TParker.net

Scimitar Syndrome

A few months ago, my sister, Karen, asked me to create a website that would allow her to write about congenital heart defects. Her son (my nephew), Nathan, was born with a rare heart condition called Scimitar Syndrome. One characteristic of this syndrome is dextrocardia, which means the heart is severely rotated backwards in the chest.

Other than being a little strange, this alone is not a problem; but it complicates the surgery to correct another problem, Partial Anomalous Pulmonary Venous Return. In PAPVR, an anomalous vein, shaped like a scimitar (a curved Turkish sword) carries oxygenated blood to the wrong chamber of the heart. Correcting this involves creating a baffle or tunnel to the correct chamber of the heart to redirect the blood flow. Finding a surgeon to perform this surgery on a backwards heart was challenging, but after a lot of research, Karen and her husband, Bryan, found just the right guy.

It was about three years ago that Karen and her family traveled to Michigan where a skilled pediatric cardiologist, Dr. Edward Bove, successfully repaired Nathan’s heart. The journey was rough, but Nathan is doing great these days. The website, NathansPrayer.com, is filled with helpful information about congenital heart defects and some stories about my wise-guy nephew. Check it out if you get the chance.

God Sends Lion to Protect Baptist Church after Ike

Looters will be Eaten!

God sent a wayward lion from an exotic pet store in Texas to protect a Baptist Church from looters after Hurricane Ike devastated the community.

Lion, Tiger Spotted Among Wreckage After Ike

Watch out for SPORE!

My oldest daughter and I have been waiting for SPORE to come out for a loooong time. Well, it finally did.

All I can say is: What an incredible dissappointment.

The DRM is awful. Electronic Arts apparently thinks that a multi-gamer family should buy multiple copies of the same game so everyone can play.

The license allows you to install the game on up to 3 computers, but you may have only one account.

That’s right… ONE ACCOUNT.

So what that we bought the Creature Creator and it allowed for multiple accounts. How nice for SPORE to be able to use up all those nifty creatures we all created.

And, since I let my daughter sign in first so she could play, the SPORE account I created with the Creature Creator is completely useless now – except to EA.

The thing that sucks the most is that to install SPORE you have to uninstall the Creature Creator. I guess I could live with only being able to play the game with one account, but now I’m out the 10 bucks I spent on the full version of the Creature Creator. Not only do I have to play on my daughter’s account, I can’t continue to build creatures in the Creator on my account.

It’ll be a cold day in hell before we buy another game from EA. From what I hear, the only people who got a game worth playing were the ones who downloaded the pirate version from a torrent.

What a shame.

U.S. facing possible hearing loss epidemic

This is for all you morons out there who think you’re so cool as you drive down the street with your bitchin’ sub-woofers.  Yeah, you… with sub-sonic, high amplitude bass with such power that your car rattles noisily and the drivers beside you wonder if parts are going to start falling off your car.  You, who complains about “the man” while pounding your brain and vital organs with something the military has developed into crowd control weapons.

This is especially for that asshole neighbor of mine who’s numerous and frequent pals thump so loudly that I can hear them over my surround sound system with the door closed and they live three houses away.

Gosh, you are SO cool.

What really sucks is that as these neighbors and people like them slowly go deaf, the average schmo like me has to listen to them get consistently louder as they loose their hearing… wallowing in denial and the desire to quench their thirst for that throbbing rhythm that has so thoroughly enslaved their temporal lobe.

Let the class-action lawsuits against sub-woofer manufacturers begin.

Iris-scan systems to secure Arab states’ borders

Wow.  This really makes me want to convert to Islam.