Lee.org

I’ve been using a CPAP for mild obstructive sleep apnea since January 2015. It definitely helps me get a good night’s rest and keeps me from snoring which helps Megan sleep. I still take it off in my sleep most nights. Megan prods me and I put it back on. Here is a list of hints, most of which I’ve tried, to keep my mask on. Do you have any tips to add? Email or comment!

– keep a log of good and bad nights and what I’m doing about it
– Set an alarm in the middle of the night to put it on
– cough syrup (helpful when I have a cold!)
– antihistamine pills (when I have a runny nose or cough)
– nasal allergy spray… Flonase, saline
– turn the temperature up to 80 degrees (didn’t help me)
– use distilled water in the humidifier (I don’t usually use the humidifier but it’ll last longer with distilled water)
– higher pressure… ramp pressure from medium to higher (waiting for the doctor to change the settings is for chumps. I fiddled with the settings a little and it helped. Just 1 small change every 2 nights and a log book helped dial it in for me!)
– Set a timer when going to bed so I don’t forget (I wait til I’m almost asleep to put it on. I sometimes fall asleep forgetting. So I set a 10 min timer when getting into bed for a while)
– Chin strap (didn’t help)
– shave before bed for a smooth face (seems to help)
– wash the facemask weekly (if I don’t, I have to keep pulling it tighter to keep it from leaking… wash every 1-2 weeks. My masks have lasted 3-12 months)
– rinse my nostrils with water and blow my nose before bed for clear nose.

August 2014-May 2016: four semesters of a very intense master’s program with a 5 hr/day, 4 days/week commute (see commuting footnote).

June 2016-May 2017: Two completed internships, one 1/2 completed due to a medical problem

Married June 2014, just two months before school started, just two years after we met.

New baby born a week before second semester started.

Two ongoing family conflicts that I won’t discuss here. Both began around 2014.

Megan told me, almost demanded that I take some time off! So I’ve spend the last couple weeks NOT studying for the boards exam in occupational therapy. Thanks honey!

At the end of May, my master’s degree posted. It’s now “Lee Sonko, MS”.

Looking forward, I just started studying for my board certification, hoping to be done in early August.

Footnote about my school commute:

Yes it was a 5 hour/day commute, Kensington to San Jose State.  Driving would have cut an hour a day but was far more stressful. When I drove, it usually took an hour for me to recover. And I couldn’t study while driving. Here was my commute: 15 minute drive down the hill, 55 minute BART from El Cerrito Plaza to Fremont Station, 45 minute bus ride to downtown San Jose, 15 minute walk to school. 2 1/2 hrs door to door. On a good day, I could study for about 45 minutes on the train and 25 on the bus. I got car sick on the bus every time I tried to study, and I needed/chose to study most of the time. It completely sucked.

These are the two most seminal comedy shows in my world, and they are (gulp!) 30 years old!
These are just links to IMDB, not the actual shows.

Emo Philips Live at the Hasty Pudding 1987
I found the LP record of this when I was working at the Tufts radio station and I pretty much memorized it.

A Steven Wright Special for HBO, 1985
He came to Tufts and completely killed it!

My sister-in-law, Gail got us a Fagor Lux Multicooker for Christmas. It’s great. We’ve used the slow cooker, pressure cooker, and even the yogurt maker settings (the yogurt came out perfectly!). I’m cooking a fancy bean soup in it right now.

Here is a local copy of the manual! Fagor Lux Multicooker User Manual 2015

Lee Sonko, Master of Science!

I received a message from San Jose State University today:

I now have two extra letters after my name!

Lee Sonko, MS

More letters to follow after I pass the board exam!

Short form: Dreamhost showed me how to implement a method of decreasing spam at the domain level called SPF. They implemented another domain level method of reducing spam, DKIM, a few months after I showed them that they hadn’t set up their system properly.

Long Form:

Until recently, there was nothing stopping someone from sending email from lee.org illegitimately (called “spoofing” email). A lot of spammers used it to send junk email “from” lee.org. This bothered me because:

1. spam :-(
2. Sometimes I’d get thousands of bounced emails
3. It reduced the assurity that my domain wasn’t hosting spammers, so sometimes real emails I sent would be marked as spam

I talked to Dreamhost support and they showed me how to setup an SPF record for my domain. See here and here on how to do it yourself.

Dreamhost support also suggested I create the emails postmaster@ and abuse@ because “I have seen some cases even though they are very rare cases in which not having these emails set up can cause some problems with servers receiving email.” Ok, sure. So I set those addresses up.

I created an account at postmaster.google.com to periodically check if Gmail is getting any spam from my domain.

I read up on spam-proofing a domain and realized that Dreamhost hadn’t implemented DKIM. Actually, they set it up for my domain but it was left in test mode. Even in Dreamhost’s DKIM example the test flag was set (see “Example of a DKIM Record, they write: k=rsa; t=y; p=GIMfMA0G…). So I had several back and forths with Dreamhost tech support starting in February and yesterday I got an email, “Our devs finally got around to removing the test flag and now DKIM records are properly being served.” Hurray!

In conclusion, you might want to check the headers on your outgoing emails. Look for the “dkim” header. Previously, when my account was still in “test-mode”, headers looked like “dkim=pass (test mode)”. And now they look like “dkim=pass header.i=@lee.org” :-)