well, i had a feeling it would be the case. surgery is no longer an option. the high resolution mri didn't show anything. with no way of knowing where in my parietal lobe the problem is, and with there being such a large area of very valuable, important brain, it's not worth going in. it's funny how much a relief it is. yeah, logically it's disappointing that this is no longer an option, but i no longer have the stress and fear of losing a part of my functionality. funny that. 12:59 pm

i'm very happy to say that we're finally getting a refund this year. i think it's the first time in 5 years that we haven't had to pay huge amounts of money at tax time. this year they get to pay us a large amount, i'm a very happy camper. 11:47 am

eric olsen was kind enough to send me a link to new media in the old pt. 2 where he mentions my portal. of course there is also a pt. 1 to go along with that. Normally, i wouldn't bother to link to them, but two things stood out. in both parts, doc searls is referred to as "blogfather". i found it rather hard to believe that people could now be mistaking doc searls for the founding father of weblogs, so i had to actually look up godfather and see if there was another definition. so doc has become the inspiration for the latest generation of bloggers. i never thought i'd ever say something like that. which brings me to the other odd thing. first i saw the words "early blog story" associated with the date august 2000 and thought that's hardly early, then i saw "one of the best early blog stories in april 2001". i would refer to the san diego union tribune's july 1999 weblog article as an "early weblog story". i'd probably even call wired's the web the way it was an "early weblog story" even though it's from february 2000 because it was published before sxsw. funny how sxsw seems to mark a turning point for weblogs. it seems rather silly to refer to rebecca's history written in september 2000 in one paragraph and then refer to an "early blog story" written the month before in another. weblogs are so old they need a history, but they only had articles written about them just before that. maybe i'm just being too cynical. hmmm. i wonder if this is what it feels like to get old. 12:25 pm

well, apparently dylan's tips worked. santacruzrealty.net is now #1 on a google search. 12:38 pm

Visited the neurosurgeon on tuesday, nice guy, very down to earth and self-confident. he explained how the spiking in the parietal lobe would affect surgery. the area that was indicated is the lower parietal which happens to be where nice, important things like reading and language are located. for some odd reason, i'm not really willing to put those at risk. the mri should confirm that. if the mri gives some conflicting data, i might fly to boston to get an meg at harvard, it's a much higher resolution than the one at ucsf. i had myself so prepared and the decision was made. now, it's very much up in the air and there is a very good chance it's not going to happen. i'm sorry, but i'd rather die than not be able to read. 10:31 am

Death of a game addict. i heard about this yesterday but didn't bother to go read any of the articles because i knew how ridiculous they'd be. i made the mistake this morning of starting this one. i stopped reading right after i got to "Shawn was playing 12 hours a day, and he wasn't supposed to because he was epileptic, and the game would cause seizures," she said. "Probably the last eight times he had seizures were because of stints on the computer." Even *if* her son was in the extremely small percentage of the epileptic population who is strobe sensitive, and he was *not* on medication that helped control his seizures, mmorpg's are *not* highly strobic games. I find it hard to believe that he wasn't supposed to be playing them or that he had so many seizures while playing them. what a greedy bitch. 10:25 am

jason has shown how to googlebomb using the title bar. which, considering how much it affected page rank for my dad's site, makes sense. 10:24 am