Todd Bradley’s Galaxy

I finally finished uploading my video “Inside Todd’s Head” to YouTube. Here it is in normal (low) quality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UZi5LPjIF4

And here is the higher quality (HD) version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UZi5LPjIF4&fmt=22

I realize 95% of people are going to watch this video and listen to it through low quality computer speakers, and those people will miss out on 95% of the point of this video, sadly. If you want to hear what my best representation of how SCDS really sounded in my case (before surgery) you’ll need to put on headphones.

I’m now at Community Coffee in Baton Rouge, having just finished my 6 week post-op follow-up appointment with Dr. Gianoli.  Short summary: he’s given me a clean bill of health and I’m ready to resume normal activities (though he doesn’t want me to really exert myself for another month).

To bring the occasional reader up to date…

Last week, I went back to week after being off for 7 weeks.  It was a bit of a challenge, and I found that I tired easily.  But I think things are continuing to improve.  I haven’t had any balance issues for about 4 or 5 weeks.

My hearing in the right ear (the one that was operated on) seemed to me to be as good as the left ear, and today’s hearing test proved it: hearing in my right ear is actually better now than before the surgery!  I know some of you are thinking, “But wait, didn’t you get ear surgery because of hearing problems?”  Well, yes I did, but the problem was that I was hearing too much.  My voice, my heartbeat, and other sounds in my head and body were way too loud in my right ear.  The surgery has definitely fixed those problems, which are called autophony.

I flew from Denver to New Orleans yesterday, because it’s quicker than flying from Denver to Baton Rouge directly because there are no direct flights to Baton Rouge.  I was nervous about how my right ear would react to the pressure changes of going up and down in the plane, but it was totally anticlimactic.  In fact, I think I noticed my left ear popping more than my right one.  In fact, things went so well with the pressure changes that I thought maybe the hole my doctor cut in the right eardrum 5 weeks ago still hadn’t healed over.  But when he looked today, he said the eardrum looks awesome.  He saw a little scar, but that may very well be from the tube I had put in years back when I was (mis)diagnosed with endolymphatic hydrops.

Also, Dr. G had me re-do a test called an ECOG (short for electrocochleography).  Before the surgery, my results were abnormal (due to the superior semicircular canal dehiscence).  Today, after the surgery, my results are normal.  Apparently, this bit of knowledge – that SSCD surgery also fixes ECOG problems – isn’t widely known, and Dr. G is gathering enough test results to write a paper on it.  He said he’d do the test for free, and I wasn’t in a hurry, so I agreed to be a guinea pig for him.

Finally, the doctor says my wound is healing up nicely.  Beth has been putting anti-scar cream on it most days since the surgery, but because the scar is covered by hair and the outer ear, Dr. G doesn’t think it’s a big deal to continue the cream past the first few weeks.  So, he left it up to me to decide whether I wanted to continue with the cream or not.  I’ll probably just drop it, since our routine has been for Beth to put it on me after she put the antibiotic drops in my ears.  But I don’t need the ear drops anymore since my eardrum is healed.

Oh, and I took Dr. G and his staff a thank you gift – two pounds of Enstrom’s Toffee, which is the best candy produced in Colorado.  They were very appreciative.

Next steps:

Followup in 6 to 9 months – 6 months if I’m having issues, 9 months if I’m not

Find an anaestesiologist near home and schedule a spinal tap to measure my CSF pressure and drain me if needed

Continue to take Diamox for the next year (yuck), to keep my CSF pressure down

Complete the sleep study to find out if I have sleep apnea (one possible underlying cause of high CSF pressure)

Continue to do lots of walking to get my eyes, ears, and proprioceptors (the three inputs to the balance system) working well together again

Get a blood test to make sure the Diamox isn’t doing weird things to me (I read one side-effect is lowered potassium)

Next week, I must return to Baton Rouge for my 6 week follow-up on my ear surgery. If I can work up sufficient appetite I plan to go out that evening to Brunet’s Cajun Restaurant and attempt to tackle…bom bom bom…the dreaded shrimp dinner.

What’s included in the shrimp dinner, you ask? Well, here’s an excerpt from the menu (in both English and French, of course):

Shrimp Dinner ……………………………………….. 20.99
Diner d’ Chevrette

Includes cup of gumbo, shrimp salad, shrimp etouffee, fried shrimp, shrimp au gratin, boiled shrimp, spiced shrimp, stuffed shrimp. Served with french fries or baked potato, and french bread.

Continer du gombo, un salade aux chevrette, etouffee d’chevrette, chevrette frits, au gratin du chevrette, chevrette bouilli, chevrette bien assaissone, chevrette bourree. Servir avec des pomme de terre frits ou cuire or founeau, et du pain francais.

Reminds me of the scene in “Forrest Gump” where Bubba lists all the ways to prepare shrimp.  Bubba would’ve loved Brunet’s Shrimp Dinner, I think.

As a very late wedding gift to my friend Sybil Baker, I told her I’d make a book trailer for her upcoming book, called “The Life Plan.”  Actually, when she first started talking to me about a book trailer, I didn’t even know what that meant.  But it’s basically a short video advertisement for a book, the same way a movie trailer is a short video advertisement for a movie.  The genre is still young and fresh, and there aren’t many expectations for what goes in a book trailer.  Obviously, unlike a movie trailer, there’s no footage you can steal from the movie to edit into a commercial.  So you gotta make up something from scratch, which is what I did.

“The Life Plan” is a comedic novel about a woman who travels to Thailand, has a bunch of crazy adventures, and ends up going through a bit of a life change.  I made the trailer from a combination of still images of Thailand and video images of Thailand, along with a smattering of stock photos.  Best of all, I did the whole thing without having to do a single shoot to create new footage.  But that meant I had to get creative about where to find footage.  Turns out the Internet Archive had most of what I needed, and Wikipedia had some of the rest.  We also got stills from a friend of Sybil.

And much to my surprise, I was able to make the whole thing using only iMovie.  I assumed I’d run into a road block and have to switch over to using Final Cut Pro, but that wasn’t the case.  In fact, there’s one short clip that could only be done in iMovie ’09 – the animated line showing the journey from Washington DC to Bangkok.  That’s a new iMovie ’09 feature, so I figured I had to use it!

The book comes out March 2, 2009 from Casperian Books.  But you can pre-order it online.  Visit Sybil’s website for more details on that.

Also, here’s a blog post I wrote with my opinions about iMovie after finishing my first project with it.  (shhhhh, don’t tell Sybil this was my first project ever using iMovie, or she might get the idea I had no idea what I was doing; or, on the other hand, maybe she’ll be that much more in awe of my skills that I can just pick up a new tool and make something wonderful using it based on my skills with similar tools)

The voice-over was read by my friend Susan Dorsey, whose short film “Clockwise” I’ve been working on since about August.  It’s nice having some friends with acting talent for times like this.  I co-wrote the voice-over script with Sybil and her husband Rowan.  The music came from one of the demo songs from Apple Garage Band, and so perfectly fit the feel of what I wanted to achieve that I didn’t feel I needed to add anything to it.

And now, since you’ve made it this far in my rambling blog article, you get to watch the YouTube version of the book trailer:

Earlier this week I upgraded my MacBook Pro and my Mac mini (the only two Macs I own anymore) to iLife ’09.  That includes iMovie ’09, which is Apple’s consumer video editing application.  I’ve wanted to try it out for a long time, since I know its professional big brother Final Cut Studio.  But word on the street was iMovie ’08 was terrible, so I never gave it a chance.

However, once ’09 came out, I figured “why not?” and had the perfect project.  A friend named Sybil Baker has a new book coming out in March, and she asked me to make a book trailer for her.  My plan: See how far I could get with the book trailer project using only iMovie before having to switch to Final Cut.  It turns out I was able to do the whole thing all in iMovie ’09!

My basic opinion, coming from the top end down, is this:  iMovie would make putting together home movies and vacation movies a breeze.  That seems to really be its sweet spot.  It’s not super flexible, but it is very easy to use if you’re trying to do a simple project like a DVD of your trip to Tuscany or something.  If you want high flexibility, though, you have to go with Final Cut.

My pet peeve: As with all Apple products, some of the features that pros need are in the consumer version and are easier to use.  For example, the so-called “Ken Burns effect”.  That’s where you take a still image (a photograph, in other words) and have the camera zoom and/or pan across the image to give your video some extra sense of movement.  This is built right into iMovie, where it’s assumed you may want to do this all the time.  In Final Cut, you can do the same sort of thing, but you must jump through lots of hoops, entering numbers and moving sliders around without a video cue to show you what you’re going to see.  It’s so difficult in Final Cut that about a half dozen third-party vendors sell add-ons to make it so you can do the “Ken Burns effect” the same way you can in iMovie.  There are probably a half dozen similar examples in  iMovie/Final Cut, iDVD/DVD Studio Pro, Garage Band/Soundtrack Pro, and so on.

So anyhow, I now understand the good and bad of iMovie ’09 a lot better.  If I ever get time to capture the MiniDV tapes I shot of our Grand Canyon trip last summer, I definitely think I’ll use iMovie to edit it down to something watchable.  But I doubt I’ll ever use it for a “real” video project or one of my Exploding Corpse Production films.

Meanwhile, in case you’re interested, the book trailer I made is for “The Life Plan” by Sybil Baker, released March 5, 2009.  If it’s a best seller, I’ll take all the credit.

The bills and insurance statements for my ear/skull/brain surgery are starting to roll in, and one thing’s certain: The amount medical providers charge my insurance company is hugely different than what they charge me. I guess this is part of what people talk about when they say the US health care industry is a mess. It seems weird and dishonest for someone to send out a bill for a service that’s 10 times as much as what they expect to actually get paid.  If my auto mechanic or plumber or barber or realtor did that, I’d think they were crooked.  But it’s standard operating procedure in health care, apparently.

So I thought it might be fun to take a betting pool to see who can guess what the total cost of my surgery (and associated medical costs) will add up to be. Anyone interested? Maybe players can choose their guess to the nearest $1000, and I’ll give out a special prize in the end.

The amount wouldn’t include peripheral costs like travel expenses for us to travel to and stay in Louisiana for the surgery, but it would include all the regular, every day, billed prices for all the services I used. So, for example, if a tiny bottle of prescription ear drops costs me $20 through my insurance company’s prescription drug benefit, but says “Every day price: $126.17″ then we’d count the larger amount for the purposes of this game. Anyone wanna play?

If not, I probably won’t bother to add up the number, because it’s kind of a pain in the ass to go through the paperwork and figure out the “regular, every day” prices for things.