Dec 16
Concise. Accurate. Perfect. Just perfect.
(credits: Looks like graphjam.com is now part of cheezburger.com empire, which confused tracking down the original author. Digging around, I found a few versions of this on different sites going back through 2011. I *think* its originally from Nathan Yau on flowingdata.com, or Garr Reynolds, posted here but if you know anything about the original author, please let me know.)
Aug 16
I spent the best part of 2 years on crutches after a venom bite and an unrelated fall. Thankfully, I’ve made a full recovery. With all that time on crutches, I built up some tips/tricks. Since then, whenever I see someone on the street who is obviously new-to-crutches, I strike up a casual conversation about how long I spent on crutches, and if things feel ok, then I share the following suggestions. This happened recently with someone in the office, and afterwards, they encouraged me to blog this in case it is helpful to anyone reading who is also newly on crutches.
1) buy fingerless cycling gloves
Sore hands from pressure of the crutch handle is a problem. Some people prefer to pad/wrap the crutch handle, but I found this still left lots of friction / movement-under-pressure while using crutches. Over time this friction led to blisters in exactly the spot that you needed to press your weight on while using crutches. Painful.
2) be aware of possible nerve damage to armpits
If you get sore hands (see above), its easy to then start resting your full weight on your armpits on the the top of the crutches. Every now and then is typically ok. However, its easy to get into the habit of resting your full weight on your armpits on the crutches. Dont. Leaning your weight on your armpits on your crutches can lead to nerve damage in your armpits, which will seriously limit future use of your arms and hands.
From wikipedia, “A condition known as crutch paralysis, or crutch palsy can arise from pressure on nerves in the armpit, or axilla.[2][3] Specifically, the brachial plexus in the axilla is often damaged from the pressure of a crutch…In these cases the radial is the nerve most frequently implicated; the ulnar nerve suffers next in frequency” and also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axillary_nerve
Use your arms to hold up your weight. As a fulcrum point, pin the top of the crutch between your upperarm and ribs – without contact to your armpit. Start with short distances. Over time, build up to longer sustained use of crutches as your arms build up strength.
Look on the bright side: when I finally came off crutches, my arms were in the best shape ever. And I had no nerve damage in my arms and hands!
3) buy a jogger fanny pack, specifically one that has holders for full-size water bottles.
One of my most frustrating episodes soon after being on crutches was my first attempt to “have a normal day at home”, by myself, making my own coffee and hoping to sit at the computer with my leg elevated. It was tricky to wrangle the machine/filter/coffee/water while on crutches, but the brew smelled great – and the first sip was wonderful.
Success! If I can make my own coffee, how bad can life be?! Then I realized I had no way of getting from the kitchen to the chair, on crutches, while holding my prized mug of coffee. Foiled!
Make coffee. Pour into travel mug. Put travel mug into fanny-pack-bottle-holder. Rejoice.
ps: While you have this fanny pack, you might as well also pack it with:
Thats it. Hope those hints help someone out there… and of course, if you have other tips or hints, please email me or add them to comments below.
take care
John.
Jun 03
I rarely go to the movies, and even more rarely do any movie reviews on this blog, especially in an area I know little about. However, after seeing this in movie in 3D at a local theater recently, I still cant get it out of my head.
Luscious imagery. Great choreography. And a soundtrack I eventually had to buy and keep looping around and around… I’m still listening to it right now, weeks later.
Very different. Hope you enjoy!
More details about Pina Bausch here on wikipedia.
May 11
I was not a participant in either of these two medical studies.
Caffeine Disrupts Sleep for Morning People, but Not Night Owls
“…for the early risers, the more caffeine in their bodies, the more time they spent awake during the night after initially falling asleep. This was not seen in the night owls.”
‘Morning people’ and ‘night owls’ show different brain function
“…In morning people their cortical excitability actually decreased throughout the day. It was highest in the morning and lowest in the evening,… It was the opposite for evening people; their brain activity was highest at 9 p.m.”
Those of you who know me, all know that I am a night owl who drinks a lot of coffee, and routinely finishes a pot of coffee before going to sleep. I used to think it was only me. However, after reading these medical studies, I wonder how many others out there are also night owls with a high tolerance for caffeine?
Apr 04
Mozilla, Remoties, Soapbox 9 Comments
[UPDATE: a newer version of this presentation is here. joduinn 25feb2013]
At the Mozilla Summit in sept2011, we ran a session on working remotely at Mozilla.
I was surprised/stunned/honored by needing to run this session *twice* because of popular demand, the sheer volume of interaction in each session and the ongoing interest since the summit.
Writing these slides, I realize how much I care about this topic… and how many careful subtle habits we’ve developed within RelEng over the last ~5 years.
During the summit, and again last week in Toronto, I had a chance to meet with Homa Bahrami (Senior Lecturer, Haas Management of Organizations Group, Haas School of Business, Berkeley). Apart from being a great person to talk with, she has lots of organizational and behavioral science background to help explain why the things that we felt were helping, were in fact, something she would expect to help!
(click image for PDF of slides; keynote available on request, but its large!)
As I said at the start of each session, at first it felt odd for a Release Engineer to be talking about work habits of distributed groups… until you think about how physically distributed Mozilla’s Release Engineering group is. I note, for the record, that *none* of RelEng are “in headquarters”. While there are occasional miscommunications, RelEng is fairly well plugged into whats going on… after all, we *need* to be in order to do our job of shipping software quickly, reliably and accurately.
To me, this feels like it actually is about working together in clearly understood ways. The suggestions here have helped “remote” RelEng people in clear and obvious ways, but they *also* help “local” RelEng people work together better.
Please let me know what you think. And of course, if you have ideas or suggestions that I missed, I’d love to hear them.
(Apologies to those who’ve been pestering me to post these over the last few months. Last week’s “remoties” day reminded me how important this is to post – even in its rough state. I’ve fixed the most egregious errors/typos, and merged in some feedback I got in the Q&A sessions. However, these slides still need further work. If you spot anything to fix, please let me know!)
Feb 24
I’m back online again, after lots of cleanup and reset work. Just what I didn’t need to soak up waste my “free time”. Grrr….
Given my day job, I’ve found myself to be very sympathetic to updates-to-fix-security problems, reacting more like “oh, goodie a fix” instead of “grrr… oh, not another update”. So, I found it interesting to note that I know I was already running the latest and greatest WordPress at the time of the breakin. As of now, I’ve reset the entire site, cleaned out the filesystem to remove malware, reset all passwords and done fresh installs of latest-versions of only-the-essentials. Other installed but not running software has been removed. And while I was at it, I added some extra monitoring to see if this happens again. Probably should have done all that the first time, but thats hindsight for you.
In case this happens to someone else reading this post, I recommend reading the following, which I found helpful: (tip-o-hat to lsblakk for the pointer):
Be safe out there, on the World Wild Web!
Dec 27
Well, here’s a nice surprise – another album from General Fuzz. Click on the album cover to jump over to the music and listen for yourself.
Tomorrow, I’ll load this new album up and see what I can crank out in the office with headphones on. Thanks, James!
Apr 17
Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières just issued their annual report for 2009 (click here for PDF).
Some numbers that jumped out at me were:
For comparison, I note that the total population of Hong Kong is 7million, and San Francisco is 800,000. That is a *lot* of vaccinations – significantly more then all the war/earthquake/flood/disaster injuries they reported. Also in the list of medical procedures carried out in 2009 was “110,236 baby birth deliveries” – even in the midst of everything else, life goes on.
Mar 25
Mozilla, Soapbox, Travel 2 Comments
Still having a hard time grasping the scale of the earthquake in Japan. Most of the news in California is focused on the nuclear power plants at Fukushima, but the following struck me about the earthquake:
Its great to see Wikipedia and GoogleCrisisResponse spreading timely information, which is really important in situations like this.
This is two weeks later.
We get earthquakes here too, which raises the question: if an earthquake happened here in the bay area, could you be fully self-sufficient for at least 72hours? San Francisco Dept of Emergency Management has setup http://72hours.org to help people prepare.
UPDATED: added today’s story about the dog. Searching building wreckage is dangerous, more so when its floating at sea, so I’ve lots of respect for the people continuing to do this day after day. joduinn 02apr2011.
Nov 03
Today was election day here in San Francisco.
When I first started getting election pamphlets in the mail months ago, I simply tossed them into recycling along with the junk mail. Eventually, it struck me that there seemed to be a lot, so out of curiosity, two weeks ago I started collecting them, putting all the various election pamphlets I’ve received in a pile. All unread.
Last night, I sat down to read them all, with a fresh cup of coffee.
There were so many, it was almost as tall as my coffee mug. Reading them all took hours.
Having avoided all the political TV/radio ads, reading these flyers was my first real exposure into the style of the election ads going on all campaign. Reading them all in one large pile like that was a bit of a culture shock, and frankly, disappointing.
Lots of “dont vote for the other person; they’re corrupt/evil/wrong! Instead you should vote for me; I’m honest/good/correct”. All the pamphlets were very destructive of the other candidates. Calling them “attack ads” glosses over the personal destructive nature of these pamphlets.
Very few leaders, with positive and open constructive discussions.
This doesn’t bode well for my hope of seeing elected officials working together to solve some (any!) of the pressing problems facing us today.
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