Okay, so we all know she’s my favorite part of Chuck.

I talk about about her every week as I relate my review of each episode.

Well, the Technonaut and I have teamed up to start our own fansite about Yvonne Strahovski.

That’s right, no more searching the Internet for sporadic information about Ms. Strahovski.

Now you can find it all in one place at Strahotski.com.

We intended to be the only source for Yvonne Strahovski but there has been some competition crop up in the last few days. It seems there’s no such thing as an original idea.

So, visit Strahotski.com and make it your #1 source for Yvonne Strahovski information.

I was having a conversation with a young fella just yesterday and he asked me what I did for a living. I answered with my usual response — I’m a Software Engineer.

His reply was a common one, “So you’re a programmer?”

He certainly meant no ill-will with the assessment. It’s a common misconception. Still, I can’t help but cringe when that’s the word used to describe what I do for a living.

I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University.

It was awarded to me by the Dwight Look College of Engineering in College Station, Texas.

That’s right, the college of engineering.

I’ve been able to program since I was in fourth grade (no lie, QBasic for the win!). But engineering? That’s an actual professional skill.

In my opinion, programming is little more than a trade skill.

While it’s not as easy as digging ditches (intellectually speaking), it’s also not exactly rocket science.

Kids in elementary school are taught to program on a rudimentary level, and kids in high school could likely program as well as me — and I have a degree and 6 years experience.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend a lot of time programming.

I absolutely do spend a lot of time programming, just like an architect spends a lot of time drawing plans.

But I am no more a programmer than an architect is an artist. It is simply something that I must do to convey my real skill — engineering.

Dictionary.com has a number of entries for the word engineer. Three of them are worth noting:

1. to plan, construct, or manage as an engineer

2. to design or create using the techniques or methods of engineering

3. to arrange, manage, or carry through by skillful or artful contrivance

My job is not to write code and make little programs go. My job is to solve problems. My job is to understand complex systems, design within the bounds of said systems, and provide a product that will perform with utmost efficiency and grace.

I would love nothing more than to give up programming and just sit around designing software. Engineering software systems is a much more challenging endeavor.

Having to program is all part and parcel to the whole job description, but that doesn’t make a software engineer equivalent to a programmer. It merely means that a software engineer can program.

Programming is the art of implementing a solution to a problem. Designing those solutions, however, is the domain of the engineer.

Today I’m taking a break from entertainment and cryptid posting in order to write about a personal story.

I’m doing this primarily because I have found doctors completely useless in solving this problem and now that I’ve stumbled upon my own solution, I’d like to make that available to everyone.

For me, it all started in the spring of 2005. I began having pain in my chest that I had never experienced before. It went on for days.

One Friday night, I became sufficiently worried and had my wife drive me to the emergency room where they did some chest x-rays and an EKG.

The results came back that there was nothing wrong with me and it must just be heartburn. I had never really had heartburn problems before, so I was willing to believe them.

A follow-up with my regular doctor and he prescribed Prilosec. To be safe, however, he also prescribed the pain medication Naproxen. He reasoned that my pain may also be caused by a pulled chest muscle of some sort.

I began that medication treatment and it only got mildly better. Over time, the Naproxen destroyed my stomach, causing it to bleed internally. This worried the doctors, as it damn well should have.

Eventually I made my way to a gastroenterologist who would know more about these things. After a few tests, they determined that I had a small hiatal hernia and surely that was the cause of this painful (almost nonstop) heartburn.

So they put me on various proton pump inhibitors until they landed on Prevacid.

Life was better after Prevacid, but not perfect. I still had the chest pain 3-4 days a week. I also seemed to be much more anxious and worrisome than I had been previously (though this is completely immeasurable).

But I kept going to the doctor and I kept having tests.

They made sure my stomach emptied itself at a normal rate, they checked on the status of the hiatal hernia, and they kept prescribing Prevacid in ever-increasing doses, with brief stints with other similar drugs.

I should also point out that Prevacid is not cheap at the doses I was being prescribed. A month’s supply was $300, quickly consuming the deductible on my health insurance.

For 1.5 years this went on, the problem never really solved. Some days were better than others and taking the PPIs was better than nothing, but I still felt like we were missing something.

I went through 4 general practitioners and 2 gatroenterologists during this time period, desperately trying to find someone who knew what was going on.

Since I was a child, I’ve always had seasonal allergies. When I moved to Virginia they turned into year-round allergies.

Six months before I started having this chest pain, my wife and I bought two kittens. I didn’t have any obvious allergic reactions to them, but they may well have contributed to my general allergic state.

I didn’t really take any medication for the allergies because the symptoms were mild and I didn’t want to be hopped up on Benadryl 24/7.

I asked my gastroenterologist if the ‘heartburn’ and allergies could be related and he flatly told me that it was highly unlikely.

Nonetheless, I noticed a trend. When the allergies got bad, I would take Drixoral. When I took Drixoral, I had no chest pain.

But Drixoral has pseudoephedrine, and it was no good being jumpy all the time, so I moved to Claritin instead to see how it would work.

As you may have guessed by now, I don’t take Prevacid anymore. I take Claritin once a day and I have virtually no chest pain.

I haven’t been to the doctor to tell him about my own solution. I don’t really see the point. I’ve fixed my own problem with experimentation and I may never know what happens to me when I go off of the allergy medication.

What I do know is that I want that 1.5 years of my life back. That was 1.5 years of utter hell.

I felt bad all the time, prompting my wife to decide that we wouldn’t even consider having children as long as I felt so horribly every day.

So if you have a similar problem, you might as well try Claritin. It’s cheap, over-the-counter, and a lot less of a headache.

Happy

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you must have seen my post on my Stalker Days.

Well, recently I was going through my Google Analytics for this site and was surprised to see that I had a few incoming links from dixiechicksfans.net.

Intrigued, I desperately hunted down where exactly on that site I could possibly be linked from. Afterall, I don’t even go by the same ‘call sign’ as I did back then, and I wandered away from the Dixie Chicks online community some time ago.

After a modest amount of searching, I found this thread which is posted by someone who stumbled across my Stalker Days post and connected the dots.

Not a lot of responses to the thread, but it totally stoked me to find out that people remembered me fondly from those days.

I registered on the site, but have thus far not been approved to post.

If I’m understanding correctly, the webmaster of the site is the same who started “Emily Robison, You Rock!” in the same spirit as my own “Natalie Maines, Will You Marry Me?” so we have some history.

Anyway, this tie back to my past has encouraged me to do something I’ve considered doing before.

I’ve migrated the entire NMWYMM site over to my domain here and put it up at http://natalie.lykaon.com. I’ve made a few changes to some broken links and updated the contact information as well.

This will make sure I never lose the site and can keep it tied in with my online web presence.

Many may ask why I would want to, but despite the zany name of the site, I maintain that it was a successful foray into online fandom that I should be proud of.

Surprisingly, my wife has encouraged me to update the site with a Web 2.0 sensibility and add some features to draw in new crowds (such as the awesome idea of an Adrian Pasdar interactive voodoo doll).

Although the Chicks have fallen out of grace with country radio, and I even have my own differing opinion from Natalie these days, I’ll always miss those days when it was just me, the Internet, and my love for Natalie Maines.