Balance and Leg Strength Conditioning

I have about 2 more weeks of physical therapy left.

The goals of the next 2 weeks involve the improving following two areas:

1. Balance (my balance stinks)
2. Leg strength (my legs feel like jello after walking up a flight of steps)

To that end, we have been tweaking my exercises as follows:

1. I do a higher level of resistance on the bike (level 8)
2. I do a 3 second hold on my wall squats.
3. I now do my BAPS board by standing up on it (this is ridiculously hard for me)
4. I now do sets of 15 leg presses (three sets with one foot, three sets with both feet)
   
5. I have to play catch with a heavy ball by bouncing it on a trampoline-like contraption. I do this while balancing on one foot.
   
6. I now do a higher level of resistance bands for my side-step exercises and ankle exercises.

Hardware comes out on November 18th. I'm excited to have it out!

Go State!

Penn State passed their first real test on Saturday, beating Illinois 38-24 (although, I argue that their second week bruising of Oregon State was a good test, too).

This was probably one of the more entertaining Penn State football games in recent memory.

Go State!

More changes at P.T.

I went to work on Tuesday without crutches. I walked into the office myself (no easy feat!). And yesterday, Jenn put the crutches in the basement for safe-keeping (don't worry Rebuck... I'll give them back to you!).

I can move around the house pretty well. However, when I walk up the steps, I really notice how weak my legs have become.

The folks are Physical Therapy are adjusting my normal routine to deal with it (just in time... I'm sure they saw this coming):


More changes to my exercise regimen at PT:

• They moved me to a machine that gives me MUCH more resistance for my leg presses
• I do a calf and leg stretches by leaning against the wall (5 sets with knee bent, 5 sets without knee bent - 30 second stretch for each set).
• My ankle rotation exercises are now done with someone holding an elastic band (to help build ankle strength)

Walking!

I think I can say that I am walking. I didn't bring crutches into physical therapy on Friday. On Saturday, I didn't even take out to dinner.

I still use a crutch to get up and down the stairs, but this is for more balance reasons.

My walking is all that smooth yet, but in a couple of weeks, I think I'll be close to 90% normal. It looks like I'll have one more (very small) operation in October to get the metal out. This is a good thing... I think part of my ankle rotation ability is being inhibited by the metal in their (plus, I can feel the metal in their... which is kind of...creepy).

My routine has changed slightly at physical therapy:

• I now do my weight shifts with my ankle standing on a squishy rubber foam pad. It supposedly helps me balance.
• I now do side-steps up an down the length of the work out area (again: working on sideways stability and balance)
• I now walk over little hurdles (about 4 inches high) to help with balance and control
• two legged shuttle reps are up to 7 bands
• I now do one legged shuttle reps on 6 bands

Basement Finished.

Our basement is officially finished. The carpet was installed late last week and we had our final walk through with the builders.

Our next big project starts next week: Painting the house!

I think Jenn has finished picking out the colors. Our basement will get painted first. Once it is painted, all of Neya's toys will move down there -- since the basement will be initially a play room.

Farewell IntelliJ...

Warning: Geek Post.

For my day-to-day software development needs, I've been using Eclipse. It's a really competent Java IDE but falls short on the side of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS development.

Some folks have at work have been using IntelliJ IDEA, and many other developers just seem to gush over it. So, I thought I would try it.

I gave it a try for one month, and I have reached my verdict: I cannot believe that IntelliJ is still in business -- there is just no way I can justify spending 200 bucks on it.

My major complaints:

• Key combinations and short cuts are bizarre. Control-Y to delete a line? (almost every other editor uses Ctrl-E or Ctrl-D). This list goes on and on and on....
  
• Three forms of Ctrl-Space completion? Give me a freaking break! Ctrl-Space should match anything in my entire project and prioritize the ones that I use most often at the top of the list of matches (or the ones that match imported entries from my class).
• No Automated Unit Test Creation? I was surprised that I needed a plug-in to do this. (and even then, the plug-in sucked)
• Outdated GUI - The GUI is just plane outdated. It looks so 2002. Note to IntelliJ: Swing interfaces can look really nice!
• No Drag and Drop - Every other IDE I have used allows me to drag files from my desktop into my project. Except IntelliJ.
  
• Slow - IntelliJ is just plain slow. Eclipse is much snappier. Even NetBeans (which I used to classify as Bloatware) is snapier. I hate having to wait 30 seconds everytime I open a project so that it can re-index everything. This is just plain silly.
  
• No Support for Multiple Open Projects - This is just lame. I can only have one project open in a pane at a time. If I want multiple projects, I need to spawn a new window.
  

I am glad I tried IntelliJ. I am hoping that next time I go to a conference, and I see poeople gushing so much about IntelliJ, they can show me what they like about it.

Note: I know that IntelliJ does have excellent Spring/Hibernate/Groovy/Rails support. However, I really think it's important to have an IDE that gets the basics done first. All of my rants above are minor things. But when so many minor things just suck, I can't get past it.

On a very pleasant note, I am currently trying the latest Beta of Netbeans (version 6.5). It is fast, snappy, and just plain works. In about 10 minutes, I was able to get my project up and running. Within a day, I am pretty productive in its environment. Nice job, Sun!

I hope IntelliJ will seriously look at their competition and see where they are falling short.

More Progress

I am doing much better with one crutch. It is almost getting easy with one crutch.

On Wednesday, I took my first couple of steps with no crutches - they were baby steps, but at least they were steps!

I also had my progress report at PT. No swelling decrease in last week or so. But I am gaining more ability to move my ankle around (this is measured in degrees using a tool that looks like a protractor from geometry class).

Break through on the steps: I was doing Level 1 steps last Friday. Level 1 steps are about a half inch high. On Wednesday, I was doing Level 4 steps (several inches high -- like normal steps).

This breakthrough is due to the fact that I can now maintain my entire body weight on my ankle. However, we did a balancing test -- and I have no balance whatsoever on this foot. Something new to work on! I didn't think that I would loose my balancing ability so quickly!