Month: December 2014

You'd think that by now my head would be crammed full enough and there wouldn't be much more room left to learn even more stuff. Yet as this fine and shining pile of books keeps staring at me, I cannot resist sawing through even more interesting books in order to explore more complicated jungles of thought.

• Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby
• The Well-Grounded Rubyist
• RestFul Web APIs
• Building Web Apps with Ember.js
• Ember.js in Action
• Agle Web Development with Rails 4
• Programming in Lua
• Effective Ruby
• Eloquent Ruby
• Ruby Under a Microscope
• Continuous Delivery

These should keep me busy for some time to come, but it being fun reading I think I'll saw through them in no time. Eleven is my lucky number anyway.

The decision will certainly become a bureaucratic one made by management folks who don't care about the low-level details. So which one will it be?

• Ember.js – "Framework for Creating Ambitious Web Applications", or
• AngularJS – "Superheroic JavaScript MVW Framework"

So if these so-called enterprise companies have to undergo a big change anyway, and they have to choose between something totally new (Ember) or something new but kind of related to a previous version (Angular), then the choice seems completely predictable though perhaps not the most logical.

Who cares if the next version of Angular is a complete rewrite, oh dear.

Ember will have to appeal to the rest of the world, all those early adopters, starters, and other small to medium sized companies ready to make the transition and start with a clean slate.

For me Angular is merely a tool to build web frameworks (although they claim otherwise), whereas Ember is truly a web framework in itself. I'm choosing to go the Ember way despite the somewhat steep learning curve, never could get into Angular anyway.

The following quote has been borrowed from the Ember Core Concepts section, and explains the essence of this fine framework.

"Ember.js is designed to help developers build ambitiously large web applications that are competitive with native apps. Doing so requires both new tools and a new vocabulary of concepts. We've spent a lot of time borrowing ideas pioneered by native application frameworks like Cocoa and Smalltalk.

However, it's important to remember what makes the web special. Many people think that something is a web application because it uses technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In reality, these are just implementation details.

Instead, the web derives its power from the ability to bookmark and share URLs. URLs are the key feature that give web applications superior shareability and collaboration. Today, most JavaScript frameworks treat the URL as an afterthought, instead of the primary reason for the web's success.

Ember.js, therefore, marries the tools and concepts of native GUI frameworks with support for the feature that makes the web so powerful: the URL."

Over a period of nearly six months, consisting of several visits to the family doctor, some X-rays followed by more tests and an MRI scan, the results are finally official.

When I arrived at the doctor's office, he smiled and asked me if I was nervous. I answered no, but I was a bit afraid that after so much research they hadn't found anything. That perhaps it was all in my mind.

Don't worry he said, we definitely found something. That's when I started to get nervous. In the back of my mind, I feared that my golfing career was over. I'd have to relearn the sport from a wheelchair, and it would be frustrating.

Turns out that the diagnosis is a so-called a bone bruise. Like a normal bruise to the skin which turns black and blue, but this takes place inside of the bone tissue.

This is exactly what it looked like in the scan picture.

He showed me the pictures of the MRI scan, and indeed I could perceive quite clearly a whitish blob. Quite large I would say, as the pain was pretty much localized to a smaller almost pinpoint area. Unlike a normal skin bruise, this type of bruising is more painful and takes much longer to heal, up to six months or even a year. Excess fluid fills up within the bone tissue, and the body has to work extra hard drying to dissolve and remove this minor blood spill.

So I guess that's positive news. Just have to be patient and let nature take its normal course of healing slowly but surely. Now that it's winter, I do not need to play that much golf, maybe just hit balls on the driving range once in awhile and putt around. Trying to swing a club from a wheelchair would not have been easy.

I've been staring at this screen all day, it was supposed to be my day off. Trying to learn new stuff is really addictive sometimes. Especially when it's cold and raining outside, and I cannot play any golf.

Punish them all for they speak too much
Hate the world for what it did to us
Will I ever see heaven again?

– Laura Marling

Every generation has it's own collection of fashionable sayings which tend to be overused. Through this overuse, their scope gets expanded to include a wide range of meaning, way beyond the initial definition.

I cannot count the number of times a day I hear people repeating the words "cool" and "awesome", as if the world around us is an absolutely amazing place. Awesome.

In my days we used to say "groovy" and "neat" once in awhile as our words of choice. Repeat: once in awhile, not all of the time like now. Some people I know say "cool" at least a hundred times an hour. I don't think I ever used "groovy" more than a few times in a whole day.

I'm sure that my parents couldn't figure it out although my peers and I were connected by these sayings. Cool.

In the same vein, I can kind of figure out what "cool" means, because it's similar to how "groovy" sounds. However, "awesome" is way off the board to me and too easily exaggerated these days.

Here, I brought you some donuts for breakfast. Awesome. Let's sit down together and discuss things in more detail. Cool.

I wonder what kind of newfangled lingo the next generation will come up with in order to embellish life's meanings even more.

This morning I had my appointment at Medinova Clinic which specializes in knee injuries in addition to a whole plethora of other sport-related problems.

They took several x-rays of my left knee: front, back, lying down, standing up, bent slightly. I wasn't that nervous until the female assistant asked me if I had been operated on before. Fortunately Marlies was there at my side and gave me comfort afterwards while we sat in the waiting room.

After nearly an hour, the orthopedic surgeon asked me into his office. He seemed like a nice guy and wanted to speak English to me (he thought I came from the UK). Turns out that there's 0.0% trace (nul comma nul) of any wear and tear. He showed me the x-rays and my bones looked perfectly sharp and smoothly formed, as if they had been created by a loving and perfect God only minutes before. What a relief.

He felt around my knee and made me move it around in various directions. Does this hurt? And this? How about if I do this? He was very quick and figured it out in no time. I think he had a very strong suspicion but was careful to give me the facts before there was proof.

Next step is to get an MRI scan done since the x-rays had not shown anything visible. It is more than likely an issue with the outside of my meniscus, some slight injury there which refuses to recover fully.

So what's the prognosis? The doctor couldn't say and needed more data from the scan. Probably arthroscopic surgery to repair the meniscus if possible. Something loose, a minute tear, who knows what.

This is what Diclofenac looks like

For the time being, my daily dosage of Diclofenac will keep me going. It's a miracle drug which nearly kills off all pain completely.

Next week the MRI scan and the week after that the doctor's conclusion. Fortunately it's winter and freezing cold, so if I need to take a break from golf for a couple weeks it won't be such a sacrifice.

At least that is what the display in my car is telling me, although it feels much colder than that outside. Fortunately when I turn on the heater full blast, my car warms up within five minutes.