GetchaBooks

Published on August 17, 2010.

I’m proud to announce that my textbook comparison shopping website, GetchaBooks, has officially re-launched for Fall 2010. GetchaBooks is the one-stop-shop of textbook purchasing for college students at ten select schools. If you’re a student at one of these schools, a thirty-second process of selecting your courses is all that separates you from the most informed and understandable breakdown of textbooks for those courses, complete with recommendations on where to buy them across the web.

In the last six months, the GetchaBooks team has redesigned almost every aspect of the site, adding features and crafting a user experience that finally makes the awful process of textbooks purchasing pleasurable. After hundreds of hours of Skype calls, instant messages, whiteboard sessions, code sprints, debugging spurts and usability testing, I’m happy to say that the experience is no less than awesome.

I’d like to thank my friends and family, whose understanding, patience, and feedback were crucial during the development of GetchaBooks. I can’t count the number of social gatherings I missed to work on this project. Aware that it means a lot to me, they’ve always excused my absence and even offered to help.

So, what are you waiting for? Check out GetchaBooks, and let me know what you think.

277 Days

Published on July 14, 2010.

After 277 days of flawless power, there was an interruption of service at my house. For 75.9% of a year, my little PowerMac G4 Cube dutifully served files and routed traffic. This post is in memory of its record uptime, cut short by a lack of electricity.

My Tympanoplasty, A Retrospective

Published on August 23, 2008.

This is the landing page to the story of my tympanoplasty. However, it’s just a slice in the middle of a larger story, which you can find in the tympanoplasty category of my blog. More importantly, this post and the others contain useful and inspiring stories from people at different parts in the healing process. Always be sure to read the comments, and don’t be afraid to contribute.

Earlier this year, I wrote about an elective surgery I undertook to recover hearing in my right ear. From the time I was little, my right ear drum had a hole in it, a perforation. I went for several procedures as a child to repair the hole, but none of them were successful.

Having that hole in my ear drum had always been a part of me. I learned to turn my head to hear people better, and I adapted to wearing an ear plug whenever around water, including and especially while showering.

Fast-forwarding eighteen years, this last February, my family and I decided it was time to take another shot. Consulting Dr. Lawrence Meiteles, we were introduced to and studied a procedure called a Tympanoplasty.

The idea of recovering any hearing was truly amazing to me – thinking about it made me instantly emotional.

As a student, I’d always refused to take any time off, unless I was particularly sick. In this case, for this reason, I was willing to take any amount of time off, even in the midst of a busy senior year of high school.

I retell this story now because it’s time to wrap it up. It’s been six months since the procedure and everything is well. I can bathe and swim without an ear plug and my hearing is much better, although not perfect. Although recovery was painful and tedious at times, I regret nothing… not even wearing this setup immediately after the surgery:

Big Bandage

At this juncture, I’m renaming the category of the blog that tells this story of my life from “ear surgery” to “tympanoplasty”. Hopefully, that’ll make it easier for Googlers to find my experience. I entirely and without reservation recommend the surgical services of Dr. Lawrence Meiteles to anyone with an ear drum perforation. I couldn’t be more appreciative to have something I thought I’d never have – decent hearing.