Vic's Busted Finger Status

Just went over the whole site, modifying over 180 pages, which made my original busted finger status report roll off of the BLOG, which only holds the latest 50 changes to the website. Since I can’t type worth squat until the splint comes off, I put finishing the Byzantine 4th Crusade page on the back burner in favor of work I could do primarily using the mouse. Cut-and-paste I can still do quickly; serious typing is just extremely frustrating.

Trying to type with the two inside fingers of my left hand tightly splinted together has been a true lesson in humility. It also revealed an important relationship between my finger tips and my brain, if I may speak as one who is used to typing very fast.

When I place my fingers on the “home keys,” I now know, the “memory” of where all the home keys and all the rest of the keys within reach of each finger are, resides less in my brain than in my finger tips. Taking two fingers out of the process makes me have to look at the keyboard rather than the screen, just to find the right keys. I’m used to hitting up around 50 or 60 words per minute, and this is just making me crazy.

Anyway, I’ll include the last BLOG entries that rolled off due to all my cut-and-paste entries right here, and then I’ll continue on what I plan do do next.

Jan 20, 2009, Stupid Vic's busted fingers.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009, Notice: Due to unforeseen circumstances, work on this site will slow down for quite a while.

Sunday after Mass I ran the snow blower to clear the driveway. At the first snow clog-up, I quickly and stupidly cleared the snow clog with my left hand while still holding the clutch with my right hand, and the hard rubber blades did a number on my first three fingers, getting the middle one really good. After the pain subsided to what I thought was a bearable level, I finished the driveway and tried to forget it. By Monday morning, I could not ignore it. It hurt like thunder, so I went to the local Urgent Care. X-rays showed two broken bones. My ring finger was broken but “in place” with no need to be reset. But my middle finger was broken really bad and needed orthopedic attention.

Luckily, because I live in America, I got an appointment for 2:30 PM that day. (If I lived in Canada or England I would have been lucky indeed if I could get an orthopedic surgeon appointment for a date that was within two years from now.) With a local anesthetic the good doctor set the bone, and immobilized the two inside fingers of my left hand, splinting them together. Which is devastating to my typing speed. I can still drive, but my typing has turned into looking-at-the-keyboard, hunt-and-peck typing, which just kills me. I will see the orthopedic surgeon again next Monday, and probably weekly until the splint comes off permanently.

Wives, each time you see your husband moving toward the snow blower, or lawn mower, or anything with moving mechanical parts, give him a hard kick in the butt as a gentler and kinder reminder to keep his hands the hell out of the mechanism.

Jan 21, 2009, Working with the Mouse

Since my splinted-up left hand precludes serious typing, I'm postponing finishing the Byzantine 4th Crusade page in favor of work that I can do largely with the mouse or track-ball rather than the keyboard. All “reference” material has been previously keyed into ad text, and I'm re-doing all page "reference" links because I'm eliminating all ads. Which means a new reference page. Previously typed ad copy can now be pasted into the new ref page. (The ads don't make me any money anyway.) Cut-and-paste work I can still do quickly, with minimal typing. A new and simpler reference page is about ready, and I will be updating all site pages with the new reference page link, among other things.

Regards,

Vic

So there you have it.

I just thank God we don’t have socialized medicine here yet, and I was able to get a broken bone properly set and cared for before I suffered either permanent deformity or gangrene.

The changes I’ve just done were long overdue. The Amazon picture-ads were difficult to keep updated, took up a lot of space, caused some of you to experience long download times, and were not really making enough money to be worth the trouble of maintaining them. So, I built the new Reference Material page and replaced the old References link on every page with the new one. All of the listed books are here in my office. It should be much easier to update the list from time to time as needed for any new WebPages.

While I was at it, I included a unique ADD COMMENT form at the bottom of each individual webpage and got rid of the private CONTACT ME link. There were a couple of reasons for eliminating the private contact capability.

First, for reasons that escape me, when I gave you a choice between private and public responses to pages, the private option was taken something like 98% of the time. It got to the point where I had a blue million individual and unrelated private email conversations going simultaneously, and many of them were quite long and involved. I just can’t keep up with them any more. During my over-the-road year-plus of not being able to even get on-line very often, the questions just stacked up to an unmanageable level.

Second, of the few times any of you took the Public response option, use of the linked-to one-size-fits-all generic comment form I had provided always precluded any reference by you to what webpage you were on, any thread-name or any logical beginning point for me to know what you were dialoging about.

For the future, it will be a number of weeks before the splint comes off and I can type comfortably enough to write, which, in and of itself, for me, demands its own form of concentration that is best not distracted and disrupted by temporary keyboard disabilities. In the meantime, I don’t at this moment know what I’ll work on.

I (or rather the trucking company I work for) transport auto parts, and the auto industry is currently in near shut-down mode, which is why I’ve had so much time to work on this lately. Hopefully business will pick up soon, or I will get a positive response from one or another trucking enterprise I’ve applied at. Hauling dirt, maybe. Dirt never seems to have a slow season.

Byzantine 4th Crusade needs to be finished. After that, I hope to kill two birds with one stone. Bird number one: The huge backlog of questions and un-responded-to dialogs from the private responses. Bird number two: The current Socialist administration and Congress, and the deepening recession are driving me to distraction.

My planned method for dealing with these two birds involves a new Argument sort of heading webpage leading to a series of pro and/or con individual argument webpages, the topics of which might shed light on unanswered dialogs, and perhaps illuminate some socio-economic / religious-economic issues. And maybe there will be some purely religious and some purely political argument pages. If I owe you a response or an answer to some old private email correspondence, please be patient and see if one of these argument / position pages doesn’t hit your point.

In the meantime, keep watching the GDP. Remember, four straight quarters of flat or negative GDP growth moves our economic condition definition from recession to depression. I’ll say it again: government is not the solution to this problem. Government is the problem. Government cannot make money, it can only spend it. The only source of government income is taxes. Of course, our government could just go wild printing money, causing wild inflation. Then it may be as in pre-war Germany, when it took a bushel full of marks to buy a loaf of bread.

His will be done.

Regards,

Poor Vic

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