Is there such a thing as a "normal" reaction?

My mom had a heart attack last weekend.

No, that's not code for something else, and it isn't a joke. My friends will be wondering, "Why didn't you tell us? We'd like to have offered some sympathy and words of encouragement". I have no answer. Mea culpa.

The mind is a peculiar thing. When my sister called to tell me Sunday morning, the expected thing happened (well, what I would expect): I got that buzzing in my head that I get when a situation is too stressful for me. The entire world falls away, time stops, and all I can sense is that buzzing. Same thing happens before job interviews, asking a girl out for the first time, that kinda thing. I'm sure you have similar reactions to whatever stresses you out the most. That's not the peculiar thing.

Once I absorbed the news and realized that I had to do or say something, that eerie, preternatural calm that you feel when consious thought is mostly gone and your reptile brain takes over... took over. Presumably I told her something sensible and then packed a bag and made my way to Nanaimo. That's not the peculiar thing either - we're getting there.

I got to the hospital and my mom was sitting up visiting with my dad, and didn't have an inordinate amount of equipment connected to her. OK, we can downgrade to Defcon 2. Between the two of them, they explained how it all came to pass and how things looked at present. Minor heart attack, likely due to a blocked artery on the heart (as opposed to in the heart - much worse). Prognosis is good; blood thinners, clear the blockage, better than before.

So I went back to my sister's place and filled her in (my dad wouldn't let her up - she had the flu), and we both relaxed and had a reasonably nice evening, all things considered. But the reptilian brain doesn't go down without a fight once it's been woken up. This tiny little thought entered my head, just before I went to sleep that night:

"You know this was just a dress rehersal for the real thing, right?"

It's one of those things that we occasionally think, but don't dare say. However, I'm not the superstitious type, so once I'd processed that thought the old ego defense came to the rescue and it's safely tucked away for another time when such a thought might be useful. Are thoughts like that ever useful? I dunno.

Anyhow, you'll be happy to know that it all went down pretty much the way the doc said it would back at Defcon 1: they shipped her down to Victoria for an angiogram, found & cleared the blockage with angioplasty, and my mom's back at home. Little tired, little freaked out, but probably in better shape than she was just before it happened. Happy endings do occur outside of Hollywood - they might not be as fabulous and captivating, but they're way better for being real.

Welcome home, Ma. Don't do that again, K?

Of templates and tired old 'puters

roxy and roz are getting old. Granted, roz has a new-ish motherboard with all the usual gear that comes with that, but for most day-to-day Winders GUI type-stuff you need good I/O as well, and her old 12/19GB EIDE drives just aren't cutting it anymore.

roxy is just plain old. I'd forgotten how old until I realized that I actually have no idea what kind of hardware she's got. /proc to the rescue (edited for space):

[dante@roxy dante]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Pentium II (Deschutes)
cpu MHz : 448.059
cache size : 512 KB
bogomips : 894.56

[dante@roxy dante]$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 257268 kB
MemFree: 47100 kB

[dante@roxy dante]$ cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name
3 0 8257032 hda
3 64 14114520 hdb

Jeepers. You know you've fallen behind when you can buy hard drives 20 or 30 times the size of your largest existing model. I think there's iPods out there with more storage than all of my drives put together. And a P2 450Mhz? Does anybody measure anything in MegaHertz any more? Maybe mobile phones.

Anyhow, I usually don't care too much about that stuff; I'm not much of a gearhead, and I'm generally happy as long as I don't have to wait too long for the pr0n to load. However, I'm guessing that the good folks at Mozilla assume something a little larger and quicker than I've got, as it takes 20-30 seconds for my brower & email clients to fully come to life. Bleh.

The capper is that I've been writing some C++ code over on roxy lately (all Linux boxes love code), and it's fairly evident that I've left behind my old bare-metal C roots, as I can bog gcc down with a mere 2300 lines of C++ code.

[dante@roxy nibblebot]$ time make
real 1m30.611s
user 1m26.470s
sys 0m1.960s

It's all about the templates, man. You can write reams of C code and it might take gcc a little longer to read it off the disk (or not if you have large clusters), but not much longer to actually compile it. I can (and just did) *cross* compile a (GUI) Windows program three times as large in half the time. But throw some basic_strings and a deque in there and it's likely that the preprocessor just quadrupled the size and complexity of your code in 2 milliseconds flat.

So. It might be time for new hardware soon, I dunno. Anybody want some old Fujitsu EIDE hard drives?