The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 22nd
44 minutes ago
This has nothing to do with video games. Though the bottom talks about a computer utility.
Imagine you are a sweet, young, and innocent lesbian stripper ninja. You head to the dentist one day due to a toothache and he tells you that decay has hit the root of your back molar and the best thing to do is extract it. You could also do a root canal + post + crown, but that’s more expensive, would take longer, what’s left of the tooth is like ‘an eggshell’, and there’s a wisdom tooth right behind it that’s starting to press on the roots.
You agree to the extraction, which should take twenty minutes. It took THREE HOURS.
They used dozens of tools on me. They drilled the tooth into parts to separate the roots. Some electrical thing burned away parts of my gum. Dozens of tools went into my mouth and came out covered in saliva and blood. After the first half-hour, the dentist’s hands shook from the effort of just grasping the end of the molar while prying and pulling as hard as he could without anything budging. They gave me so much anesthetic, I lost sensation in my nose, but I was still treated to occasional bursts of pain as they cracked my tooth and tore it out millimeter by millimeter.
Dentist: This is one of the most difficult extractions I’ve done in twenty years.
LSN: hh.
Dentist: But you’re very calm, you’re a good patient.
LSN: *shrug* (there’s not much else you can do after someone’s cracked your tooth into bits and drilled away the pulp)
Apparently, I have strong gums, significant root curvature, and there are bulbs at the end of my roots. At two hours, forty minutes, the dentist yanked out the last root… and then explained that there was a root tips left within. After twenty minutes of digging and scraping within my gum with a series of picks, he took another X-ray and realized that wasn’t a root tip, but my wisdom tooth.
Ha ha?
Since then, I’ve had a slice of bread, two darvocet, a glass of water, and four hours of sleep. I want chocolate or tapioca pudding.
On to defragmentation! It’s important. The people at Priform are wonderful because they give us ccleaner, which I install on every computer I can get alone for 6 minutes. It’s a utility I run on a daily basis. It takes little time to work. It’s easy. It’s free. It doesn’t try to get me to upgrade to the ‘full’ version, it installs only itself, and it never tries to advertize crap I don’t want.
As such, when I updated my copy today and noticed Defraggler – a defragmentation utility by the same company – I downloaded it immediately. I play games. I constantly install and uninstall stuff. I ought to defragment more often, but my internal HD is 586 GB while my external HD is 300 GB. Defragmenting takes too long, and the software that comes with Windows is finky; if I’m messing around with my computer, it slows it down, but if I leave my computer alone, it complains and stops working. It’s like asking a teenager to do the dishes.
Defraggler helps some of the problems but seems to have its own oddities. I downloaded, installed, and ran it on two computers at work – no problem. It seems less resource intensive than Norton or Microsoft’s Defragment program. I used it on a laptop and computer running XP, the laptop is older than 2004 while the computer has those sticks of RAM that are as long as your arm. 2002, maybe? Either way, I was able to work on them while the program ran with no slow down, and for both (26% and 31% fragmentation) it took about 2-3 hours to complete.
The real test came when I got home. My computer had 41% fragmentation. I turned on the program and headed out to my dentist appointment. When I came back this evening… the program had freaked out. I’m not sure what happened. When I clicked it, it filled the screen with a large, blank box, and when I clicked it again, it minimized.
I restarted the computer, restarted Defraggler and... I had 45% fragmentation? I left it to frolic again, went to bed, and after four hours of sleep, I came back to find that it wasn’t running.
The thing is, I’m in pain and grumpy and hungry but can’t eat because of the pain and the bloody wound where my molar used to be. It’s very possible I just forgot to turn it on. I run it again and…
It’s strange, when I first ran it, it said that I had more used space than free space, and now it says I have exactly half and half. Did I delete something? Did it delete stuff in some sort of Hall 9000 mental breakdown? Is it defragmenting AND compressing?
It’s been running fine since I first sat down at the computer four hours ago. Internet Explorer is taking more resources than it is. Now, it’s about half way done. But it just disappeared again. It’s not minimizing to the system tray. It just vanishes.
Other than that, it’s a great program.
Imagine you are a sweet, young, and innocent lesbian stripper ninja. You head to the dentist one day due to a toothache and he tells you that decay has hit the root of your back molar and the best thing to do is extract it. You could also do a root canal + post + crown, but that’s more expensive, would take longer, what’s left of the tooth is like ‘an eggshell’, and there’s a wisdom tooth right behind it that’s starting to press on the roots.
You agree to the extraction, which should take twenty minutes. It took THREE HOURS.
They used dozens of tools on me. They drilled the tooth into parts to separate the roots. Some electrical thing burned away parts of my gum. Dozens of tools went into my mouth and came out covered in saliva and blood. After the first half-hour, the dentist’s hands shook from the effort of just grasping the end of the molar while prying and pulling as hard as he could without anything budging. They gave me so much anesthetic, I lost sensation in my nose, but I was still treated to occasional bursts of pain as they cracked my tooth and tore it out millimeter by millimeter.
Dentist: This is one of the most difficult extractions I’ve done in twenty years.
LSN: hh.
Dentist: But you’re very calm, you’re a good patient.
LSN: *shrug* (there’s not much else you can do after someone’s cracked your tooth into bits and drilled away the pulp)
Apparently, I have strong gums, significant root curvature, and there are bulbs at the end of my roots. At two hours, forty minutes, the dentist yanked out the last root… and then explained that there was a root tips left within. After twenty minutes of digging and scraping within my gum with a series of picks, he took another X-ray and realized that wasn’t a root tip, but my wisdom tooth.
Ha ha?
Since then, I’ve had a slice of bread, two darvocet, a glass of water, and four hours of sleep. I want chocolate or tapioca pudding.
On to defragmentation! It’s important. The people at Priform are wonderful because they give us ccleaner, which I install on every computer I can get alone for 6 minutes. It’s a utility I run on a daily basis. It takes little time to work. It’s easy. It’s free. It doesn’t try to get me to upgrade to the ‘full’ version, it installs only itself, and it never tries to advertize crap I don’t want.
As such, when I updated my copy today and noticed Defraggler – a defragmentation utility by the same company – I downloaded it immediately. I play games. I constantly install and uninstall stuff. I ought to defragment more often, but my internal HD is 586 GB while my external HD is 300 GB. Defragmenting takes too long, and the software that comes with Windows is finky; if I’m messing around with my computer, it slows it down, but if I leave my computer alone, it complains and stops working. It’s like asking a teenager to do the dishes.
Defraggler helps some of the problems but seems to have its own oddities. I downloaded, installed, and ran it on two computers at work – no problem. It seems less resource intensive than Norton or Microsoft’s Defragment program. I used it on a laptop and computer running XP, the laptop is older than 2004 while the computer has those sticks of RAM that are as long as your arm. 2002, maybe? Either way, I was able to work on them while the program ran with no slow down, and for both (26% and 31% fragmentation) it took about 2-3 hours to complete. The real test came when I got home. My computer had 41% fragmentation. I turned on the program and headed out to my dentist appointment. When I came back this evening… the program had freaked out. I’m not sure what happened. When I clicked it, it filled the screen with a large, blank box, and when I clicked it again, it minimized.
I restarted the computer, restarted Defraggler and... I had 45% fragmentation? I left it to frolic again, went to bed, and after four hours of sleep, I came back to find that it wasn’t running.
The thing is, I’m in pain and grumpy and hungry but can’t eat because of the pain and the bloody wound where my molar used to be. It’s very possible I just forgot to turn it on. I run it again and…
It’s strange, when I first ran it, it said that I had more used space than free space, and now it says I have exactly half and half. Did I delete something? Did it delete stuff in some sort of Hall 9000 mental breakdown? Is it defragmenting AND compressing?
It’s been running fine since I first sat down at the computer four hours ago. Internet Explorer is taking more resources than it is. Now, it’s about half way done. But it just disappeared again. It’s not minimizing to the system tray. It just vanishes.
Other than that, it’s a great program.
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You poor ninja, I had a similer experience with a dentist a couple of years ago. He wanted to do two extractions and four small fillings in one appointment. I thought "well he's the dentist he knows what he's doing." and let him. Big mistake, he did the fillings and started to do the first extraction which seemed to be taking longer then he thought it should. The tooth broke and suddenly there was alot of blood.
Apperently he'd numbed me bad enough I didn't feel it when I bit my tongue but it bled abunch and then he couldn't get the other damn tooth out! All in all I was in that chair for three and ahalf hours, the right side of my jaw had swollen to the size of a grapefruit and I had to take the bus home. Not a good day.
Wow! That sounds much worse than what I went through. :( Perhaps he wasn't careful enough with the anesthetic he gave you. My dentist numbed the nerve that runs across the top of my jaw, but my cheek and tongue never lost sensation.
It’s stories like these that make people afraid of the dentist!
Yeah I didn't go back to a dentist for two years after that. which was stpid of me because now I have six thousand dollers worth of dental work that needs to be done. But I've got a great dentist now so it's worth it.