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To be more accurate, the title should say, “How my FitBit may have landed me in the hospital.” But first, you’ll want to know what a FitBit is.

The FitBit Ultra is one of a couple of health-related gadgets from the company called FitBit. It’s a nifty little gadget that clips to your clothing or drops in your pocket. It keeps track of all your activity—walking, running, stair-climbing, and even sleeping. Then it communicates all this data automatically and wirelessly whenever you’re near your computer.

I’ve been trying to be more active lately, but found it difficult to stay motivated. When the alarm buzzes at 6:15am for my walk before work, it’s sometimes easier to roll over, especially when the kids have kept us awake all night. But playing some online games showed me that winning “achievements” and reaching goals were a good motivator for me and so when I saw the FitBit and it’s system of goals, badges, and accountability Tweets, I thought it would be just the thing.

Now the way it tracks your sleep is that you put a wristband on your non-dominant hand, slip the FitBit inside and set it to sleep mode. Then while you sleep it keeps track of your movements and how often you wake from deep sleep. Now, let’s put a pin in that and come back to it later.

Saturday morning, when I woke up, I noticed my forehead and right front scalp felt numb. I’ve woke up with a numb forehead before, which I attributed to sleeping face down on my pillow or arm, but it always came back within a couple of hours. But this time it didn’t. By early afternoon, I still had no sensation in my scalp and it hadn’t got any better (or worse).

Melanie and I decided that I should call the Nurse’s Helpline that our health insurer provides. She asked me a bunch of questions related to both heart attacks and stroke. (This would be the first of a dozen different times in the next 24 hours I would answer these same questions.) She couldn’t say it was nothing and being a very conservative service, she suggested I call the on-call doctor for my primary care physician. He asked the same questions and said I should go to the Urgent Care center for his practice, which he said would be open until 7pm. (It was about 3:30pm by the time I talked to him.)

So I drove off by myself to the Urgent Care center, which is about 25 minutes south of us. When I got there, it turned out that the place closes at 4pm on the weekends. Thanks, Doc. So off I drove to the local hospital’s emergency room (about 10 minutes north of our house).

After giving my situation to the triage nurse, they immediately brought me back in a wheelchair, which I thought excessive. I saw a nurse, then an attending physician. They sent me for a CAT scan that showed nothing. (Yes, ha ha, they found nothing in my head.) So with the numbness still unexplained they thought there was still a real chance of a stroke, and I should see a neurologist… who would only be available in the morning. Ugh.

At first I was told I would be moved from the ER to a room upstairs in the cardiac monitoring unit, so I was fitted with an IV line and EKG electrodes and hooked to a monitor. Then I proceeded to wait. (My brother came to sit with me for several hours that night, for which I’m grateful.) I tried to read, but was too distracted. So I watched some TV and then tried to sleep, which was nearly impossible with all the talking and beeps and alarms and hullabaloo, not to mention the needle in my arm and wires wrapped about me. In the morning the nurse asked me if I got some sleep. Hah! Who can sleep in a hospital?

I never did get moved to the room upstairs, which meant the electrodes were pointless after all. But the neurologist ordered an MRI. Ugh. I’d heard the horror stories about claustrophobia and they were right. They laid me down on the table, put a cage over my face that touched my nose, put on headphones for music (because of the noise), and told me I wouldn’t be able to move for 45 minutes. They then started sliding me into a tube that would put me about an inch away from the sides.

I’d never thought I was claustrophobic before, but I could feel the panic rising. Perhaps the lack of sleep and anxiety over my still unexplained condition that contributed to the feeling, but whatever it was, I was almost ready to push the eject button and demand to be pulled out when the technician stopped feeding me into the tube. It turns out my shoulders were too wide. Thank God for my stout build! They pulled me out of the device and told me that I’d have to use the larger MRI in the cancer center next door, which was only open during the week. (This was still Sunday.)

They sent me back out to wait for the neurologist to see me and this time I was sent to a private room. While I lay on the stretcher outside the room, waiting for them to make it ready, I was wondering if Melanie would be able to contact our pastor and have him bring me Communion, since I was missing Mass. Wouldn’t you know it, just a few minutes later I see a man walk by holding a gold pyx. I stopped him, by asking “Are you a Eucharistic minister?” He seemed a little surprised, but said Yes, so I said I would love to be able to receive Communion. The Lord provides.

Finally,I saw the neurologist and we had a good conversation. He did the same tests—touch your nose, follow my pen, squeeze my hand, although pull my finger was new (and smelly); Ba dum bump! I’ll be here all week, tip your waiter—and then suggested that I pinched a nerve. There’s a one nerve cluster that controls sensation in the area of the skull that went numb and we agreed I must have slept on it funny. Then he suggested I do a sleep apnea study and I mentioned how the FitBit measures my sleep pattern and started to explain it: “I wear the wristband on my non-dominant hand and put the device inside…”

He interrupted me and said that must be it! The nerve cluster begins in the forehead right about where I sleep with my head on right wrist at night. I must have slept on the FitBit where it pressed on the nerve ending all night, causing it to go dead.

No stroke. No aneurysm. No Bell’s palsy. No heart attack. No, I just spent about 24 hours in the hospital because I slept on my new gadget the wrong way.

Good grief.

So here I am, home again. At least I didn’t have to endure the MRI after all and now I’v e had a full workup of my heart’s health. And while I didn’t wear the FitBit last night, I think there’s a way to wear it at night without turning me into a numbskull. And even if I don’t wear it at night, it’s still useful for everything else it does.

But if you’re a FitBit Ultra owner who sleeps on his belly, beware of the possible consequences. Here’s hoping the feeling returns to my scalp because at this point it’s coming back, although slowly.

Better safe than sorry, though, right?

Photo by pixieclipx - http://flic.kr/p/u7Kty

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What a world they will live in. What amazing inventions they take and will take for granted as just the way things are.

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There’s been a lot of furor over the Obama administration’s implementation of universal health care, specifically the provision by Health and Human Services department regulation that every health insurance plan, without exemption for religious reasons, must include coverage for contraception for employees.

The Catholic Church (and I don’t mean just the bishops) has reacted very strongly against this intrusion on our religious liberty. Some have said that this is just the chickens coming home to roost; that it’s the result of years of backing down from conscience violating laws when the institution, but not individual Catholics, gets an exemption.

And then last week, Obama claimed to offer a compromise—one that didn’t include anyone but his own team in the “negotiations”—that wasn’t really a compromise at all. In fact, Nothing has changed:

 

But the rule HHS finalized on Friday actually put in place nothing like what the president announced. On the contrary, the final rule enacts the very same terms that HHS had announced on January 20th.

But I think there’s a wider issue here as well. Under the President’s plan, the health insurers for Catholic organizations would be required to provide contraception to employees at no cost. But not a word was said about government reimbursement. In fact, it looks to me that what the federal government has done has ordered an industry to provide a product at no cost, with no reimbursement.

What’s next? Doing away with food stamps and ordering grocery stores to provide food to the poor out of their own pocket? Telling local fuel oil providers to give heating oil to customers who can’t afford it? Free college educations for all?

This is essentially nationalization of industry. I’m no constitutional scholar, but it seems to me that this is unconstitutional. Why isn’t the insurance industry howling? Why haven’t they been fighting Obamacare tooth and nail? If this law was really going to reform healthcare in this country and make it less expensive, you’d expect they wouldn’t like that at all. Maybe they aren’t protesting because in the end they know that with the federal government being the bad guy—mandating premiums, limiting treatment options (except where it’s requiring them like this)—they’re going to end up with even fatter profits.

The HHS mandate is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s not really news for any of us who objected to four years of extreme policies from this White House. While I have great hope that come November we’ll have a new president, I think this thinking goes beyond one president and even one party. I have a hard time imagining politicians mustering the will to walk back all the Obama-era excesses. If so, we are on a very bad path indeed.

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(The memory of the Bible study is also near and dear to my heart because it’s where I truly started the courtship of Melanie. After our near-disastrous beginning, she started coming to Bible study with her roommate and she saw I wasn’t just an impetuous cad.)

We haven’t had anything like the Bible study in a long time. After we and our friends started getting married and having kids, getting a free night to have people over the house became more and more difficult. Then we had to up and move to the South Shore of Boston, at least an hour away from our old place (at best). I’ve been attending the Men’s Group in our parish, but it’s not the same.

However, Melanie just started something new, which brings back the old theological joy, while also making me appreciate all over again what a smart, intellectual woman I married. Someone (I forget who, sorry) linked to 2006 academic article by Dr. Scott Hahn published in the journal “Letter & Spirit”. It was entitled “The Authority of Mystery: The Biblical Theology of Pope Benedict XVI” (PDF). It looked intriguing so I downloaded it to my iPad, but I was having the hardest time reading it. Maybe it’s the lack of hard theological reading lately or just the many nights of sleep interrupted by wakeful children, but I couldn’t grasp it.

However, when I mentioned this, Melanie asked me to start reading it aloud to her. So I did as she cooked and cleaned in the kitchen, with punctuations from children seeking a drink or something. And what do you know? It worked. Suddenly I was grasping it. Not only that, but we start discussing it as we went, digging into the meaning, applying to our own situations or more broadly. As if by magic, we were back in our dating days, when we’d have long intellectual discussions while sitting in my car in front of Melanie’s house, as I was dropping her off from a date. Or standing by the door of my house after Bible study, her hand on the doorknob, for two hours.

A large part of our mutual attraction was indeed the intellectual curiosity and capacity of the other, but as we settled into the routine of family life, we seemed to have let that slide somewhat.

(While I’m shallow enough to admit that Melanie’s good looks were an equal part of my attraction to her, I’m also lucky that when Melanie considered me, looks were not as important as intellect.)

I’m reminded again what a blessing it is to have a wife with whom I share not just so many interests, but whose differences from me are also intriguing. I’m not a big poetry or “literature” fan (I like books just fine, but serious English Lit eludes me), but with Melanie I can begin to appreciate it. Likewise, Melanie has never been big on politics or science, but she likes to talk with me about them. And when it comes to faith and theology, that is a shared love we dig deep in together.

Some of the best husband-wife couples I know include two great intellects in them, which seems to spur both on to greater accomplishments. I’m thinking of Scot and Kimberly Hahn for one and Phil and Leila Lawler for another. Certainly, the life of the mind is a key element to a happy marriage, I think.

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The reality is that there are two requirements if your goal is to make money from your new media project: Work hard and be talented.

That’s it. Okay, I’ll expand a little.

It’s like the rest of life. There aren’t shortcuts. You can’t become a millionaire in four hours a week. Yes, I know about that one guy with the book and all that, but he’s a fluke. That’s not the real world.

If you want a lot of readers for your blog or listeners/viewers for your podcast, you have to work hard. Not work hard at artificial number inflation or stupid search-engine gimmicks or social media trawling. I mean work hard by writing a lot, by creating a lot.

You need to have something interesting to say. You need to be consistent in your publishing. Don’t be annoying. Don’t get anxious about numbers. If your stuff is worthy, people will find you.

But it’s not enough to spew words onto the page or sounds into a recorder. It has to be good. This is the tricky part. Quality is king; mere quantity isn’t enough.

Talent is innate. It’s God-given, although raw talent can’t do it on its own. Skill is learned and practiced. It must be honed. Combine skill and talent and you have a winning formula. Add in hard work and passion and you have success. This isn’t just true of success in new media. This is success in anything.

It seems so simple. So why all the other folderol of “the secret to success” being peddled everywhere? First, because nobody likes to work hard so if there’s a shortcut to be found, they want it. Second, because not everyone has talent. I’m sorry to break the news to everyone in the self-esteem generation, but it’s true. For many people, no matter how hard you work, how much time you spend working on skills, you just don’t have what it takes to be a success in this area.

So move on. Find your talent and succeed there. Your road to fulfillment leads elsewhere.

I’m no self-help guru and this isn’t just about new media. It also seems like commonsense to me, but judging by what I see a lot of people posting, it’s not.

Good luck.

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Living in Massachusetts, I can’t count on passersby having a handy handgun or knife to help us in a similar situation, which is why I purchased two Lifehammers, one for my car and one for Melanie’s. They are designed for the single purpose of getting you out of your car in an emergency. One end has a pointed steel hammer that punches readily through tempered auto glass while the other has a razor in a safety position for cutting through seat belts.

They sit right in the little map pocket by the driver’s door for at-hand access. I keep in mind that it’s not just for an accident that I may get into or Melanie, God forbid, but if like in the story above, we encounter others in similar need.

(Note: Although that’s an Amazon affiliate link, I don’t have any interest in Lifehammer other than wanting people to be safe when driving with their kids or to be able to help others at need.)

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The Tears of the Sun by S.M. Stirling
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The whole book had the whole “second book of a trilogy” feeling to it, where everything is being set up for resolution in another book. The previous two books in the series really advanced the story at a rapid pace, so Tears of the Sun was a bit jarring in how little it actually moved forward. In fact, it felt more like Stirling was going back to fill in various plot holes and tie up loose threads.

That’s not to say that there aren’t big things that happen. In fact, there are some very big events that occur. Very significant to the major characters. I would say that this is a book that explores the characters more than advances a particular plot.

One thing to keep in mind is that Stirling engages in his trademark non-linear storytelling, where the chapters jump around to focus on different people in different places, sometimes a year or more before or after the events of the previous chapter. It can be disconcerting if you’re not paying attention. By the eighth book in the Emberverse series, you better be paying attention to have got this far.

So “Tears of the Sun” may not be my favorite book of the series, but it’s still worthwhile, especially to see where Stirling is going and as the set up for what promises to be an epic conclusion to the tale, worthy of the massive buildup we’ve seen. I just hope we get some real answers to the overarching mysteries in the end.

View all my reviews at Goodreads.com

If you’d like to buy a copy of the book or other books by S.M. Stirling, I’d appreciate if you used this Amazon affiliate link.]]>

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To be clear, this is not a list of my favorite software of all time, just those that I either first acquired this year or were released this year. All of them are apps I continue to use on a regular basis and have become a part of my normal workflow.

Mac OS X Lion and the Mac App Store

Let’s start with the foundation. In 2011, Apple released the latest version of its Mac OS X operating system, 10.7 Lion. There were a number of improvements in Lion that I immediately adopted wherever I could use them, including full-screen applications; Resume, which re-opens the apps you last had open when you restart your Mac and re-opens the documents you last had open when you re-open your apps; Autosave and Versions, which only work in Apple’s own apps so far; Air Drop, that lets you transfer files wirelessly within your network; and so on. Of course, there were some “improvements” that weren’t so welcome, including Launchpad, Mission Control, and the removal of always-visible scroll bars. Among the biggest changes, though, was iCloud, which lets me sync all kinds of data among all my Macs and iOS devices. Likewise iTunes Match is so big, it might merit its own entry on this list. For $25 per year, I get high-quality versions of all my music for streaming and/or downloading on all my devices everywhere: home Mac, work Mac, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, and so on. I no longer have to remember to synchronize my Christmas music playlist to my phone in December—It’s just there already!

A related piece of software also makes my list this year: the new Mac App Store. For the first time, there is an authoritative place to find and download Mac software, both free and commercial. In fact, much of the software on this list can be found there. The best part of the Mac App Store is that you only need to buy a piece of software once and the license allows you to install it on all your Macs, In addition, all upgrades are done automatically through the App Store. No more wondering if you have the latest version and scouring sites like MacUpdate for updated software. On the other hand, the restrictions Apple imposes on software in the Mac App Store prevent many very useful utilities from being able to be included. However, there’s nothing preventing such software from being downloaded independently of the App Store and installed yourself, so it’s the best of both worlds as long as Apple doesn’t change that ability.

The rest of the list is in no particular order:

Spotify

It’s been a good year for music lovers on the Mac. Before Apple made iTunes Match available, earlier this year Mac users in the US finally got access to Spotify, a service that allows you to listen to any of the millions of songs in their library for free (with a small catch) and even create and share playlists of music with friends, on blogs, and on social networks. The small catch is that the free music is only available on Mac and Windows computers. In order to listen to music on portable devices like iPhones, iPod touches, iPads, Android phones and tablets and more, you have to buy a Spotify subscription for $10 per month. That $10 gives you access to their entire catalog wherever you go, which is nice, but if you stop paying you then lose access to all that music. I prefer to own my music, which is why I don’t have a Spotify subscription. (I buy from iTunes or Amazon MP3.)

Instead, I use Spotify as a preview for music I might want to buy and as a way to discover new music. If I hear of a new artist or song or album, I can listen in Spotify to full tracks, instead of the short previews you get in iTunes or Amazon MP3. You can also see what your Facebook friends are listening to on Spotify as well. One caveat is that like many free services, you have to endure occasional ads. These short audio ads play every fourth song or so.

Piezo

Sticking with our audio theme for a moment, a new app from one of the best Mac software developers around just came out and has already made my list. Piezo by Rogue Amoeba is a simple but elegant audio recording app, so simple in fact that it has two buttons. First, you select your source, whether it’s the Mac’s microphone or one of your apps like the DVD player or QuickTime Player or Spotify. (You might see the implications of this ability right there.) Second, hit record in Piezo and play in the source. Then when it’s done, hit the record button again and you now have a file on your computer. If you want a little more control, you can change what kind of recording it makes, but that’s about all. Now if you have more serious needs like timed recordings or autostart and stop or filters, then you’ll likely want Piezo’s more capable (and more expensive) cousin, Audio Hijack Pro.

Fantastical

On a more productive level, Fantastical from Flexibits has become invaluable for entering and tracking calendar events. The program lives in your menu bar and when it’s called, you start typing your new calendar event in natural language: “Meeting with Joe at Panera on Saturday at 10am.” Fantastical then parses your words and puts each piece in the correct box so that you just have to hit enter and — BAM! — you have a new entry in your calendar. Fantastical supports both iCal and BusyCal (my preferred calendar software) and even shows you a preview of your calendar events for the next couple of days or other period.

Moom

This is a tiny piece of software, but oh, so practical. Moom by Many Tricks hardly has any visible footprint on your Mac until you hover, but don’t click, your cursor over the green zoom button in the window controls of any window on your Mac. A small translucent window pops up that allows you to both move and change the size of the current window. This is especially useful when you have multiple windows open that you want to place so that you can see more than one or copy and paste or something like that. You can either click on one of the preset positions/sizes or choose your own by clicking and dragging over the grid. It may seem a bit pricy at $5 for what it does, but use it for a few days and you’ll begin to think it’s a bargain.

Yoink

Yoink (where do they come up with these names?) from Eternal Storms is another one-trick pony, but it’s a useful trick. It’s a temporary holding place for files or folders that you’re moving from one place to another. On Windows, you can copy a group of files and paste them elsewhere, but on Mac OS X, you have to drag them, which can be a pain as you navigate several layers of folders while trying not to let go out of the mouse button. With Yoink, you drag the file(s) to the translucent Yoink pad that pops up as soon as you start dragging. Then, once you’ve got the destination folder open, drag them from the Yoink landing pad.

This is much like a particularly useful feature of the massive Finder replacement app, Path Finder, which I used to use but eventually gave up on because it was a bit unwieldy and taxing on the system. Yoink yoinks this nice feature out of Path Finder and makes it stand alone.

ScreenFloat

Also from Eternal Storms is my next pick, ScreenFloat. Often when I’m learning a new Photoshop or web design skill, I follow along with a tutorial I’ve found online. Unfortunately, I will find myself having to keep swapping between programs because their windows are overlapping and Moom won’t help because I need the windows to stay large for some reason. That’s where ScreenFloat comes in. With it I can take screen shots of windows or parts of windows and then have those shots float over everything else. It’s especially useful, for example, with Photoshop dialogs where I have to set many different values to accomplish a particular effect. You can have one or many shots floating at once and the program can store them in collections (say related to a particular task) or smart collections where they are group by rule-based criteria.

Marked

Another small and focused app (detecting a theme?) is Marked from Brett Terpstra. I do most of my writing in TextMate, a powerful text editor, using a markup language called Markdown. Rather than writing and editing everything in HTML, which leaves all kinds of difficult-to-read code and tags to wade through, I use Markdown to write and edit and then when I’m done, I use a command in TextMate to convert to HTML. Thus this …

![Marked](http://cl.ly/CjtE/Marked.jpg “Marked”)Another small and focused app (detecting a theme?) is [Marked](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/marked/id448925439?mt=12) from [Brett Terpstra](http://markedapp.com/). I do most of my writing in [TextMate](http://macromates.com/), a powerful text editor, using a markup language called [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/). Rather than writing and editing everything in HTML, which leaves all kinds of difficult-to-read code and tags to wade through, I use Markdown to write and edit and then when I’m done, I use a command in TextMate to convert to HTML.


… becomes …

<p><img src=“http://cl.ly/CjtE/Marked.jpg” alt=“Marked” title=“Marked” /> Another small and focused app (detecting a theme?) is <a href=“http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/marked/id448925439?mt=12”>Marked</a> from <a href=“http://markedapp.com/”>Brett Terpstra</a>. I do most of my writing in <a href=“http://macromates.com/”>TextMate</a>, a powerful text editor, using a markup language called <a href=“http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/”>Markdown</a>. Rather than writing and editing everything in HTML, which leaves all kinds of difficult-to-read code and tags to wade through, I use Markdown to write and edit and then when I&#8217;m done, I use a command in TextMate to convert to HTML.</p>


However, it’s sometimes useful to preview what I’m writing to be sure it’s going to look right. I could convert back and forth between Markdown and HTML and then open it in a browser, but that’s cumbersome. TextMate has a built in previewer, but Marked is better. For one thing, it updates in real-time every time I save my document. For another, I can set up multiple custom CSS stylesheets so that the preview looks like the eventual web page it will post to.

Reeder

The final entrant on this list is Reeder from Silvio Rizzi. I’ve used RSS readers for years, most faithfully Netnewswire, which in its later incarnation synchronized with Google Reader.

But once I got an iPad, I began using Reeder for iPad, which is the best implementation of an RSS reader that takes advantage of the unique properties of multitouch-based computing. It’s a smooth and intuitive process. So when Reeder for the Mac came out, I wanted to see if that same intuitiveness translated to the Mac, whose own strengths are somewhat different from the iPad. And it did.

The process of moving through feeds and entries and folders is just so easy as is the integration with external services like Instapaper and Evernote and social networks. It’s also been optimized for OS X Lion’s multitouch gestures and full-screen view. And the synchronizing with Google Reader is fast and easy. Well, worth the price.

So that’s my list. I’ve installed other applications and utilities this year, some I continue to use and others that have fallen by the wayside, but these are the standouts. I look forward to seeing what comes next year, but judging by this list, one thing’s for sure: a lot of it will be coming through the Mac App Store.

So what are your favorite Mac apps that came out in 2011?

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