It’s been over a month now since I had the unfortunate experience of breaking the middle finger on my left hand. Now, post surgery, sporting a Luke Skywalker styled hand with two metal rods pinning the joint firmly in to place I’m hopeful to regain full movement in the affected knuckle. Both of the pins actually stick out of my finger, one out the top with the other right through the tip and it’s that particular one that provides the basis for my story.

You see to protect the pin from any bumps or prods there is a small rubber ball on the end of it, similar to a tyre on the side of a boat to stop it banging against the dock. You can’t actually see this, nor the pins themselves, everything is hidden under a very attractive looking splint I’ve had moulded to my slender digit but it’s because of this rubber inertia dampener that I now find my finger to be a good two centimetres longer.

Graced with a new found reach you quickly learn just how subconsciously accustom you are to body’s limits. I can only personally liken it to a new pair of shoes that are slightly too large, you spend the first week or so bumping in to cupboards and having doors that you open clip them gently until your body starts to adjust for them without you even thinking about it. I’ve lost count of the amount of times having finished a meal my splint will be dripping in pasta sauce or most recently sweet chilli, eating a burger you tend to stab the guts out and lets not even mention knocking over liquids (thus far thankfully away from any expensive equipment – oh my poor couch!). The point is it takes some getting used to this body extension and that got me thinking.

Firstly it had me saying the word “extension” over and over in my head, which because of my lucid childhood arcade addiction I can not say without hearing the sound bite from Sega’s classic arcade racer “Daytona” playing over in my head… “Time ex-ten-sion!” Yes, I’m sad… this is not new information.

Secondly, and a little more on topic, being that I’m seeing a plastic surgeon to get all of this sorted out I’m constantly confronted with paraphernalia on what is obviously a plastic surgeon’s biggest drawcard in the current market, breast augmentation. Now if I’m having trouble dealing with an extra couple of centimetres on a finger how exactly do these women cope that wake up with a bust size that now doubles their previous waist circumference? I couldn’t imagine it! Forget about stubbing your toes on doors what about naked flames on gas-top stoves! I’m sure with time yes your body would adjust and things would become normal making considerations for your new found enhancements as I too have done over the past month or so but boy would it be a risky time. It certainly explains Robin Williams’ mishaps in Mrs. Doubtfire that’s for sure.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, the other day I found I could reach the remote control all the way on the opposite arm of the couch with my new found powers. Sure I can’t bend my finger but is that a fair pay off for my now super-hero like abilities? Stand back ma’am I’ll press that elevator button for you!! My kryptonite being of course anything requiring a firm two handed grip like brooms, vacuuming or housework in general riding a bike or holding a weapon.

Hmmm, ok, on second thought I’d be a pretty crap crime fighter.

In case you’re one of the 6 people in the world that didn’t already know Apple today released a longly anticipated product, the iPad. Many have cheered, others have cried and then there’s those like me who write an opinion piece on it for an Australian Mac website MacTalk.

If you’re interested in learning more about it then may I suggest you check out the full article here:
http://www.mactalk.com.au/2010/01/28/the-apple-ipad-3-x-5-points-of-opinion/

In the few times that I’ve retold this story the consistent theme in each response has been along the lines of “Gee you’re accident prone aren’t you?” generally conveyed in a somewhat sarcastically rhetorical kind of way. I can’t blame them, in the past few years I’ve been hospital twice already and now with this latest endeavour I’m surgery bound once more.

The short version of events comes down to my knuckles trying to (unsuccessfully) catch an American football. Normally I’d allow the palms of my hands to look after such a task but on this particular occasion my brain decided to do things differently, you know, try and keep things fresh and all. I had, after all, been catching balls using the tried and true method for quite a few years now and it’s just plain dull.

It would seem however that my knuckles, or to be more specific the top knuckle of my left middle finger, wasn’t quite up to the challenge on this particular day and instead it felt the need to sustain an injury called “mallet finger” where the tendon is over extended and stretched causing a rather significant amount of pain.

My doctor the next day didn’t seem particular concerned with what had taken place, “A common injury among footballers I see every day” he told me, whilst at the same time observing my rather scrawny body seated opposite him and quietly quizzing himself as to why on Earth I would even put such a fragile frame in a position. I felt the need to reassure him that I was merely tossing the old pig-skin with a mate and not actually participating in an actual game. That would, of course, be suicide.

“Nothing to worry about” he said, “We’ll just take an x-ray to be sure but you’ve got some movement there, which is good, but you’ll be splint bound for about 8 weeks, less than 5% chance there’d be anything else going on”.
Oh joyous day, my day-job of programming was sure to suffer from the splinted attributes I was soon to inherit and no doubt it would of course ice my moonlighting career as the new wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers but that’s ok, they were knocked out of this years Superbowl that morning – most likely due to my absence mind you.

X-ray done and a few minutes waiting for the docs return I was met with what could only be described as “you’ll-never-frakin’-believe-it-but-you’re-in-that-5%-I-shouldn’t-have-mentioned-about-10-minutes-ago” look smacked across his gob. I started to smile, it just seemed funny waiting for him to try and figure out how to break the news to me that my finger was completely rooted. The smile evolved into a giggle and I apologised telling him that it was OK I was used to being in the medical minorities.

Turns out my tendon had done a little chop and wiggle from my bone, which was already expected, but a shard of bone had come loose, which again was kind of expected but as this shard was over 50% the size of the joint it was a little bigger than 8 weeks in a splint was going to fix and meant it was going to need some surgery to get things back on track.

“I’m going back to the tit doctor aren’t I?” I asked him.
“Um… sorry?”
“I had my wrist operated on a few years back by a plastic surgeon” I informed him, “His entire office was decorated with breast implants that he displayed with gusto & pride; ‘tit doctor’”.
“Ah, well yes, that’s probably where you’re headed” he confirmed.

Turns out my plastic surgeon is on a little extended leave post new years and I wont be seeing him any time soon meaning my day surgery attendance is beyond that by some time. At this rate I’ll do 8 weeks in the splint, have the surgery and then spend another month recovering (in a splint). I might make the Packers’ pre-season if I’m lucky! Haha.

As you can imagine having any body appendage retarded you begin to quickly realise just how often you rely on it. Sure it’s my non-dominant hand but I’m quickly broaching a new level of admiration for those of the world missing limbs or paralysed. In that spirit here’s a quick top 5 list of things I’ve found embarrassingly difficult to achieve only one finger down.

1. Squeezing toothpaste out of a tube while holding a toothbrush at the same time.
2. Putting deodorant on, it now involves resting the can on my bedside table and pushing the button with my thumb and spraying it al over my arm nowhere near my armpit.
3. Eating a meal that requires cutting meat, the “stab & devour” method of food consumption is now employed on a regular basis.
4. Opening a bottle of… well anything really, even though I use my right hand to twist the cap keeping a grip with my impaired left hand is like lifting a 10kg weight with my pinky finger only.
5. And then finally… making the bed. It took me 20 minutes to put on a fitted sheet yesterday, the whole process now involves me holding the sheet in my teeth whilst lifting the mattress with my good hand and hooking it underneath. It’s just plain awesome to watch in a rather sad yet unbelievably humour-able fashion.

All that said typing is something that I’ve quickly adapted to doing one finger down and once this new medical chapter comes to an end I’ll probably have to teach myself to use the current dead-weight-digit the other 9 are carrying on the keyboard!

Having moved in to a new place a few months ago I was once again greeted with the issue of not having an internet connection until the powers that be connected the relevant wires and flicked their respective switches. This; an all far too familiar occurrence I’ve had dealt with in a timely fashion in times gone by (it helped when you worked for a telco) would this time blow out to well over a month to which point relying on my iPhone would not cut it. Coming to my rescue a good friend (thank you Gavlar) bestowed upon me a USB wireless internet dongle that would suffice my addiction until normality was restored with some ADSL.

Armed with an Optus flashed Huawei E169 I was quick to find that at the time there was no software around that was compatible with the relevantly new Mac OS X – Snow Leopard (10.6.x). The solution was to set up the device as you would any other modem and install some lovely modem scripts and what not from Huawei’s website, this got you online but I then found my next problem, reception! It seemed that the Optus network had a little difficulty in particular areas of my CBD apartment and not having an real software to report things like signal strength and data network I spent a good amount of time walking around my place laptop in hands “guessing” that the reception was actually best 1m to the left of my kitchen stove at ground level laying on the floor.

As you can imagine I quickly got sick of that game and thusly decided I’d take a look at just how complicated it was to find out the signal strength was directly from the device. A few googles later and I’d opened a connection directly to the serial device through the terminal and was now actively seeing what I was after albeit in a rather nerdy fashion. Coincidently at the same time as this I was ploughing through Aaron Hillegass’ 3rd edition of “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” and thought to myself “Hey, why not create a program to scrape this nerdy jargon and present it visually.” and that’s exactly what I did.

So here you’ll find a little program I like to call the E169 Monitor, because that’s pretty much what it does, monitor your E169’s data connection reporting back on things like signal strength and network connection type (WCDMA, HSDPA, etc) as well as giving you a couple of buttons to connect and disconnect.

Credit where credit is due; a lot of the code in here would not have been possible had it not been for the wonderful AMSerialPort project that makes connecting and reading from serial (USB) connections so much easier than the standard Cocoa libraries and to make the whole connect/disconnect functionality work (and I’m still not sure I understand) I’ve borrowed heavily from the source of the now defunct CheetahWatch, a program which essentially did everything I’ve done and more back in the days of the E220 and OS X 10.4. I really wish this project was picked up again and nurtured because it is a really fantastic effort, if I actually owned one of these wireless cards I think I’d even try an revive it myself, even with my rather fledgling cocoa skills.

Rambling and thanks aside a link to my Xcode project is available here & below. Do with it as you will but please be aware that I’m offering no support, this is all just a learning experience for me that I thought others may find useful. I’ve only tested this code on my own machine, an Intel based MBP running 10.6.2. I hope you can get some use out of it, I had fun doing it and throwing back to the days I used to have to manually enter AT commands to dial the local BBS.

Download my E169 Monitor Xcode Project files. (3.1MB)

Useful Resources: AMSerialPort Project, CheetahWatch application

Last weekend Melbourne played host to the Championship Trophy. The international men’s hockey tournament consisted of the world’s top six teams including Australia, Germany, & The Netherlands. To be honest I had no idea that it was even on until a friend from Adelaide rang to say he and his hockey club team mates were flying over for it and I managed to grab a ticket from them. I’m glad I went, I really miss playing and for the two days I was there I had a great time.

On the photography front I think I took nearly 200 hundred photos from the crowd, a lot of them useless but some of them pretty fun and catching a bit of action. The fruits of my labour are viewable in the slideshow below. Unfortunately taking photos like this at a sports event only makes me want to go out and buy some ridiculous zoom telephoto lens rather than using a stock standard 250mm lens that came with my DSLR.

You’ve got to love a good headphone’s review don’t you? I’m sure that you and all your friends are in that boat, which means that you’re going to absolutely love my latest review for the MacTalk folk. This round sees me tackle the latest and greatest in wireless audio for your iPod in the form of the “DigiFi Opera S5 Wireless In-Ear Headphones“. Boy that’s a mouthful.

So what are you doing hanging around here still? Go get your audiophile nerd on…

Article Link: http://www.mactalk.com.au/2009/12/03/review-digifi-opera-s5-wireless-in-ear-headphones/

Credit: Flickr user 'lolojajaja'

I had an disturbingly interesting experience on one of Melbourne’s fine public transport receptacles yesterday that I felt I just had to share will the world of internets out there.

Whilst travelling from point A to B there was a point that the seats next to me became occupied by a young mother and her two boys around the ages of 5 and 10. Nothing particularly fascinating about that I know but what was to come had me wondering if perhaps I’d just encountered a young Charles Manson.

Once seated the eldest of the two boys noticed an advertisement adorning the tram’s walls that contained a picture of one of Australia’s own Ringtail Possums.

“Look Mum, there’s a possum” stated the boy. Yet another statement confirming Douglas Adams’ theory of humanity merely stating the obvious for 90% of conversation.
“Yes, you’re right, do you like them?” enquired the mother.
“I want to kill it” replied the boy. Um… ok. Not the response I was expecting.
The mother, clearly embarrassed by the child and now noticing the majority of the tram glancing with judging eyes quickly responded with “But you can’t, they’re endangered”.
Slightly puzzled yet not deterred the boy retorted, “I don’t care if they’re ‘engaged’ I don’t like them, can I kill it?”

The conversation then went on with the mother doing her best to explain what “endangered” actually meant, another entertaining story in its own right, before the boy quickly lost interest and began jumping up and farting on his brother clearly disinterested in her efforts, the “death to all possum” revolution purged from thought.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m probably not reciting the conversation verbose but you have agree that this is hardly the conversation that instills faith in humanity’s new generation. Coming from a Gen-Y’er like myself that’s saying something!

Things have been a little quiet for me in the online world of recent but that’s all about to change today with a recent guest appearance on MacTalk Australia’s podcast in episode 95.

I’ve you’d like to have a listen head on over to their website or fire up your iTunes and get your Mac on.

Call me crazy but I absolutely despise the artwork that’s on Apple’s latest Mac OS X release. I mean come on, seriously, did Apple fire all of their graphic designers as a part of brew-ha-ha around the Global Financial Crisis or did someone decide they could just phone-it-in one day whilst the overseeing lord El-Jobso was away sick leaving Tim Cook & Phil Schiller dropped the approval ball?! I have never been so appalled by Apple’s efforts in an area that has always set them apart!
It would appear I’m not the only one with a grudge to bear as the folks over at Gizmodo are even running a contest on who can design something less shitty!

As for Snow Leopard itself, it’s had its problems, but overall I’m quite happy with how things are chugging along. But still, it’s no excuse for that google image, stock-photo, clip-art, crapola of a picture that adorns the box. Pull up your socks Apple!

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now and last night with a spare hour or so I threw together a video of my photos from the 365 Day project I finished on flickr earlier this year.

You can see all the photos individual (if you wish) here: http://www.idontquiteknow.com/365-days/