What do Percocet, Vicodin, Lidocaine, coldpacks, physical therapy, Flexall 454, a sling and acupuncture all have in common? They’re all pain-alleviating technologies I’m using right now on my shoulder after sustaining a rotator cuff injury on my birthday last weekend. Check out this xray from the emergency room:

Unfortunately it doesn’t do much to show the knotted muscles or convey the level of pain associated with this injury. And I didn’t get the films for the MRI I had on wed (ever have a 4″ needle jammed into your shoulder socket to inject contrast dye? wheeeee). I’m fairly certain that if torture experts learned about this, the “bamboo under the fingernails” technique would be quickly replaced. We had a great time for Cinco de Mayo and took the party bus out and celebrated my 31st. Unfortunately my truck’s battery somehow died that night and even though I got it started by jumping it the next morning, it crapped out in traffic on my way to buy the battery. I guess being dehydrated, amped by the adrenaline of having cars whizzing around you and trying to push a one-ton automobile out of the road by yourself is a bad idea… I got it moved but not before ripping the muscles apart in my left shoulder.

Odd things I’ve learned this week being one-handed:

1. For the first time since high school, I am able to write faster with a pen than I can type.
2. Flossing is one of the more difficult activities to achieve with one hand.
3. I’ve actually found a practical use for the electric pepper grinder gag gift I got for my brother for Christmas
4. How much we take for granted the absence of pain everyday

On a different note, the window for applying in the 4th round of submissions for the 9rules Network is tomorrow (Wed) one day only. My friend Chris is currently syndicated through them and says it has tripled his readership so it’s worth it for anyone who uses his/her blog to reach potential clients

I’m scrambling to complete Phase I of the ABC project this week to meet their deadline. I feel like the runner that comes around the final turn only to pull a hamstring and wind up clawing his way across the finish line though- typing is waaay hindered right now and it’s going to come down to the wire. I will do an extensive writeup on what I learned and all that was involved in delivering this system once it’s live. It’s been an enormous exercise in pushing the limits of screen scraping techniques to essentially emulating a browser and writing a wrapper API for a system that had no way of exposing its internals and then to automate a bunch of business processes via the API I created. The most challenging thing is not that this company fails to provide an API to their system but that they have countermeasures in place to thwart people like me from doing what I’m doing so essentially I have to defeat those first before I can make the screenscraping work. My legacy integration stuff is all done in ColdFusion running on BlueDragon JX and entirely done using cf components and xml mapping files. What’s nice is when this company inevitably changes the formfields in their system, I only have to update an xml mapping file and the client-facing application theoretically should not have to change at all. The guys from Fivetwenty Web Services were an absolute pleasure to work with (I subbed the client-facing portion to them so I could focus entirely on all the legacy stuff). Their stuff is all .NET and we talk XML back and forth. The next phase will encompass all the financial data and involve extending the legacy integration to talk with a housing provider app that rides ontop of a FoxPro db, a custom Cobol accounting system and an AS400 that has all the data from the social workers- all this to avoid the volley of faxed patient information that is their current process. Everything must be HIPAA-compliant so it’s all stored encrypted in the db and the encryption key actually resides on a different network segment (thanks to the 520 guys)- it has been quite an experience setting it up… I will definitely share what I’m allowed to as far as lessons learned.

BTW, Pandora rocks – if you haven’t used it yet, be sure to check it out. It’s a free, flash-based music discovery service that lets you setup your personal radio stations and learns to recommend artists you like. What’s cool is you can share stations with friends. I just added their js widget to my blog on the right column to syndicate my stations. This replaces shoutcast now for me as being the music of choice during the day.

© 2006 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

“Value-for-Value” as my friend Ed Nusbaum would say… if I hadn’t already filed my taxes this year I would try this approach:
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Dear Internal Revenue Service:

Enclosed you will find my 2005 tax return showing that I owe $3,407.00 in taxes. Please note the attached article from the USA Today newspaper dated 12 November, wherein you will see that the Pentagon (Department of Defense) is paying $171.50 per hammer and NASA has paid $600.00 per toilet seat.
I am enclosing four (4) toilet seats (valued @ $2,400) and six (6) hammers (valued @ $1,029), which I secured at Home Depot, bringing my total remittance to $3,429.00. Please apply the overpayment of $22.00 to the “Presidential Election Fund,” as noted on my return. You can do this inexpensively by sending them one (1) 1.5″ Phillips head screw (see aforementioned article from USA Today newspaper detailing how H.U.D. pays $22.00 for each 1.5″ Phillips head screw). One such screw is enclosed for your convenience in matching the correct type of screw.

It has been a pleasure to pay my tax bill this year, and I look forward to paying it again next year.

Sincerely,

TAXPAYER
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note- this came on a printed page from my grandmother so I don’t know to whom it can be attributed but it’s genius. Odds of the IRS finding the humor in this…zilch. Odds of getting audited after this stunt…solid to very solid.

Paul Scrivens over on 9rules Network recently advised prospective applicants for their network to maintain consistency in the frequency with which they post. I’ve seen this advice given elsewhere so I don’t mean to pick on Paul but I respectfully disagree with this. Blogging is not about informative journalism, it’s about taking what’s in your head and bubbling it up into a virtual playground which extends beyond the earshot of the people you normally share your ideas with and making them available for anyone on the playground to consume, synthesize, criticize, remix and respond. It’s not about grammatically-perfect language, absence of spelling errors or slick design (though those elements help the digestibility and transmissibility of your thoughts)- it’s about unadulterated expression of the things that are core to one’s being and it’s about connecting with other people on a very fundamental level. The term blog when used as a verb still feels hoaky to me because it seems to imply that you’re practicing a different art that involves customary practices. Dude, you’re not- you’re writing. Period. It just so happens that your publishing mechanism incorporates certain features that make it easy for people to monitor and respond to your words but there’s nothing inherent to this act of writing when it’s on a blog that should demand it occur on a certain schedule. I went 3wks this month focused on other things and now this is my 3rd post in the past 12hrs… If you’re looking for traditional journalism with regular frequency of publishing you pick up a trade publication or periodical (ahem, periodic-intervals…). Imposing artificial consistency and forcing regularity on one’s blog posts robs them of the characteristic that makes them interesting to begin with- their "raw-ness."

The critical thing to understand here is that the people writing the interesting blogs out there are not writers by trade- they are wacky people in weird professions doing bold things and chronicling what happens. It’s the realest of the reality shows- an uncut, from-the-source account of what is happening. Would you rather read the blog of a media journalist or the blog of a deep-sea treasure hunter? How about a forest fire smoke jumper? Or an arctic explorer who hiked to the North Pole on foot ? Call me crazy but a few weeks without posts from any of those people would be completely acceptable. I don’t proclaim to have nearly as sexy a job as any of those people but I’m extremely excited about the projects I’m part of right now and I’ll go stretches of several weeks without posting and instead focusing intensely on other pursuits. Being able to write at will and not adhere to any deadlines (I believe) is core to the proposition of what makes blog content compelling. If you have ever tried writing a piece of music by a schedule it’s the same effect. So "why do you write?" is the question my buddy Keith asked. It’s a stew of motivations for me, namely:

1. expression: idea catharsis from all the things that pile up in one’s head
2. connection: a basal desire everyone has of connecting more intimately with other human beings
3. uncertainty: that "you-neva-know-whatchu-gonna-get" thrill of the random backflow of ideas and people you meet
4. archival: consolidation of insights and techniques and references in a spot you know you can come back to and refer others to
5. credibility: hosting a living resume that anyone can traverse to learn your capabilities
6. encoding: writing helps with retention and recall of concepts later on
7. exposure: shameless self-promo for whatever you do and a way of reaching new potential customers

Running your raw observations through any purification process dillutes the effect of each of the above and removes the edginess – at that point you’re not truly L-I-V-I-N as Wooderson would say. Google’s blog as useful as the info is, has the distinct flavor of being run through five approval layers and tweaked by marketing folks until all the impurities are gone and it "meets criteria for alignment with corporate vision" or whatever. What’s funny is getting syndicated by 9Rules is on my laundry list of goals – arguably criticizing the advice of their founder is counterproductive to the realization of that goal and yet reserving one’s honest opinion for the sake of advancing is an empty win and in doing so you trash the validity of what you’re you’re trying to get syndicated. And therein lies the rub…but that’s just my non-journalism-major take on this subject. Oh and I swore I would never fall into the trap of blogging about the act of blogging like Dennis but here I am doing it- I suppose it’s inevitable at some point.

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide