I recently had a 3 day bout with food poisoning. I had lot of different things that day, but I’m pretty sure it was from Panda Express. It was certainly the sketchiest thing I ate. Now that I’ve moved to Back Bay I’m pretty close to the Prudential Center, so my girlfriend and went to try out the pru food court. It was near closing time, and every place was starting to clean up. I got orange chicken from Panda Express and my girlfriend got something from another place. It’s the only meal we got from separate places that day.

The next day I woke up with a pain in my stomach that got really bad as the day went along. I felt like I was dying, I can’t remember a worse experience in my life. Unfortunately I couldn’t go to the emergency room since my new insurance hadn’t kicked in yet. My girlfriend took me to get some medicine and after lots of water, motrin and heating pads I was finally able to get some sleep. When I woke up, the pain had subsided a little bit. I repeated the process a couple of times and I’m completely fine now.

The experience has me thinking a lot about my health. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like seeing a doctor, and I’ve never been really really sick. I didn’t have insurance for a while and I didn’t really do anything about it. When something that you take for granted fails everything else goes to hell. I’m very lucky that I didn’t have something serious, but one shouldn’t have to be worried about money during sickness.

So lessons learned:

1. Never go to a food court near closing time
2. Never eat from Panda Express… ever
3. Don’t play games with insurance.

Or wait, what the hell, maybe I should move to one of the MANY COUNTRIES that have universal health care.

I forgot to mention this because I was in the middle of moving, but the new Aerva website was finally published last week. Aerva builds interactive display networks, and my job involves mostly flash programming but also UI design and product development.

Since the company’s been growing we decided a couple of months ago to improve our image. I’ve been working on the site for quite a while now, it’s gone through about 10 different revisions but we finally have something everybody’s happy with, and it’s a big improvement from our previous site. It’s been different from my previous web publishing experiences in that I shaped a large part of the message, usually I leave that to the big wigs. There’s still some work to be done, and I’ll be adding awesomeness as time goes by, but I’m glad it’s finally up.

This is a comic from left handed toons:

The funny thing about this is that I know very well the episode of Batman that they’re talking about. It made a big impression on me and its something I think about every once in a while. In that episode the Mad Hatter trapped Bruce Wayne in a dream where Batman was constantly persecuted. Bruce realized he was trapped since he wasn’t able to read the newspaper, and he escaped the trap by committing suicide.

I’ve found that I can read while I’m sleeping. The words make sense but the sentences do not, and the interesting thing about it is that I realize that the sentences are crap and I’m aware of my brain making things up. Sometimes I keep things going to see how ridiculous things get.

An undercover reporter was recently outed at DefCon. So funny: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/media-mole-at-d.html