Over Spring Break, I decided to take a break from taking a break by launching BiasIncident.com, my first non-academic Ruby on Rails project. Noting its simplicity, I felt a Barack Obama is your New Bicycle clone was my new bicycle Hello World.
The site’s purpose? Display and archive faux pas at Tufts University. Go ahead and report an incident, and you may be featured on the front page!
For National Grammar Day this year, I’m reposting a sign I saw at a fast food establishment two years ago:
Fishy Business
I don’t have any idea what it means, either.
An absolute must-read blog post from Google today. Go read it now.
…We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China…
Google has been struggling to win the hearts and minds of Americans as it continues to churn out more products and services with hopes of organizing the world’s information. Noting its massive efforts, privacy advocates and technologists have warned of the emergence of an evil empire. I believe these concerns are valid to a point, and therefore, today’s blog post and change of policy are huge news.
I don’t want to give anyone or any company a free pass. Although I’m thankful for Google’s services, and honestly owe much of my success in life to them, their policy of censorship in China gave me pause. Today’s announcements, although troubling in some aspects, give me some hope.
Just figured you should know.
When I was learning HTML back in middle school, I discovered a Dynamic HTML snippet that let me change the user’s mouse cursor to whatever I wanted! With the power of copy and paste javascript, I had a site more hideous than a typical Myspace profile, long before Myspace hit the scene.
Unaware of the atrocity I had slapped together, I went to a forum (remember those?) to ask for feedback. I was summarily told that my site was not worthy of 1999, much less 2004. It was the Internet, so people were pretty mean, but one person’s constructive feedback has stayed with me.
Just because you can do something, it definitely doesn’t mean you should.
In reflecting over the last decade in my last post, I remembered that advice. As I conjured up the mental image of the worst website I’ve ever made in my life, I took a look at this site. I saw a useless sidebar with unnecessary graphics, confusing static page titles, and an inconsistent site methodology. I went back to the drawing board, updated WordPress and my trusty K2 theme, and hacked away at CSS and PHP until I came up with the design you’re looking at now.
I’ve thrown away as much template text, promotional material, and other crap as possible. I upped the size of the beautiful Lucida Grande that graces these pages, and completely ditched the sidebar. I’m pretty happy with it, and can’t believe I didn’t go simple sooner. In writing, design, or any other art I can think of, simplicity is king.
People have a lot to say about the upcoming year. I’ve been monitoring the #10yearsago hashtag on Twitter. If you cut through the noise, there’s a lot of interesting stuff there – examples of humanity. Collectively, we like to reflect on change and the passage of time, especially when we hit our arbitrary big base-ten milestone years. There’s no harm in that, and I am no different.
Ten years ago, I was nine years old. My family had not yet moved to Dover Plains or even to Carmel, the community I lived in before moving to Dover. I spent most of my time playing video games, and struggled in school. I had a hole in my ear drum that prevented me from taking normal showers or swimming with my friends. Never had I operated a modern personal computer. A good deal of my mental energy was absorbed by jingles on TV, some that celebrated a new millennia.
In these ten years, I studied, worked, laughed, and cried. I took hundreds of standardized tests, met many people, and spoke dozens of million of words. I grew closer to some people, and drifted away from others. I had my fair share of heartache, but publicly and unashamedly fell for a beautiful woman at Tufts University.
Although that brief story seems pretty special to me, I bet it’s unremarkable to you. With some luck, your story has similar themes of progress and development. After all, a lot happens in ten years. In these last ten, many of us became completely different people, with something still recognizable from our pasts.
I love looking back every once in a while. It’s comforting, and I benefit as a person by remembering who I was, where I came from, and who helped me get where I am; it’s that benefit that pushes my evangelism of journaling.
If you’re not already taking a few moments a day to jot down what you’re thinking, you’re not really getting the full benefit of these collective, reflective moments. Although I’m not an expert on memory formation, I know you’re missing a lot if you don’t write stuff down. To reflect on what remains in our heads over a long period is incomplete; leave notes to yourself to piece together a more complete narrative.
Entering this new year, give journaling a shot. If you’re celebrating the dawn of a new decade tonight, remember to remember it.
Hi I am Alison, from Cheshire England. had my surgery on 26th November, a tympanoplasty with new ear bones and also closing up of the mastoid cavity left by a previuos op 17 years ago. was extremely apprehensive beforehand, but surgery went well and I came home same evening. Sneezed that night and panicked as ear bled all night, went back to see my lovely surgeon following day and he checked it, all seems OK. Things healing nicely now it seems, but my hearing is odd – I can hear things at high pitch in my ear, which I couldn’t before, but they are on a slight time delay, almost like an echo. Does this settle down when packing dissolves etc? Back to hospital on 18th for another check up, still off work and will probably stay off for 4 weeks to ensure I don’t catch any infection or swine flu from work colleagues! Even if my hearing doesn’t improve, then I will be able to swim etc without fear of ear infection, something I have not been able to do since I was a child. Hope you are all recovering well too. Alison
Hello Alison! It’s been more than a month since your tympanoplasty and related procedures. I regret not being able to get back to you sooner; please accept my apology. Hopefully by now you’ve realized that waiting for the packing to dissolve is actually the entire endgame of this procedure. As time goes by, I believe that many of the odd sensations you’re feeling will go away. The packing does some weird things. I cannot emphasize enough how odd that packing can feel.
Please come back and let us know how you’re doing.
Thanks for the pics of the headgear! I was not expecting that. I go next Friday. It’ll be the 18th. I am hoping I feel better before Christmas!!! How long was it before you could exercise? Thanks
Hopefully you are doing well, too! It was a few months before I could exercise, unfortunately. Well worth the wait.
I had tympanoplasty surgery the exact same way you did 3 weeks ago. My hearing came back within a week but the gelfoam and goop is still in there. Thats what I’m worried about. I had it check today and he still can not see my eardrum. I had zero pain with the entire experience but I’m a little sketchy about him going in and removing it. Is it extremely painful????
Although everyone has a different pain tolerance, I want to assure you that it isn’t extremely painful. Trust your doctor; he or she is a doctor for a reason.
Hey Richard, I’m scheduled to get a tympanoplasty on January 5th and I’ve done a lot of research on it. Firstly, I’d like to thank you for posting all this stuff about your surgery and recovery. It’s been really helpful to me in understanding exactly what it is that I’m getting myself into. I right ear drum was perforated when I was about 14 and I’m 19 now, so it’s been a few years and I’ve had to deal with the ear infections and avoiding getting water in it for all that time. It’s really quite a bother in the shower and prevents me from swimming, which is something I love, as well as the girls in the bikinis (haha
). Anyway, seeing as how you went through all of this already, I was wondering if you could answer one of my major questions with a unique perspective, seeing as to how you had to deal with it (my tympanoplasty will be done by going into the ear from making the incision behind the ear, not through the ear canal, by the way). After your surgery, how did you manage to wash your ear and hair in the shower without getting water/soap/shampoo on or in the wound or your ear?
Daniel, you’re very welcome. It’s been my pleasure to document the experience.
This is an excellent question! Similarly, my tympanoplasty was done with an incision behind the ear, which as you’ve already anticipated, can lead to some interesting complications with bathing.
For several weeks, my bathing experience was very different than what I was used to. For the first week, I didn’t bathe my hair. After that, my mom helped me wash my hair in a sink of our house. I put cotton balls in my ear, laid a sterile pad over that, and finally firmly pressed a cup over that sterile pad. It’s odd to picture, but think of the cotton ball as a last defense, and the sterile pad and the cup as a “sealed” protection layer from water. As I held that contraption together, my mom carefully washed my hair, avoiding the area close to my ear.
It worked pretty well for me. That is, I never got my ear wet. Please come back and let us know how your procedure goes! With a little time you’ll be back on the beach enjoying all there is to see and do.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone! I appreciate it.