I’m going to be a bit slow or absent on blogging and email for a few days because I’ve injured my left hand and my thumb is in a splint which makes it pretty tough to type. (One-handed mostly.) There is a ton I want to write about, but the doctor said pushing it too hard might aggrevate the injury, so it’ll mostly have to wait. To keep things interesting around here I’ll send a WP.com invite to whoever comes up with the best story about how I did it.
What? a blogging slow-down??? Horrors! *thinks* Well, Matt, you could always go for a voice recognition program… 🙂 Once you get them, er, condidtioned, they work fairly well!
Keep ’em comin’!
Josh
who knew coding was a contact-sport.
Seriously though, how’d you do it?
Entry updated.
Given the number of years I’ve known you, I feel I have the right to laugh at the irony of this particular injury. 😉 But hey, this gives you the perfect excuse to practice all of those one-handed things that you haven’t had time for in the past year, like working that television remote. For some ideas, check out this site: http://www.interstice.com/journals/Simon/20030713.html
Take care,
Iram
Hope you feel better soon. Hand problems suck… I have carpal tunnel, and thank to you I am now a Dvorak convert. Thanks for the great tip. Gathering speed is slow, but I have stuck with it. I did find a cool link on modifying your Powerbook keyboard to Dvorak. Making Your Own Dvorak Keyboard for a PowerBook G4. I am just waiting for the tool to do it.
How’d you get injured? Tell ’em you were in a shouting match with some person, and they blurted out “Movable Type is better!” before getting a Mullenweg left cross. I’m not too creative right now, but if you can elaborate on that somehow, that’d be pretty funny! *shrug*
And you thought the security patch that preceded WP 1.5.2 went without a hitch. Well I’m here to tell the sad, sad tale.
There Matt was, cheese sandwich in one hand “PHP security for Dummies” in the other, bowl of ramen noodles on the table. Transfixed he was, looking at his mega-bucks flat screen as the “bugs” danced across it unabated Patch, patch and one more patch. “there that should do it,” exclaimed Matt while taking a well deserved nibble of his sandwich and a dash of ramen thrown in for good measure.
Then it struck, one last “bug!” A big one. The mother of all bugs. Patch, patch and a HEAVY left-handed SWAT at “CNTL+ V” patching in the last of the last.
And serenity returned to all things WordPress. Almost, as the euphoria of another patch well done subsided the pain commenced. A dull ache at first, then a throbbing that sent Matt to “Our Lady of WordPress Hospital” for X-rays on the injured hand.
Alas, the impossible has occured. Matt has been silenced. For now.
Matt, entry updated, but there is still typo in the title (demonstrating the issue with text as image and permalinks based on slugs)
So they finally caught you cheating at poker huh? Your lucky they only smashed your left hand, in past times they would’ve shot you.
</joking>
You make a podcast! 😀
I know how you feel matt. I injured my right hand a few weeks ago playing with my son and have had it in a splint since.
http://flickr.com/photos/jflint/49371863/
I feel your pain. Since I’m an animal lover, I’m well acquainted with one-handed typing. My cat loves to jump up on my desk and lay down right across my hands. The only thing I can do is move him and pet him with one hand, and do the one-handed typing dance with the other hand. 🙂
I hope you get your hand feeling back to normal quickly.
Aaron Kulbe
a.k.a. SuperLag
Yeah, I’m going with a Paul Newman in The Hustler scenario… 😉
Feel well soon, Matt.
The guy seemed… off, Matt thought. Kept looking at you, then away as soon as you met his gaze, then back again. He seemed to be deciding to cross the hotel lobby and come over.
Let him stay on the other side, Matt silently beseeched the coding gods. I don’t need this. Not today.
But the gods were apparently off deleting comment spam, because the guy rubbed his palms together, took a deep breath, and lumbered across the Holiday Inn’s scuffed gray-green carpet.
Matt looked up and, resigned to the situation, offered a not-unfriendly “Hey.”
“You’re that guy. The one who does the blog.”
“WordPress?”
“That’s it. WordPress.” The guy grinned and nodded, one hand in his pocket. “WordPress. You’re going to be coming out with a new version any day, right?”
“We keep working on it, yeah.”
“Is it going to have an image gallery?”
Sure. Snowboarding pigs would blockade the I-5 before that happened, but what the hell. “Maybe.”
“You ever see a thumbnail graphic?” The guy was smiling, open-mouthed. You could fit a guinea pig in there.
“Uh, yeah,” Matt said, closing up his laptop. Somewhere, way too late, his spidey sense was tingling.
“How about a graphic thumbnail?” asked the guy, and out came that hidden hand, swinging in an arc. Three things ran through Matt’s mind: 1) his initial instincts had been right, 2) you don’t see many ballpeen hammers these days, and 3) ow.
The hammer practically flattenedg his thumb against the surface of the laptop. Matt grunted, winced, but was damned if he was going to give the guy any more satisfaction than that.
The guy leaned over, looked at Matt’s thumb and said, “Yep. Pretty graphic.” He slipped a sheet of paper into Matt’s other hand — what Matt would soon be calling “my good hand” — and strolled off.
Matt blinked through the pain, and glanced at the paper. An invoice. Man, Dell’s bill collection department was getting tougher every day.
I think Matt just really wanted to get a good looking transcriptionist for his weblog entries.
Argh, Rob C beat me to the short-story idea while I was writing up one of my own this morning. Well, here’s my theory anway, on my own site, since it’s a bit long for a comments thread: http://hownow.brownpau.com/misc/ad-sells-you.htm
Sorry to hear you injured your hand and have your thumb in a splint — what a pain!
While you wouldn’t be able to really use it for any programming/coding needs, as someone with RSI in both wrists from computer overuse I have to say that speech recognition software has come a LONG way in the past 10 years and I’d highly recommend Dragon Naturally Speaking 8.0 to aid you in handling blogging and email. It’s surprisingly accurate (and fast if you have a powerful enuf PC), although it takes a while to get used to speaking your thoughts instead of typing…
Anyway, hopefully you won’t be out of commission for long enough to truly need the software to keep going, but it might help you in your downtime. In any case, I certainly hope you’re feeling better soon!
I officially fold. Paulo’s story rocks. A hard-boiled, deeply conflicted yet sympathetic character poised on the brink of a decision that could ruin the blogosphere and his own self-respect finds redemption at the business end of a Russian pistol.
Despite what people are writing here, I heard it nothing to do withWordPress, PHP, or computing at all.
After picking up new found old music, Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane, you were fighting with physical world packaging. Those darned CD wrappers will get you every time!
The little silver thingy somehow flew across the room, landing in the bell of your own sax. Not wanting it to stick to any gooey spit residue it the curve, you immediately flew to extricate the extraneous material that would totally mess up your sound.
Sadly, in your enthusiasm, you managed to wedge your thumb in a tone hole. Amazed that that would even be possible, you pulled out too quickly, tweaking your entire hand.
Not wanting to admit this, you told the doctor it was a skateboarding accident.
Nah, he probably dropped a tenor sax case on his hand. Ever picked up one of those things? I hate having to carry mine to and from school. Better than a bari sax though…
So here’s this really cool guy, Matt. He can do ANYTHING, just ask all his buddies. He’s rumored to replace Red on “The Red Green Show” (If you can’t be handsome, you can at least be handy!) because he can do ANYTHING from roofing his house to programming PHP and MySQL to setting up a cool video room.
Anyway, he’s remodeling his basement to make this really cool video room where he can watch all his DVDs on an 8 foot projection screen with 5.1 Dolby surround sound. He’s putting on the finishing touches – the wood trim around the outside corner at an open doorway. Wouldn’t you know that the darn wood trim extended about 1/4 inch too far around the corner and was pushed out instead of laying flat. Matt, being the perfectionist he is, decided to take the trim piece out to the garage to plane off the extra trim.
Now in the garage, he can’t find the freakin’ block plane to take off some of the trim. He’s at wits end when suddenly… he spies the utility knife! He thinks, “I’ll just slice off that excess from the wood trim and finish this up so I can watch ‘Star Wars’ in about an hour!”
The blade of the utility knife turns out to be very dull, probably from cutting shingles from when he roofed his house this spring. But he thinks, “It’s just a LITTLE bit that needs to be trimmed off, I can do it!”
On the second slice of the wood trim, the dull utility knife slips and manages to gouge his left thumb nearly all the way through. SHIT! Now there’s blood everywhere! He thinks, “I’m going to have to get another piece of wood trim because this one has blood all over it!” as he continues to bleed. So he wraps up the thumb in ice and in a towel and heads to the emergency room.
After a trip to the emergency room, a tetanus shot (while the doctor laughs his butt off at the description) and six stitches later, he’s got an ugly looking splint on his thumb and is told not to use it much for a few weeks.
(This actually DID happen to me about 10 years ago!)
Damndest thing — me too. In my case, I was stripping heavy-gauge cable.
With pinking shears.
Fighting the forces of darkness. The less said the better.
I ponder how one-handedness affects Dvorak. Vowels are fairly isolated so there is plenty of ‘finger’ travel.
By the way, your “Archives” lead to the front page. Intentional or a fluke?
Get well soon.
This is for Daniel above and all those other’s who suffer from RSI in some form or other. You shoud check out workrave It’s a nice program which helps in recovering and preventing RSI.
And no I am not a developer but only a user of a program which I found useful and one which works 🙂
Okay, I’ll bite….
It’s really quite simple. Descendents of the late Christopher Latham Sholes, finally fed up with the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that Matt has sown in the world, have broken his left thumb in a Mafia-esque attempt to end his silly crusade.
Get it? Punchline below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Sholes
Christopher Sholes, among other things, patented the QWERTY layout.
PS – if you need me to take dictation, just call. 🙂