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Yes, my toilet was clogged again. What did i do to deserve this? (Probably threw too much paper down the drain :S). Well anyway after a few of my old tricks didn't work (detergent and a stick) i went to the big guns and used brute force: a plunger. The monster in the toilet had no chance at all :D
If you're a fanatic of me, you may know that i like cooking :) (i also put this piece of information somewhere on my site :).
Well anyway, today i didn't know what to eat at lunch. I can't go out in this scorching heat and i'm tired of ordering :D So i felt the vectors of the Force (yes like a Jedi :) and just made up a food from what i got in the fridge. I took some carrots and broccoli from the freezer. I threw them in a pot with some water and salt and boiled them for about 10-12 minutes. After i got rid of the water, i put in some cheese and tartar sauce. Then i mixed the whole thing and ate up. It was pretty cool! (not to mention healthy, and colorful :D).
I don't know if someone applied this recipe sometime, but i never heard of it; so from now on i'll call it 'morccolli'. Carrots in my language are called 'morcovi'. That's where the 'mor' is from. And the 'ccolli' is from broccoli. Yes 'broccoli' doesn't have to Ls, but i put 2 so it can be a complete new word which can't even be found on Google :) If you use this recipe, tell me what you think...
Ok, when i tell someone about my uncommon salivary gland problem they look so surprised that this gland can actually produce sand or stones like the kidney. What is even more incredible to me is that in the 3rd millenium i find the treatment for this so primitive. This is a problem that occurs every once in a while for me, and throughout time i became a specialist in the salivary gland - this week it occured again but thanks to my experience (by which i also mean experimenting) i was able to keep this phenomenon under control. In this post i'll tell you some of my tips and tricks (now remember i'm no medical expert and what i'm telling here shouldn't be considered medical advice; i'm just saying some things i tried on myself under my mom's supervision - she's an M.D. - and which seem to pay off; i hope this will help other people who have this condition to understand how the gland works).
- First of all, let's look at this picture i found on Wikipedia:
My gland problem is with number 2, one of my submandibular glands, which can be found right at the connection between neck and jaw. Its location is usually easily spotted or felt if the gland is swollen. Now, my tips refer to this gland only, i don't know any kind of treatment for any other glands.
- Let's think about the psychological problem. Don't be scared, at first it seems to be something you can do nothing about. A stone, or sand caught in the salivary duct (you may sometimes see it, sometimes not) and which cause your gland to incontrolably swell especially when you eat or think about food can be pretty scary and feels nasty too. If it hurts, you should really see a doctor.
- If you had something like this before, and you feel it coming again but it's only beginning, i think this is a good time for some prevention. This is what worked in my case:
- Gargling with Cola: Mouthwashing and gargling with Cola was good for me because the caffeine in it makes the tissues relax and the carbonic acid (H2CO3) in the Cola reacts with the different type of salts (Calcium Carbonate and Calcium Phosphate) in the so called 'stones' and 'sand' creating solvable substances. This is a long shot, but i felt it was worth it.
- Sucking NO-SPA tablets: Yes, not simply swallowing them. I discovered that if i keep the tablet in my mouth without swallowing, that portion goes numb and relaxed. So when i feel a blockage somewhere around the duct under the tongue i suck NO-SPA keeping it over the problematic duct - when i feel the portion goes numb i swallow the rest of the tablet. I don't think this is recommended practice, i did it at my own risk. Sometimes half of lip may go numb but i found this pays off for me. In a matter of 20, 30 seconds of sucking a tablet i feel the flow of blocked saliva just being released in my mouth. There are no side-effects that i know of, but again, this is something i discovered on my own, so use at your own risk.
- Bromhexine: these i swallow :) it's a mucolytic agent to make mucus less viscid. It's been found that it makes saliva more liquid, thus keeping an easier flow - also keeps the probability of forming new stones low.
- Nurofen for anti-inflammatory effects: this is helpful in preventing the salivary duct from constricting or going red around a stone.
I hope this was a bit of an eye-opener about how the gland works. I developed this treatment for myself because all the doctors that i went to weren't salivary gland specialists. For example, the surgeon said i should take it out - but i thought i'd give my gland another chance and i ran away from surgery. Anyway this was my case, and what i said here might not work for you. And even if you're scheduled for surgery and you're braver than i am, it's ok, a human has more than 600 salivary glands, big and small :D
Now getting back to the actual problem. Ok sure there are treatments, customised or not, which may delay or treat problems. But the bigger issue is: what causes them? In my quest on the internet i found that this isn't really known for sure.
What's VERY strange is that i get this 'thing' every year in the beginning/middle of August. There are only 2 periodical things i can associate this with:
- Extreme heat, but i don't know how this can be it, when it's been literally hot for over a month now;
- and the famous Perseids meteor shower. Sure some of you may think it's funny :D, i think it's funny too. But this is a fact: every year in august, in this period of the month, i just recently associated with the Perseids.
I'm curious if someone with similar problems is reading this; does it occur regularly for you too? can you associate it with a recurring event? What treatments work for you? Please share your thought in comments, this is something that medicine doesn't consider important but solutions may rise from our own personal experiences.
Today when i went into my Adsense account i saw something incredible :D No it's not Photoshop, it's real. This was long awaited by us ad freaks, and with any luck, this post should be the first with an ad for me.
I don't remember seeing an official announcement, i only found other amazed people that were sharing what they found; anyway i think this started rolling out quite a while ago, so it's about time :)
Yep, this is something i've been waiting for a long time : the second Stargate straight to DVD movie with an old-school SG-1 story: Stargate Continuum
Btw, what happened to that Stargate spinoff there were rumours about? Didn't hear anything about it in quite a while..
I think it's fantastic. Who thought you could do so much with a phone. Here are my impressions in chronological order and tips i think will help other HTC newbies like me :) :
+ when i got it, it came in something like a shiny inverted pyramid, which was very cool.
+ the contents were great: phone, 2 screen protectors, the stylus that fits in the phone + an extra one, 3 CDs, a lot of fun stuff
+ you can charge it not just from the power outlet, but from the USB connection with the computer which i think it's great (i think it's even greater that you can opt out of it)
- what you get might not look like in the ads from the beginning. I found out that happened to me because of the old firmware version, which you can update using the Downloads section from the HTC support site for Diamond. I don't know why they ship it with a version that can't do everything but who knows, kind of got scared for a moment that i didn't get the right phone, but it's good that it finally worked out pretty easily.
- there are a few settings that might slow you down or bug you a lot. If you want to speed it up a bit, you should probably disable automatic incoming Beam connections, disable error-reporting and make sure WiFi and Bluetooth are turned off. Also, there is a strange option to reject calls with automatically sending a SMS saying that you're busy right now. I disabled that on the spot :D. I also found a pretty cool tweaker for a Pocket PC which you can find here (make sure you set cache sizes that you're comfortable with + you can also increase the screen sensitivity).
+ the TouchFlo 3D technology is just amazing, i play with it non-stop just to see the animation
+ battery lasts a lot longer than expected, and it charges quite quickly
+ i don't know how they can fit so much in such a small device (it was also a lot smaller than i expected)
+ it has FM radio (+ dedicated headphones)
+ syncing with the PC is quite straight-forward, but the phone isn't recognized unless you install its application, even if the phone itself has an option to appear just as a storage device
+ it has some cool games, and the one where you tilt the phone to make a ball fall through holes is the most addictive :D
An HTC Diamond that is. I chose to buy this phone (and now) because of all the rumours i'm hearing about delays in Android (and which sadly are not denied by Google - i hope they will be anyway). I won't buy an iPhone (which will be available only from 22 August anyway) because it doesn't officially work with my carrier. And i won't buy an HTC Touch Pro because i want to get rid of the keyboard, not carry it around when i have a touchscreen :) Below is what i think is the best advertising video ever for a techno gadget (and yes, i am aware that Diamond isn't perfect itself, but the vid is just spectacular):
It would be really strange to me if someone who knows how to browse the internet hasn't somehow heard about Cuil, the new, supposedly Google competitor, search engine. I've seen reviews, reviews of reviews, reasons for Cuil sucking, reasons why it shouldn't suck. Can someone explain this phenomenon to me? There have been a lot of search engines since Google, some better than Cuil in my opinion, engines which deserved more buzz than what we're seeing these days. There are obvious bugs in Cuil, and besides a relatively original interface approach it won't be a Google killer. Wtf is wrong with the blogosphere? :D
