Today is (was?) International ME/CFS Awareness Day, and the Sock It 2 ME/CFS project is officially launched. Hoping to do for ME/CFS sufferers, research budgets and families what the AIDS quilt did for HIV, the “sock project” has the potential to open a lot of eyes.

Some quick info from the site:

What is Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, as it’s known in the US, is a debilitating disease which has been classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an organic, infectious neuro-immune disorder since 1969.  It can occur in both epidemic and sporadic forms; over 60 outbreaks of ME/CFS have been recorded worldwide since 1934.

ME/CFS …

• causes more functional impairment than diabetes, heart failure or kidney disease.
• creates a level of disability comparable to MS, chemotherapy or the final stages of AIDS.
• strikes an estimated 17 to 20 million worldwide, impairing function and shortening lives.
• like AIDS in the early days, gets inadequate funding due to widespread misunderstanding.

has only recently gained notice in blood banks internationally as an infectious disease concern.

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I don’t usually talk much about my day-to-day life here, but that doesn’t mean I never do. This is one of those times. If you just want more tech talk check out the end of this post. The rest is all me whinging anyway. ;)

I need a break. A real break. I mean, I am technically on a break right now from school but it doesn’t really feel that way. I finished out my first year of school a couple weeks ago (26 years after graduating from high school, no less) and I thought “wow, I have an entire month that I can use to rest, catch up on some personal stuff, maybe clean out the garage ….” Unfortunately it is not turning out that way.

Instead I am writing this at 5:54 in the morning as this has been the first chance I have had to pay any attention at all to the blog. So what has been keeping me busy? Well, first, there is work. I did use a little of what would have been study time to modify the script I use to generate weekly work reports from Trac so that it now shows the amount of change for hours on each ticket (which is set in a “custom” field). And holy cow, I put in 58.5 hours last week. At least 8 of that doesn’t really count, though. I messed my back up and spent some time trying to work while under the influence of cyclobenzaprine which means that I wrote, scrapped and rewrote one class method at least 6 times before finally giving up. (Programming and drugs that make you stupid don’t mix!)

Aside from work I have been putting some time into a project for a non-profit that is kicking off on May 12th. I’m not allowed to say too much about it ahead of launch, but I can say that it is about raising awareness about ME/CFS and how badly it has been mismanaged and patients marginalized for the past 25 years.

Finally, I upgraded the WordPress plugin Shorten2Ping which I will continue to pimp as long as it keeps working so well. Of course I like my post tweets to have some hashtag love, so I do a little editing of the shorten2ping.php.

Here is a diff:

--- shorten2ping/shorten2ping.php       2010-04-12 10:22:34.000000000 -0700
+++ shorten2ping.mine/shorten2ping.php  2010-04-19 06:47:58.000000000 -0700
@@ -119,6 +119,15 @@
     $post_url = get_permalink($post_id);
     $post_title = strip_tags($post->post_title);

+               // add some tag bits here
+               $tags = wp_get_post_tags($post_id);
+               $my_tag_list = '';
+               if (is_array($tags)) {
+                       foreach ($tags as $j=>$tag) {
+                               $my_tag_list .= '#'.$tag->slug.' ';
+                       }
+               }
+
     $short_url_exists = get_post_meta($post_id, 'short_url', true);

              if (empty($short_url_exists)) {
@@ -205,9 +214,19 @@

             //get message from settings and process title and link
             $message = $s2p_options['message'];
+                                               $message_bare_char_count = strlen(str_replace(array('[title]','[link]','[tags]'), '', $message));
+                                               $title_count = strlen($post_title);
+                                               $link_count = strlen($short_url);
+                                               $tag_count = strlen($my_tag_list);
+                                               $over = $message_bare_count + $title_count + $link_count + $tag_count - 140;
+                                               if ($over > 0 && $over <= $post_title/2) {
+                                                       // if the overage is more than half the post title then skip it and let tags get truncated
+                                                       $post_title = substr($post_title, 0, $title_count - $over);
+                                               }
             $message = str_replace('[title]', $post_title, $message);
                              $message = str_replace('[link]', $short_url, $message);
-
+                                               $message = str_replace('[tags]', $my_tag_list, $message);
+
             if ($s2p_options['ping_service'] == 'pingfm'){

                send_pingfm($pingfm_user_key,$post_id,$message);

(You can download the diff as well.)

Ooops! Draft Saved at 6:23:27 am. And it is now 8:10, and this would still be a draft if I wasn’t closing browser tabs.

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Just a short post to update all my regular readers out there (yes, both of you) that I start my new job next Wednesday and I started school full-time today. Yes, today. I have started in the BS – IT Security Emphasis program at Western Governor’s University. I don’t have a projected finish date yet, but their competency-based model means that I can finish my degree much faster than with a standard program. (Word from one of the admissions counselors is that IT professionals going in to the IT program tend to finish their Bachelor in around 2 years.)

Although I shouldn’t have to remind anyone I will: everything I say (well, type) here is my opinion and does not reflect the views or opinions of my employer or the school which I attend. With that said I have only one small grievance about my first day at WGU: every link in the student portal has a target of _blank or uses a js call to open a new window. Grrrr. My opinion: bad design idea.

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Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time knows I don’t usually talk about work except to share things that I have learned or discovered while doing said work. This post, however, is a break from that tradition, as I am no longer employed. I was laid off in the latest round of RIF (reduction in force, a more polite way of saying downsized). I am back in the market and finding that there are a few things that make it tricky. As I pointed out in this post none of the code I have worked on recently belongs to me.

Which means that for those who desire code samples I need to do one of three things: either hand over old or unfinished code, write something entirely new, or get permission from my previous employer to share samples of some of the work where I was the only (or at least principal) developer. While the first is not appealing and the second will be ok once I have to time actually build something new or finish something I started back when, the third would be the simplest, at least if I felt that I would get the ok. But seeing how the last day went, I am not so sure. I walked some of the remaining developers through the code and documentation for a project I had headed up, and was on hand to put out fires. I was expecting to be answering questions right up to 5:00 PM. But at 3:30 PM my email account was disabled and shortly after that my Jabber account. While that was not unexpected, the lack of a final message from any of my current bosses was. No thanks, no sorry about the lay off, no good luck, nothing. I did get the farewells, sorry and thanks for everything you’ve done (as well a written LinkedIn reccomendation) from my former boss last week, and I appreciate that.

I don’t know, maybe I am just being overly sensitive. Or maybe I just expect too much from people. But would it really have been that hard to send an email to all the departing employees? Meh. I’ll get over it.

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While it was nice to have hosting during the move, I really do prefer having my server available at hand. And once again it is – after canceling the hosting and updating my DNS information this site and talkingfox.com are again hosted from my home office.

For future reference: SSH and command line access beats the crap out of cPanel any day.

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I am taking a few minutes before my work day officially starts to write this. We are hitting the road tomorrow, for our move to Olympia. There are certainly things I will miss about Alaska, like the ravens, the aurora, the endless summer days, the sheer vast beauty of the place… There are a few things I won’t miss though, like the smell during break-up, the short winter days, the bitter cold (I don’t need to do another interior winter to know that -50F is no fun), snow (no really, I’ve had my share, Washington state could outlaw it for all I care at this point.)

Anyhow, the move (as I said) happens tomorrow and we will be on the road for several days. The last couple times I drove the ALCAN I did it in 3 days or less. This time we are taking our time, seeing a few things along the way and generally trying to be sane about it. As I find wireless on the way I will update twitter so those who care can see where we are.

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As we start the new year I find that I am sadly fallen behind on things like this blog, social networking, reading and news aggregation, and generally anything unrelated to work or the daily functioning of the household. In other words, I have been working too much and relaxing too little. Well, that will have to change. Of course, that means I have to get back into a routine, which seems to be difficult when making major changes, such as, oh, starting a new job in a new town.

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