“But you don’t look sick.”

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For many people with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), it’s not easy. You don’t Really think of all the crazy things that happen when you get CKD. The kidneys play a big part in your everyday health. You know (or may not know) the kidneys produce urine and subsequently you pee it out. You know that this stuff is just “waste” but honestly, do you Really know what it is?

The kidneys act as filters for your body. When your kidneys start to fail, the filtration process gets worse, and while it may produce more urine at first (common for diabetics), it’s actually not filtering as much of the “poison” in your body. So what happens is that the poisons in your body are still in there, and wreaking havoc on your body.

While this may sound horrible, and it is, there are always ways around it. For people with stage 5 CKD, they must go on dialysis. There is no one, and I repeat no one that will say with any honesty that dialysis “isn’t that bad”. We hate it. Dialysis sucks. Anyone that has gone through it will tell you that it’s horrible.

But to the point of this whole blog post. Most people who are on dialysis and have CKD don’t look like they’ve got a chronic illness. As a matter of a fact, the people you work with could very well have it and you’d never know. But you better believe they are not “fine”.

Here’s some advice I tell everyone and I try to heed it myself. Some people Really make it hard for me. There are a lot of people with illnesses and chronic conditions that you could never see. It won’t even be apparent. You know when you see that one person who parked in the handicap section and didn’t even look sick? He or she could very well be sick and need that spot. Don’t be rude and yell at them for parking in a handicap spot. You might consider asking them if they’re allowed to park there. But don’t be rude.

Treat everyone like you want to be treated. If you like being yelled at and harassed, then okay, by all means, continue to do so. But Really, if you treat people nicely, you’ll get a nice response most of the time.

If you’re looking for resources for CKD or Dialysis, I’d recommend these sites. They Really helped me out when I was looking for answers:

  • Davita – I haven’t used their dialysis centers, but I hear they’re pretty nice. Good resource for recipes and just plain info about CKD and more.
  • I hate dialysis – This is a great site for anything dialysis. This is a site made by patients for patients.

Do you have a story to tell? Any experience? Tips, tricks and advice?

Custom Title for Posts

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I know that almost everyone probably has some SEO plugin or package that already replaces the title per post, but I got this request from Katie because her SEO package for some reason or another did not have custom titles. She didn’t want to change the SEO plugin to a different one, since it was already established. She asked if I could write a plugin for this, but lo behold, it was as easy as customizing your header.php file in your theme. Granted, every time you change your theme, you will need to edit your header file, however, it’s so easy, it’s not even funny. Here’s the code segment, and the documentation is within the comments.

/*
* Custom title for Katie. Make sure you have a custom field in your
*     posts called "title" in order for the
*     custom title to show up. Replace the line:
*            wp_title( '|', true, 'right' );
* with everything within the Custom Title code. It's that easy.
*/
$custom_title = get_post_meta($wp_query->post->ID, 'title', true);
if (empty($custom_title)) {
wp_title( '|', true, 'right' );
} else {
echo $custom_title . " | ";
}
// END Custom Title Code

Why I love my Kindle Fire

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Just recently I bought an ASUS Transformer Prime. I love it. It seems the more I use it, the more I love it. Being a developer, I love the android OS. I’m honestly not sure why I don’t have an android phone and just ditch my iPhone. Well we know the iPhone is solid right now and honestly I could not live without it. But I digress.

I also have a Kindle Fire. Yes, I’m one of those people who bought it on the first day it was released. Hell I might have preordered it. I don’t regret it for a minute. I already have had just about every version of Kindle since it’d release. I love my kindle. I can do so much with it. I’m actually writing this post with one as well.

Many will argue that there’s so much it doesn’t have. There’s no camera, there’s not this, there’s not that. That’s ok. I mainly think I don’t mind all that because I Really got it as something to read my books with (that I bought on kindle previously) and to do a little extra on the side like play a game and so on.

The ASUS also does everything the fire does, however its a little cumbersome and bulky. It’s not something I can easily take to bed and read. That’s why I love my kindle fire. Its kind of like a hybrid tablet and book reader.

Do you have a Kindle?

Mists of Pandaria Beta

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For those of you who are lucky (or not so lucky) to have received a beta invitation to the new World of Warcraft expansion Mists of Pandaria, this post will not Really come as a surprise. There is no NDA for the expansion, so I figure we’re free to talk about all we want. Besides, with so many people in the beta, is it even possible to enforce an NDA?

Let me get to the nitty-gritty. For anyone who has played the game, there is a quest for Pandarans where you must click on a scroll which then burns into nothingness. There’s nothing wrong with this quest, Really, it’s a very simple quest. However, when you have so many players trying to do the same thing, we have an issue. Imagine a group of say twenty people trying to click on one scroll which disappears after clicked. I’m sure you can imagine the outcome. You end up standing there for approximately forever trying to click the scroll. This inevitably becomes a tiresome task.

I understand the circumstances. Normally you would never have this many people trying to click the scroll. However, this is going to happen because everyone is trying out the beta at the same time and beginning at the same time. This is inevitable. You’d think that after 4 expansions, Blizzard would have realized this problem and come up with a solution to the problem.

As you can guess, if you do not complete this quest, you cannot continue in your quest-line. While this might be a problem which can be overcome by just discovering things around you, at this point, you’re still level 1 or 2. There aren’t too many areas to discover at this point.

So at this point, I’m just wondering how Blizzard is going to fix this problem. I Really hope they nip this one in the bud. Because honestly, the game is losing my interest. I’m yawning here. I’m much more interested in just playing Diablo 3 at this point. World of What?