John's Blog

I've decided to take a complete different focus on this blog and have moved it to http://jklarsen.com/blog . Notice i changed from myblog to just blog.

I have not been keeping up on this blog and I believe taking a change in direction will open new opportunities for me to post more often!

I just upgraded my blog software because I was getting so much spam in the comments area by good for nothing spamsters.

(I personally feel we need to catch them, prosecute them, and if found guilty, sentence them to be shot. Chinese justice style. I am so sick of the mess and lack of respect by those spammer idiots.)

Anyway, this version has MUCH better spam protection, however, it broke my design. I need to convert the old design into the new version. Until then it will sport this temporary one.

I have always been proud of my oldest daughter who is currently in 3rd grade. She's a witty girl who loves to read (more books than I've read in my lifetime!) and memorize her times tables.

Anyway, she has been taking tests in school the past couple of weeks, end of the year exams. Today we got this notice in mail from the Utah State Board of Education.

"Certificate of outstanding performance on the Iowa Tests. Jaclyn is awarded this certificate in recognition of scoring in the top ten percent nationally. Her areas of outstanding performance are reading, core total, total composite, language and science"

This got me beaming from ear to ear. Heck, when I was her age I probably managed the bottom 10%. My mother had to twist my arm to get me to read a book. See Sam, see Sam run! I was a typical boy looking out the window, day dreaming about the next football game in the school yard with friends.

Sorry I haven't posted here for awhile - been extremely busy this past month with more projects than I can barely handle.

We just got back from Disneyland last Wednesday and it was a blast despite my sore feet. We went with another couple and their two children. We really enjoyed their company and the kids had a blast.

I took the whole week off from work so that I could get some stuff completed on the projects I have been working on. I made pretty good progress. Tomorrow I return to my full time job - I am not looking forward to it at all.

This is gonna be a short post - I will probably write more this week since I have another mapping scheduled Monday afternoon.

Anyway, If you have a login to my photo album, please login and enjoy new pictures from Disneyland 2006.

February 1st is finally here - its been an extremely LONG month for me.

I just got back from 3rd mapping and I'm in a very good mood! Read on and you'll find out why...

As you remember the low tones needed to be turned down due to uncomfortable facial stimulation, so my goal with this mapping was to slowly turn them up in hopes that my nerves will get used to it. With the first program still at ACE 900hz we turned the low tones up until I could barely feel the twitching.

Then for Program 2 we tried a map called speak which is lower hz than 900 and is used to focus on the voice for better speech discrimination. My brain had a hard time picking up sounds at anything lower than 900hz and it sounded weird.

For program 3 we tried ACE at 2400hz - and guess what... no facial stimulation! - even with the low tones turned up!!!

900hz is slower and more pronounced - more stable but cannot handle much detail. 2400 is faster and shorter, more frequent triggering. But wow, I was hearing MUCH better. So my conclusion is that my facial nerve only operates with lower frequency range and ignores anything at higher frequencies.

Since I could utilize the low tones now - I decided, for the 4th program, to make the sounds more equal across the board. Currently the graph slopes up from low towards the high tones on program 3, so for program 4 we brought the low tones up and the high tones down a bit. With this - it sounded like my hearing aid did and comfortable - nothing sounded funny - but I wasn't picking up different sounds as well as I was with program 3. Apparently Equability is not the answer. This is probably why I couldn't hear fluctuation in the voices - causing me to speak monotonously.

After we my Audi setup the maps - I took a hearing test to see how well I progressed from having the processor for one month. I am not sure how I did on the tones - always the hardest with my tinitus (ringing in the ears). However, I got 40% on the speech discrimination test. Which is substantial improvement since I only got about 23% when I was tested with my hearing aid last year. Imagine what Ill do in 6 months from now?

Gosh I am excited. Kept thinking I wasn't progressing very well or working on progressing as hard as I should. I was told that I am progressing faster than usual and they think I might be pushing myself too hard. Well I'm going to keep on pushing!