Ren’s Journal

I used to get periodic headaches. Most of the time the headache would be present when I woke up in the morning — perhaps once or twice a week, though not every week. Spontaneous headaches during the day were quite rare. The morning headaches were almost always mild and I would often just want to ignore them. However, I found that if I did not take anything for these mild headaches they would just get worse throughout the day. Naturally, I started taking something earlier rather than wait until the headache was severe enough to really bother me. It didn’t really matter what I took, pretty much any pain medication did the trick.

Losing weight didn’t help. It also didn’t help with my hypertension, which certainly could have been a factor in the headaches.

One thing I noticed was that I often felt like a soft drink would help me feel better. It never actually cured the headache and I’m not even certain it *actually* made me feel better, but I certainly wanted a soft drink. Now, this isn’t necessarily specific to headaches as I find I really appreciate the feel of the carbonation in several other situations (e.g., sore throat). Still, it definitely was in my mind that there could be a caffeine connection, but it’s not something I really believed.

I had gone off of caffeine before, but I wasn’t thinking about the headaches at the time so I do not know if there was a correlation. I switched back from caffeine free Diet Coke to regular Diet Coke after being challenged to a taste test and being therefore directly reminded of the fact that regular Diet Coke tastes better. (I have since discovered that Coke Zero tastes better than Diet Coke, but there isn’t a caffeine-free version.) Since I hadn’t dropped caffeine for any particular reason, I switched back for taste.

About three years ago I decided to go off caffeine to see if it would lessen my headaches. After a pretty severe couple of headaches in the days that followed I proceeded to have no headaches for nearly three years. At least nothing severe enough where I needed to take any pain medication. (I would sometimes have something that felt almost like a headache after a strenuous game of racquetball or a long day of golf in the heat, but it never really fully developed). During this time I also started taking medication for my hypertension, but it was after my headaches had already ceased.

Some time during this three year period I started having caffeine a bit more often. In particular, I started drinking more soda at restaurants, where there is almost never a caffeine free cola. This was still quite a bit less caffeine than I had previously been consuming and it did not trigger any new headaches.

Last night after racquetball, and after having probably consumed even less caffeine over the previous several days than usual, I again had one of those “almost” headaches. But this one seemed to be getting stronger as the night progressed. I went to bed a bit after midnight (having finished watching the evening’s Olympic coverage) and then woke up at around 3:30am with an honest-to-goodness headache. Bleh. I took a couple of Ibuprofen and managed to get back to sleep. When I woke up again at 6:30am the headache was gone.

Caffeine withdrawal? Something else? I was pretty tired from racquetball — it was a fairly strenuous set and there were only two of us playing rather than the three we sometimes have.

On the 18th hole of this morning’s golf round I hit my tee shot into a hazard left of the fairway. I found my ball and the lie was not too bad. I decided to try and hit an 8 iron over some trees to the green.

Things didn’t quite work out as planned. I failed to get the ball very high, though the result was acceptable and I managed to bogey the hole despite my ball going through the cactus pictured here.

It was a fitting end to a round of golf where I had several things go my way. On the par 3 8th hole I also hit my tee shot left, but it hit the edge of the cart path and bounced onto the green near the hole. On the 9th hole my approach shot was heading right but hit a tree and kicked back toward the green. Along with the cactus shot those were the three big examples.

The end result was an 84 — my best round of the year so far and I think my best score since 2004.

My iPhone arrived yesterday and I went and picked it up at the AT&T store. I’ve ported my number over and started what I expect to be a long process of migrating my other apps and data from my Treo.
I’m writing this in the Wordpress app on my iPhone, so that’s all for now.

Marci and the girls brought home a new puppy last night — a female mix between a Chocolate Lab and a Beagle appropriately named “Hershey”. It’s been a while since we had dogs. I expect it to be quite an adjustment.

I took her on a short jog to the mailbox this afternoon and she did a wonderful job staying with me even though we don’t yet have a collar that fits (so she wasn’t on a leash).

… at the AT&T store as is required to get a corporate discount on the monthly plan (voice only, unfortunately). They tell me it should arrive in 7 to 10 days.

iYardage

Very cool. Now just need some sort of mechanism to vastly expand the number of supported courses.

I previously described some Palm Apps I’d Miss if I were to switch to an iPhone. Now that the App Store is open and I’ve had a chance to look through the iPhone Apps that are available, here is an update on the status of each item I mentioned:

Pocket Quicken

I haven’t used it in about a month and though I miss it some, it’s not as bad as I had expected.

IntelliGolf

This is still a must-have, but since it is not something I need with me at all times, I can simply bring a Palm with me when golfing.

HandyShopper

SplashShopper is now available for the iPhone, so that should take care of this for the most part. I think it is missing the ability to assign dates to items, which I use for my DVD watching list, but there’s probably a work-around I can come up with.

AutoMobile

I saw a few iPhone apps that should be able to fill this function — one in particular that looked like a particularly good replacement (though without the graphs that AutoMobile has). I don’t have access to iTunes right now so I cannot check the name of that app.

DateBk6

I’ve got my calendar syncing between Apple’s iCal, my Palm/DateBk6 and Google’s calendar. It’s working pretty well so I am hopeful that the syncing between iCal and the iPhone will be sufficient enough that I will not find the lack of control provided by DateBk6 too painful. Repeating ToDo items may be the most significant loss but there seem to be a plethora of ToDo apps available for the iPhone, so perhaps one of those will be sufficient.

Also, it looks like eReader, at least, is already available for the iPhone, which will cover most of the eBooks that I have purchased.

Certainly the situation with 3rd party apps for the iPhone is much better than I had anticipated — more specifically, it is well-varied much sooner than I had expected.

In the end, it really just comes down to money. $300 for the iPhone (16GB version) + $150 for early termination of Sprint contract (unless I wait until next May) + an extra $20/month for the AT&T plan (at least, depending on the realities of taxes, fees and the corporate discount that is apparently valid for the 3G iPhone plan). That’s a total of $1030 for two years — ouch!

I think I’ll just bide my time for now and try to hold out until May. It may only save me $150, but it could end up saving a lot more depending on what else happens between now and then.

I had my first $100 fill-up today, primarily because I ran the truck nearly out of gas. Paid $3.93 per gallon, which I don’t think is the highest I’ve paid for regular unleaded.

1 Iron Golf…extreme game improvement golf clubs.

Having all irons the same length sure does sound like it would lead to more consistent swings….

(Edited to change “link” to “length”, which makes much more sense, I expect.)

Now that the iPhone will finally support a decent data speed it is at least tempting, even if it would cost an additional $20/month when compared to my current unlimited data plan on Sprint. The primary temptation is the decent web browser and better resolution.

However, there are several Palm apps that I use regularly that I would need to replace (or learn to live without) before I could really abandon a Palm device — and I’m not inclined to go back to carrying an extra device.

Pocket Quicken

I use this as much for data review as for data entry, perhaps even more so. In fact, it is the ability to review data whenever and wherever I want that I would miss the most.

IntelliGolf

I don’t use this for much more than scoring these days, so I could probably give it up more easily than I had previously thought.

HandyShopper

Ostensibly a shopping list, I use this more often as a packing list and a DVD management list. In the past I’ve used it for all sorts of check lists, with or without priorities and categories. It’s very powerful.

AutoMobile

Losing this wouldn’t really be a big deal, but it is nice to see a graph of fuel prices I’ve paid. I also use it for odometer-based maintenance reminders.

DateBk6

This is a very powerful calendar and task management app that I know I would miss. It seems like the iPhone calendar is very limited.

Additionally, I have a number of eBooks that I think may be locked into specific formats for eReader or Mobipocket Reader.

My current contract doesn’t expire until next May so perhaps some of these needs will be filled by then, assuming the iPhone SDK catches on with developers.