Monthly Archive for February, 2008

Day of Ear Surgery

Published on February 27, 2008 in Tympanoplasty. 9 Comments Tags: ear surgery, hearing, Tympanoplasty.

As is tradition on my blog, I type this post in the back seat of a car. I just left the hospital a little while ago, 6 PM.

I woke up this morning at 4:30 AM to get ready to go to the hospital. As I showered, I felt a mix of excitement and terror, mostly terror. Not allowed to eat, my biggest problem in the morning was hunger, but I got over it.

I arrived at the hospital at 6 AM, checked in, and went to a waiting room. I didn’t end up going in for my procedure until around 8 AM. It was five hours long! The hospital staff were remarkable friendly and professional. A comedic side note, I love the new trend that’s observable everywhere, a pain scale from 0-10.

My next memories are a blur of unconscious actions like dealing with hospital staff, adjusting myself, and relieving my nausea – somehow.

I have a hilariously massive bandage on my head right now, covering my right ear. I have to go back to the hospital in a week to get the stitches behind my ear removed. I’ll also be heading back a few weeks later for a follow-up, at which point my hearing will be accessed again. I shouldn’t notice an improvement in hearing until after I’ve healed. In addition, while I’m healing, I can’t partake in any physical activity whatsoever.

The no physical activity aspect is a massive bummer to me because I’m taking Phys Ed (Gym) right now. In lieu of physical activity, I’ll have to write a two-page paper for every day missed. Great! Those will add up.

But – that’s not what I’m going worry about right now. As I should, I’m just going to rest up. I’ve decided to take tomorrow off from school, too, for good measure.

As always, I’ll keep you posted.

Ear Surgery

Published on February 26, 2008 in Tympanoplasty. 4 Comments Tags: ear surgery, hearing, Tympanoplasty.

I’m taking the day off from school tomorrow to go for an “elective” surgery. That is to say, it isn’t necessary or life-threatening. I’m choosing to do it, for good reason, after waiting for years.

Every person has characteristics that define his or her childhood. One’s location, parents, and consumed media establishes the “brand” of his or her adolescent years. These factors determine whether the childhood was wonderful, miserable, or somewhere in between.

What defined my childhood, and somewhat defines me to this day, is my right perforated eardrum. It’s exactly what it sounds like: I have a hole in my eardrum caused by constant ear infections as a child. Throughout my entire life, as long as I can remember, I have had significant hearing loss in that ear. To add insult to injury, I’ve had to wear earplugs while bathing, every day, as long as I’ve been able to bathe myself.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, or even complaining. I’ve completely adapted to it and it’s just part of the daily routine, like going to the bathroom.

And the hearing loss? I’ve managed to deal with it throughout my almost-finished high school career. Over the last few days, I’ve told people about what I’m doing, and they were shocked to learn that I have hearing loss at all. I’ve worked very hard to conceal it.

I’ve literally waited my whole life for what is going to happen tomorrow. There is a good chance that I’ll be able to reclaim a slightly more “normal” lifestyle by getting a good deal of my hearing back.

I’m excited, hopeful, and terrified.

Reconsidering Commitments

Published on February 19, 2008 in Apple, Ideas, Productivity, Ricky and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: adium, Productivity, quicksilver, twitter.

One of my heroes, Merlin Mann, did a talk at Macworld called “Living with Data“. Although I was disappointed that it didn’t deal with my favorite second officer of the USS Enterprise, I enjoyed it. It’s long, but very entertaining. As I watched it last night, I found myself inspired.

I thought my personal productivity system was air-tight. I’ve been getting my tasks done – or so I’ve thought. But as I listened to Merlin’s talk, one point in particular resinated with me.

At 25:12 in, Merlin asks, “Who gets access now?” That is, who will I let interrupt me as I’m working? I looked around my desktop. Gmail notifier, Twitterrific, and Adium are constantly demanding my attention. I’m changing my use of these applications. I’ve decided to only use Adium when I’m actually open for conversation or have to post where I am, I’m axing Twitterrific in favor of the canonical twitter website, and I’ll check my email twice a day or so.

And then I got to thinking about Quicksilver. I love Quicksilver; it’s an application launcher on steroids. One of the plugins I use for Quicksilver is the Camino Bookmarks plugin. I can evoke Quicksilver using my keyboard shortcut (command + enter), type the first few letters of any website I’ve bookmarked, and press return to load that page. For example:

f – facebook
g – gmail
r – google reader
d – digg
p – pownce

Because those time-suck websites are so easily accessed, I go to them far too often. My new productivity experiment is to disable the Camino bookmarks feature of Quicksilver and see how much of my life I get back. Instead, I’ll check those sites in the morning, at night, and maybe when I have a free moment at school.

It’s amazing to realize that the tool you appreciate the most to save time is what’s actually causing you to habitually waste it.

Cleaning an iTunes Library

Published on February 18, 2008 in Apple and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: ID3, iPod, iTunes.

I’m the proud owner of a shiny new iPod Touch. It’s a considerable upgrade from my previous portable music player – a 6GB iPod mini with a broken headphone port. It served me well as a car iPod, though.

The iPod Touch is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a wonderful media player and an even better Internet and email device. But, when you’re looking at your iTunes library on its superb screen, you realize just how badly your ID3 tags and album art are.

I spent a large part of this holiday (happy President’s Day!) cleaning up the cruft from years of accumulating music. Luckily, there are some great pieces of software on the Mac and web services to do this.

iEatBrainz (Freeware) – The Mac OS X client of MusicBrainz analyzes any tracks you feed it and compares its musical ‘fingerprint’ with a known database.
Album Art Thingy (Shareware) – This inexpensive app looks up your currently playing track on Amazon.com and tries to find artwork. It does lyrics, too.
Amazon.com (Service) – Whatever Album Art Thingy doesn’t get, you can get yourself by searching the MP3 store.
Last.fm (Service) – This social network site helps see if you’ve done your ID3 tags right.

It’s really worth it to clean up the cruft from your iTunes library. You’ll not only delete music you don’t like anymore, but you’ll have a greater appreciation for the music you do like. The album art browsing in iTunes, Front Row, and an iPod is really great looking, too.

Good luck, and be sure to share your experience in the comments.

Living on a Slow Mac

Published on February 11, 2008 in Apple and Tech. 0 Comments Tags: mac os x.

My MacBook Pro returns from its extended hiatus today, Monday. Over the last twelve days, I’ve been living on a 450mhz PowerMac G4 Cube with 640 MB of RAM. It’s eye-opening not only how difficult the transition has been for me, but how usable the older and slower machine actually is.

Moving down from a 2.16 Core2Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM is difficult for a few reasons. The first is just plain speed. Running Camino, my Macintosh web browser of choice, was painful on the Cube. There were optimized builds available, which helped somewhat, but browsing was slow and unpleasant. Loading a comment thread on Digg caused the browser to lock up for around ten seconds, playback of Flash videos (like the ones on YouTube) was tricky, and having more than four tabs open turned the browser into a snail.

The second difficulty in jumping to a computer introduced in July of 2000 is its operating system. My MacBook Pro runs Apple’s recently introduced version of Mac OS X, Leopard. As we know, the G4 Cube can run Leopard, but it is largely unstable. Thus, for the last twelve days, I’ve been using Mac OS X Tiger. Although Leopard has bugs that I often twitter about, it is the most impressive operating system I have ever used. The perspective I have from running this antiquated computer for so long lets me see that.

My third difficulty was not being able to do certain tasks. For example, I encountered a major design bug on my site this week thanks to a reader email (thanks, Michael Clark!), but could not fix it. I couldn’t trust the Cube to run the all of software I use to fix up Exposay (Transmit, Coda, Safari, Firefox, Opera) at the same time. I’ll fix the bug as soon as possible.

Doing a key school assignment in the last week was very difficult on this computer. My word processor of choice is Office 2008 for the Mac, which is a very slow and very unstable application on a 450mhz PowerPC G4. To be fair, its requirements clearly state that a PowerPC G4 processor must be clocked at 500MHz or faster for it to run acceptably.

I pushed this machine to its limit this week. I had Camino, Adium, iTunes, Finder, TextEdit, Dictionary, Last.fm, Twitterrific, QuickSilver, and the Gmail Notifier running at almost all times. Although it was most definitely difficult to use, the machine never crashed once, even under long stretches of 100% CPU load.

Really, I’m fortunate to have purchased this extra computer. For what I spent on it, $250, it really came in handy. Besides serving as my Mom’s computer, it never hurts for me to have a backup machine. If it ran Leopard natively, it would have been perfect. I would have just cloned by MacBook Pro’s hard disk to it and carried on as usual. That’s a wonderful aspect of the Mac – true application and data portability from machine to machine. It’s a shame that the Cube could only run Tiger.

Besides downloading optimized versions of some of my applications, running the computer at a lower color depth was helpful in speeding things up. Rather than displaying millions of colors on my screen, I elected to display only thousands of colors.

I hope my experience will provide some insight to others running slow computers and let everyone else appreciate their modern supercomputers. I’m glad to be back.