About 4 years ago in Tahoe I remember going down a Black at the end of a fun day.

I remember doing interlaced C turns: right, left, right, left: this is great! Then the slope got steeper, and I got Zoolandered turning back to the right -- leaning back, the board didn't feel right: "Come on, start cutting into the snow..." No luck, I was skipping along the top of some ice, leaning back farther, picking up speed... "Come on!"

I stopped leaning back, the board cut back to the left, caught, and -- FWOOM -- I was airborne. The steep slope fell away from me as I continued straight out into the air. I was in the air long enough to think about:

1. Arthur Dent flying techniques.
2. That my arms were both straight out like wings.

My last thought was "you might want to bring those arms in for landing" before slamming into the ground.

That was the first time I bruised a rib. Last week I got to go to Squaw for a ski trip, and it was great.

I'm not sure which fall borked my ribs this time, but something's definitely wrong with them today. I didn't experience any pain during the trip, but in the 5 days since returning: the pain has slowly increased every night.

Last night if I moved my right side at all, I woke up gritting my teeth and bearing down.

Enough to get up and do an Internet search on "bruised rib treatment." Apparently there have been no medical breakthroughs since the first time I hurt my ribs -- the only thing that heals them is "time." The internet tells me I've got about 3-4 weeks of this to go through before recovering. I guess that means last night wasn't the pain climax I was hoping it would be.

Still, the Ski Trip was worth it. So, each time I feel the pain (that's basically every inhale) -- I try to think of something pleasant from the trip. Maybe eventually it will work.

After Comcast stopped giving me a reasonable deal on their internet about 6 months ago, I switched to AT&T's DSL Direct Basic plan.

AT&T advertised the service as offering 768kb/s down, but I guess AT&T has forgotten how to count that low... I was getting over 2Mb/s in practice:

Sure, its graded an "F" -- but that was "f"ast enough for just about everything I use the internet for (OnLive did deny my signup request though). Netflix, SSH Shells, and multi-player iPad games seemed to work just fine.

AT&T representatives have been calling semi-weekly to push me into a uVerse upgrade. "All your neighbors are doing it" (when they're not in LockUp for drug dealing?). Every time I've said "No thanks; I'm happy with my current DSL service from AT&T -- I have no interest in uVerse. Please add me to your do-not-bother list" but these requests seem to get lost in the chaos of a fully-staffed callcenter... They call again in a week.

So last week I put in an order with Comcast and, thanks to the two service techs that spent the morning in the box outside the apartment complex, I've now got Comcast Business Class Internet:

Now I can do 30" (2560x1600) high-quality Remote Desktop connections over a Secure VPN, AND still stream Google Play, watch 8 cat videos on YouTube, a Netflix movie, and do an "Update All" on all 43 outdated apps on my iPad. No Buffering!

The last bonus of Comcast Business Class Internet is that the service comes with a static IP -- if it really stays static I might drop Linode's virtual hosting service (as great as they are) since my computer at home is always on in practice anyway. Since I prepaid Linode through 07/2013, I have some time to think about that.

Looking forward to the next upsale call from AT&T.

This weekend I was "on call" so I wanted to stay near an active internet connection and a big display.

Unfortunately my office had started to resemble an episode of Hoarders with piles of accumulated paperwork; piles of camping, fishing, and picnic equipment; and piles of old computers.

That's a lot of piles.

Each pile started life individually in a disused corner, but over time they grew, met, and a giant Optimus Prime Pile was formed in the gestalt.

There's not much visible carpet when you've got Optimus Prime Pile living in your office.

With all that clutter, it was hard to maintain any kind of keyboard focus. I considered calling a home cleaning service -- but I think a maid equipped with only a regular-issue Swiffer mop would have just run from my office clutter. Maybe a biohazard-friendly crime scene cleanup service would be able to cope?

At first, I tried putting it all in the closet. "Out of sight; out of mind," right? Unfortunately, my closet is no Tardis: so I had to clean things up right.

It took the whole weekend, and I literally filled a dumpster... Okay, it was a small dumpster -- but still, a dumpster with shredded paperwork, an ungodly number of ketchup packets, and boxes of junk. I made at least two dozen trips to that dumpster. Bye bye, Optimus Pile.

Now I can see carpet. Lots and lots of carpet.

Ok, this isn't a picture of my office -- there are still desks everywhere, but there are no boxes or piles on the floor. Feels good. Best thing about the weekend though (and I'm tempting fate by saying this): there were no on-call pages -- w00t!

edit: ha, 10 minutes after I posted this the pager went off.