Joe Crotty

Yesterday while looking at the new blog header I decided to have a hand at adding a quote mechanism. I have always been fond of the hilarious tongue in check The Tao Of Programming series – the first self titled book being best by far. My initial notion was to put it in the footer which seemed vacuous. Puzzled I gave up for a few hours and wandered to a tangential stream of thought. Later, while talking with my wife just before bed an idea hit me like a ton of bricks.  Why not put a sliding quote panel in the header animated by jQuery? Nearly sick with excitement I “uhm”-ed my way through the rest of the talk with my wife and then stole off the first chance to get to a computer to hammer out some initial code before the ephemeral concept evaporated from my mind.

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It was an arid posting week here at the blog trying to come up with something fresh to say. In the process of looking around at the ship shape of the blog the realization that the header and logo look squirrelly occurred. So I fired up Photoshop, vim and git and changed things around to a more streamlined, recognizable and social/web 2.0 header area.  Also, the archive layout issue was fixed yet again. Now if I could only come up with a good idea to blog about.

In have been eying the Nikon D90 DSLR for the better part of three months. At the start of March, 2010 Nikon Rumors reported some deep online discounts were in the works and with my birthday pending at the end of the month I pulled the trigger and purchased a D90 camera kit including a Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VRII all around lens from B&H Photo Video. Much to my joy even my wife approved the purchase. Now that the easy part is done it’s time to learn how to use this interface monster.

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As a programmer and all around nerd dating back to my teen years I have covered a fair bit of computing terrain. However, at a recent job interview requiring Java skills I completely floundered when asked, “Talk to us about design patterns and illustrate some instances where you have applied them?”  Baffled and not one to beat around the bush I admitted my naivety immediatley. In a gesture of kindness the interview panel threw a few classic design patterns at me like singleton and abstract factory both of which I was aware of, but only had a vague grasp of. One guy on the panel suggested I read up on a famous engineering design pattern book by a group referred to as the Gang of Four. I took him up on that offer a few days later and ordered a used copy of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software from Amazon.

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Recently, while developing a web charting application I ran into a problem involving combinations and permutations. The application mimics an existing paper charting method with it’s own meta language to describe certain visual biological markers.  One subset of the meta language defines eight shorthand notation character codes:

• B = Brown (or Black) Bleeding
• C = Cloudy (white)
• C/K = Cloudy/Clear
• G = Gummy (gluey)
• K = Clear
• L = Lubricative
• P = Pasty (creamy)
• Y = Yellow (even pale yellow)

Each code can be selected once with any other combination of codes.  Some examples of possible code string combinations with dash separator(s):

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Infraspinatus Muscle

It has been just over six weeks since injuring what I thought was my Latissimus Dorsi. After four weeks of total rest from all sports I was nearly pain free except in the late evening when the wear and tear of the day would lead to some aches.  So, I took two more weeks off and decided that at six weeks I would see a PT specialist to help direct my recovery. My main concern was discerning what exercises to use and when so I could return to full sports ASAP – especially climbing.

As luck would have it one of my fellow parishioners at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Daneen Luna, is a back specialist with many years under her belt at the Veterans Affairs facility here in Denver, CO. Daneen has a cozy PT facility setup at her house in north Denver and after catching up on life for a half hour we settled down in the examination room. After 15 minutes of background discussion she began probing, pulling and testing ruling out lat, teres major, and teres minor muscle injuries. More then likely she was sure I had an infraspinatus muscle injury that was for the most part healed. Further, she noted that my caved in chest and over development of certain muscles had left my upper back susceptible to injures. Of course her assessment was spot on as I have had many shoulder injuries the last five years: trapezius muscle both right and left, left SLAP tear +/- (i.e., barely), left rotator cuff strain three times, and some deep muscle injures between the lumbar and cervical regions affecting breathing (i.e., mostly resurfacing injuries from snow boarding/skiing accidents).

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About a month ago I revised the website look.  Today I fixed a few subtle things:

1. ‘Featured Posts’ widget images in the sidebar now link directly to the post.
2. Padding between all the sidebar widgets (e.g., ‘Featured Posts’, ‘Recent Posts’, etc.) is now even.
3. ‘Archives’ sidebar widget is now collapsible. Note, there is a bug in IE6-8 and I am not sure when I’ll have time to fix it. My recommendation is to switch your browser to Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.