Brace yourself: the after-heal edition

So it's been a little over 2 weeks since I injured my knee and right now, I'm still in a brace but walking 95% normal. There's a very, very slight limp in my steps but I'm working on it by walking around more. I was told to do exercises to strengthen my muscles but I find walking itself to be pretty damn good (enough). :)

With all this (sit) down time, I've been banging away at my computer getting projects out of my to do list. By the way, I'm seriously loving my Remember the milk Pro account. The downside is that the USB port of my phone has screwed up so it can only charge the battery but not transfer data and having this silly knee of mine means it's hard for me to take care of its warranty. Not to mention I'm off to the US on 19th morning so if they take my mobile phone in for repair or checking, I'm quite screwed. So it'll have to wait till I return. Sigh. That's the one downer of my injured knee, a lot of things are "do it when I can...... later". As you may know, I really like to get things done and I'm not one to procrastinate. Not because I'm a disciplined guy, but my to do list system is like a mean woman always nagging at me to finish what I wanted to get done.

I formatted my macbook and cleaned it up. Inside and outside. I researched online and found that many people had good experiences wiping their laptop with rubbing alcohol and soft cloth, so I went and did it and boy does it feel different. I took it one step further and cleaned my super dirty mouse and keyboard on my desktop. Boy, my keyboard feels so smooth now it's crazy! Not to mention my mouse is no longer sticky (no, no dirty thoughts :P).

I've also been tweaking my macbook a lot and came across some cool tools like GeekTools and DateLine. I also went and installed Litestep on my PC and so far things are working great! Sure it takes a little getting used to it, but it sure makes my system feel.... well cleaner.

On a different note, Hong Kong got hit by a typhoon last night, it was pretty intense and people got to miss a bit of work this morning due to the conditions but everything seems to be back on track now. So I'm hoping nothing happened to my appointment with the physiotherapist today. It's 1:21pm now and I got an hour before my appointment so I'll ring them up at 2pm to double check. Getting a bit hungry, could use some food. Hm.

The few benefits I got from having an injured knee is that it forces me to stay in one place for a while. I get to focus on what I'm doing because the distractions are only on-screen. Sure I still have a lot of interruptions but I've figured out a better way to do things so I avoid the "Oh my goodness, I've got new email, I'm so curious I have to stop everything I'm doing to check it out" problem I used to have because with the Better Gmail extension for Firefox, my Favicon used to tell me if there were any new emails in my inbox. Whenever I saw that update, I'd get excited and stop what I'm doing to check it out. This used to totally screw me up because sometimes I'd get some long email that I'd end up taking care of, then afterwards wonder what I was doing before this! Yikes. So now I have an email notifier that checks my email every 15 minutes and informs me of any new messages. It gives me a short snippet of the email which allows me to skim through them quickly. I finally can sit and do my work. Interruption-less. Not free, just less.

As much as I feel my inability to do a lot of things now an annoyance, in some ways, being disabled has its benefits, it makes you enjoy the world slowly, like forcing yourself to walk slower and just notice things. One thing I noticed, not surprisingly, was how fast I actually walk normally. It sure has hell is humbling when you can't do that simple task. So the next time you get fed up with say traffic jams, at least remind yourself, you have the option of walking fast to beat this jam. It really sucks having to take taxis everywhere here. I'm used to getting there myself. And so is my wallet. Oh well. See you in 10 days from the US (fingers crossed I get some Internet connectivity while I'm there!).