also ironic is that my vacation was going pretty well up until that day, and then everything came crashing down, figuratively and literally.

For once in my life, I’ve actually started playing sports. One of my coworkers organized a small volleyball sports league that I’ve been participating in for the last three weeks.

Yesterday I jumped for the ball at the same time as someone on the other side of the net, and I guess we collided on the way down and somehow fell on each other with a very audible cracking sound. A quick trip to the hospital emergency room later, and I discovered that I’ve fractured my left fibula in two places. Who knew volleyball could be so dangerous?

It’s the first bone I’ve ever broken (that I’m aware of, at least). Sigh.

The hospital emergency room took x-rays, showed me pictures of the fractures, and put my leg in a splint. The doctors there weren’t able to set the bone, however, and told me to see an orthipedist. I wondered if I should ask them for my x-ray film, but I figured they would give them to me if they thought I’d need them. Besides, isn’t everything done on computers these days?

This morning I called the orthopedist the hospital referred me to. The receptionist set up an appointment for me in the afternoon, said that she’d get the x-rays from the hospital, and finally asked me for my phone number in case there were any problems. When I showed up for my appointment, however, they didn’t have my x-ray results. They didn’t know my date of birth, which the hospital needed to release my information. Why didn’t they call me? What the hospital eventually did fax over was not a copy of my film but a description: “two-part fracture in fibula”, more or less.

The orthopedist couldn’t do much without the x-ray pictures; I described what I remembered to him, and he could only make some conjectures. Finally my dad drove me back to the hospital, which luckily was nearby, I picked up my film, and I went back to the orthopedist. And after all that, the orthopedist didn’t really do anything. He thinks my bone doesn’t need to be set, because the three fragments of my fibula apparently are aligned well enough that it should be able to heal without a cast. Hmph.

Several months ago I finally set up a simple software page to make some of the programs I’ve written available for download.

Then, in August, I mentioned one of my Palm OS applications in a comment on mytreo.net. The editors preferred it to the competition and added some of my programs to their download section (not with my permission, but I don’t mind):

• Card Autorun download page from mytreo.net
• Moxy download page from mytreo.net

As of this writing, both programs have perfect 10.0 ratings. Yay! (There is some slight bias, however, since Michael apparently gave one of them a 10.0 rating without having actually tried it. Jeffrey thinks that maybe Michael just knows quality software when he sees it.)

My Moxy program also got briefly mentioned about 43 minutes into some random podcast.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve lost the ability to get excited about anything for fear of the inevitable rejection and disappointment.

At CHI 2006, I finally met Jimmy Lin. He entered grad school at U.C. Berkeley while I was an undergraduate there, but for some reason I never had gotten around to meeting him until a couple of weeks ago.

Jason Hong, his former officemate and one of my old teaching assistants, recorded the event with a photo of us, joking that it would be sad if I were known only for being “the other James Lin”. Gee, thanks.

Well, I’m back from the CHI 2006 conference in Montreal. I stayed at the Hyatt Regency, which the conference organizers recommended, but I later discovered there were hotels just as close to the convention hall that had better rooms, better service, and that were cheaper too.

Things I didn’t like about the Hyatt Regency in Montreal:

• The light switches were in non-standard locations. Rather than having the switches for the main area and for the entryway arranged side-by-side as usual, the switches were arranged vertically.
• The only light switch to the bathroom was on the outside. It confounded me every time.
• The bathroom was not laid out well. The towel rack was on the opposite side from the sink, so after washing my hands, I had to drip water across the floor before I could dry them off.
• The shower faucet confused me. It took me a couple of minutes without my glasses to notice that it’s the small ridge along the top that points to the temperature, not the handle itself like in my shower at home. (Incidentally, the valve in the faucet broke the morning of my return flight, so it was broken in more than ways than one.)
• The hotel room’s alarm clock used Comic Sans for its labels. Good gravy. I immediately knew I’d hate it.
• The alarm clock had no buttons to adjust the hour for the current time or for the alarm time; there were only minute adjustment buttons. (To make matters worse—and this wasn’t really the hotel’s fault—but its time was off by 12 hours when I got the room. It’s a good thing I noticed!)
• The alarm clock was a radio alarm clock, and the volume knob controlled only the radio; it didn’t control the normal alarm chirp, which happened to be way too quiet.
• Hyatt charged money for Internet access, and it’s hard to find the rate from the hotel’s internal website. Just to get to the pricing page, I first needed to try to sign up for service and to accept a license agreement. And even once there, the pricing page was hard to understand, listing prices in a seemingly random order. (Luckily, the Hyatt apparently blocked just web traffic; ssh access was unrestricted, so I used Remote Desktop through an ssh tunnel to do everything I needed.)
• They didn’t leave chocolates on my pillows.
• There was a plate in the hallway by my door when I arrived, and it was there for the following three nights. I swear it got closer to my door every night.
• Half of the television stations were in French, and the ones that were in English had mostly American programming.

In contrast, the hotel that Jeff Wong stayed at was cheaper, had free Internet service, was large and spacious, and even had a kitchen and fridge.

One nice thing about the Hyatt was that it was connected to the convention hall by way of an underground shopping mall, so I could get to the conference without going into the outside cold. Still, it wasn’t so cold in Montreal that it was a big advantage, and I’d rather have seen more of the city anyway. I didn’t get to look at any of the stores either, since almost everything was closed outside of the conference hours.

Scroll to the bottom of the CHI 2006 sponsor list. How sad. Not only is VMware the only “friend of CHI”, but they don’t have our company logo and don’t even give us a hyperlink!

I never thought I’d say this, but I’ve now been to two wedding receptions where the DJ played “Baby Got Back”. I had no idea that Sir Mix-a-Lot was such a wedding staple.

Mitchell says that almost all the weddings he’s been to have played that. What is wrong with people these days? Well, at least I haven’t heard Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” yet.

I am such a square that I am now a cube.

Bah.