What’s Up With the Peanut Study?

My apologies to anyone who reads this blog and wondered about the Duke peanut study. I’ve been lax in keeping it up to date since moving my technical content off to my company website.

I wish to take a moment and update people on the status of the Duke peanut study. I last wrote about the Duke study in January of 2007. At the time, we had just returned from my son’s first appointment with Dr. Burks. The appointment was a really a meet and greet session where they talked with us to see if we were really serious and we learned the details of the study. I came back and wrote about how the study would be done and my feelings about being the father of a son with a life threatening peanut allergy.

Since then I’ve been fairly quiet about the allergy and study, at least on my blog. A few people have asked me for an update on my son and, more to the point, the Duke study.

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Categories: Peanut Allergy
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Firemoss Dunked By Alagad - For the Good of the Children

For me, personally, the highlight of CFunited was the Dunk The Guru event. Someone had the astoundingly brilliant idea to rent a dunk tank and to put various ColdFusion luminaries in it. All proceeds from the dunk tank were donated to the Make a Wish Foundation.

Thankfully, I'm apparently not considered a ColdFusion luminary! But, Joe Rinehart of Firemoss fame is! Seeing as Joe is both my neighbor and competitor, I had no choice but to support the foundation.

As is shown in this photo, boy oh boy did I support the foundation. I spent about $25 on tickets. At 3 balls per ticket that would mean I threw about 75 balls. And that doesn't count the balls others paid for me to throw.

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Categories: Alagad, General, Pictures, CFUnited
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First Impressions of the iPhone

For fathers day, which was a few weeks ago, my wife gave me permission to get an iPhone. I had a Nokia 6620 which was on its last legs and which, for the most part, the most part I found disappointing. Beyond that, I was the one person who still had not yet bought an iPod. So the Steve Jobs Effect clearly piqued my interest.

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Categories: Personal
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Any CF Radio Control Car Drivers Going to CFUnited?

For about a year now I've enjoyed an occasional hobby of driving remote control cars. I usualy drive my nitro car (gas powered) but also have a small electric. I'm not really very good at driving (nor the maintenance) but I have fun. It gets me out of the house and I get to annoy the neighbors a bit. (Joe will vouch for that. I once hit a neighbors van at full speed – roughly 50 mph. Oops.)

Anyhow, I know another prominent CFer who drives RC cars. We were planning on both bringing a car this year, but unfortunately he is unable to attend. I was wondering if any other CFers out there drive RC cars and are planning on attending the conference? I'd love to put together an impromptu race or something. It might be a nice, non technical/informal BOF one afternoon.

Any interest?

Here are a picture of my two (working) cars:

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Categories: General
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CFUnited: Looking For a Place to Crash

I was just wondering if anyone out there in blog-land was going to CFUnited and was looking to share a room at the Marriott?  I've decided more or less just now to try to attend the conference and, of course, they're sold out.

If you're interested please drop me a line at dhughes(at)alagad.com.  Thanks!

Update: I found a place!

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Categories: General
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Bose Knows Customer Support

A couple years ago my wife got me a nice set of Bose TriPort headphones. These were not the noise canceling type, which is what I really wanted at the time. (I sat between Joe and Scott at the time – there was a lot of noise to cancel!) However, they were very nice and the over the ear design cut out all but the most obnoxious background noise.

Before the Bose headphones I had a bad habit of wearing out headphones every few months. I had previously owned several over the ear headphones from Sony and a sound canceling knockoff from Phillips, all of which broke after only a few months of use.

The problem is that I'm always wearing headphones when I work. If I work 40 hours a week and 50 weeks a year then I'm wearing these headphones 2000 hours a year! The cheaper headphones just can't stand up to that type of usage.

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Categories: General
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Peanut Allergy Study Thoughts

As I blogged last night, my son had his first appointment at Duke Children's hospital to begin his participation in the peanut allergy desensitization study.

We started the day out early, roughly 5am, so that we would have time to eat, get the van loaded, and drive in rush hour traffic out to Durham for our appointment. (For those in the area, we took our first drive around 540, which was a nice change from the standstill which is 40 into the RTP.)

As expected, the hospital was quite nice. When you walk in, you enter a modern four story tall foyer. The foyer has large, brightly colored, mobiles hanging from the ceiling. Balconies for each of the four stories open up into the foyer and are lined with decorative colored glass that catch light streaming in the front windows of the hospital.

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Categories: Peanut Allergy
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