Ouch!

Today was not a good day for the ol' body. It was so bad of a day that I ended up in the hospital for four hours!

I prepped myself this morning for a wonderful game of basketball today. Lately, I've been in the mood to play lots of ball. Ive been doing over lunchtime to play with a bunch of staff members at my place of work in some pickup games. I pretty much stink at basketball, but I've gotten to a point where I can play a half decent game, setup some screen and rolls and rebound well. It was a fun way to exercise. I was really looking forward to today.

So we start - the very first play on D I do a good job against a dribble penetrator and we get the ball. I then gobble up a rebound and then turn it over after trying to dribble (I'm not graceful enough for ball handling apparently). Then back on defense the fellow I'm guarding has the ball and is working underneath the hoop. I jump up to block his shot and then it happened... I landed on my right toes.

You see the human foot was designed to landed the balls of your feet or the heel. When you land on your toes on one foot, the ankle pretty much contorts off to one side or the other and a sprain occurs. In my case, at least a sprain, a broken tibia, and possibly some torn ligaments. I'll find out more later after I visit an orthopedic doctor. But boy did it hurt. I let out a nice explicative for the rest of the gym to hear immediately after it happened. Within 30 minutes, although I could walk on it, my foot had swollen to the size of a baseball. So it was off to the emergency room I go. For my effort I got to talk with some cute nurses, receive some X-Rays and prescription for vicodin, which I haven't filled (yet).

And I lay here now in my bed, ice on my ankle and pretty much confined to remain stationary for at least a week and possibly 6 weeks depending upon how badly I've hurt myself. It really stinks, because I was enjoying basketball and I was getting into a great routine with lifting weights. Now I'm on the injured reserve.

Clinton Curitis - Election Fraud Whistle Blower

I happened across this video on Google Videos (it was actually linked from digg:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5173816754727816515

For anyone who isn't aware of the risks associated with electronic voting machines, I implore you to watch this. This is a testimony from Clint Curtis, formerly an employee of Yang Enterprises who was a developer for electronic voting machines and is of him testifying in front of what looks to be the Florida state Congress. He pretty much reveals how easy it would be a for a person seeking (re)election to a public office to rig the vote using voting machines. The most important point he makes is that such attempted to fraud could be negated by using a paper trail of votes.

Of course, you should probably take what Clinton says with a grain of salt. He did end up running against the very man he accused of election fraud, Tom Feeney.

I'm Dreaming of a White February 1st

Yup, the white stuff fell from the sky today in droves. Well, somewhat in droves at least given I live in the mid-south. It was enough snow to cover the ground, build up on my windshield, to encourage all of the college kids to go sledding down a hill on whatever piece of cardboard they could find... and to cancel work! Unfortunately, I didn't get that last message until I rolled up at 7:45 this morning. So I stuck around till lunchtime, mostly reading documentation and spent probably an hour catching up on the latest happenings digg/slashdot/del.icio.us. I then decommissioned my 2nd workstation and gave myself two monitors to work from on my primary development machine, so now I get see what life is like with double the pixels to work with.

By the time I finished this, I broke away to the coffee shop for a change of scenery, a few cups of decaf (I switched... breaking the addiction)) and a nice environment to hack on my thesis a bit. I had to throw together some scripts today that would allow me to run some local tests on my full dataset, so that took a decent amount of time. I read and took notes on another paper and submitted an abstract for the paper I am currently writing to an Artificial Intelligence conference.

As it approached 5 PM, I decided it was time I finally got that oil change in my car that was putting off. So I get that taken care of and low and behold they have wireless access in the car maintenance shop I was in. So I fired up the 'ol lap warmer and hacked on generating some cluster predictions. And after leaving I find myself sitting in my red chair running those predictions and listening to my Grand National on Pandora.

So all in all, a relaxing day and productive today - rarely are those two combined. Perhaps it was the snow. I guess I'll know by tomorrow since it will surely all be gone!