The week has been a bit interesting.  At work, the group I am in moved into a new area.  I am part of a small group (about 35 people including management) working in a call center where a much larger group (a few hundred, I am guessing) also works.  Prior to this week, my group occupied one corner of a very large room which the larger group also used.  This week we moved to a downstairs area which is just big enough to hold my little group.  We have our own private break room and restrooms.  Our cubes are not cubes in the traditional sense as they are not square.  It’s hard to describe, so I’ll try this drawing:

Work Move Diagram:  Before and After

Naturally, this is not to scale.  Also, I got the “After Move” angles wrong and realized it as I was finishing the drawing so I didn’t correct it.  The angles above are sixty degrees but the “cubes” actually are on a seventy-five degree angle, so there are five cubes in a set.  The dark areas are co-workers’ areas and the light area is mine.  So before the move I shared half of a wide cube with somebody and after the move I have my own little space.  There is a little more desk space this way, but because of the angle (seventy-five instead of ninety) it feels a bit more crowded.  I am adjusting this; it’s actually nice because my Stuff is closer at hand.

Anyway, the move is done and I like it.  There’s a snack machine within a dozen steps and the bathroom is about three dozen steps away.  Pre-move, the shared break room and restrooms were half of a very large room away.  There’s no fridge in the break room yet, but there will be soon enough.  Meanwhile, I’ll bring canned pasta to work for lunch.

Meanwhile, Sony Online Entertainment released its newest EverQuest expansion, House of Thule.  I have started to play in it, and I already like it a lot.  One very cool feature is Player Housing.  I have hopes they’ll give this more purpose in the future, but for now it’s at least entertaining.  You buy a plot, then you buy a house (there are many varieties available) then you buy furnishings for the plot and house.  This includes animals to roam around.  So I have a white leopard wandering the inside of my three room house and outside I have two rabbits and a big dog-like thing.  The inside also has a couple of tables, some chairs and a bed.  The outside has some trees, a bunch of flowers, a gazebo, some shrubbery…well, you get the idea.  Maybe next week I’ll post some screenshots.

The new expansion raised the level cap for characters.  Previously, it was eighty-five and now it’s ninety.  So Shaka is once again grinding experience, as is Boomer.  Dan had barely reached eighty-five pre-expansion, so his grind is more of a continuance.  I am focusing more on Shaka for awhile.  She never really progressed in the previous expansion, and I do not want to repeat this failure.  She is my main character in the game, so I will get into groups and such until she is finished with her progression.  Along the way I will get Boom and Dan what progression and such as I can, but mostly I will focus on Shaka.  Eventually, they will all be progressed, but Shaka comes first.

That ends my personal news for the week, but I do want to touch on something else before signing off.  I Stumbled across an article this morning about a company in California which is set to start doing embryonic stem cell treatment trials on human patients with spinal cord problems.  This has the promise of allowing paralyzed people lose their paralysis.  Embryonic stem cells are controversial because their harvest means loss of viability of a human fetus.  However, they are harvested as a byproduct of an abortion, a practice which is currently legal in this country.  President Bush, among other butthead things he did, stopped (or at least severely curtailed) embryonic stem cell research eight or nine years ago, so this development has been waiting a few years to happen.

I’m going to try to going into a rant about this–this is Nothing Day after all–but this really bugs me.  The conservatives would like to see abortion made illegal, and while it is legal they don’t want any good to come of the practice, even if it means saving or dramatically improving people’s lives.  That’s bullshit, quite frankly, and it pisses me off that Bush wouldn’t let this happen.  There is a multitude of nervous-system problems we could fix with this technology.

Stepping halfway aside from the mini-rant, I will point to some things stem cell research is doing which is very exciting.  Not just the controversial embryonic stem cells, either.  There have been at least three cases now where somebody with throat cancer, cancer specifically affecting the trachea, have had said trachea removed and replaced with a new trachea grown from stem cells.  This is a big deal, because usually the only thing people with this variety of cancer can look forward to is death.  This cancer does not respond well to radiation or chemo therapy, and trachea transplants are chancy at best.  But growing one from stem cells?  No anti-rejection drugs or procedures are needed because the organ is grown from the body’s own cells.  The article I found was about a specific case in England where the patient was mostly recovered and speaking again within three or four days! Going from death’s door to a near full recovery in less than a hundred hours!  Wowzers!

Elsewhere, folks are working on growing lung replacements.  This has been successfully done in animals; human trials will hopefully be along shortly.  Same with livers, by my understanding.  This will take a few years to become fully realized, but we are the brink of beating the big C.  Cancerous lungs?  Removed them and replace them with brand-new, freshly grown ones.  The trachea took three of four months to grow, so maybe five or six months for lungs (I really have no clue; this is an uneducated guess) and you go from hacking and wheezing and such to breathing easy.

Seriously, there hasn’t been a more promising technology in medicine since…well, I am not sure there’s ever been this kind of promise from a single technology before.  It’s got me very excited.  Immortality is at hand.

See you tomorrow.