webdevelopreneur

Our 3rd child Camilla Josephine Walker was born on Thursday. She’s awesome, super cute, strong :) It was a little stressful for me to be full-time dad to Emerson and Isabella from Wednesday to Sunday, but we made it through it. I did my first driving since my Achilles rupture!

And on that note, I get my cast off on Thursday – I’m still pretty much pain free, crutches suck, I’m getting a little nervous about physical therapy. Right now my foot is wrapped in it’s protective cocoon. I’m going to feel like a snail out of it’s shell at first :)

Why is it that the Firefox 3 mac UI looks so much better than PC UI?

click to zoom in

Obviously the mac UI looks much closer to OSX Safari – and I guess they couldn’t also take the PC UI closer to OSX Safari without a lot of griping. But show 100 “non-religious” people the two UI options, I’d say the Mac version would be chosen 2 to 1 or more…

Quick update: I’m feeling pretty good. Went out to work @ client location past two days, good to get back out and get off the couch :) Good thing is that if I’m lying or sitting, my foot doesn’t hurt… Crutching around is killing my armpits, and my foot throbs a little when moving around, but at least I can move around. I’m off pain medication for the first time in a few months.

Now my focus turns to taking care of my clients and hope they forgive me for being less than 100% past few months. Oh and of course we have child #3 due to arrive in a week or two! One thing I can say with certainty is that I’m not suffering from boredom :)

Thank you to everyone who has offered help and support. People are great, my spirits are up. Randy Pausch has been an inspiration for how to handle the curveball’s that life throws at you; I really can’t complain that I have it so bad.

My surgery yesterday involved:

• First they gave me a nerve block behind the knee that blocked pain for 24-48 hrs after surgery. A lot of needles while I was semi-conscious—I don’t remember anything about that, but they said I was basically responding to all their questions with sarcastic jokes… I guess the “true me” was coming through :) Then I was given general anesthesia and was out.
• Removal of haglan’s deformity—irregular bone growth on my heel that is the result of my years of achilles tendonitis.
• Flexor hallucis longus (FHL) tendon transfer—they harvested a tendon behind my big toe to lace into the achilles tendon. Basically they drill a hole in my heel and pull that tendon through, which serves as the new anchor. The bone will grow around it to secure the connection.
• Achilles debridement—small cuts are made to the tendon, which stimulates an in-growth of blood vessels and results in a healing response.

I vomited about 6 times after waking up, went home about an hour later. Went right to sleep for about 5 hrs. Watched the Celtics-Lakers game, then the trouble began.

I tried to fall asleep at midnight, but could only sleep for about 30-45 minutes before the pain woke me back up. I took some of the percoset they prescribed @ 5am, but it didn’t help too much. I struggled through it until 6am when I had Shannon go get valium prescription filled, I was writhing in pain waiting for her to get back. Once I got that stuff in my system, I fell asleep until 9am, and my pain level was lowered.

I called the doc, he called me back around noon and he told me a lot of the post-op pain I’m feeling is attributed to the bone work he did. He said today + tomorrow are going to be rough from a pain standpoint, but from there it should slowly subside.

I go in to see him in 2 weeks to get staples out, and then he’ll recast me for another 2 weeks or so. Then I’ll be in a boot for a few weeks before starting physical therapy, around week 6. He thinks there’s a good chance I’ll get back to 100% percent strength, but that’ll be about a year(!) out…

When it rains it pours…

This morning I woke up at 4am with tooth pain (I had my 3rd root canal appt in 3 weeks on Thurs), couldn’t fall back asleep, so went to play basketball @ 6am. Around 6:20 I was running down the court, tried to cut to the basket for a pass, and it felt like someone kicked my calf. I turned back to see who it was, saw no one, tried to take a step, and went down.

I knew immediately that I’d ruptured my Achilles. I just about lost consciousness for a few minutes. They called paramedic and took me to hospital. X-rays confirm it’s a complete rupture, and will require surgical repair. I have a temporary cast, I’m on crutches, and I can’t drive.

I plan to try to get surgery scheduled ASAP (with Shannon due in 4 weeks, timing for this injury is quite inconvenient), and I’ll be in a cast for around 6-8 weeks afterwards (so I’ve read). I haven’t seen an orthopedic doctor yet, so nothing is official on this stuff yet.

Good news is that I’ve got very little pain, and I’m hoping I can work on computer fairly normally. Traveling to work office is probably out of the picture for next few weeks.

Not a good start to the holiday weekend :(

Our 5-year old daughter Isabella was watching TV today and told my wife “Do you know Lucky Charms has less sugar now? Now we can buy it…I think it has vitamins too.”

Well played, General Mills :)

Lance Garrett Steagall complains that only 4.4 percent of our federal budget goes towards education, and that we’re overspending on defense.

People like Lance have a warped view of the role of federal government. Federal taxes should go towards federal defense… and there is no reason education needs to be federalized. I’d support 0% of federal education expenditures. Remember we’re in a republic, people, and the states can handle education without federal assistance!

A few months ago I was asked to provide a bid to redo the “forum” area of a software company’s website (an old client of mine). The current forum system is 5-year-old custom ASP, rigid, and feature poor.

I put together a barebones quote to redo the forum using Beast as the foundation. I followed up a few times, no news, no big deal, I moved on.

Found out today that when they were discussing the proposal, the CEO found out that the forum software was “Beast” and he “couldn’t possibly” have it be known that they were using software with such a name. Needless to say, the company isn’t the most progressive out there :)

And that’s how I lost that bid. Beast is brave and I’m sure that more people choose Beast for it’s name than reject it. I wouldn’t have the product named anything else; Beast is a great name.

SWSWSWN (Some will, some won’t, so what, next!)

I bought one last night, dumping my “ancient” Treo 650. The big criticism I’ve heard, and one of the reasons I’ve held back, is that it’s hard to type on due to a lack of tactile feedback.

There is some truth to that, but there are so many positives about it that dwarf that issue. I truly feel, for the first time, that “the Internet is in my pocket” as Steve Jobs professes.

A few nights ago, I was typing an email, addressing it to “Sandy” and my wife looked over to my computer… “Who’s Sandy?”

I replied, “Just a cool little todo list & reminder thing I’m trying out.”

The trial is a success. I’m no power user yet, but I am now using Sandy to manage my todo list and it can be used to send yourself reminders via email and sms. Highly recommended, lots of cool features inside.

So President Bush’s approval is extremely low. I was wondering last night what the “truth” could be about the circumstances of his presidency, and what his legacy will be eventually. Some people believe him to be one of the worse president’s ever, a view I don’t share. I think there are three possible truth scenarios:

1. He’s a psychopath, hell-bent on taking over the world and ruining the United States In this scenario, he is proven to be involved in manipulating intelligence so he could go to war with Iraq under false pretenses, for his own political gain. I think this is a wacko idea mostly because I’ve never perceived a malicious intent in him, and ultimately his decisions have led criticism, not glory. I give this a 10% chance to be the truth.

2. He’s just not very smart In this scenario, we are only able to take the intelligence for what it was (no proof of falsification), and we only know that he says he considered his options carefully and thoughtfully, and made some hard decisions. But he lacked the political agility (and perhaps mental acuity) to effectively defend himself and his decisions. I fear this could be reality, but I am rooting against it, since I voted for him. Still, I’ll give this one a 50% chance to be the truth.

3. He’s a patriot In this scenario, we discover that he “took one for the team,” the United States. The entire body of intelligence had to remain classified for strategic reasons, but eventually the whole picture was revealed to us and his legacy will be that of a courageous man who sacrificed his own political image for our benefit. I’m the eternal optimist, so I’ll give this a 40% chance of being the truth.

I look forward to the answer, some day.

Nice article @ Nichegeek with great advice at the end:

“For anyone, no matter what age they are, if they find something they truly love, write about it. You have nothing to lose but time. And it could really pay off.”

Oh, if only I had the time!

If a beginner was starting his ‘Rails journey’ should we advise traditional test::unit testing vs. new rspec testing… I think rspec is the future, and it’s now relatively stable, but it’s also more complicated + tricky than test::unit.

Would you advise newbies learn test::unit before rspec in order to more fully appreciate rspec?

I just gave advice not to test at all on first project, as learning Ruby + Rails is tough enough without trying to figure out testing… Did I goof?

My intelligent 9-year-old son just finished reading The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. It’s children’s book, and features greek gods Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, and Athena.

We were driving home from Applebee’s last night, and he told me that the book was part fiction, part non-fiction.

“Well it has Zeus and Hades and Poseidon” (he mispronounces all the names badly).

“Ok, and what’s the non-fiction parts?” I ask. He is confused. He was referring to the Greek gods as the NON-FICTION parts of the book.

(Quick background, I grew up Catholic + went to a few other churches with my mom as a teen. I looked at other religions in research, but I’ve come out pretty much agnostic, bordering on atheistic. I don’t take my kids to any church.)

Earlier this year, I kiddingly suggested to a coworker that I may as well believe in Greek mythology vs. Judeo-Christian “mythology.” I did some Googling and found out that there are virtually no believers left of Zeus, and it’s too big of a project to revive it all by myself :) I do believe there’s a good chance that 2,000 years from now, people will look back on both religions as quaint, outdated, and ultimately made-up.

So imagine my shock to discover that my son “believes” in Zeus. Some part of me feels guilt for not “bringing my kid up properly”, the other part says “why not?”

He still believes in Santa Claus (due to my own lies) so why can’t he believe that Zeus is real?