courtney johnston von nieda has a blog. again.

Let’s Talk About Bobak Ferdowsi

Courtney — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 11:51:23 +0000

On August 5th I sat on my laptop in my living room watching a University of Washington channel that broadcast NASA tv part of the day. I sat on IRC with my friends around the country, my preferred method of communication since 1999. There was a guy on screen with a mohawk. One of my friends drunkenly called him names on IRC. I went to twitter search and found a tweet naming the flight director as Bobak Ferdowsi and giving up his @tweetsoutloud handle. We were still 10 minutes from mission control erupting with joy. With 5 minutes left before confirmation of landing I had claimed fuckyeahbobakferdowsi.tumblr.com and had already posted the image macros found on twitter. Aside from my friends in IRC I may have also let Joel Johnson and Rachel Sklar know about it via twitter. I spent hours retweeting and tumbling that night. Luckily Jessica also reminded me to install Google Analytics. I went to bed.

I woke up to emails for interviews and this:
The site got mentioned by most major news sources, although not all of them were comfortable with name. I gave reporters various stats but as this wasn’t my story I only agreed to be quoted in an online opinion piece in The Guardian about the viralness of the ordeal. As it wasn’t my story I also sent an email to Bobak himself apologizing and offering to take anything uncomfortable down. I heard from his coworkers. I eventually heard from him. Everyone seemed pretty cool with the deal. I told Bobak some day I’d buy him a beer. I made a rule to not take pics of Bobak dug up from the depths of his real life friends social media accounts.

By the end of August I had spent dozens of hours approving and scheduling submissions. Traffic-wise August 5th thru August 31st looked like:After August everything really waned. It wasn’t the newest story, but Bobak was being booked for talks and events and the submissions became much more about where he was going to speak and who was coming to visit JPL. It plodded along though, and I was over 200 posts when I had brunch with Bobak himself. He’s extremely polite, very friendly, always on message and he genuinely loves his job. The person you see in all those interviews and talks is the person you get. It’s good to get validation that the person you created a silly website about isn’t an asshole, it’s even better when they’re someone you actually enjoyed hanging out with.

I thought the site was close to dying then. There’s been a lot of appearances and visits since then though and now I’m sitting on 399 posts. At 199 and 299 I thought the next post would be the last. At some point the number will embarrass me, I’m sure. Who knows how much longer I’ll post on it. It was fun at the beginning though.

Removed Cards Against Humanity Cards

Courtney — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 18:03:07 +0000

I love Cards Against Humanity. It’s the game I’ve always wanted to play and didn’t know it. Sometimes the game goes a little too far or a little too obscure for my friends. Or it goes a little outdated. Some cards have to be removed to make way for new cards. This will be the living list of cards removed from the von Nieda CAH deck.

Dead parents.

Sick again.

Courtney — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:59:13 +0000

I’m afraid my worst fear might be realized. I may not be able to eat a Thanksgiving dinner this year.

It took a good 3 weeks on the Nexium but the coughing nearly stopped. I found a few things that triggered coughing spells pretty easily, so no more dousing thai fried rice with an entire lime’s worth of juice, but by a large I was well. Then last week Jason caught a cold. Then Sunday I caught a cold.

Now I’m a big ball of tylenol cold, pineapple-orange juice and whining. My nose is almost cleared out which means it’s soon time for the coughing to begin. The last 2 times this happened, before the Nexium, that meant it’s soon time for the next 3 months of coughing to begin. We’ll see.

However with Thanksgiving 2 days away I’m not sure I can extract myself from my cold medicine or contagious haze in time for any turkey or stuffing. If you hear a loud wailing Thursday it’s just me hanging out over a plate of grocery store fried chicken and StoveTop stuffing.

Old

Courtney — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:13:19 +0000

In further adventures of I’m finally starting to wear this body out I’ve been switched from Zantac to Prilosec and now to Nexium.

The problems are pretty clearly related to when I eat. I wake up feeling good but the first time I ingest anything the day goes to shit. It’ll ease up just in time for another meal when it comes back right after eating. Still no other symptoms.

Prilosec worked for a few days and nearly stopped the coughing altogether, but that was also when I was in Denver for GABF. Drinking also stops the coughing. I wish it would have worked. It was about $200 cheaper/month than the Nexium. The Nexium is helping some, I can feel, but I still feel like if I’m awake I’m coughing. I’m giving it another 10 days or so and if I still feel the same it’s time to make an appointment with a GI doctor at Polyclinic. I’ve already got the referral.

WTF Lungs?

Courtney — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 07:09:06 +0000

The internet has the answer to a lot of medical questions, except the one I have.

What is wrong with me?

It’s not just me either. I can find hundreds of posts from the last few years from numerous other people with the same symptoms lasting for months and years without any sort of diagnosis or fix. Here’s the basics:

I have a very hard cough, so hard in fact that I’m purging with the coughing numerous times each day.
The cough is productive, but colorless.
The cough lasts for months.
Antibiotics do not help.
This cough has occurred annually since 2008.

I get sick easily. Put me in a crowd of people and I always come out with a cold. I’ve always been that way. When I was young I also had constant ear infections which the local Indian Health Services hospital always threw a short, fat bottle of chalky amoxicillin at, which in turn gave me a penicillin allergy. I have spent most of my adult life getting 2 sinus infections a year which would move into my chest and leave me with a week of coughing this awful walrus cry with a high pitched squeak at the end, but it was always a week and done.

In late 2007 I moved from Kansas City to Seattle. Sometime in 2008 I got my first sinus infection in my new town and got a new primary care doctor. Afterwards I felt fine except I had this cough that wouldn’t go away. A month after all my other symptoms passed I was given an Advair inhaler. It took a full month and a half on it before I was back to normal. Same thing in 2009. In 2010 I was given a Flovent inhaler.

I got sick with a sinus infection in early November 2011. I got a refill of Flovent from my doctor without being seen because my new insurance didn’t kick in until the 15th. It didn’t do anything. Xrays didn’t show anything. I was coughing into February, when she prescribed I take 2 Zantac a day proclaiming the cause to be acid reflux that didn’t show up any other way…and you know, the cough did eventually stop not long after (after around 5 months total). I’m still taking those 2 Zantac (she preferred Zantac for women citing less issues with causing bone density loss) because I do get a dry annoying cough without it within a single day.

A little more than 2 weeks ago I did find myself in the general public for about an hour…the general smoking public infact at the Snoqualmie Casino. Don’t ask. The following Sunday my throat was a little sore. I’ve been coughing non-stop ever since. My doctor was on maternity leave so I had to choose a new doctor until October. No x-rays, no spirometry tests. She believes I’m having an allergic reaction that has majorly inflamed my bronchial tubes (bronchospasm) but isn’t bronchitis or pneumonia and gave me 2 inhalers. Albuterol every 4 hours and Flovent every 12 hours. When the cough got worse she suspected I may have an infection somewhere in there and gave me a Z-Pak.

None of that has helped so I’ve asked for an asthma/allergy specialist referral. I’m not getting better and I’m mentally exhausted. The coughing has gotten worse each time I’ve gotten it, and this time the introduction of regularly vomiting the water I’ve been drinking to calm it also brings embarrassment. I’m averaging a hard coughing fit about every 5 minutes if I’m resting…less if I’m sitting under a humidifier. Sleep is non-existant. Every time I have talked in the last 4 days it’s caused a major coughing fit. I’m not running a fever and my O2 is steady at 98% but I haven’t been able to put on clothes or sleep with more than 1 thin sheet this week and I’m usually frozen and under multiple blankets. And yes, I did get so worried about my oxygen levels I went and bought my own oximeter at Walgreens.

I’m really not looking forward to another 6+ weeks of this without any answers. Hopefully since it coincided with my arrival in the PNW there is an allergy that can be picked out as the cause, or maybe a more long term medicine to prevent it.

To Cure My Ills

Courtney — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 08:13:00 +0000

12oz of hot water
+
2 Red Rose black decaf tea bags
+
2 teaspoons of raw honey
+
1oz of bourbon
+
5 ice cubes because fuck that’s hot

Drink. Repeat until your lungs stop burning.

This place

Courtney — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 07:43:42 +0000

I know, my site has been neglected.

That theme, it was just too girly for me and I never wanted to put anything on it. I’ve reverted back to my favorite (and free) StudioPress theme.

I’ll post up something about what it was like to run fuckyeahbobakferdowsi.tumblr.com soon. As soon as the queued posts ever drops below 4.

Anyways, with that I need to reorganize into some simpler categories and make this place livable again. My websites to make list only has 10 things on it right now so this will surely happen by mid-next year.

Until then here’s an Instagram picture of Sonja

Teriyaki Sauce

Courtney — Sat, 26 May 2012 03:46:25 +0000

Jason said he wants this again so I need to remember how to make it since I threw it together from an ingredient list pieced from 5 different recipes.

1 cup Mirin
1 cup soy sauce
2 tbsp sake
2 tbsp rice vinegar
1 tbsp sesame oil
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp light brown sugar
1 tsp red pepper flakes
6 cloves of garlic, cut in half
1 big square inch piece of fresh ginger, cut in half

Simmer the mirin and sugar until combined. Add in all the remaining ingredients. Simmer uncovered for 15 minutes. Cover and simmer for another 10.

Rdio Playlist: 35 Songs to Get Up &…Work?

Courtney — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:54:43 +0000

Working from home gives me the opportunity to dj my life for 8+ hours a day. I rely pretty heavily on Rdio these days as it has everything I loved about other streaming music services: artist specific radio stations, playlist, good coverage of new releases, and lots of indie and electronic. It also built on some things I didn’t like about other services, specifically the ability to listen ONLY to the artist you specified for an artist radio station, no overt p2p networking and it only costs $4 a month.

I spend a lot of time in darker droning music so I need something full of bounce and a little cheese to get me going sometimes. Here’s the 35 songs I’ve got on my upbeat get to work playlist currently. It’s good any time of the day but if I want to work after 10pm it’s the only way to go.

If you’re a rdio subscriber or if you have the free rdio account you’ll be able to listen to the playlist below, otherwise you will only get 30 second clips of each song. I highly recommend getting at least a free account as it does give you a decent amount of free, ad free songs to listen to each month. I signed up before I hit my limit but I listened for 2 weeks without running out.

I Spoke Too Soon

Courtney — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:42:11 +0000

]]>