Life after the Knife

Well, surgery is over kids, and things seem to have gone fairly well.  My doctor told me that my ACL was indeed shredded, along with most of the cartilage in my left knee.  He said the injury seems to be old (i.e., it wasn’t something I just did recently).  My best guess is that I did it playing team handball on the old Loftus Astroturf freshman year of college.  That means I’ve been walking around, jogging (very occasionally), and playing basketball in Bookstore with a torn ACL.  Nice work, Matt.

Today I took off my bandages for the first time to get a good look.  It’s not the prettiest thing, so I put a picture up on Flickr if you’re really interested, but I’m not putting it up here.  I’m getting antsy just sitting around the house all day and am really ready to head back to work as soon as I can get in a car.

I have to tell you, when you have a medical situation like this, it’s freaking fantastic to be married to a nurse.  She was in the hospital making sure the nurses weren’t screwing around and explaining everything to me, and she’s been great here at the house taking care of me too.

Going Under the Knife

Just a quick note to everyone.  Tomorrow morning (Monday morning), I will be undergoing surgery to reconstruct the ACL in my left knee.  I’m not really looking forward to this because I’ve never been forced to stay overnight in a hospital before.  I hate hospitals.  Every time I go in one, I invariably get nauseous.  It’s no small irony that I married a nurse who spends three nights a week in a hospital.  One time she asked me to meet her at her hospital for dinner.  We were still dating at this point, so I thought it would be a good way to win some brownie points.  The second I walked on her floor, I lost my appetite and didn’t eat a thing.  She thought I was weird.  I haven’t been back to the hospital since.

The surgery will last approximately 90 minutes and will involve removing torn cartilage on both sides of my knee, as well as replacing my destroyed ACL with one from a cadaver.  Unfortunately, there’s no way to choose the cadaver they will use on you beforehand.  I’m hoping my cadaver is an athletic gang-banger from North Philly and not an 80 year old woman with osteoporosis. 

In any event, I’ll be confined to the couch for a good part of this week, probably, so expect to hear from me often since I won’t have anything better to do than sit here with my computer.  It will annoy Kelly to no end.  I’ll try and post updates as often as I can, but I’m not sure if I’ll have wi-fi in the hospital.  I should have my cell phone on me though, so check out my Twitter to see if I’m dead or not.  If you’re the praying sort and think of it tomorrow, I wouldn’t mind if you would offer one up for me asking that that doesn’t happen.  Thanks.

Another (more useful) use for Twitter

Today I just noticed that Newark International Airport is a Twitter user.  That means you can get up to the second info on delays and such via Twitter.  Genius!  Check it out here.

On the way to work this morning, I was actually thinking Twitter could be useful for traffic updates.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be driving to work in the morning and get a message from a fellow commuter saying there’s an accident up ahead and to take a different route?  Now, I know that radio stations have traffic updates every 10 minutes or so in the morning, but I still think it’d be cool to have up to the minute updates generated by other users.

Technorati Tags: twitter, ewr, airport, traffic

Twitter Followup

In a follow-up to my post on Twitter the other day, check out Robert Scoble’s rundown of Twitter and a few other Twitter-like services.  I think it might make more sense than what I wrote.

Technorati Tags: twitter, scoble

The Beauty of Photoshop

I just wanted to show people a little bit of what Photoshop can do for you people who have never used it before.  Take a look at this picture I took last weekend when Kel and I went to Gettysburg.  This view is from on top of Little Round Top looking down on Devil’s Den:

Now take a look at this Photoshopped version from the same picture and try and pick out what I changed:

Now, obviously I cropped the picture and made it kind of a sepia tone, but what else? Check it out:

- You’ll notice a small building on the left side of the untouched version. That is a bathroom the park installed some years ago that they are eventually going to remove. I did it for them.

- Got rid of all the roads the tourists use to get around the park.

- There are a few monuments way in the background.  Outta here!

- There are numerous cars in the parking lot, and a tractor over by the bathroom.  I got rid of those guys too.

- If you look closely, you’ll see there are a couple of dozen people climbing on the rocks in Devil’s Den.  Had to get them out.

- There are various walkers, bike riders, and joggers both on the road in the foreground, and back behind Devil’s Den.  Gone, baby!

- There are two different birds that flew through my shot that I nixed.  One on the left, and the other on the top right. 

This just goes to show you how Photoshop can take a normal, “touristy” photo and help turn it in to something more.  Now, I’m not one of those guys that normally likes to Photoshop his stuff to death on every shot.  In my opinion, the truly great photographer is one who can capture a shot and not have to doctor it up afterward to make it decent.  But Photoshop can be a very useful tool.

Technorati Tags: photoshop, flickr, gettysburg, civil war

What exactly is Twitter?

You may notice the right side of my blog now sports my Twitter RSS feed, but you may be wondering, what exactly is Twitter?  Some have called Twitter a “micro-blogging” service.  Basically it allows users to go on and update their status for other users to see.  Think of it as a more encompassing IM away message.  Once you update your status, your friends are notified (if they choose to be) of what you’re up to via an IM message, text message to their cell phone, or simply by viewing your page on the web.

Instead of having to go to the Twitter website every time you want to update your status, there are several easy ways to do it, both from the computer and on the go:

- You can send updates to Twitter via a cell phone text message
- You can send updates via an instant message from all manner of IM clients
- Twitter now has a Facebook application, allowing you to update your status from within Facebook
- You can get a Firefox extension such as TwitBin to update from within your browser

I think it’s a really ingenious way of keeping you connected with people.  Say you go to see Transformers and think it’s freaking sweet.  You can send a quick text to Twitter like, “Transformers is freaking sweet”, your message will get sent to your friends via their medium of choice (web, IM, or text message), and they will then know that Transformers is freaking sweet from an authoritative source.

Twitter is also fairly customizable in that you can send Twitter messages to single individuals, decide how and when you want to receive messages, and put Twitter into “sleep” mode to stop receiving messages for a certain period of time.

Twitter is quick and easy, and it helps to keep people in touch.  If this post has persuaded you to try it out, feel free to add me as a friend by visiting my Twitter page.

Technorati Tags: twitter, twitbin, facebook, micro blogging, firefox

This is what it was like working for KPMG…

and…

Campeones!

Real Madrid won their first Spanish La Liga title in 4 years yesterday with a 3-1 victory over Mallorca thanks to two goals by Jose Reyes.  All they had to do was get rid of Ronaldo, Michael Owen, Morientes, Zidane, and about 12 coaches to do it.

Felicidades!

Some Friday Entertainment

This one is dedicated to Looe Baker.  Here’s a YouTube clip I found from the 2005 Keenan Revue.  For those of you non-Domers out there, the Keenan Revue is an annual variety show put on by Keenan Hall at ND.  It’s usually pretty funny.

The video itself is pretty funny, but you had to go to ND to get the punchline at the end.  If you watch it and have no idea of the allusion that the sketch is making, see the second video (a music video) and then it should make more sense.  For even more fun, try and synchronize the two together.  Play the top one until about the 3:05 mark, and then start the bottom one.  Pretty funny.

Enjoy!

Social Cameras

Dave Winer has a cool idea for a “social camera“.  It’s kind of a neat concept, really.  I wonder if anyone has made something like this.  One concern I would have is keeping people from passing off pictures I took as their own.  What would be really cool is if it could somehow be integrated with Flickr.  Your camera would store your Flickr info in the file’s EXIF metadata so that if you transferred a photo to someone else, the file would have your info embedded in it.  It would help prevent you from uploading the photo without proper attribution to its true owner/author.

I’d also want an easy way to choose which photos I wanted and which were trash.

Wouldn’t it be nice to go on vacation and get some pictures of yourself without having to ask some stranger to take a picture of you with your camera?  Someone smarter than me, invent this, please!

Technorati Tags: winer, social camera

Rhema Impresses

Saw this quote this morning on BGS that I think is very telling:

In the four minicamp practices in which Meachem did participate this week, he was overshadowed by free agent Rhema McKnight of Notre Dame, and Dante Ridgeway, who spent time toward the end of the 2006 season on the Saints’ practice squad.
nola.com

“He [Rhema McKnight]
is coming out of a very sophisticated system, with many similarities to
some of the things we do,” said Johnson said of Notre Dame’s and the
Saints’ top-ranked offense last season. “He understands the game of
football and a lot of the intricacies about offensive sets that young
players often donﾹt have at the same stage of their careers that he has
right now. That is a credit to what he learned under Charlie Weis.”
NewOrleansSaints.com

It’s nice having a good coach.

Technorati Tags: weis, rhema mcknight, nfl, nd football

Woodchuck Problems: Part 1

I have a problem.  When I closed on my house almost two years ago, the previous owner advised me that there was a woodchuck (or if you’re from Philadelphia, a “groundhog”) living under the shed in my back yard.  I didn’t really think much of it until Kelly and I got married and I inherited a glorified cat as a pet (Roxy the Shih Tzu). 

Fast forward a year: somehow the woodchuck has morphed into 5 woodchucks, and the initial woodchuck has doubled in size so that I am now able to put a saddle on him and ride him around my apple tree.  If you don’t know, woodchucks can be mean.  At my parents farm in Northwestern PA, they’re all over the place and one once attacked and bit the crap out of my mom’s 45 pound English Setter.  Now you see my concern: if 10 pound Roxy got between a woodchuck and its hole, I’d have an inconsolable wife to console.

Things have come to a head, and I began brainstorming plans to take care of problem.  Here’s what I came up with:

1) Shoot the woodchucks.  This is what we do up at my parents’ farm, normally by removing the screen from a window on the second floor and raining lead on them from above.  Unfortunately I live in a residential area where that sort of thing is frowned upon, which leads me to option 2:

2) Buy a silencer for my handgun and go Vincent Vega on them.  Unfortunately, silencers are illegal so this wasn’t a real option, but it was fun to think about for a few minutes.

3) Call animal control to have them removed.  Probably the most humane option, but also the most costly.  Being a frugal kid, I nixed this idea pretty quickly.

4) Get a trap, catch them, and release them at a nearby park.  Also a humane option, but it would entail transporting disgusting, smelly woodchucks in my nice clean car.  Probably not going to happen.

5) Get a trap, catch them, and drown them in a garbage can full of water.  This is sounding good, but the only issue could arise if my already excessively nosy neighbors see me and call the Cruelty to Animals Tree-hugger Society.  A definite option.

6) Have my father-in-law sit in a nearby tree with his bow and take them down.  I thought this would be good because if he hit them and didn’t kill them, the woodchucks would at least be unable to reenter their hole because of the arrow sticking out the side of them, allowing me ample time to walk over and whack them with a shovel.  However, the idea of my father-in-law in a tree in the back yard hurling around broadpoint arrows with little kids next door probably would draw undue attention.

So which route did I go?  Tune in to Part II to find out!

Plastic explosives are unfortunately not an option for me

Technorati Tags: woodchuck, groundhog, exterminate

Flock

Since I’m a big time lover of Firefox, yesterday I decided I would give Flock a try since I’ve heard so many good things about it.  Well, you know what?  There’s not really an easy way to get my Firefox bookmarks into Flock.  What’s the deal with that?  The two browsers are built on the same architecture and you can’t move bookmarks between them easily?  That’s ridiculous.

Flock has some cool features, including integration with WordPress (and other blogs), Flickr, and deli.ciou.us; but I’m going to stick with Firefox.  To me, the combination of extensions ScribeFire for blogging, Flickrfox for browsing Flickr in my sidebar, and Sage for RSS reading beat out anything Flock has to offer.

Technorati Tags: flock, firefox, flickr, scribefire, wordpress, bookmarks

One Down

Well, this weekend already marks one year of marriage to CMB.  Time really flies.  It seems like just yesterday we were rocking out to Livin’ on a Prayer while Fitzy chased married women around in his Don Johnson-esque white suit.  So happy anniversary to me and the wife.

Google Maps Street View

Not sure if everyone has seen this or not, but Google recently released a new feature in Google Maps called “Street View”.  To check it out, go to a map of San Francisco and click “street view”.  Streets that have a street view show up in blue, and if you click anywhere on the blue street, it will give you a street-level picture of what is at that exact spot.  Now that is cool!

I’m assuming Google is doing this by driving around and taking pictures of everything.  I’m not sure how feasible is for them to do this on a national level without some sort of user-generated content.  However, if they open up that can of worms, how will they police it?

Either way, it’s pretty cool stuff!

Technorati Tags: google maps, street view, google

Google acquires Feedburner

I must have missed this due to my busyness last week.  I wonder what Google will do with Feedburner?  There are a lot of “geeks” out there that tend to decry Feedburner for whatever reason, but it’s a service that I’ve always liked.  It came in especially handy when I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress last year.  I didn’t have to worry about giving everyone a new RSS feed for the new site.  Instead, I justed changed everything over in Feedburner and walla! 

It’s just like when the law changed a few years ago allowing you to keep your same cell phone number when you change between carriers.  You didn’t have to worry about calling 100 people to tell them your new number.

Sweetness.

Technorati Tags: feedburner, google, rss

Done and Done

The big exam is finally over everyone, and I have to say that I’m pretty relieved.  5 months of studying is done for now, and I can finally relax a bit.  The test itself went fairly well, I thought.  It was a bit intimidating though.  There were about 1,000 people in my testing center (the PA Convention Center in downtown Philly).  They have everyone in a giant room testing at the same time, so it’s not exactly a “warm and fuzzy” feeling in there.  The testing room reminded me a lot of East Berlin, actually– a lot of concrete and dark lighting.

The general consensus was that the morning session was easier than the afternoon, and I tend to agree with that.  If I pass, then I get to do this all again next year, and if I pass that one, I’ll get to do it again after that.  If I pass that, then I will finally be awarded the CFA designation.  So best case scenario, we’re looking at 2009 here.  Craziness.

It’s Friday!

You know what I do when I’m feeling down and troubled?  I crank up some Little Superstar:

Test day is almost here

Tomorrow is finally the big day I take the CFA exam, everyone.  Testing starts at 9AM and wraps up around 5PM.  Should be a fun filled day.  Wish me luck, kids!  I’ll tell you all about it when I’m sitting around the house in my underwear eating a block of cheese the size of a car battery on Monday.