So on monday, tuesday, wednesday I have finally done stem cell apheresis: yes, it took three days, about four hours each. The big plus is that they harvested enough of them that with almost absolute ceretainty there will be no need to do so the next (and last!) cycle. The procedure's biggest annoyance is having to stay still with both arms for all of its duration. Of course you can't move the rest of your body significantly, either. However the first day went like a charm, the remaining two it brought me some nausea, but nothing terrible in this sense - it was to be expected anyway, they told me.
Fortunately my veins are rather large (but it seems to me that they were even larger when I used to practice sport regularly) and superficial so it was not difficult to locate them and to insert needles, nor did they hurt significantly, well except on the third day, when they had become slightly hard. And in any case the third day the whole thing had become even more tiresome: an mp3 player helped me greatly with the last hour and a half.
How 'bout the other stories? Well not much... However I had recently written here that Project Euler's problems are "not that challenging" after all, then I just found one that actually is. That must have been exactly on monday, but then I haven't looked at it any more. If anything else fails, then I will use brute force. But since the problem is of the same nature of a later one which has a search space such that brute force won't do in any case, first or later I'll have to think of the smart algorith to do it...
Basically, in the hospital they granted me an internet access. But for some reason it wouldn't let me reach my news server. I did use Google Groups to reply to some followups to posts of mine, but then didn't use it extensively because I just hate the interface and hardly can feel at ease with it. So as soon as I got back home, I downloaded all that I had missed in the meanwhile, and that included quite a lot of discussions I wanted to partecipate to.
I've not done much else in the meanwhile, just a couple of posts in Perl Monks, I suppose. For the rest I continue to hold to my grand projects, that I continue to procrastinate. But hey, I must have something to think of, tomorrow!
Oh! I was about to forget... yesterday I came back to Milan. Incidentally it was the city's feast, Sant'Ambroeus (Saint Ambrose, in local dialect). It is accompanied with the O Bei O Bei fair ("how nice, how nice"), which I use to love. Indeed last years I often spent there the whole day, also because it's very near to my home. BTW: it should be near to my home, precisely around Saint Ambrose' church, but actually I heard that this year they moved it slightly apart, which is not great news IMHO - just homesick, as you may easily infer. Anyway it's difficult to explain why I'm so keen on it, but to be brief I'd say it has a certain importance in both traditional and (part of) juvenile local culture here.
In any case the fair is being held for a few days from December the seventh on, and today it's national holiday too, so I would have gone there today -not staying there as long as the other years, of course-, but the wheather was just terrible. So well, maybe tomorrow. I hope!
