I just screwed up making instant pudding.
Enough about I Am Alpha (for now, anyway), this is about my foot, and I know you can’t read enough about my stupid foot. I spent Wednesday and Thursday walking around in normal shoes and doing OK. I even wore long pants on Thursday for the first time in seven months! There were some pangs and general discomfort, but no outright pain. This morning, though, my foot was a rock: stiff, kinda purple, painful and pretty much not hearing any requests for shoe wearing other than driving to and from physical therapy. So, I’m back in the boot today, snug in its warm fleece embrace and remembering why I hate it so much.\
Tomorrow? I’m going back to shoes, and we’ll see how it goes.
Lawver family breaking news: Kevin wore pants yesterday for the first time in 8 months.\
Why is this exciting news? It means Kevin is out of the boot. YAY! Sadly, he is still sore and gimpy and can’t help out around the house or go on walks yet.
I can finally reveal what I’ve been working on for the past couple months that’s making me write all this javascript. It’s I Am Alpha, something kind of new and interesting for AOL. Why? AOL doesn’t do public development. We’re usually very close-lipped about what’s going on with a product. We just launch stuff on an unsuspecting public. We also don’t often foster any sort of interaction with the outside developer community. There are things like AOLserver that’s open source, and the new AIM plugin stuff is open to the public, but I can’t really think of much else we’ve done in the area. That’s changing, as of today, with this thing.\
What is it? Well I Am Alpha is just a prototype to give folks some idea of what’s coming, and to introduce our microformat for transporting modular content and the idea of creating modules for this new product.\
I think this is really cool. No one’s paying me to say it’s cool, either. I think getting more people to create microformatted content is great, and I think our microformat is pretty cool (don’t know what a microformat is?). I think some of the stuff we don’t have a live prototype for, like server-side modules is super-cool.\
It’s going to be a little rocky. We don’t have a lot of experience with the whole public development thing, and a lot of things won’t be public (old dog, new tricks), but we’re trying. We’re really really trying. We’re going to be using Dojo for our internal framework and for modules. We’ve released the microformat under an extremely liberal license, and with this alpha, are actively seeking feedback.\
It’s great to be involved in a product at AOL that feels so open, and with forward-thinking standards at its core. It didn’t take hours and hours of red-faced pleading to get us to create a microformat for modules instead of YATXS. It didn’t take kicking, punching and hiding bodies to get us to agree to create (as much as we can) valid, accessible pages. Of course, we don’t control what goes into modules, but we’ve set up the pages that will be saved (the current ones aren’t perfect or what’s going to be final, to be sure) will be valid XHTML, and we’re requiring that all modules are valid too.\
Oh yeah, and it’s the first public facing thing I’ve done at AOL where I was the designer and wrote almost all of the content. So, if it sucks, it’s my fault. I didn’t build the prototype, but I helped design the microformat, the server-side module process, and wrote 95% of the documentation. Hooray for flying under the radar!\
I’ll try to keep the posting about it here to a minimum. Mostly, I’ll be yakking about it over on the unofficial official blog. Come join in the fun!
We got back from Austin yesterday, so it’s time to rethink this whole traveling thing. The trip was great from a trip perspective. I got to eat good Mexican food, barbecue and hang out with the Browns. But, my ankle wasn’t real happy about spending time in the air (swelled up pretty good), standing in line or walking through the airport (pain and more swelling). I didn’t bring the Home Electrocution Kit with me, so I was left with hotel ice in ziploc bags to dull the throbbing.\
I have a full plate of travel coming up that I’m not about to cancel. But, this was a relatively short trip to a domestic destination. Being injured, and injured for a long time, sucks. Walking around the airport in the Velcro Terror was no fun.\
But, I got to hang out with the Browns, and Jen had a lot of fun. So, I guess it’s OK.
Reading…\
This review may be a little weird. I read it solely while either getting heat or ice at physical therapy. I loved it. It’s ridiculous, in the way the best Monty Python skits are ridiculous. It’s smart, well-written and extremely sly. The jokes are constant, and really really funny. If you think the following things and people are funny: Dave Eggers, Good Omens, McSweeney’s or, The Onion, you’ll love this book. Now I have to find something else to read while getting cooked, frozen and electrocuted. I’ve been reading The Meaning Of Everything, which is really good (almost done… can’t wait to see how it turns out! do they finish the dictionary??!!), but dense. It takes concentration to read, which I don’t really have when being tortured… any suggestions?
I’ve never driven in a foreign country. When we drove around Ireland, I made Porter do all the driving. Now, I’m going to France for the Plenary, and I’m renting a car. The only thing that’s making me less jittery about doing so is having a friend who lives there and is feeding me driving tips for driving on the Riviera like:
When Brian is told “no”, he throws his hands in the air, looks up toward heaven, slowly flops backwards, rolls halfway on one side, and then half on the other side. And then he is done. It is really funny. Except for the times when there is something behind him that he falls on. I guess that happened one too many times, and now usually he falls forward. But his hands are busy being thrown into the air, so they can’t brace his forward fall, so he lands face first into the carpet. Heh, kids are funny.
A couple updates from the weekend (and the end of last week) before I get back to work:\
I am now a member of the Loudoun County Democratic Committee. I joined officially last week. I’m still not sure what all that means other than attending committee meetings and brushing up on Robert’s Rules Of Order, but it feels good to be more involved in the process.\
In ankle news, I wore a “regular” shoe all morning after physical therapy. I broke down around 1 and put the Velcro Nightmare back on, but I was walking around in a matching pair of hiking boots for a good three or four hours there. Progress, baby, progress.\
Yes, now, back to writing javascript and longing for CSS.\
update: Wearing a regular shoe for the first half of the day was a really bad idea.
I went to see Dr. Ankle yesterday, and he says to me after playing with my foot, “Yep, everything’s still intact, that’s good.” Yeah, I made a face.\
I’m allowed to wear normal shoes for a grand total of 15-30 minutes a day and have four more weeks of physical therapy. I see Dr. Ankle in six weeks and he says by then, I should be walking full-time in regular shoes, but should keep the Velcro Terror around “just in case”.\
I had to walk out of there and try to find the silver lining. I’d built yesterday up to be the day I went back to being “normal”. Yes, it was unrealistic because my right calf is still about the size of my forearm, but it was there. I thought that was the end of having to wear shorts even though it’s 30 degrees outside (jeans and other long pants rip the velcro straps right off), the end of wearing it all day every day no matter what I’m doing or where I’m walking.