Archive for April, 2005
Back once again with the renegade master
If you recognise the lyric, your brain has the same alarming capacity for bad music as mine :-)
Sorry for the lack of updates, but I’ve been buried underneath Deadline Mountain. I’m still there, but I’m slowly tunnelling out with a teaspoon. But never mind that. I want to talk about how my back is messing with my head.
(Apologies to David, Squander Two et al, who I’ve already bored senseless about this)
A quick recap if you’ve come here from Google or haven’t been following my back saga. Last April, I hurt my back and slipped two discs. In September, I fell down some stone stairs and made it worse; around Xmas, I developed sciatic pain which got worse and worse. By February I was munching 12 pills (anti-inflammatories, painkillers) per day, pretty much unable to sleep, focus, think or work. I’m now scheduled for a horribly expensive operation to get rid of the pain, and it’s due to happen on May 2nd. The sciatic pain has worsened by the day, and by last week I was at the point where if I’d been told the only cure was to amputate my leg, I’d have sawn it off myself.
Last Thursday, after yet another sleepless night, I made an emergency appointment with the doctor to get some ridiculously powerful painkillers. If the doctor had refused, I’d have attempted to kill him: I was at the end of my tether, sick and tired of being sick and tired. If you’ve never had a serious back injury, I hope it’s something you never experience; if you’ve had one, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s amazing how debilitating it can be.
I only ever took one of the super-painkillers, because the following morning I discovered two strange and startling things. The first strange and startling thing was that my clock said it was 8am: for months, my night-time routine has been go to bed - eventually fall asleep - wake up half an hour later - eventually fall asleep - repeat until you get pissed off and start work at 6.30am. The second weird thing? I didn’t have any sciatic pain. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
I’m now well into my seventh day without sciatic pain - not even a twinge - and I’m pretty much convinced that going ahead with the operation would be a dumb move. The op won’t do anything about the slipped discs - they’re still knackered - because it’s designed to relieve sciatic pain; getting an operation to relieve symptoms that I no longer have isn’t exactly a bright idea. I’m going to call the neurosurgeon later today to get his opinion, but it’s safe to assume that he’s going to cancel the operation.
Don’t get me wrong, my back is still goosed - getting out of chairs is a challenge, and I can’t lift anything even slightly heavy - but I can live with that; it’ll sort itself out sooner or later. But for no apparent reason, the pain that’s been driving me daft for months on end vanished overnight and doesn’t seem to be returning. I’m delighted, of course, but baffled too. How can something so bloody painful just vanish overnight?
Naturally, I have a theory about this - helped considerably by the gentleman who posted some interesting links in a comment on a previous back pain post (which I can’t find at the moment, sorry). I suspect that it was the chiropractor, in the study, with the lead pipe.
It may be a coincidence, but when I think about the timeline here it does look as if the arrival of the sciatic pain coincided with the chiropractic treatment. Even after falling down the stairs, I didn’t have sciatica; that arrived in December. I started regular chiropractic treatment in November, and I stopped it one month ago. After a lot of web wandering - and excluding the lunatic fringe of whack-jobs whose medical sites are dubious at best and dangerous at worst - I’ve found a number of articles suggesting that spinal manipulation, if you’re unlucky, can sometimes cause or exascerbate sciatic pain.
Of course, I’ll never know: it could just be a coincidence. And I don’t really care, because at last I can put on a pair of socks without swearing.
A (ten) grand gesture
Today’s “maybe the human race ain’t so bad after all” story comes from the US, where a man found $10,000 in the wall of his new house. He promptly traced the previous owner’s widow and gave her the whole lot.
[Via Fark.com]
Blinking sites and other revelations
It’s been, ooh, at least a week since I blogged about Eels.
I’m not going to go on about how Blinking Lights and Other Revelations [amazon link] is a masterpiece - although it is - though; I want to talk about the band web site, as it’s a great example of how to use the internet properly.
On most bands’ web sites, you’ll find thinly disguised PR puffery; on the Eels site, things are a bit different. There are letters from fans with problems, such as the uncontrollable urge to take off their trousers whenever they hear Eels’ music; and there are also letters from former collaborators, which describe Mark “E” Everett as a “drug-addled schizo”, a “paranoid control freak with little-to-no people skills” and an “across-the-board prick” before spiralling into some serious abuse. This stuff ties in perfectly with Eels’ rather dark sense of humour, and it makes the site worth visiting even when the band isn’t up to anything.
In addition to all the daft stuff, there are lots of videos, previews of the new album, information about the various songs and so on; there’s also some clever use of the iTunes music store, which is currently offering digital versions of rare records such as live albums.
Oh, and buy the new album. It’s fantastic.
Everyone’s an author
There’s an interesting article in today’s Guardian by Max Hastings, who talks about the news that Amazon.com has bought a firm called BookSurge. BookSurge specialises in “on demand printing”, which raises the possibility that in the not too distant future anybody will be able to stick a book on Amazon without having to persuade a publisher that their effort is worthwhile.
It’s a fascinating possibility, which ties in with all the “long tail” stuff that’s getting net-watchers excited. To put it simply, the future of commerce may be in niches: instead of selling millions and millions of copies of the same thing, businesses might thrive by selling one or two copies of millions of different things.
Of course, it’s bound to result in some really bad books being made available, in much the same way that the digital music revolution has resulted in some really bad music being made available. However, the potential gains massively outweigh the potential losses: sure, there’ll be a lot of crap, but there’ll also be some gems that wouldn’t otherwise have seen the light of day. Just like the music business, the publishing business often ignores talent because there isn’t a big enough market for it. With on-demand printing, that’s no longer an issue.
Cold blade
MetaFilter is one of the best sites on the net: it’s home to some of the smartest people in the world (together with some of the most argumentative). This discussion about shaving came up with a handy tip: if like me, shaving leaves your neck looking like a horror film set in an abbatoir, use cold water to rinse the blade. It works!
Updating OS X stuffs Safari
One for the Mac users: watch out for the latest OS X update if you’re running Safari plugins such as AcidSearch or SAFT: after upgrading to OS X 10.3.9, Safari will quit unexpectedly or refuse to load at all. You can fix the problem by going to:
Library > Application Support > SIMBL > Plugins
And deleting items such as “acidsearch.bundle”.
Reznor puts his music where his mouth is
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has come up with an interesting idea: he’s letting you download a new song in GarageBand format so you can play around with it to your heart’s content. He says:
For quite some time I’ve been interested in the idea of allowing you the ability to tinker around with my tracks - to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what’s there. I tried a few years ago to do this in shockwave with very limited results. After spending some quality time sitting in hotel rooms on a press tour, it dawned on me that the technology now exists and is already in the hands of some of you. I got to work experimenting and came up with something I think you’ll enjoy. What I’m giving you in this file is the actual multi-track audio session for “the hand that feeds” in GarageBand format. This is the entire thing bounced over from the actual Pro Tools session we recorded it into. I imported and converted the tracks into AppleLoop format so the size would be reasonable and the tempo flexible.
More anti-terrorism silliness
Barely a day goes by without another example of idiocy in the name of anti-terrorism. Today’s gem? Yet another item has been banned from US airplanes: cigarette lighters. According to ABC News:
The genesis for the ban was Richard Reid, who tried unsuccessfully to light explosives hidden in his shoes on a trans-Atlantic flight in 2002. He used matches. The sponsors of the ban, Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon, worried that a lighter might have worked in that kind of situation.
Maybe we should ban shoes. You can never be too careful.
All hail Tofu
I’ve been meaning to blog about Tofu for ages: it’s a little Mac OS X application that reformats documents into newspaper-style columns for easy on-screen reading, and it’s quickly become one of my favourite programs.
You can download Tofu, free, from here.
We’re doomed!
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, The Guardian lists ten worst-case scenarios ranging from exploding supervolcanoes to hyper-intelligent robots enslaving us all. I love this stuff.