What I learned from a sprained ankle

I sprained my ankle back in July 2017 showing off for some teenagers (wait, how old was I??).

It felt ok for a bit, I could still sort-of walk on it, but it hurt. And after a few hours it *really* hurt. Pretty soon I couldn't even touch my foot to the ground, it hurt so bad. I had to crawl out of bed and into the bathroom.

I read lots of opinions, professional and otherwise on the internet on how to handle it, and I learned a couple things that made it heal much faster than I expected.

(1) The first stage is inflammation -- this is where the body sends in "macrophages" to come in and devour the damaged tissue and carry it away -- for me, this translated into swelling and pain. But the swelling is good -- my body had to remove the bad tissue before it could start adding good tissue, and ice and anti-inflammatories would hinder that process. I took Tylenol instead of NSAIDs like aspirin or ibuprofen.

(2) The second stage is reconstruction -- muscle movement encourages blood flow, which is really useful for moving macrophages in and damaged-tissue out. I quickly realized that just laying in bed doesn't help that. But movement really hurt! So instead of creating my own forms of torture, I would try to move my foot and ankle around so that the pain level stayed below a ~3 on the 1-10 hospital pain scale. That way, it wasn't unbearable, but it kept the blood flowing to those areas. I started drawing the shapes of the letters of the alphabet with my big toe in the air, as often as I could reasonably stand.

Doing this, I felt like I recovered very quickly -- I injured it on Friday night, Saturday I couldn't put a single ounce of weight on it without excruciating pain -- but Sunday I was back on it, and Monday I couldn't feel the injury anymore and it was fine after that.

Obviously I'm not a doctor and your case may be different, but hopefully that helps someone out there.

FaceTime calls via URL

This is another one with a very narrow audience (welcome Googlers!) -- To do FaceTime calls using your iPhone from the command line or from a script (on the Mac), use this URL: tel:%28<number> e.g. tel:%285555555555 At the command line, you can do it with: open 'tel:%285555555555' From AppleScript, you can actually tell FaceTime to initiate the call:

  open location "tel:%285555555555"
  delay 2
  tell application "System Events" to click button "Call" of window 1 of application process "FaceTime"

For everyone else, if you have calling from your Mac set up, just for fun, go to the Safari address bar and type "tel:%28" (no quotes) (UPDATE:  I was missing the ":") and then a phone number. It should bring up FaceTime and offer to call the number. Enjoy!

So you're thinking about getting shoulder surgery

My story:

It's early spring of 2013, still cold outside, but supposedly the right time for trimming my crape myrtles. The more tired I am, the lazier I get, and not wanting to move the ladder again, reached too far out to the right and tugging on the loppers, felt a stinging pain shoot up through the middle of my shoulder.

Fast forward 18 months, and the stinging pain came and left and came and left, and ended up worse than at the start. Any kind of backhand, tennis, racquetball, ping-pong -- all hurt and made it worse. Time to do something.

Options: (1) Do nothing, (2) Physical therapy, (3) Surgery.

Tried PT exercises for a month or so but didn't change much, so I went in for a consult with the orthopaedic surgeon. Dr. says, "Do nothing isn't a good option, you probably have bone spurs that are tearing on your rotator cuff. Physical therapy at this point might help, but surgery is the fix."

So, I get signed up for:

1. SAD (sub-acromial decompression), and
2. ACJR (AC joint resection)

... with no rotator cuff repair required.

Great! What does recovery look like? "Oh, you'll be able to type the next day. But I wouldn't swing a golf club for 4-6 weeks."

Surgery was done on Dec. 12, 2014. No muscles or ligaments needed repair, but there was indeed a bone spur starting to tear at my rotator cuff, so the surgery was timely.

---

Arthroscopic surgery sounds amazing, tiny holes to allow thin tubes in with cameras and tools. But here's what I didn't know, and he didn't tell me:

• Seeing around in your shoulder is cool, but there's no space in there, you know, to look around -- so, they end up pumping your shoulder full of saline, which blows it up like a balloon. Your rotator cuff muscles really don't like that.
• I went in thinking that it wasn't going to be too painful. In fact I told the anesthesiologist, "So, when I wake up I'm going to feel like somebody punched me in the shoulder, right?" He turned, "Uh -- well, it'll be worse. Much worse." He was right. In fact, for the first week or so it felt like I'd gotten hit with one of these:
• I had to have 3-4 weeks of physical therapy, 2 to 3 times a week. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a lot if you're not expecting any. And 4 times 3 times $40 copays is almost $500, plus a lot of time.
• The nerve block was creepy, a gigantic needle stuck down through my neck. I don't really remember it much, though, because they put something in my IV that really knocked me "out of it". I remember when they tried to move me I thought my arm was on my side, but someone was holding it up in the air, and I was stunned to see my arm being held up in the air. It stayed numb for a day or two.
• If you've had surgery before, you know what to expect, but I didn't. Coming out of anesthesia I was really nauseous, and had to stay for a few hours with them trying different anti-nausea medicines. Yuck. Anesthesia is weird, time flies quickly, and I was really dizzy -- for about a day I could barely move around without feeling like I was going to fall down.
• I was given oxycodone, and a strong anti-inflammatory. I don't know why oxycodone is considered addictive, it was horrible -- I'd start itching like crazy, get super dizzy, and crash asleep. Then I'd wake up a few hours later with horrible shoulder pain. Maybe that's how it works, but I wasn't a fan.
• They also gave me an anti-biotic. I started taking it, but stopped after a day because I was getting stomachaches, and I've grown attached to my micro-biome and didn't want to mess with it if I didn't have to. At my follow up with the Dr., I admitted I stopped taking everything about 36 hours after surgery and he said it was fine. He had told me that he does 600 of these surgeries a year, and said, "I've never had an infection in any of my patients -- there's too much fluid being pumped through there for any bacteria to get in and stay." I may have suffered a little more than I needed to, though.
• Mattress stitches are weird and itchy. Ignore the blood, that was just from pulling off the bandages.
• I was able to go to work the next Monday, but it's best if your boss/coworkers let you take it easy for a few days.
• Dr. said I needed to move my arm through its range of motion, and I had my kids help me with that. Going very slow at first, that really helped keep my mobility up.

It's now been a little over two weeks, and aside from a little stiffness and pain when I move it through certain positions, it's a lot better. There are some motions that I can do now that I just couldn't do before the surgery, so that's awesome.

All said, as long as you know what you're getting into, I recommend the surgery. If you're in North Alabama and looking for a surgeon, Dr. John Greco is very efficient and patient, and knows exactly what he's doing.

I'll post an update in a couple months.

---

UPDATE: It's now been 6 months since the surgery, and I almost never notice my shoulder. There are a few ways I can move it that seem a little off, but I think it's finally back to good. =)

If you're curious, it hurt pretty badly for about 4 months after surgery. I thought it would be 90% better in 3 weeks, but it was more like 25% in 3 weeks, 50% in 2 months. 60% at 3 months, 70% at 4 months, 80% at 5 months, and then seemed to stop hurting almost overnight at 5-1/2 months.

Sleeping was the worst, by the way. I ended up sleeping on a 4" foam pad on the floor, on a mountain of hard, decorative pillows. They seemed to support me just the right way... I'd sleep on my right side (affected shoulder down), with pillows under my torso and under my neck, and another under my right forearm which kept it from hanging down and pulling on my shoulder.

The doctor said as long as I could move my arm from a raised position (right arm equivalent of the bicycle "right turn" signal), down to the lowered position (right arm equivalent of the bicycle "stop" signal), things would be okay. So I had my daughters move my arm through that rotation. The first rep. always hurt pretty bad, but loosened up as we went through the reps.

I felt like the physical therapy exercises were the key. I hung hooks in my closet at shoulder and waist height, and hung the stretch bands from them. It hurt to do the exercises, but not doing them was worse. So I shot for about a "2" or "3" out of 10 on the pain scale when doing them. Sometimes that meant just moving my arm through the motion without pulling the stretch band. But it helped.

Hope that helps someone!

Problem installing Office 2011 updates

Grr, Microsoft -- Office 2011 won't update because it says I have to quit the "Sync Services Agent" and "Microsoft Database Daemon".

Solution: Open the terminal (use spotlight to find it quickly), and paste these two commands in, one at a time, hitting return after each:

• killall "Microsoft Database Daemon"
• 
  launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.LaunchAgent.SyncServicesAgent.plist

... then go back to the installer and try again.

For those who care, the problem here is that even if you go into Activity Monitor and quit the Sync Services Agent process, our good friend "launchd" notices that it died and restarts it.

I'm a little soft on whether unloading it actually quits the Sync Services Agent process -- it seemed to, but I don't know why. I'm also not sure whether I should be re-"load"-ing the job with launchctl -- after the Office update installed, the Sync Services Agent was relaunched somehow, so maybe Office just launched it.

Anyway hope that helps someone.

---

ps. Having worked in a big company, my guess is that the last person who truly understood the entire design of the Office suite from install to test is long gone, and we're left with myriads of people who only understand pieces of it. As they work on the parts, those parts grow increasingly incompatible with the other parts, and we're left with something that starts looking like a Frankenstein product. That's my theory, anyway.

Does your iPhone battery not last all day?

Via DF, of course:

The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain:
http://www.overthought.org/blog/2014/the-ultimate-guide-to-solving-ios-battery-drain

Heartbleed

In case you've been living in a hole for the last couple days, there's been a massive bug found in the open-source (free) server software that handles secure connections. For the lay-person, the software behind the padlock you see in your browser:

... had a bug that would happily offer up chunks of computer memory if someone sent it the right type of message over the network, with no record of having done it.

Here's XKCD's attempt at an explanation.

Some Q&A:

What does that mean to me?

We're not sure that anyone knew about this before it was found. Maybe NSA, maybe Chinese or Eastern Europeans, or internet crooks, or maybe nobody...

But if someone did know, in the best (most likely) case, they got very little if any of your info. In the worst case, they got your username and password and any other personal information from the websites (and other servers) you've logged into in the past 2 years.

How does this compare to past security bugs?

Catastrophic: 11 out of 10.

How will I know if they got my info?

This is the best question, nobody knows. Your best bet is to check your bank accounts to make sure there aren't any strange charges, check other accounts you log into to make sure there isn't any strange activity, then do the steps below.

Note, not all sites are affected, only the ones using the open-source version of the software (hurray for free and open source).

Is it fixed? What do I need to do?

Check the list of sites here, and reset passwords on any sites that are affected. My short list of sites using the affected software: Facebook-YES, Pinterest-YES, Apple-NO (yay), Amazon-NO (yay), Google-YES, Microsoft-NO, Yahoo-YES, Gmail-YES, Paypal/Target/Walmart-NO, Intuit/TurboTax-YES (doh!), most banks-NO, USAA-YES (doh!).

Then check your financial accounts to make sure there's nothing fishy going on. But you should be doing this regularly anyway (given that some e-commerce websites are zero-margin stores selling you cheap stuff just so they can get your credit card number to sell to crooks).

Oh, and be sure to use different passwords on different websites, and don't make them easily guessed. Apple's iCloud Keychain is a decent/free option for managing passwords for Mac users (though oddly it doesn't work with all websites, incl. Google). 1Password is a better option, but expensive (and I hate having to pay upgrade fees every year, feels like a subscription!).

So is the internet broken now? Should I stop trusting computers completely? Seems like we're always finding bugs like this...

No, the internet's not broken. But are people happy about this? Definitely not. We all hate changing passwords and not knowing who has what information about us.

What this means is that software isn't perfect, and memory bugs are pretty hard to recognize and track down. It may also mean that NSA is really sneaky about this kind of stuff, but the story sounds a little more innocent than that. On the plus side, anyone who knew about this is probably either chasing bank accounts much bigger than yours, or not interested in money...

But the same way armies learn where soldiers need more armor, the software-development communities learn how to better protect against not only this exploit, but this type of exploit, so I wouldn't expect us to have problems with these kinds of bugs for long. Coders are now looking for them, and stand to make a name for themselves finding them.

Hang in there, we'll get through this.

Sometimes they just need the words.

A little flash of insight from the other day:

My son, age 3 -- in a most demanding tone -- calls from behind me: "Dad, put on my shoes!"

My second instinct was to turn to him, and with a stern voice, tell him: "Hey, that's rude, you don't tell daddy what to do -- you're such a little turkey, why can't you be sweet like your sisters?"

Fortunately for me, my first instinct is to not do anything rash because some mistakes can be very hard to fix.

As an adult, I've spent literally thousands of hours interacting with other people and watching others interact with each other. I know what words and phrases imply, and that even slight differences in tone can send very different messages.

My kids on the other hand, even the older ones, are oblivious to most of that. Usually the content they're wanting to convey is perfectly fine -- they just don't know how to say it.

Sometimes they just need the words.

So I turned to my sweet little boy and said, prompting him, "Dad, can you help me get my shoes on please?"

"Oh -- Dad, can you help me get my shoes on please?" he said with a smile, happy to know the right thing to say.

"There's my sweet boy."

=)

Food supplements

Science Friday from July:

"The best advice I can give to anyone is to just stop taking supplements."

Gnuplot, Mountain Lion, and Malloc errors

A quick tip for google searchers:

If your Mac crashes when exiting gnuplot, or you can't interact with your X11/XQuartz plots, make sure you have Xcode updated, then try installing from sources with this command:

  sudo ./configure --with-readline=builtin

... instead of the usual "sudo ./configure".

Mac idle flash killer

My kids are always playing flash games on our Mac. I have nothing against flash games, of course, but when the kids want to do something else, they always go, leaving the game running on the computer.

Flash is a processor-hog, which means my computer works like crazy to keep up with it all (especially if they leave 8 tabs of Barbie karaoke going), which means the computer gets really hot and I'm sure runs like that for hours, which can't be good for it...

So -- a solution!

I've written a small perl script that checks to see if the Mac's been idle more than 10 minutes, and if so, kills all flash processes owned by the current user. Firefox then shows a message where the flash process was that the flash process crashed and you can reload it any time.

Then I set up a launchd ("launch daemon") process to run my script every 10 minutes. So those processes will now run at most 20 minutes unattended before the script kills them.

Interested?

Only do this if you trust me and accept that there's no guarantee of anything. And if anyone you don't trust asks you to download files and install them on your machine like this, don't do it.

Okay, that all said, here are the two files you need.

Setup:

1. Unzip those two files to your desktop.
2. Open Terminal (Finder: Go -> Utilities, Terminal)
3. Copy/paste this command into the terminal, and press enter:
   
   mv ~/Desktop/killFlashIfIdle.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents; chmod a+x ~/Desktop/killFlashIfIdle; sudo mv ~/Desktop/killFlashIfIdle /usr/local/bin/ ; launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/killFlashIfIdle.plist; launchctl start local.killFlashIfIdle
   
   
4. Enter your password when it asks for it.

You'll know it's working if you open a flash site, then leave the computer untouched for 20 minutes -- it should kill it.

The scripts are so tiny you can round their sizes down to zero. The commands they issue are super simple (ps, perl, and ioreg), so the odds of anything awful happening are miniscule. Still, if for some reason you want to uninstall the scripts, here's how you do it:

Uninstall:

1. Open Terminal (Finder: Go -> Utilities, Terminal)
2. Copy/paste this command into the terminal, and press enter:
   
   launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/killFlashIfIdle.plist; rm ~/Library/LaunchAgents/killFlashIfIdle.plist; sudo rm /usr/local/bin/killFlashIfIdle
   
   
3. Enter your password when it asks for it.

Enjoy.

Ashton Kutcher's advice for young people

... is surprisingly wise:



His "smart is sexy" comment probably rang an odd chord with some of the youth, probably because that's not the experience most of us have -- at least the way we usually define "smart".

I'm guessing he meant something more like "confident", but thankfully the best kind of confidence comes from wisdom, which comes from knowledge paired with experience, so "smart" is a good word for this audience.

Nice job, Chris.

AppleScript, the Finder, Mac OS 10.8, and "get selection"

Regular readers, skip this one -- only Googlers with very specific problems are going to be interested in this one...

I use Keyboard Maestro often in conjunction with AppleScripts to make my life easier. One of my favorites is the keystroke <cmd-b> to open files with BBEdit.

Under 10.8, AppleScript and the Finder are ridiculously slow -- "get selection" takes about 5 seconds per item selected to return a list of items selected.

The solution? Change it to "get selection as alias list". That returns the list instantaneously, and seems to work about the same in most cases.

Here's the script if you're curious (view on blogger, not feedly, to see the script correctly):

---

tell application "Finder"
 set theApp to application file id "R*ch"
 set theFiles to (get selection as alias list)
 if (count of theFiles) > 0 then
  open theFiles using theApp
 else
  open theApp
 end if
 
end tell

---

Enjoy.

Google Reader: The shout heard round the internet, and what to do

For everyone who uses Google Reader, you've surely heard that Google is discontinuing it tomorrow. It will be the shout heard round the internet...

Anyway, the most important thing is that you go to this Google Takeout page, log in, then click "Create" archive. After a minute or so you'll be able to download the archive as a .zip file. Supposedly other products will let you import those files.

In the meantime, most people suggest Feedly. I've been using it for a day and it's pretty much the same, with a slightly confusing interface.

Interestingly you authenticate via Google -- basically Feedly asks Google to figure out who you are, then they trust what Google tells them), then it imports all your feeds and read/unread status. More info from Feedly on the whole transition here.

Hope that helps someone.

DropScript for Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

Anyone remember and love the old DropScript app by Wilfredo Sánchez?

Well, I found the source code, but it wouldn't compile on my machine, so I played around with it for awhile and got it to work under Mountain Lion.

At this point I'll note that I am *not* a software developer or Obj. C programmer, and only got it to work because I've hung around the platform long enough to know the terms and am able to use Google. There might be stupid stuff in the binary and I wouldn't know it (e.g. artificially limiting it to certain OSes or architectures -- though I did check the source code for URLs, email and IP addresses making sure it isn't overtly doing anything dangerous...).

Anyway, if you're interested in a binary, leave a comment and I'll see if I can help you.

In the meantime, for those who got DropConvert and DropResize scripts from me ages ago that have now broke under Mountain Lion, try these. ;)

Dear Google

Today I realized how much I use Google Docs, and started to get scared. Your servers might crash, or corrupt my documents, or you might shut down your service. So I decided to download copies of all my documents off of Google Docs so I'll at least have something should that day come.

So I went to docs.google.com, and clicked the box above my list of documents, then I looked for something like a "Download" option. I quickly found it under the "More" menu, and immediately it offered to convert all of my documents to the new Office format, and .zip them all up and download them to my computer. It also gave me the option of converting them to PDF files.

The .zip file is 3 MB, and contains 88 files. The ones I opened look fine. Suddenly I love Google Docs way more than ever before. Flexibility of formats? No lock in? Ease of use? You are amazing.

Thank you for a terrific service. I hope the relatively few times I click on your ads is somehow worth all the value you give to me.

Warmest regards,

Bryan

Getting a new iOS device?

Just a quick tip for anyone getting a new iOS device (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) for Christmas:

Everyone in a single family should use the same iTunes Store account (Settings -> iTunes and App Stores), but each individual should have their own iCloud account (Settings -> iCloud).

That ensures that you all get to share the same media (videos, songs and apps), but the separated iCloud accounts lets you each have your own contacts lists, calendars, reminders, etc.

Many people make the mistake of all signing into the same iCloud account and quickly find out that their contacts and calendars, etc., all sync up and make a mess.

The harder problem is if the device is for a child, since the minimum age for iCloud accounts is 13. I can't find any recommendations for this on the net, so my best guess is to lock down the phone with restrictions, limit Safari, iTunes, iBookstore, installing apps, and explicit language -- all with a passcode that only you know. And don't install YouTube, Google Search, Vimeo, and any other video- or web-searching apps. If you want them to be able to watch videos, consider Netflix' "Just for kids", or WeetWoo (an app that's basically a directory of clean YouTube videos). You'll want to monitor your kids carefully too, remember my post about allowing a crippled mind to poison itself? Lots of mental and emotional poison on the internet, and people can be pretty awful about discerning it, especially kids.

Merry Christmas!

Who's losing jobs?

Interesting data on who lost the most jobs during the recession. Another good reason to get a college degree.

Someone mentioned in a church talk a couple years back that recessions happen every 8 years or so. The linked report confirms that's mostly true. That means we should expect another recession to start in the 2016-2018 timeframe, and another in 2024-2026.

We also know that people who graduate during a recession typically stay at lower salaries than those who graduate during a normal growth period, even many years on into their careers.

That means if your kids are scheduled to graduate during a recession, they should definitely consider an advanced degree, which will improve their earning potential, and keep them from starting into the workforce at a depressed salary.

Hopefully someone will figure out how to break that cycle.

Apple working on Flashback removal tool

Posted yesterday on an Apple Support document (via AppleInsider):

Apple is developing software that will detect and remove the Flashback malware.

Choosing a mobile phone

One of the best metrics I can think of for what smartphone to buy is customer satisfaction.

How to become exceptional

From SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner:

"A lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with," he says. "But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it." Or, put another way, expert performers -- whether in soccer or piano playing, surgery or computer programming -- are nearly always made, not born.

And yes, just as your grandmother always told you, practice does make perfect. But not just willy-nilly practice. Mastery arrives through what Ericsson calls "deliberate practice." This entails more than simply playing a C-minor scale a hundred times or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

The people who become excellent at a given thing aren't necessarily the same ones who seemed to be "gifted" at a young age. This suggests that when it comes to choosing a life path, people should do what they love -- yes, your nana told you this too -- because if you don't love what you're doing, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it.

I'm not sure how this applies to little kids, they have no idea what they love. A wise person recently told me, "Kids tend to like things they're good at."

Those last two paragraphs sound contradictory, but I have a feeling they're just true at different times in people's lives.