“Book ’em, Danno.”

–Detective Lieutenant Steve McGarrett, Hawaii Five-O

My most recent project has been working with page scraping and HTML parsing in order to work with our publicly accessible arrest records to parse them into a more view-able format. From conception to completion, this app took about 12 man hours – a new record for me for this type of project.

For privacy reasons, I’ve redacted the info from the screenshots (and for the same privacy reasons, opted to not make this app public beyond a closed alpha). I’m working on tidying the code and getting it up on GitHub (though school is first on my mind right now).

Oh goodness – it’s the beginning of the end of this blog… I almost made a post solely to apologize for not posting more often – that’s like the death rattle of a blog. *cringe*

ANYWAY.

What’s been going on in my life (abridged):

• Got back from an awesome trip in Texas
• Have been hard at work building server provisioning procedures at work (I’ll post some on here when I’m done; they’re great resources for anyone trying to take a box from bare metal to server)
• My magnet is still in my finger, with no change from the last post (shocker!). I think it’s hit an equilibrium point in extrusion, and may be in my finger for a while longer.
• I’ve got a big 100mL bottle of lidocaine I got from Thailand for $20 (much better deal)
• I’ve got 2 more magnets in the mail, this time new and improved from the research done by Amal and Glims over at Biohack.me. They’re titanium nitride coated; much more durable and resistant to fouling than my last ones. Gonna wait for a bit and do another implantation! :D

Things are pretty busy with work at the moment, but it’s just a few weeks until I’m off and relaxing until school!

I had an awesome weekend of kneeboarding and tubing at Lake Livingston in Texas, and somehow the magnet stayed in! It was tender at a few points, but it has survived the hardest weekend of the trip, so I’m back to expecting a gradual extrusion rather than being painfully popped out.

Today I was taken by surprise as I picked up my energized power brick and felt my magnet tingling! I could get a sense of the shape and volume of the space with a noticeable field – super cool!

Unfortunately, the magnet continues to near the surface of my skin… It’s anyone bet how much longer I’ve got it for – a week in Texas of tubing and fun lakeside may work it out early; I’m bringing a surg kit to manage extrusion if it happens while I’m there. Research continues for magnet 2!

My primary medical contact throughout all this, Linda, has confirmed my fears that the magnet seems to be extruding/rejecting. From Linda:

Looks like your body is working super-efficiently and I might not be surprised if it popped out in the next few days, like in the night when you’re sleeping. This pic looks very much like a bullet I saw buried near the skin (it had migrated down his arm) that extruded the day after I saw it.   So hurry and get to Denmark now :)  !   next transhuman adventure… ?

Just a quick pic after a long 24 hours. My sensitivity is increasing, as is the sharpness of the outline of the magnet edge on my skin – the magnet is definitely being pushed on by my body; hopefully it doesn’t get pushed out.

There’s exciting work in the pipeline with some new coatings, so I’m watching eagerly and considering a part 2 if the results are promising!

At work, we’ve been going hard on building some reports while working with a particularly difficult database that ignores more normal forms than it follows. While my coworkers have found this frustrating, I quite enjoy it. Most of the code for previous reports has been handled entirely in PHP, with database queries getting all the relevant (and irrelevant) data, and looping through massive volumes in PHP (O(n^3+)). In my report, I’ve been working to offload all the processing to the SQL server, which has far more power than our web servers. I love solving the web of joins and sub tables. It’s essentially spacial perception – I visualize the tables and keys as blocks in space with specific connectors (the keys). Interestingly, I’ve never been terribly good at spacial perception – my teachers in pre-kindergarten in New Zealand would make me come to school early and do puzzles, which I despised, partly because it was hard, and partly because it took so long to slow down and think about (if you know me, you’re of course _shocked _that I didn’t enjoy a task that I wasn’t good at and forced me to slow down). The practice paid off though, and while I still have to think hard about 3D nets and folding, my 2D visualizations of SQL databases are a fun challenge.

This next week marks the halfway point of my summer job as a developer. It’s also near the five year anniversary of my employment with this company, and I’m starting to realize how unprepared I am for stepping into the job market in a more full way.

I’ve been formulating a mental todo list of tasks I’d like to do over the next year to try and shape up my employable skills (in addition to keeping up my grades, which is priority number one!).

Things keep looking better and better. There’s definitely a lump where the magnet is, and there’s one edge that’s closer to the surface than I’d like, but the skin is giving way to more top layer epidermis. I’m really happy with how it’s going!

This picture is after a day under a bandaid (I usually moisturize twice a day, and put a bandaid on it in the morning), and it can get a little more raw looking and feeling without protection, but generally speaking this is a great indicator of progress.

I’ve been playing with a magnetometer app on my iPhone 5S – it looks like, with my finger against the phone body, I can register ~4 mT (milliteslas), against ~45 µT of background flux. That’s about the strength of a common fridge magnet!

I’d love to get my hands on some more accurate equipment and see what an empirical measurement would be.