Husband / Father / Developer
We’re done for the day. Packed up Ms. Haileigh, which took longer than planned, then hit the open road. The countryside out here is absolutely beautiful. It’s green with great, tall, trees everywhere.
We found a Red Roof Inn for the night. It’s nothing fancy but it will do. I’m beat.
Goodbye, Virginia, you’ve been fun.
Down the road we go. Six hours from now, Greensville, SC.
Here is the new office for the next five to seven days.
First stop: Greenville, South Carolina.
What a morning. I got up at 5AM, got Kim and I some coffee, packed up, and headed for Avis to return our car. One would think that’s a easy process, but in true Fahrni fashion, it wasn’t straight forward. We made to Avis and I realized I forgot to fill it up. So back on the road to hunt down a gas station in an area I’m not familiar with. We found a gas station 10 minutes later, then found our way back to Avis. First goal achieved.
No, we didn’t go to the zoo. We were at LAX, but the place is a zoo. You’d think these places would move people through much faster, they don’t. We have a new, very paranoid, system. The TSA makes getting to your flight more difficult that it should be, but we survived. I’d hate to see the porno scan of my body. Poor reviewer.
Kim and I like flying Virgin America. That’s why we grabbed a flight out of LAX. We’re on board, settled in, headed for Virginia. We’ll be in the air for just over four hours. Kim will most likely read the entire time, a physical book none the less. I’ll most likely burn through some podcasts I queued up before leaving.
While boarding it’s apparent we are a gadget crazed society. Just about every row I passed had at lest one iPad in it and many iPhones. I saw a few Android tablets and one Windows 8.x laptop (using WordPerfect for Windows with Reveal Codes active, remember that? I didn’t know the app still existed.) The remainder of the devices were iOS or Mac.
I’m composing this from my trusty iPhone using the WordPress for iOS client. I plan on blogging during the entire trip from this device.
I suppose today is the first official day of my vacation. Tomorrow Kim and I fly to D.C. for the weekend. We’ll stay with family, get a chance to visit with Kim’s sister and the family (we haven’t seen our niece and nephews in a few years.) On Monday, May 5, we pack up our oldest daughter, in Richmond, VA, and start a trek across the country, back to California.
Tonight we’re in L.A. just chillin’ south of LAX. Tomorrow is a travel day. I hope to update my weblog frequently, or at least as frequently as I can manage.
Here’s to cross country driving trips. It’s a “bucket list” item for me and I’m really looking forward to it. I have to believe it will be an unforgettable adventure. We get to see our daughter, family, then drive across this great country. It doesn’t get much better than that.
We’ll see how it goes.
A quick test. I’m hoping to post some photos of our upcoming trip. Let’s see how this looks.
On March 25th I had Ulnar Nerve Transposition surgery. I wrote about it, one handed mind, a few day after. (Wow, I just realized I posted that on April 1. No, that post was not an April Fools joke, but I digress.)
I hit the four week mark on Tuesday, April 22, and my recovery is ahead of schedule. My range of motion is at about 99% in my estimation. Fully straightening it is still accompanied with a bit of pain, but it’s not bad. Overall the incision has healed nicely, no infections, or other troubles.
I love modern medicine. Surgery was on a Tuesday. I left the hospital with gigantic cast-like wrapping on my arm. I couldn’t move it, it was fixed in a 90 degree angle because your ulnar nerve likes that relaxed position and would allow the nerve to cool down. The first couple days were the most challenging, my nerve was not a happy camper, and I’ll be honest, at times I wanted to cut my hand off. By Friday I was feeling pretty darned good and visited the hand therapist for my first session.
I didn’t know what to expect on my first visit. I’d already gone through therapy with this group in an attempt to fix my issue without surgery. I couldn’t imagine doing nerve glides just yet. The arm was a bit too tender and swollen for that. Session one was all about getting the bulky wrapping off my arm and replacing it was a much lighter version I could remove if necessary. They even used a nice removable wrist brace because anything touching my hand could cause the nerve to go crazy. By using this removable brace I could seek relief when the nerve flared by removing the brace. It was quite nice. That was all for the first day.
My second session was at the seven day mark. We took the brace off the arm and I received a massage just above my elbow on my triceps muscle, which was surprisingly nice. Then we moved on to some simple exercise to make sure scar tissue didn’t form around my newly relocated nerve and prevent it from moving properly. The first exercise was to move my arm downward from its 90 degree angle to 45 degrees and move my open palm left and right, without pain. The second exercise was to make sure my head was properly aligned over my shoulders and tilt it to the right, which pulls on the nerve from the other direction. Done for the day, sent home with homework to do these exercises throughout the day. Pain free movement was the operative word.
At just over a week I visited the surgeon for a check-up. The doc removed the soft cast and said “Take that thing off, but wear it to bed.” So, that’s what I did. I was able to do some light typing after that, but couldn’t push too hard or I’d anger the nerves in my palm. It was really nice to have it off. Unfortunately I didn’t think to grab any pictures of the different cast setups.
By the end of my second week my arm was feeling really great. When we hit session three I was able to do all sorts of “advanced” stuff. I think you’d be surprised how much your ulnar nerve is isolated and used doing very simple things. I got to crumple paper, play with coins, use the rainbow arch, and rub my elbow in rice. Yes, rice, it’s a texture thing. The nerves around my elbow didn’t like to touch things after surgery. It was actually quite unpleasant when I rubbed up against something. Moving the rice around with my elbow allowed the area to become accustomed to being touched again. I was also instructed to rub the area throughout the day with various different textures to help with the process.
I’ve been doing so well the therapists have decided to cut me lose until after the six week mark. At that point we’ll begin strengthening.
Lately, as in the last few days, I’ve experienced a sensation I’ve never experienced before. I’m not sure this has anything to do with the surgery, but I’ll run it by my doc. I’ve been getting a strange sensation at the base of my neck, then it spreads out and down both arms, almost like a cramp. My arms become very weak and I get sick to my stomach. It’s not a pleasant experience. Knowing my body it’s a stress thing, but I guess we’ll find out.
I started this process in hopes I’d get feeling back in my left hand and fingers (pinkie and ring finger, and half of my palm.) That hasn’t happened, yet. According to the doc feeling may never return. It will take six months to a year to know for sure.
In the meantime I need to get back to writing software.
M.G. Siegler: “As a standalone business, just based on the last 12 months of revenue, the iPad would be in the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500. Think about that for a second. The iPad alone is bigger than almost all Fortune 500 companies.“
Boy, I wish I could have a disappointing product like that.
Heck, I’d love to have a disappointment that made enough to support a “Lifestyle Business.”
It’s interesting that Wall Street absolutely hates how Apple operates, yet Apple continues to give investors plenty of return on their investment, and they continue to do things The Apple Way.
No, Apple does not need to do what everyone else is doing. No, they shouldn’t listen to the industry “experts.” They should continue to do what they do. Apple doesn’t make revolutionary things, like people believe. The work they do is evolutionary. They go the extra distance. They polish the rough edges.
Think of it this way. Apple didn’t make the first portable music player or smart phone or tablet. They made them better. You don’t have to be first, you just have to make something magical. That’s the key, but it’s not easy to do.
I happened across some old C++ code I wrote back in 2001. I decided to put it up on GitHub for kicks, might as well put some history up for future generations, right?
I was curious to see if I could build it. The original project was built with Visual Studio 6.0, circa 1998. I have a copy of Visual Studio 2010, so I fired it up pointed it at the original cp.dsw file and was pleasantly surprised it converted. I selected Build All and got a few warnings about some ATL include files I no longer needed, so I removed those. The only other thing that needs correcting are a few warnings related to use of older CRT string copy functions that are not secure. If you’ve upgraded a C or C++ project over the last few years you’ll be familiar with this warning:
warning C4996: '_tcsncpy': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using _tcsncpy_s instead. To disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS. See online help for details.
The code still builds and will execute, but if I were going to use it daily, I’d update it. For now, it’s OK, the code built. Maybe I’ll download a new copy of Visual Studio 2013, get it working with that, and check it in. It would be pretty nifty to create a Mac version by doing an implementation of the HttpIf interface using NSURL and NSURLConnection. This could be a GrilledCheese implementation. Hmmmmmm.
Anywho, once I got a build I hopped out to the command line, and ran it. I was surprised to see, it still works. Amazing.
Brian Hoff [Medium]: “But here’s the kicker: the new owner of the @kathleen username on Instagram is a current Facebook / Instagram employee. Yes, you read that correctly.”
This is something I think about from time to time. Losing my “Fahrni” account name on Twitter for some random reason. These services are FREE, right? Yes, which means most of them reserve the right to take your account name at any time, for any reason.
While I know they’re free and they can take them at any time, this move, by a Facebook or Instagram employee, is super scummy and you would think they would have policies in place to prevent this type of activity.