diabetes – Watne Household Site

Tour de Cure 2015

April 28, 2015john

The obvious reason I ride in the American Diabetes Association’s Tour de Cure, as I did the last seven years, is because I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes 42 years ago. While I have seen amazing advancements in the treatment of diabetes over these decades, I look forward to further research and improvements. Most of all, I pray for the day that a cure is found.

In this eighth year that I ride in the Tour de Cure, I have more important reasons to ride, as shown in the photo on this page: my wife, Sara, and our twin boys. I would like to see a cure and, until that day, better treatments to ensure that I may share as long a life as possible with them. I want to see these two precious boys grow up, from their first day of school, to teaching them to ride bikes and join me on rides, to teaching them to drive, to teaching them to shave, to seeing their high school and, I hope, college graduation ceremonies. I would like to see how much Paul, whose face is the spitting image of mine from 45 years ago (ignoring his strawberry birthmarks), continues to resemble me as he ages. And I would like to see how much Michael, whose face bears a similar resemblance to Sara’s at his age, also resembles her as he ages.

I also pray that our boys do not inherit my Type 1 diabetes, and hope that research may prevent its onset or provide a cure should they be susceptible to it.

Please support me with a donation by visiting my Tour de Cure page and selecting the “Donate to Me” link. Our efforts will help set the pace in the fight against diabetes. So let’s get in gear and bike to beat diabetes!

Each mile I ride, each dollar I raise will be used in the fight to prevent and cure diabetes and to improve the lives of all people affected by diabetes.

No matter how small or large, your generous gift will help improve the lives of my family and more than 20 million other Americans who suffer from diabetes, in the hope that future generations can live in a world without this disease. Together, we can all make a difference!

Thank you for considering making a generous contribution to this cause that is so important to me.

Visiting CareLink Site on OS X Mavericks

November 7, 2014john

Here is a tip for people who fall into the same small category as myself. If you

use a Medtronic insulin pump,
use the CareLink site to store your pump history,
use a Mac, and
are running OS X Mavericks for a time – short, I hope – after I write this post,

you will run into the problem that I ran into when I first attempted to upload my pump data after upgrading to Mavericks. You will get an error page stating,

Unfortunately, the configuration of your PC or web browser is not compatible with our standard system requirements.

This is because the only OS X versions supported are “MacOSX 10.5 (Intel), MacOSX 10.6/10.7/10.8”. Unfortunately, Mavericks is version 10.9. Unlike the logic for the browser, which recognized that my Firefox 24.0 met the Firefox 5 requirement, the OS check does not appear to allow for future versions.

The workaround that I am using, for now, is to use the Firefox User Agent Switcher plugin. After installing the plugin and restarting Firefox, create a new “Firefox on Mountain Lion” user agent as follows:

Select Tools / Default User Agent / Edit User Agents…

In the “User Agents” section, choose New / New User Agent…

In the window that appears, you will see “… Intel Mac OS X 10.9;…” in the “User Agent” field.

Change the version from 10.9 to 10.8, and give a helpful description like “Firefox on Mountain Lion” in the “Description” field. Then, before visiting the CareLink site, select Tools / Default User Agent / Firefox on Mountain Lion [or whatever name you gave the user agent]. You will now be able to use the CareLink site!

This Year’s Charitable Bike Rides

April 11, 2013john

Though recovering from trigger finger surgery and the bad weather (winter storm warning on April 11!) are delaying my start in warming up for them, I am once again participating in two charitable bike rides this Spring. I am participating in:

If either or both of these causes interests you, I would be very grateful for your sponsoring me by following the donation instructions on the pages linked to above.

Thank you for your consideration!