My Fracture

I finally got to really clearly see my fracture today.

It turns out that I have a fracture in my lateral malleolus. Mine is a type B fracture (the middle picture).

On the road to recovery!

I had my first post-op visit with my orthopedic today, and things are looking good. My screws and plate appear to be keeping my ligaments and bones together, as they would normally be.

I have two sets of surgical staples (one on each side of the ankle). I got to see them for the first time today... I look a little like Frankenstein. :-)

And my nasty fracture blister is gone!

I'm in a splint for another week. I need to rest this week, because I still have a decent amount of swelling in my foot.

If all goes well, I should have my staples remove next week, and moved into a cast. Then, I can start getting my life a little back to normal.

Out of Surgery, Out of Mind

I had my surgery done on Tuesday night. I ended up getting two screws and a plate in my ankle. They are not permanent, and will be removed in a few months. They are just there to provide support in my ankle, and so that the ligaments can heal properly.

The anesthesia really worked well. All I remember is being carted to the Operating Room and scooting over to the operating room table. After scooting over, I woke up with a sore ankle.

I stayed overnight in hospital and was out by 1pm. It is nice to be at home, resting in my own bed.

They gave lots of vicodin for pain management at home. I'm trying not take a lot of them. They make me feel just a little different.

In any event... it feels good to be at home, and hopefully on the road to recovery!!!

The Best Twenty Bucks I've Spent

My left ear closed up on me over the weekend. The result is that my hearing was about 50%. I noticed that I had a lot of wax in my left ear, so I scheduled an appointment to get it checked out.

The doctor took a quick look and said "yup, you have a lot of wax in that ear".

With some warm water and a syringe, she was able to quickly flush it out. When the water was in my ear, it sounded like an ocean! Two quick washes, and I saw all of the wax that was removed. It was incredible (and smelly). I wanted to take a picture, but Jenn wouldn't let me. I was really surprised how much junk has been clogging up my ears!

I instantly was able to hear much better. Now my right ear felt like the clogged one! A couple of washes later, both ears were in tip-top shape.

Twenty bucks and five minutes later, I walked out thinking that this was the best doctor's visit I've ever had. No long recovery. No prescriptions or medications. No referrals No x-rays. Just a simple procedure with dramatic results.

Next time, I won't hesitate to get my ears cleaned out. :-)

Bill Falls Down (and doesn't get up)

I finally did it. I broke my ankle.

I was playing roller hockey after work. I needed to move from a forward moving position to one where I could turn sharply and backwards.

This is normally handled with a small hop of the skates. Unfortunately, my right foot gave out and twisted in a bad (and wrong) way when I fell on it.

The good news is that I only have a minor fracture. The bad news is that I have severe ligament damage and will be going to surgery next week to get my ankle cut open, fix the ligaments, and get some screws or plates for added support. This will keep me in crutches for another 6 weeks (I have a solid two weeks under my belt) plus several weeks of physical therapy.

My hockey career is over.

Here are some pictures... the first is a couple of days after the incident:




The second picture is about a week later (after my splint was taken off):



It has no where to go but to look better. :-)

I Don't Want to Operate a Data Center any more...

I am a big fan of Amazon.com. They have already transformed themselves from an online book retailer to THE online retailer of just about any product. Just when everyone said that Amazon had nowhere to go, they started commercializing web services. Everything from storage to elastic computing to databases to queuing services are now available.

The services are cheap, reliable, and scalable.-- and you get to take advantage of Amazon.com's expertise at running a data center (they probably know how to do that better than most people).

I think that this is a slam dunk. I look around and see lots of companies running data centers. And it's expensive. It's even more expensive to run it properly.

Perhaps, Don MacAskill @ SmugMug said it best - I don't want to operate data centers any more.

He's right.

SmugMug (fantastic service and company, by the way) is in the business of providing me great online software to manage my photos. They are a software and services company. They should be focusing on that stuff - operating a data center for them is almost like running their own phone service or running their own power grid. Why should they?

For years I've held the belief that computing power and services are best delivered as a utility. I've heard lots of companies talking about. It's great to see Amazon making this a reality, and it's great to hear about the successes of companies like SmugMug using these services.

Power to the cloud!!!

Using sox to resample audio

The following nifty one-liner will resample to 8000Mhz, convert to mono (one channel), and increase the volume level:

for i in *.wav ; do sox $i -v 1.8 -r 8000 -c 1 ../resampled/$i resample; done