Class V

Fall Is In the Air

The older I get, the longer it takes to get into any semblance of physical shape.  After my severe elbow injury last November I spent much of the winter and spring not running, not surfing or swimming, and only minimally riding.  (Long before my surfing accident, I had invested in a 2008-09 Epic Pass and so I felt compelled to at least partially amortize the cost, injuries be damned (and a little light cruising on good conditions never hurt anyone, right?))

I still haven't truly stressed my elbow to the point where I know for certain surgery of some kind won't be necessary.  But I began swimming in earnest this summer (no pull buoy and paddles yet, however) and was recently inspired to add running again.  Wow.  Nothing like my run last weekend at 6,300' at Lake Tahoe (after maybe only running six times in this "comeback") to remind myself that I am definitely much closer to forty than thirty.

Still, there is something about the physical pain of getting in shape that really makes one feel alive.  I love this time of the year for so many reasons.  As a young girl, I was one of those nerds that really liked getting back into a classroom.  As a New Englander, I loved the touch of crispness in the evening air that served as a prelude to flaming orange maple trees and ripe McIntosh apples.

But I know it's this time of the year for one reason more than any other: literally, my body expects to be in shape.  It's very hard to describe what that internal anticipation feels like, but I imagine those who have repeatedly gone through rituals to physically prepare for an activity they love, and enjoy the pain and repetition of the rituals * almost * as much as the activity itself ... perhaps they understand what I am describing. When water polo became such a significant part of my life when I was 12 or 13, I always associated this time of the year with the start of a new season of a sport that I enjoyed so much.  And polo camps with three a day training sessions, endless runs up and down stadium stairs, swimming, swimming and more swimming, additional time in the weight room and studying film and all of it.

Having this happen annually in August and September during my formative teenage years has now resulted, 20+ years later, in my body literally wondering out loud at this time of the year, why I am not as sore as it thinks I should be.  Am doing my best to keep it placated by stepping out for a run in the rain now ...

Totally Geeking it Out

This past weekend, I got my serious tech geek on and took on the task of doing a clean "erase and install" on my two Mac's with the new Apple operating system, "Snow Leopard" (OS X 10.6).  One of the features of Snow Leopard ("SL") is that the installation process has been greatly improved such that Apple recommends that users do not do an "erase and install" and simply upgrade the operating system on top of their current setup.

However, the relatively puny hard drive (80 GB) of my MacBook Air was over 90% full, seriously degrading performance.  So I thought I would take the occasion of an operating system upgrade to really purge, and explore new setups like creating a separate media server on my wireless backup drive.  My iTunes library was about 30 GB alone, a lot of it old television series (video files) I had purchased way back in the day and will never watch again.  Grey's Anatomy Season Two, anyone?  And my photo library was 13 GB.

SL itself leaves a much smaller footprint than its predecessor, Leopard (OS X 10.5).  Installing SL freed up at least 5 GB of space alone.  One of the main reasons I upgraded was because of SL's built in connections to Microsoft Exchange, my employer's mail (and calendaring) system.  So I also was able to get rid of Microsoft Entourage (Microsoft's very clumsy Mac answer to Outlook) and it's 2 GB database.

Apologies to several coworkers, clients and candidates who I think received a small flurry of meeting cancellations and deletions as a result of this.  Its unclear to me if the upgrade created some duplicate meetings, or if the duplicates were sitting on my work's Exchange server all along and I was able to "see" them for the first time after the upgrade.  Oddly enough, there seemed to be no real rhyme or reason as to which meetings were duplicated; it was probably half of them.  Regardless, one of the more painful time sucks this past weekend was eliminating the duplicate meeting files off of my work's Exchange server one by one ...

I also took the occasion of spending all of this time in front of my computers to start exploring video a bit.  One of the primary reasons I finally upgraded my first gen iPhone this summer was because supposedly the video recording capability of the iPhone 3GS is decent.  And I thought it might be fun to start capturing impromptu video.  (Of course, you want to talk about large file sizes ...  at the same time, Apple has apparently dumbed down the HD capability of the hardware inside the iPhone 3GS so that the file sizes are manageable over AT&T's crummy 3G network to conserve the battery.)  More video to come, but early indications make it clear that there is no Steven Spielberg in these genes.

At the end of the day, my MacBook Air's drive is only 30 GB full, and both machines are running even faster.  And I got to revisit my inner tech geek, even if for just a little while.

Stream of Thought

Feel like I've traveled back in time two or three years, and am blogging from a tech conference.  Here at the Real Time Stream CrunchUp and thoroughly enjoying engaging a side of my brain that's been a bit dormant for a while. As high a mountain today's search engines seemed to have climbed in indexing all static web pages, there is an even higher peak to ascend in indexing (in a relevant way to each individual) all of the streaming, real time information being created on the web now. 

With real time information, the volume will be massive.  Filters will be needed but by definition, filtering suggests a screen of some kind that may slow down the "real time" quality of the information.  Our relationship to information today is more about recall or memory, but in the future, our relationship to information will likely be much more forward thinking.  Big problems.  Exciting time to be a tech entrepreneur.

Certain industries, such as finance (trading) and intelligence (CIA), have invested billions in handling streaming data because minutes (even seconds) matter in those fields.  I wonder if there are other industries where this is true.  If so, then this concept of indexing (and then analyzing or monetizing) streaming, real time data may indeed be a big deal.

Motivation

Inspiration can strike during the most mundane of moments.  Working far too late in the office on a Friday night, perusing an old friend's blog, I was reminded of how interesting these random scrapbook pages on the World Wide Web can be.

Not that any of my digital "scrapbook pages" may be of any interest to anyone other than me, but it's all good.

The digital break was terrific.  I haven't perused any message boards in over a year (and have zero intention of engaging again anytime in the near future), I took a several month hiatus from Facebook, I've been very hit or miss with microblogging and digital photography and the rest of it.  And amazingly, life goes on.  The financial system collapse, Obama inauguration, Mexico drug wars, African pirates and David Ortiz being benched notwithstanding.

Improbable Injury

Everyone that's heard my story, even my orthopod, can't believe it but it's true - about a week ago, I managed to completely destroy my right elbow in knee high water, before I had even enjoyed a paddle out for a surf session in Santa Cruz county.  Absolutely freak accident, and I don't want to relive the details here.

Diagnosis by MRI: ruptured UCL (major elbow ligament) and partially torn biceps and triceps tendons.

For now, we're focused on getting the significant swelling down, which is contributing to both the pain and limited Range Of Motion ("ROM").  A week later, it's still far more swollen than it should be, so just started a course of oral steroids.  If we're not making good progress by Thanksgiving on that front, I'll get a cortisone shot the week after to really try and knock it down.

Physical therapy starts Tuesday.  Needs to be done, whether I get surgery or not.  Muscles around the joint need to be strengthened to take on more of the load going forward, and I need to do whatever I can to try and preserve as much ROM as possible.  This is my right elbow, and I'm right handed, so that really kind of sucks - daily tasks which are currently a major challenge include eating and putting my hair up.  (So if you see me walking down the street, you may not recognize this woman with the unkept hair and food dribbling off her face. ;-))

Surgery?  We'll see.  If I can't live a normal life (which I define as not needing to throw a major league fastball but needing to be able to swim competitively, ice climb, lift heavy objects and otherwise be active) then Tommy John surgery will likely be in order.  Seeking other expert opinions, and giving myself at least a few weeks to adjust to life without a UCL, before we make the decision.

Need to learn to keep my typing more brief.