The changing face of blogging

I've been wondering for a couple months now. Is blogging dying or just specializing more? With Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and the onslaught of other social media outlets popping up, it is difficult to keep a traditional blog running. I myself believe I have reached the point where it doesn't make sense anymore.

So, I think this may be my last post. If you are interested in keeping up with me, please find me on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Yelp.... Ok, you get the picture....

The joys and pains of hockey

I've always enjoyed skating and became interested in hockey at an early age. I remember, when I was a young boy, listening to Dan Kelly call Blues games as I laid in bed with my Pepsi can transistor radio. I would go to the rink on occasion, but never took any skating lessons or spent a great deal of time on the ice. After college and before kids, I started skating more and began playing a little recreational hockey with a group of guys at a local college. The more I played, the more I enjoyed it and wanted to play more. After a couple years, I was playing in leagues or pickup games twice a week and 12 years later, I'm still at it and enjoy it now more than ever. Below are a just a few of the joys and pains I've experienced from hockey over the years...

Hockey Joys:

• I love the challenge and speed of the game.
• It's a great workout and helps keep me in shape.
• Hockey is something I can share with my brothers and a few friends (we all play on a team together).
• I've been pleasantly surprised at how many people I've met and come to know through playing hockey.
• My oldest son has shown an interest in hockey and I look forward to sharing the game with him as he grows up (even if he doesn't play, he still loves going to games).

Hockey Pains:

• Bruises. It's pretty much a given you will have a bruise (or several) 365 days a year, assuming you play on a regular basis.
• Fights. If you play long enough, at some point a few punches will get thrown around (even in the non-checking leagues).
• Injuries. Due to the speed of the game, people swinging sticks and collisions (intended or not), there are often injuries and sometimes serious ones. I've witnessed several nasty injuries and had a few myself.
  
• Scheduling. Getting ice time can be difficult and often the recreational leagues don't get the prime time slots. Which means you are playing late at night or on the weekend.
  
• If you live in St. Louis, you are still wondering if the Blues will EVER win a Stanley Cup.

These are pretty short lists, but I didn't want to bore everyone. So, how about some nasty injury pictures?

Recently, as many of you know, I tore my meniscus (yes, playing hockey). The injury originally occurred in August of 2008, but after taking it easy for a while it felt good enough to go back to playing. Things were fine until March 1st, when I tripped over a stick during a game and stumbled. I felt something pop in my knee. I finished the game and went home not thinking much about it. When I got home, I noticed my knee was swelling up quick and it started to hurt quite a bit. I took the next day off work and went straight to the doctor. After x-rays and an MRI, my doctor said I had tore the meniscus further and would require arthroscopic surgery to repair it. I was still in pain and said "Where and when?" We scheduled the surgery for March 12th. I went, had the surgery and actually walked out of the surgery center. I started my physical therapy the next day and my knee actually felt better after the surgery, than it had before.

Yesterday, I met my doctor for my two week follow up. He came into the room and handed me a stack of photos he had snapped during the surgery and says to me "you had a real problem". Actually I had two problems. The first problem was suspected from the MRI results. Part of my meniscus had tore away and had peeled back into my knee joint. Below is that photo.
The round part at the top is bone and you can see the tear on the right with the tissue folded back under the bone. OUCH!!! The next picture shows what it looks like after the surgery. A little bit of that tissue has been nibbled out and everything is flattened out and normal again. The second problem was something called plicae. I've never heard of this before, but apparently most people are born with it and it can vary greatly in seriousness. The plicae in my knee wasn't too serious, but removed nonetheless.

Hopefully the other knee holds up and it won't need a similar surgery anytime soon. I have a tear in that knee too, but an MRI years ago showed it was not as serious as this. Not being able to work out has been driving me crazy.

Well, that wraps up this post. Hopefully, I'll have my PT completed in a few weeks and I'll be back on the rink in April.

Busy Busy

It's been a busy winter and I wish I had more time to spend online. I just haven't had as much time as I would like the past couple months. Kelly and I have been busy with the boys and work.

So, just a few highlights in bullet form:

• Riley is learning a few signs and is able to communicate with us on a few things. Which is great, since he doesn't really have any spoken words yet.
• Ty is learning to skate (Ice) and took a 10 week roller hockey class (he loved it).
• Riley is crawling and almost walking. He is a busy kid and is always on the go!
• I picked up a new SUV. I was a little sad to see the SVT Focus go, but we have the Cobra for the fun car now and really wanted something with a warranty and more room.
• I have a lot of exciting projects going on at work. I predict it will be a rewarding year. (I'll share more later).

Finally, I've been following the economic news as best I can. I have a hard time with some of it, because it just seems everything is ALL gloom and doom. Almost like there is nothing good to look forward to. Plus, I just keep wondering when the government is going to step back and let some of these companies fail...

Failure is a necessary part of learning and I think many people have forgotten that. Anyone who has played sports knows this well, but the same rules apply to business. I can think of many examples, but I always think of this these:

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." -Michael Jordan

"
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas Edison

Greetings

This is test post from my iPod. Looking for a decent blog writing program for the iphone. So far lifecast seems like the best app.

Geolocate this post

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It's Over, Time to move on

Finally, the election is over and we can get back to listening to the radio and watching TV free of the crazy political ads.

Just finished watching McCain's concession speech. Pretty good and classy speech as I would expect. Time to put the differences aside and get behind our new president, whether you like him or not. Can't disagree with McCain on that. Hopefully we can now focus on getting the country to come together and start digging ourselves out of the economic crisis.

So, here's to Palin in 2012... just kidding ;-)

A small collection of headlines:

Mac VS. PC

A few of you know I am now a little over a year into my switch from PC to Mac and I'm loving it. I now use a Mac both at home and at work. Recently, I loaded MS Vista for the first time. I figured it's probably time to start testing it at work with our various applications. Mainly because I know XP won't be around forever. Proof of which is evident on Dell's website. Want XP instead of Vista? It'll cost ya... check out the screenshot:


Anyway, my first attempt at MS Vista left a bad taste in my mouth. I got the PC all loaded up, joined to our domain and then let it sit for a couple days. When I went back to log into it again this week, I could not log in. None of the local administrative ID's would allow me to log in and neither would any of the domain ID's (admin or not). I had one of my employees try a few things like repairing the install and resetting the admin ID from the command prompt all with no luck. I didn't want to spend too much time on it. So, we finally gave up and reformatted and reinstalled. So, that was strike one. Strike two came after we got Vista all loaded back up and we tried to install our Teller software. The install hangs in IE7 trying to install an ActiveX control, which works fine using IE7 on XP. We are still researching this and think there is a solution, but one more strike and we'll be staying on XP for at least another year. We'll see what happens...

So, in keeping with my pro Apple post today, I came across this picture and thought it was fitting:


Today I also saw Apple announced a 26% increase in profits due to iPhone sales and that they hit the 10 million iPhones sold for 2008 goal they set. Not too shabby. BTW, have you seen the new switch to a Mac ad? Microsoft's new ads just can't hold a candle to the Apple ads (sorry Microsoft).

Strange Times Indeed

Watching the roller coaster on Wall Street and trying to make sense of all the craziness with the economy has been a wild ride the past few weeks. It's looking like it may be the biggest crisis of my adult life and it's frustrating to be one of the people who has lived within his means and now may have to spend years paying for the greed and corruption that got us in this mess. The scary thing is that nobody seems to know what to call the situation we are in; recession, depression or whatever. Anyway, I saw this picture today and thought it was fitting: