The cold, fever and chills got out of hand so I had to go out in the rain to Walgreens at around 1:00 AM yesterday night. It was like one of those descriptions in the Wuthering Heights of wild rainy miserable nights but without any of the fun.

The Walgreens on North has undergone some kind of ludicrous rearrangement of shelves. It took me a whole 5 minutes to realize that everything had been shuffled around. The cold and flu medications are not with the other medications on the far wall anymore. I finally found them in the next aisle. It made no logical sense. I am convinced the whole point of the rearrangement was to make sick people suffer even more in their misery.

And that was not all. The walgreens brand was nowhere to be seen. The shop is aggressively promoting some new hippie form of the Nyquil concoction called Nature Fusion I looked at the ingredient list:

Acetaminophen
Dextromethorphan
Doxylamine Succinate
Citric Acid
Flavor
Glycerin
High fructose corn syrup
Honey
Polyethylene Glycol
Propylene Glycol
Purified Water
Sodium Citrate

Basically what I had been eating along with "flavor" (surely a taunting joke on people with colds), two different glycols, high fructose corn syrup AND Honey. I got it anyway.

And Walgreens was out of Biscoff Speculoos. How unbelievably unkind is that??

When I came home I couldn't open the stupid Nyquil bottle. I tried so hard for nearly 1/2 hour. It was the hardest bottle to open. You need to press down the lid while twisting it anti-clockwise. You can tell it's not going to open because it makes this annoying rachet-like noise. At that point I was almost livid with rage. I took a knife and ran it all round underneath the rim of the hideous cap and tore it off. It probably won't close well again, but who cares at this point?

I think I must have gone past 104 degree F with all that anger. When I was brushing my teeth later, my eyes looked completely bloodshot. They are still kind of murky now. I can only guess that I must have split many minor vessels in my conjunctiva. When I finally got at the syrup, it was extremely sweet. Sweeter than any other cough syrup I have ever had my entire life. This is what happens when people think that honey is not enough and go ahead and lay on the high fructose corn syrup.

So the point of this post is that NyQuil's new bottles are so hard to open that you need a knife. At 3:00 AM, anger got the better of me and I composed a nasty letter to Vicks, but in my hurry, I didn't save it and it got deleted. I have no idea now what I wrote in it. All I can remember that it was a page long before the Nyquil knocked me out. Now it seems silly and trivial but I was so unbelievably wretched and murderous last night. Illness does strange things to people, especially to me.

Update: 26th February, 2012

I received this message from a guest:

21372 02/26/2012 @ 21:08 guest @ 75.142.240.232 says:
Nature Fusion Drama
I loved the previous NyQuil drama. Walmart must have pulled all of the regular stuff off the shelves so you were guided to purchase the new (green) version of cough syrup. Got it home to my ailing husband and heard him cussing and grunting and whining about getting the damn thing open. Thinking he was inept and just felt to crappy to get it open. I asked to try.....needless to say I wore my hand out and tried using the can opener notches on my kitchen shears and only managed to strip all of the outer lid threads. So I went to the web to see if anyone else was so inclined to cut the top off. Oh boy! There is a ton of folks that would like watch the makers of Vick's products open their own designs. After reading NyQuil Drama and other similar complaints, my husband used a knife to break the child protection and was able to finally take the dosage.

So it's not just me!!!!! Vicks should be ashamed of its design team. Making sick people suffer even more in their misery! I am glad I was able to spread the hatred around. ;-)

I have a temperature of 103 Degree F and a pulserate of 97/minute . I am shaking with chills even though I am wearing a sweater and woollen stockings AND drinking a hot cup of tea. My nose and throat are burning as if someone has put in hot embers into them. To add to the irritation my nose is also dripping like a broken faucet. It's not pretty at all. I tried to lie down to sleep but my head hurts with dull pains in a supine position. I am also very dizzy when I get up from a sitting position even though I am fairly certain I am well-hydrated. I can feel that my chest is congested with some really thick mucus. Not much is coming out, which is worrying me. Whatever little comes out once every 2 hours or so is a greyish yellow in colour and very thick.

So here I am typing my detailed symptoms into the new wide (e:strip) text area that I like very much!

Seriously, this is the worst cold at the worst possible time. My work is suffering because I am making a ton of mistakes and I can't go to see my brother.

My flat is littered with lozenge drop wrappers and soup bowls. I can't wait for this cold to go away but it seems like it never will. I am on

• ibuprofen 400 mg X 4-6 hourly for the pain,
• Co-trimoxazole BD (12 hourly) for the secondary infection and
• Paracetamol (Acetaminophen) for the fever.
• Guaiphenesin (oral) 1 tbsp X 2 hourly - expectorant
• Dextromethorphan 1 tbsp X 2 hourly - anti-tussive

AND none of it is working in expected ways!!!!

WHHHHHHYYYYYY do I have to be sick now?? I have so much to do and can't do anything effectively. I hate being sick.

I sometimes wish my desktop was the Chrome browser. What's the point of even having an empty space staring at me. I just want all that space to BE the browser. My nexus one has a small search bar embedded in the desktop. What I want is for the entire browsing to be the desktop.

I am sure there is something like this out there, something that implements this in Debian or maybe Red Hat. I just don't know how to search for it yet.

Update: Found it.


Someone obviously feels like I do.

The real question, however is, is that someone as technically challenged as I am? Can I even get to step 1?!

I think different people have different methods of retaining what they learn. I asked Paul how he keeps notes on the code he writes and he told me he memorizes it and writes notes INTO the pieces of code, probably as comments.

That's good coding practice. But it doesn't help me when I have forgotten where I have used a particular structure or syntax. Since I am not building websites, but rather analyzing data, there is no predictable flow to the code.

Data processing tricks in my repertory need to change with every new data manipulation I want to do and I can't remember what tools I used for each single variable very well. I have found that I learn the most when I take the time to consciously analyse if my mind has absorbed the concepts by writing it down.

I considered using (e:strip) as my code notebook because I wanted to keep everything together. But it does not handle code well. Back and forward slashes produce wonky results. Characters don't escape well even with the code box. The code box itself is a fixed size. I always work in big wide screens and don't see it changing so I also wanted my notebook to have a very generous text area and very little of anything else.

All of these criteria are met by:


I still wish I could do that on (e:strip) though. As my life gets to be more about how to successfully survive in academia, I can distinctly see how that blog will get more entries per week than this one in the near and distant future if I stay on course. But of course, I don't see how I can I wax eloquent over trivia, veggies, food and the side effects of medication in between R, LaTeX and Perl, so maybe that blog does need to be separate.

I woke up today with the most excruciatingly severe throat pain. I had a couple bowls of that squash soup and 400 mg of ibuprofen.

Now the ground is spinning as I type this and my peripheral vision has an extraordinary sense of movement.

I hope to goodness this won't be a repeat of the benedryl drama. I know I am not the biggest of people but common doses of medicine have the weirdest effect on me. The kid dose of 9-10mg/kg comes to around 42 X 10 = 420 mg. I am 20 mg under the kid dose.

And I have dizziness. It is so ludicrous that on the very rare occasions I HAVE to take medicines, ALL the frustrating side effects come on to haunt me in full force. I mean who gets dizzy with ibuprofen, one of the most common NSAIDs?? ME. Arrrgh.

The Acorn Squash is hands-down my most favourite squash among all the other squashes.


I just made a roasted acorn squash soup with shredded coconut, tomatoes, red onions, moong dal, ginger, dried red chilles, cumin, asafoetida powder and dried curry leaves in 17 minutes.

A new record. Take that, rice cooker!

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I always have a timed (and rather unhealthy) competition with my rice cooker. While it steams the beans or lentils or some other staple, I chop and hustle to finish before it can. 80% of the time, its a tie between us, it wins 15% of the time. Today was my croaky and gloaty 5% win!

And victory was tasty! :-)

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Acorn Squash shot from Mango&Tomato: I don't own that kind of photo equipment!

I worked almost 24/7 and yet I don't feel like I am getting even close to where I wanted to be by this time.

And I didn't get to make that bread from cookbooks 101 because there was no time after endless iterations of analyses and endless bug fixing of my 60+ variables. I thought maybe I was just obsessing, but you have to be obsessive when it comes to data. One small mistake in coding and the data is telling you something else.


This is exactly how it feels like. I am not even sure where I am on that pile of unfinished work.

I want some magic to happen this week. I want to suddenly get very efficient at coding R or fluid in LaTeX or extremely good at coming up with insights on my dataset or just maybe finish everything I need to finish very soon. I am going to try and help myself very intensively this week.

When a good dose of panic wakes you up at 4:30 every morning.



Paul: When are you done
Me: I am never done.

NB: Click on the alien for the perfect simulation of how I wake up everyday.

A very well written comprehensive progress report on where we stand in cancer research and what we know currently in the war against cancer was released by the American Association of Cancer Research a couple days ago.

I think this report is well worth reading, if only to know a little more about this terrible disease. The plainly laid out facts in the report challenge the ill-founded conspiracy theories about how the medical, research and pharmaceutical establishments are out to get the cancer patient and are suppressing the cure to cancer (See for example: (e:vincent,55175))

If you had any questions about cancer or simply wished you had a better understanding of the disease, I highly recommend this read:
::READ PDF::

Humpty Dumpty was making a longtable
Yes! It was part of a thesis, and not a fable
Something about "Save" was taking far too long
Humpty didn't want to become egg foo yong
Stopping and listening to (e:strip) voices
Lead to Humpty having a million+ choices

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Nice longtable reference: