Author: Paul Tomblin

The State of the Paul

I’ve had my surgery, and it was a rousing success. The doctor said that there was wear on the rotator cuff, but no actual tearing. He’s opened up the gap so that there is more room for the rotator cuff to move without wearing on the acromium(?). After the surgery, I was a little concerned that half my tongue was numb (although I could still taste with it), but that numbness is getting a little bit less every day and currently just involves about 2 millimeters of the tip of my tongue. Over the last two weeks since the surgery, I’ve been seeing less pain and more range of motion, although I’ve still got lots to recover. I start physio next week, and I’m going to do every exercise they give me, and then some. I got the doctor to sign the request for physio for both shoulders, so maybe I can stave off the same thing happening on the other side. I’ve also been approved for limited driving, although without being able to raise my arm very high it probably wouldn’t be good to go out in a snowstorm or long drives on the thruway just yet.

Obviously the good news has me re-evaluating my plans for this kayaking season. It’s going to take a while to get back into the shape I was in last year after 6 months completely off, and however long it takes me to regain full mobility. So I think I still have to consider the spring races a complete impossibility. I might be able to do some of the summer races, although I don’t think I’ll be competitive. But really, I think what I need and want most of all for this summer is to get better in surf and waves in the ski, and also (once I’m better in the ski) even in the Thunderbolt. My dream is to be as good as Ken, but I’d settle for being as good as guys like Mike or Bill. (That’s not a slam at the other guys – Ken is amazing in the waves, and I don’t think anybody would deny that. Dan and Doug are almost as good, but they don’t look as at home there as Ken, and then a few steps below that comes everybody else, and then a bunch of steps below all them comes me.)

So the big question in my mind is whether I should aim everything at being good and fast in time for Long Lake, or whether I could build up the enormous distance base I’d need to race The 90. I don’t think I could hang with Doug or Mike in the 90, but I could probably finish. Either way I’m going to have to put in a lot of hours, both on the water and off. And I’m putting aside the money now for a SpeedStroke to help towards that goal. I know a lot of people say they get bored doing hours on the SpeedStroke, but I’ve done several 1.5 hour workouts on other people’s SpeedStrokes and I enjoyed it.

Last year my goal was to do 650-700 miles during the year and then 800+ the year after to prepare me for the 90, and I actually managed 778, but I’m probably not going to manage 800 in 2011. So I don’t know where that leaves me.

How did Google find that?

Google has a blog post showing how they set up some fake search results, and then a short time later Bing started returning the same fake results, and therefore they suspect IE8’s “Suggested Sites” and/or Bing’s “Customer Experience Improvement Program” is spying on what you click and sending the results off to Microsoft.

But before Google gets all high and mighty, I want to tell you about what happened to me. I did some documentation for a customer I was doing some work for. I did it in the form of a TiddleyWiki and stuck it up on a brand new, never used before subdomain of my main domain. Well, she hated it and asked that I do it as a Word document instead, which I did. But I forgot to take it down. No problem, I thought, after all nothing links to it or mentions it in any public place, so how would a crawler find it?

Imagine my surprise when the customer calls me up some time later saying that this old version of the documentation, in a subdirectory on a un-linked to site is showing up in Google searches for her product’s name. How did that happen? Using the advanced search, I couldn’t find anything that linked to it. There was one mention of that domain in a forum post, but in that case I was using the :8080 port because I was referring to the Tomcat server that was also running on that domain.

So as I see it, the choices are:

  • Google saw the mention of the domain in the middle of a forum post, recognized it as a URL (it wasn’t a link) and stripped out the :8080 and crawled the site OR
  • They saw me mention the url in a link I send in a GMail to the customer and used that as an excuse to crawl the site.
  • IE reported the link to Bing when the customer clicked on it and then Google stole it from Bing somehow
  • Chrome reported the link to Google when I clicked on it

Either way, they’re crawling things that aren’t public links. Me thinks Google protest too much.

Nissan Maxima NY Plates ELT 2912

Hey, jerkwad. When you swerved suddenly into the middle lane, the bus you cut off had to lock up his brakes and started to slide. If he’d been half a second slower on getting on the brakes, he would have hit you. If he’d been half a second slower in getting off them, his rear end would have broken loose and probably hit me or the guy in the left lane. Next time, instead of thinking of your own selfish and stupid need to get to your destination without applying your brakes, why don’t you give a thought to the people around you?

Back to the Mac. (Sfx: sigh of relief)

My laptop has been in the shop because it couldn’t connect to wireless networks with any sort of consistency. It wasn’t preventing me from doing my work, but considering I have surgery next week and my AppleCare expires in two months, I figured now was the time. So for a week now, I’ve been using Linux as my desktop. I’m extremely glad to be back to the Mac.

But not really because of anything wrong with Linux. As soon as I started using the desktop on the Linux box, it told me I should upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, which was time consuming, but afterwards a persistent problem I’d had booting any kernel newer than the one I’d installed it with went away, and it recognized my Wacom Bamboo which it hadn’t before. I had to struggle a bit to get my VPN set up, and it was a struggle to get it to treat the “Caps Lock” key as a control key. And because my Linux box is a server, I’d originally set it up with XFCE4 instead of KDE or Gnome, so it wasn’t as functional and beautiful as it could have been.

No, the real reasons I was glad to be back on the Mac are because:

  • The Linux box doesn’t have speakers or a microphone, so I had to set up Skype on a netbook, which made for fun when somebody sent me a file or a url.
  • The cut and paste functionality is quite different in Linux, and required some getting used to. It wasn’t very consistent between apps.
  • The RDC client I was using on Linux didn’t translate the local printer so that it appeared as my default printer on my Windows session like the Mac RDC client does.
  • I couldn’t figure out how to switch desktops with a keystroke, especially not when I was RDC’ed into work.
  • Without my Mac, I couldn’t listen to my podcasts, and I couldn’t pay bills.
  • Most importantly: because my laptop has a 17″ 1920×1280 screen, and I also plug it into this 20″ 1080i screen, but with the laptop gone I only had the one screen to use for Linux, I felt very hemmed in.

So I’m glad to be back. But I’m having to retrain my fingers for cutting and pasting with Command instead of Control.

That was an unexpected bonus

Vicki and I are refinancing our house. Mostly this is to get a shorter time period, but also to reduce the interest a bit. We kind of dithered about this and missed the best rates, but the one we got isn’t too bad. That’s not what I’m writing about here though.

Because the 2009 tax year was a little light (because I spent some time unemployed and some time working for peanuts), I dug out both our 2008 and 2009 tax files. And while I was flipping through them, something caught my eye: an amount on the 2008 tax form that said something like “Capital loss carried forward to 2009”. Oh oh, I don’t remember carrying forward any amount. Sure enough, I couldn’t find any mention of it on the 2009 tax form. I also couldn’t remember where this capital loss had come from.

I looked back, and discovered it had to do with the sale of Vicki’s mom’s house back in 2006. I’d been using TurboTax in 2006, 2007 and 2008, and it had carried it forward without my even noticing it. (When you have a large capital loss, you can only claim $3,000 each year and carry the rest forward.) But for 2009, I’d switched to H and R Block on-line for reasons I don’t remember. And because I’d forgotten about the carry forward, I hadn’t applied it.

So today I downloaded the 1040X and IT-201X amended tax forms, and filled them all in manually because H and R Block on-line doesn’t give you any way to go back to last year’s return and amend it. (Something which you can do with TurboTax, I happen to know, because I amended the 2006 return using it.) I filled out all the forms and it turns out we’re due a nice little chunk of change. So that’s a nice little surprise consequence of our refinancing efforts.

One side note: both the IRS and New York State provide handy downloadable PDFs that you can edit and print. But for some bizarre reason that I can’t fathom, the IRS one can be saved but the New York one can’t. Can somebody explain what was the logic behind not allowing you to save?