Hand Coding

The other day, I was fiddling with my Nixon watch (yes, that’s the company name with no relation to the dead president). I was just trying to resynchronize its seconds-hand (“seconds-LCD”?) with my computer’s clock which I had just synced with an Internet time server (not literally an atomic clock, but yet kinda in an A-to-B-to-C sort of way). As I was pressing buttons, trying to remember how to get to the time-setting screen, I ended up putting my watch into 24-hour mode. Yeesh.

Thus the saga began. I ended up finding the watch’s manual on their website and I read over about how to set the time. Much of it was fairly straightforward, but the section on setting 12-hour vs 24-hour time simply said “You can set for 12 hour or 24 hour mode while setting the hours”. Well, that didn't really help much. I fiddled with the watch for about ten more minutes until I figured out how to do it.

Most (digital) watches support both 12-hour time and 24-hour time. And, they generally swap between the two modes with a 12/24-hour selector within the time-setting screen. That’s where the Nixon guys decided to be different. Rather than do something that I expected — an explicit 12/24 mode selector — they just built 24-hours time right into the hour-setting sequence. A normal watch might have the hours cycling from 12:00am to 12:00pm through to 11:00pm and, after switching to 24-hour mode, 00:00 to 23:00. But, in this case the sequence was just one long loop: 12:00am to 12:00pm to 11:00pm to 00:00 to 23:00 to 12:00am (and so on).

So, if you have a Nixon watch and you end up getting it stuck in 24-hour mode, don’t worry — just keep advancing the hour and eventually you’ll get back to normal time. Or, I suppose that you could be the type that likes 24-hour time but ends up getting stuck in 12-hour time (which could happen too). Still, you should be able to use the same steps to get back into the time you’re used to.

I’m flying off to England tomorrow as my cousin Jenny is getting married. I’ll be flying into London (Heathrow) but the wedding itself is in Beaconsfield (map). As it turns out, I’m flying there by way of Miami (yeah, I didn’t expect that one either) and after the layover plus the time change, I end up getting there on Thursday morning. Yeah, I’m sure I’ll be wiiide awake after that one ;).

Fortunately, my flight back is only on Sunday — the wedding is on Saturday — and so I have at least a few days to get acclimated to the time change. On the other hand, I get back Sunday evening and (surprise, surprise), I have work on Monday. But, I’m not going to look forward to spilled milk (or something). I'm just determined to relax and have a fun time. My whole family will be there and I’m looking forward to seeing all of them and spending some time with my extended family as well.

Then, on Tuesday, I have jury duty. I received notice for this a couple weeks ago and I counted my lucky stars that it didn’t coincide with this wedding. For any Dallasites reading, it’s at the Frank Crowley Courts Building which I believe is kinda in the West End. And while I'd normally reserve such trite commentary for its title attribute, that page for the Frank Crowley Courts Building has some truly hideous web design. What, are we still living in 1995?

I’ve never been to jury duty, so I don’t have much of an idea about what to expect. Interestingly enough, the jury summons includes a tear-off form asking for various information about me. Much of it is ordinary and expected — “name”, “date of birth” and so on — but why do they care about my “religious preference”? And, for that matter, my race? The form does appear mandatory, but it does make me a bit uneasy that they’d have any use for some of those tidbits.

From what I gather, there’ll be a lot of waiting around, so I’ll be sure to bring a book (perhaps my copy of The Tipping Point, unless I bring it on my trip to England and finish reading it there). And, I was about ask about whether I’d be allowed to bring my iPod (filled with NPR, natch) but I just ran across this D Magazine blog entry on jury duty which says that it’s apparently ok. And besides what I should or shouldn’t bring along, I’m also curious about how long it lasts — assuming for a moment that I’m not selected for the jury, I’m guessing this would this be an all-day thing? Anyway, if you’ve already been to jury duty, I’m open to any suggestions on what to expect or other tips.

You may have heard about the social bookmarking site del.icio.us but, if not, you wouldn’t be the only one — I only wrapped my head around it a couple weeks ago. As you may have guessed, the basic idea is that you can store all your bookmarks on a centralized website and assign them keywords or “tags” as they’re called in del.icio.us-land.

Then, all the links and usernames are linked together :). So, you can:

• ... click on one of that tags which you've given a URI (say “CSS”) and see all the other sites with that tag.
• ... click on a link and see who else bookmarked it
• ... click on a link and see what tags other people gave it

But, other than linking everything together, del.icio.us is fully RSS-capable. A quick primer on RSS, in case you hadn’t heard of it: RSS allows subscriptions to websites and with an RSS reader (such as the web-based Bloglines), you get a notification when that site/blog is updated.

So, you could “subscribe” to a tag if you wanted to (such as “steelers”) and you’d receive a notice in your RSS reader every time someone tagged a link with that word. Or, each user’s account is also RSS-readable, so you could subscribe to subscribe to (say) John Smith’s account (or my account) and see each link that he added.

Of course, you could subscribe to your friends’ accounts and view links as they bookmark them. Or, you could follow a tag for one of the links which you added to del.icio.us, see who else bookmarked it, and then subscribe to his/her links — for instance, if you like motorcycles, could click on one of your links which had the tag “motorcycles” and then click through to one of the accounts of someone else that bookmarked that link. And, maybe you'd find some useful links of interest on that guy's page (even if he didn’t tag them with “motorcycles”).

As I wrote this entry, I also looked around to see if anyone else had given a straightforward explanation of the del.icio.us concept. I found this thread at Ask.MetaFilter and there, gwint lists quite a few advantages of del.icio.us in one of his posts, but I didn’t want to paste all of that here without his permission.

There were also several recommendations in that thread for this article entitled “Us.ef.ul — A beginner’s guide to The Next Big Thing” and I would have quoted a few bits of that but that article ends up rendering about 2000 pixels wide in my browser and I couldn't really make my way through it. (Then again, I’m running the Firefox build from two days ago, so the odd layout may not necessarily be the authors fault.)

At any rate, I’d recommend giving del.icio.us a try. For what it’s worth, my account is “handcoding” there and there are several Firefox/del.icio.us integration tools (in addition to a del.icio.us-supplied bookmarklet which works just fine as well).

Some coworkers and I went out to lunch last week at T.G.I. Friday’s and, as I had a late breakfast that day, I didn’t really want something too heavy. I started looking over their lunch menu and noticed that they had a Cobb salad — and considering that Cobb salads have both avocado and blue cheese, I could hardly resist. But, if you’re not familiar with Cobb salads, here’s the gist of how they got started:

One night in 1937, Bob Cobb, then owner of The Brown Derby, prowled hungrily in his restaurant’s kitchen for a snack. Opening the huge refrigerator, he pulled out this and that: a head of lettuce, an avocado, some romaine, watercress, tomatoes, some cold breast of chicken, a hard-boiled egg, chives, cheese and some old-fashioned French dressing. He started chopping. Added some crisp bacon — swiped from a busy chef. […]

Now, I don’t think the T.G.I. Friday’s version had watercress and I can't recall whether it had chives, but this was a fantastic salad. As described by their menu, their Cobb salad has “chilled chargrilled chicken, crisp bacon, avocado, Colby cheese, egg, black olives, tomatoes and Bleu cheese on salad greens”:

• Grilled chicken: Unlike some poseur grilled-chicken ### salads (like the grilled chicken Cesar salads that some restaurants have), the chicken was sliced into bite-sized pieces. It always annoyed me when restaurants slapped4” slices of chicken onto a salad; but, that wasn’t the case here.

• Bacon: This was real bacon, natch, and not some of that soybean-based fake bacon. And, it was cooked to a point of crispiness (but not yet crunchiness) which, as I see it, may the optimal texture for salad-based bacon.

• Avocado: Here’s where the salad really shone. Of course, I'm a bit of an avocado fiend as it is and I'll order nearly anything if avocado is a primary ingredient. However, nothing ruins an avocado-based dish more quickly than unripe avocado (bleh). But, this avocado was ripe and soft — I really couldn’t believe that Friday’s hadn’t screwed this part up as restaurants so often use almost-ripe avocados on hamburgers and the like.

• Hardboiled egg halves: Other than overcooking them, it's hard to flub a hard boiled egg. And, sure enough, these eggs were cooked properly and halves (which meant that I didn’t have to manually slice them myself).

• Diced black olives It doesn’t look like diced olives were part of the original salad, but they worked well here. And, like the eggs, it’s hard to incorrectly add olives to a salad ;).

• Blue cheese: Like the avocado, the blue cheese was another stand-out in this salad. Really, I was expecting a few pea-sized bits of blue cheese scattered throughout the salad, but the blue cheese in this salad was generously sized, of which some chucks were almost approaching the size of those bite-sized (cube-shaped) candybars that are popular around Halloween.

At the time I ordered it, I was thinking to myself that I’d “just have a salad” and that I’d order “something more substantial” next time. But, this salad had a deliciousness that surpassed my expectations and I’ll definitely have one again sometime.

As you may have noticed, I’ve switched to WordPress. Now I must go to bed or I’ll be tired at work tomorrow ;).

PS: There's a WordPress Meetup on Saturday at 4:00pm which I’ll be attending, natch.

I bought an iPod Photo just before Thanksgiving and I’ve been enjoying it ever since. I bought it primarily for the gym and for traveling, and it’s worked well for both of those. However, I thought the sessions on the elliptical machine might be more fun with some news or a talk show to listen to.

I listen to NPR in the car anyway and have often wished that I could time shift their shows (a “TiVo for radio”, if you will). Of course, none of their shows are available in MP3 format (well, except for On The Media). I was aware that many NPR stations offered MP3 streams off their websites, but I still didn’t have a way to record and schedule recordings.

After some searching, I discovered Streamripper, a command line utility that records MP3 streams. I then found PublicRadioFan.com which lists the MP3 streams for hundreds of NPR stations. Putting those together, I’ve been able to record NPR as MP3s and, with some scheduling, grab individual shows for my iPod.. Here’re the steps which I went through, in case you wanted to try this on your own. I run this on my PC but this process may be adaptable to other platforms as well (in particular, I’m pretty sure Linux or FreeBSD could be made to work).

1. First, download the latest version of Streamripper and extract the zip to a directory of your choice (I put mine in “C:\Program Files\Internet\Streamripper\”).

2. Then, load up PublicRadioFan and set your time zone and, if you like, you can set some other preferences as well. But, be sure to set your time zone — if you don’t, none of this will work.

3. After that, it’s time to start looking for programs which you’d like to record. So, head over to the Schedule Grid: Advanced Options page. Here’re the settings which I’d recommend:

   • What time? — choose the “starting at” radio button along with “6 hours”. Then, it’s just a matter of choosing a day and time which is kinda close to a program which you’d like to record. So, for Morning Edition, you could choose 5:00am; or, for Marketplace, you could try 2:00pm (keeping in mind that those represent 5:00-11:00am and 2:00-8:00pm, respectively).

   • What Stations? — you could leave this at the default or you may find that setting it to “USA” (assuming you live in the USA) may yield more relevant results (since Europe probably doesn’t have many NPR affiliate stations).

   • What audio formats? — since Streamripper can only grok mp3s, you should uncheck all of these except for “mp3”.

   • What programs? — feel free to narrow this down but “all programs” is probably fine to start; you can always narrow it down later if you end up with too many results.

   • Display format — I find that the “grid” is easiest to work with.

4. After all that, click on “display listings” to get a list. Look through the programs to find one which you’d like to record and, once you’ve found one, right click on the lightning-bolt icon next to it (the Winamp logo) and choose “Save Link As” to save the link to your local drive. Yeah, this may seem a bit weird, but those links only point to a playlist and we need the URI for the actual mp3 stream.

5. At this point, it may be helpful to open up a text editor to make a few notes. Anyhow, once you’ve downloaded the playlist file (which should have the extension “m3u”), open that file in another text editor window and copy the path in there to your “notes” text file. Then, going back to your web browser, make a note of these attributes from the show which you’d like to record:

   • Its name
   • Its starting time
   • The recording time, in seconds (which would be 60 x the time in minutes)

6. Now it’s time to build the batch file (we’re almost there!). Open a third text editor window and enter these two lines:

   • C:\path\to\streamripper.exe http://servername.net:12200 -a D:\path\to\name-of-the-show.mp3 -s -l 7200 -o
   • del D:\path\to\*.cue

   Of course, the “\path\to\” bits represent your respective paths for streamripper and the path you’d like to use for the mp3 file. And, servername.net is the server which you extracted from the .m3u file earlier. The port “12200” is just hypothetical — use whichever port was listed in the m3u file (which may be a different number or there may be none at all). And, you'll also need to specify the time length to record (in seconds) which is the “7200” above.

   So, what’s the “del” statement in there? Well, “.cue” files are a meta-file which are created through the mp3 extraction process; but, they’re useless for our purposes. So, deleting them just makes for less hard drive clutter.

   And, if you’re curious, here’s what each of those parameters do:

   • -a: this records the mp3 to a single file. Without this, Streamripper may try to rip the show into several separate files (which could be useful if you’re ripping an Internet radio station, but not really for public radio).

   • -s: this prevents Steamripper from creating a directory for each stream. I find it easier to just sort the files on my own afterwards.

   • -l: as mentioned above, this specified the length of time to record, in seconds.

   • -o: this tells Streamripper to overwrite tracks in the destination directory. I find this handy since I only really want the most current episode of (say) Morning Edition at any given time.

7. That’s it for the batch file, so just save it with a “.bat” filename, such as morning-edition.bat or marketplace.bat.

8. Just two more steps left: scheduling (this one) and id3 tags (the next one). Now that you have a batch file set up, it’s just a matter of telling your OS to run that file at the program’s starting time. To do that, go to Control Panel -> Scheduled Tasks and choose Add Scheduled Task. You can probably figure out the scheduling from here — you choose the batch file which you just created and set it to run at the program’s start time.

9. At this point, you’re all set to record mp3 streams from NPR but they’ll probably have weak (if any) id3 information in there (which is the data inside an mp3 file that describes the artist name and track number, among other things).

   So, after each time a file is downloaded (or at least just before you sync those files with your iPod), you’ll need to add its id3 information. For that, I prefer to use Mp3tag (which is free). And, here’s the naming scheme which I like to use:

   • Title: the show’s name, such as “Morning Edition”

   • Artist: “NPR”, which ensures that all my public radio mp3s are grouped together

   • Album: the date, in YYYY-MM-DD format. This way, after selecting the Genre and then Artist on my iPod, I can select a date and see all shows from that day.

   • Track: I generally choose a number the chronological sequence of the shows for that day, so that they’ll play back in the same order in my iPod. So, Morning Edition might be “01” followed by Day to Day (“02”) and Marketplace (“03”).

   • Genre: I’ve set all of my NPR recordings to “Public Radio” for the genre.

So, that’s how you can set up Streamripper to record MP3s from NPR. I know it may look like a lot of steps, but it's not too hard once you get into it. And, if it doesn’t record what you’re expecting, you may find it helpful to try setting your recording time to five seconds or so (temporarily), and then running the batch file manually; that way, you can see whether it’s recording the right station or even whether it’s recording at all. Or, if you get stuck, leave a comment and I’ll try to help out.

I went to SXSW last weekend and got back to Dallas Tuesday evening. Then, the following day (Wednesday), there was the DFWBlogs March Cocktail Event at New Amsterdam Coffee Haus (which actually is a bar, contrary to what you might think). I actually wasn't sure if I’d go, but decided to give it a try as I had heard that there might be some new bloggers there.

I ended up getting a bit lost on my way there and wound up about ten minutes late. Now, even though ten minutes late is still “on-time” in the DFW-blogiverse, I still expected that there’d be a few people there ahead of me. However, as I walked in the door, I took a quick look around and soon realized that I was the only one there. So, I just ordered a drink and sat down at a table which looked big enough to hold several more people. And, fortunately, New Amsterdam has an excellent beer selection; I certainly didn’t mind a few quiet moments as I sipped my Chimay White.

As I waited, I peered around the place and took in their decor. Soon enough, a few other bloggers arrived — Leia, Matt, Julie and Andrew walked in about the same time. Each of them ordered a drink and, as we began talking, we soon realized that neither Leia nor I had dinner beforehand. Leia mentioned off-handedly that the last time the DFWBlogs happy hour was at New Amsterdam, the group went off to Cafe Brazil afterwards. That sounded pretty good, actually, and I suggested that we could go get some dinner there.

After finishing our drinks — and meeting new-blogger Heidi — we closed our tabs and headed off to Cafe Brazil. And, as an illustration of the goofy road patterns in the area, I recall that Matt’s directions to get to Cafe Brazil went something like this: “ Go left on Exposition Ave and then turn left onto Elm Street. Well, actually, you don’t need to turn left onto Elm — Exposition just curves around and then becomes Elm.”

We drove to Cafe Brazil and there were plenty of free tables; we were seated just about as soon as we got there. And, while I often order a make-your-own omelette when I go to Cafe Brazil (with chorizo, feta and sun-dried tomatoes), I felt like something a bit sweeter this time. I turned to the breakfast section of the menu and the pancakes caught my eye. Of course, the menu only said “pancakes” and didn’t make it clear whether fruit-filled pancakes were available (such as blueberry pancakes which would have hit the spot right about then).

When our server came around to take our order, I just asked him what kinds of pancakes they had. I recall that there were plain, chocolate chip and some third variety of pancakes. Well, that made my choice easy — I could hardly resist a dish featuring both pancakes and chocolate. And, just to ensure some protein intake within the meal, I also ordered a side of chorizo.

Our food arrived a little while later and I dug right in. And, I’m not sure if this is typical of all breakfast-is-our-specialty restaurants, but these were some enormous pancakes — each of the three pancakes was about 6-8 inches across and about a third of an inch thick. Sure enough, there were chocolate chips in there. But, the thickness of the pancakes worked to their disadvantage. I mean, let’s not kid around — this was a chocolate-chip delivery vehicle which happened to be in a circle and I just wanted as many chocolate chips in each bite as possible.

To the cook’s credit, it was evident that the chocolate chips were added as the pancakes were cooking (as opposed to adding right into the batter) as chips might have all sunk to the bottom of the mixing bowl otherwise. With this manual chip-sprinkling midway through the cooking process, the chips were evenly distributed. But, the pancakes were so thick that even a 2" x 1" slice — a throughput of perhaps two to three chocolate chips — still left me with a mouthful of pancake.

Perhaps some thinner pancakes would resolve this. Nothing crazy or crepe-like (not that I would be opposed to that) but perhaps something closer to a quarter-inch thick. That should be thick enough to remain structurally sound when transferring them off the cooking surface while ensuring the most favorable chip-to-batter radio. Not that these were bad pancakes — they were soft and delectable — but they did have that area for improvement.

Come to think of it, most restaurant-pancakes are pretty thick, if memory serves. Maybe it’s just that their customers like the spectacle of a pile of plate-filling pancakes. So, I suppose I’ll just have to make my own chocolate-chip pancakes to get them properly unthickified. (And, that reminds me of the DFWBlogs-breakfast which we had about two years ago. Everyone joined in and we cooked up a huge breakfast; I wouldn’t be opposed to trying that again sometime.)

It’s mid-March, and that can only mean one thing — it's time for another fun trip to Austin for SXSW 2005. For those not aware, South by Southwest (more commonly known by its initials, SXSW) is a music, film and interactive festival in Austin, Texas; I’ll be attending the Interactive conference.

The interactive conference runs this Friday through Tuesday (March 11th-16th) and their schedule of panels is online. Here’re some of the panels which I’ll be attending:

Saturday March 12th

• 2:00 pm — Opening Remarks: Jeffrey Zeldman. With all the useful links on Zeldman.com, his site is almost like a mini aggregator for the web coding world.

• 5:00 pm — How to Make Big Things Happen With Small Teams. I work at a small company and I thought I might be able to get something out of this. And it's presented by Jason Fried of 37signals, so it’s hard to go wrong.

• 6:00pm — WaSP/CSS-D/WD-L/WSM/AIR Meetup for SXSW Interactive. Hosted by James Craig, this could be a good opportunity to meet other standards-minded web coders.

Sunday March 13th

• 10:00 am — Emergent Semantics. It had “semantics” in its title and it’s presented by Eric Meyer. I needed no further convincing ;).

• 11:30 am — How to be Beautiful: More Hi-Fi Design With CSS. This panel also has some of the big names in CSS, including Doug Bowman, Dan Cederholm and Dave Shea.

• 2:00 pm — Keynote Speaker: Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve enjoyed Gladwell’s work ever since discovering his article on the Science of Shopping. In this keynote, he'll probably talk about his new book Blink, which I’ve also heard good things about.

• 3:30 pm — How to Use Accessiblity Guidelines, Standards and Testing. I try to stay current on web accessibility and this panel particularly interested me as it appears to focus on real world testing with (free) tools.

• 3:30 pm — The Elements of Meaningful XHTML. Yeah, so I have two Sunday-at-3:30 panels on my list. It's really hard to decide between these two as this one is also right up my alley. And, while I’ve been to panels where Tantek Celik spoke among other panelists, I haven't been to one where he spoke as the sole presenter.

• 5:00 pm — How to Build Your Brand with Blogs. The company I work for (RD2) also has a corporate blog and this seemed a useful panel to get the most out of that.

Monday March 14th

• 11:30 am — How to Inform Design: How to Set Your Pants on Fire. Jeffrey Veen is one of the panelists on this one and, even though I’m not an information architect, his panels which I went to last year were so engaging that I couldn’t resist going to this one as well.

• 3:30 pm — The Semantic Web: Promising Future or Utter Failure. This looks like it could be one of those debate-panels where experts discuss opposing sides of an issue — sometimes it works out while other times it falls flat. Here’s to hoping this one is lively and interesting.

• 5:00 pm — A Sample of Style from the Homestar Runner Folks. Homestar Runner is an amusing online Flash animation series which can only be made better by puppet versions of their characters (w00t!). Oh, and I’ve discovered that there’s also a Homestar Runner Wiki. Who knew?

Tuesday March 15th

• 11:30 am — Notes From the Underground: The Rise of Remix Culture. I get a kick out of mashups — an art form where someone superimposes one song on top of another to form a brand new song — and I’m looking forward to seeing what they cover in this panel.

• 2:30 pm — Accessibility Shoot-Out. In this panel, URLs are thrown into a hat and then accessibility experts look over the site and give advice. I’m concerned that I may not learn much new out of this one, but you never know.

So, those are the panels which I’ve penciled-in so far. SXSW is a great time every year and I can't wait to get to Austin!

I’ve been working full time for RD2 since the summer and prior to that I worked for myself. And, at the time, I gave myself benefits, though they were largely of the in-case-I-get-hit-by-a-bus variety. I didn’t give myself dental benefits and so it had been about three years since I had last seen a dentist. But, now that I had a full time job with benefits, I thought that I should have things checked out at a dentist. I hadn’t felt any tooth pain or other obvious signs of tooth anomalies (otherwise I would have gone to see one earlier) but I didn’t know what they’d find either.

There aren’t many things which I fear, but dentists are probably one of them — I’m the kind of guy that winces at the sound of hearing a dentist’s drill on tv (really). So, wanting to educate myself, I Googled around for new dentistry techniques on repairing tooth decay on the chance that there might be something which could be used in lieu of a drill (on the off-chance that I had a cavity after all). And, I came across a technique called air abrasion which, in simplest terms, is like microscopic sand-blasting on your teeth:

Air abrasion works by blowing a stream of powerful dry clean air, mixed with minute abrasive particles of aluminum oxide onto the surface of the teeth. Air abrasion uses the kinetic energy principle, in which particles bounce off the tooth and blasts the decay away. […]

Air abrasion procedures are virtually painless eliminating the need for an anesthetic injection. Air abrasion systems produce no vibration and no heat from friction. The technology can’t harm soft mouth tissue and they operate very quietly.…

“Ah, that sounds good&rdquo, I thought to myself. Of course, I didn’t know if I had a cavity at this point, but I knew that I wanted to go to a dentist that offered air abrasion on the chance that I did have a cavity. The next step: search for dentists and air abrasion in Dallas. I looked through the first few links and 21st Century Dental seemed the most promising. I think I was hooked from the introductory sentence in which they described themselves as a “dental spa”. Among other things, they tout televisions in every room, massage mats on the patient chairs and fresh fresh Otis Spunkmeyer cookies.

So, I scheduled an appointment with them which was earlier this month. Laurie was my hygienist and she was very friendly. One of the first things she did was to take my pulse (with one of those automated arm-cuff machines) and she remarked that mine was a bit high. I commented that I “wasn’t really a ‘dentist person’” and that I may have been a bit nervous to which she replied “I don’t think anyone’s really a ‘dentist person”. And, after a few seconds pondering, she added “… well, except for me” with a smile.

She took x-rays of my teeth with digital x-ray which then displayed the images on an overhead LCD monitor hanging from a multi-jointed arm. And, once she got to cleaning my teeth, she handed me a remote control which set the LCD monitor to television duty. As she worked away, I flipped through the channels and settled on CNN Headline News. Not that teeth cleaning really hurts, but the scraping sound can sometimes be a bit disconcerting; and, watching tv helped get my mind off of the sharp tools in my mouth.

After the cleaning, she called in Dr Roy — Jeff is his first name — who examined the x-rays (back on the LCD monitor, so that I could look over them as well) and informed me that I had a cavity. Well, I wouldn’t say that I was pleased to hear this, but it’s not something that was completely unexpected either (considering how long it had been since I had last been to a dentist).

So, I scheduled another appointment to get the cavity filled, and that appointment was yesterday. And as I drove there, I wasn’t too nervous; but, I was a little uneasy by the time I got to the waiting room. However, the waiting room, to their credit, includes at least one hanging waterfall which actually helped a great deal. Soon enough, Michelle called me back to one of the dental chairs. And, right off the bat, she asked whether I would like laughing gas to help me to relax, to which I readily agreed.

She placed a nosepiece over my face and started the gas. And, after a little while, I did feel a bit more calm. Then Dr Roy came in to anesthetize the tooth (one of the upper-left molars). He used a machine with a jointed mechanical arm which delivered anesthetic to just that tooth (and it made kind of a purring sound in the process which I suppose is one of the better sounds a dental machine can make). However, they needed to wait a few minutes for the anesthetic to take effect. Both Dr Roy and Michelle walked out but, before leaving, Michelle asked if I wanted anything to drink while I waited. She named a few drinks including Diet Coke which is what I settled on.

She brought back a chilled can of Diet Coke and then left me to wait. Really, this wasn’t that much fun. Sure, I had sugar-free refreshment at hand, but I could only ponder the upcoming cavity-filling. I sipped the soda and looked out the window, trying to think of anything but stuff related to teeth. Fortunately, the lights in the patient rooms are always kept dimly lit — about what might come to mind if you were to think of the lighting in a stereotypical web development shop (and the hygienists and dentists use those overhead mouth-spotlights for light when they’re working).

Dr Roy and Michelle eventually returned, about 10-15 minutes later, and they reclined my chair. I asked if I’d be getting an air abrasion filling or a more traditional filling and they said that it would be a regular filling. I was aware of that possibility as not all cavities are suitable for air abrasion; still, I just reminded myself that I needed the filling and that I would just have to stick through it.

Before Dr Roy and Michelle began the procedure, Michelle offered me a variety of Internet radio stations which were listed on the LCD monitor. I asked for some jazz with the provision that I didn’t want “any of that smooth jazz”. She flipped through a few of them and I settled on a jazz classics station. And, after having chosen that, I noticed a browser window in the background which I recognized as DigitallyImported.com. I briefly pondered what it might be like to get a filling with Euro Dance pulsing in the background but thought better of it.

There was some drilling, of course, but it wasn’t as bad as I had envisioned. I was pretty relaxed from the nitrous oxide in ways that I hadn’t anticipated (not that I’m complaining). I could hear the sound of the drill but it was if I was just listening to someone’s cordless drill — my brain wasn’t making the connection of “hey, that’s a drill I hear… in my mouth!”. And, after they finished digging the hole in my tooth, they filled it with a tooth-colored resin.

When it was all done, I felt less bad than I thought I would. I had some numbness but it was mostly just that one tooth which they had anesthetized. And, my jaw was a bit stiff from having it propped open while they worked, but nothing really hurt. I walked back to the main desk and, before I left, they offered me a milkshake in a choice of vanilla, strawberry or chocolate. I asked for strawberry and they brought one by shortly. They also motioned towards a plate of the warm chocolate chip cookies under a glass lid and I helped myself to one of those as well.

I still don’t know if I’d call myself a “dentist person” but this was almost pleasant, all things considered. I found Dr Roy and his staff very down-to-earth and that really helped put me at ease. Everyone was very friendly and not once were they condescending (which is probably my number-one pet peeve of dentists). I have a follow-up appointment on Tuesday and, while I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it, I’m not fretting about it. And, if anyone needs a dentist in the Dallas/Irving area, I can’t recommend these guys highly enough.