SteveStreeting.com

2008 has been a hell of mixed year - ups, downs, odd shimmying movements, it’s had it all. In the grand spirit of catharsis, I decided to pick out a few of the moments that stick in my memory about the year that zipped by when we weren’t looking.

Most Inspirational Moment : Obama winning the US Election

The moment I honestly didn’t think would actually happen for most of 2008. The idea that a young, smart, left-leaning man with a positive message could get the top job in a country that’s been dominated by a grizzled, fear-spreading, right-wing old guard for the best part of the last decade was almost too much to hope for. The fact that he’s also mixed-race, and has an unconventional, cosmopolitan background, brings with it a sense that some things that always should have been possible, but somehow never occurred, could happen after all. It brought a little ray of hope to cynics like me who nevertheless want to believe good things can happen sometimes. Of course, he now has one of the hardest jobs in the world and is not about to walk across water to fix everything, but despite that, I and many others take heart from that November night.

Worst Moment & Most Transformational Moment: Back Trouble

Unsurprisingly the low point of my year was being carted off in an ambulance, pumped full of morphine, due to acute back trouble. However, what it also did was serve as a wake-up call, that after years of simply ‘managing’ my occasional back problems, which amounted to doing the minimum required to keep doing the things I wanted to do (like coding), it was time I actually sat up and took it more seriously, and got my priorities straight. I still love programming, and tinkering on computers generally - I’ll never get that out of my system. But, I can no longer let it dominate my lifestyle to the extent I have in the past. It’s a hard thing to do, because like many people much of my ‘identity’ as I perceive it comes from my work & hobbies, which have always been strongly oriented around computers. I’m having to adjust and reform that identity to a degree, to one that is not so biased in one direction. As well as taking more exercise, I’ve added back previously marginalised hobbies like music and gaming in greater measure, and this blog has evolved along with that. It’s had to happen fast, and I’m still adjusting.

Most Hours Spent Pressing Plastic Buttons: Rock Band 1/2

This game could in fact have qualified under any number of categories, such as ‘Most Money Spent On A Single Game’, ‘Most DLC Purchased’, ‘Best Social Gaming Experience’, ‘Most Wrist / Hand Injuries’, ‘Most Likely To Inspire Delusions of Grandeur’, and many more. But most of all, we’ve sunk hours without measure into the Rock Band experience over the last 8 months, and have loved every minute of it.

One of the few games I have almost never played alone, and all the better for it. Also the game that’s encouraged me to buy more music I hadn’t heard of before, and to take up a real instrument again, almost 20 years after I gave up my fairly considerable extra-curricular music lessons in favour of, you guessed it, computer studies.

Most Effective Practical Lesson in Comradeship: Left 4 Dead

I love this game, no matter how much it frustrates at the higher difficulty levels when that total bastard of an AI Director decides to wear you down, before throwing a Tank and horde wave at you just as you’re mere feet from safety. Gaaah!! But, no other game apart from Rock Band has made co-op so satisfying, and it does it in a completely different way. The game design is quietly masterful, the way they engineer a situation where you play together not because it’s an option, or a neat little add-on, but because your only chance of survival is sticking together and helping one another. And yes, you will scream like a girl when a Hunter leaps on you from a rooftop and your companions are tentatively out of reach. You will want to hug them after they come back to help you before your face is ripped off. You will also genuinely mourn the loss of a player because you just know that you’re more vulnerable as a group with him/her gone. You won’t find any other game that remotely makes you appreciate your companions as much as L4D does.

Most Used Entertainment Device : Xbox 360

It may sound like a small industrial air conditioner. It may have an old-school disc tray. It may be saddled with a higher-than average chance of breakdown. But pound for pound, the 360 has given us the most gaming fun in 2008 by a considerable margin. I always said I would finally buy a ‘next-gen’ console for Rock Band first and foremost, and the unexpected timed exclusivity of the title on 360 in Europe meant that alone would have made it a lucky choice. However, the surprise came from games which I wasn’t necessarily clamouring to buy originally but which in the end proved to be really excellent, like Gears of War, Fable 2, Crackdown, Braid, N+, Skate. Those plus the games which I’d planned to buy (like Mass Effect, Geometry Wars 1/2, Pac Man CE, Rez HD, Halo 3, Rock Band) really made it a crowded year for my 360. I have several games that I’d like to go back to sometime if I get time, like Assassins Creed and Burnout Paradise. I’ve also been really impressed by the completeness of the online experience. A few friends & relatives who hadn’t bought into the current gen of gaming yet also bought one this xmas so I’m expecting more shared fun next year.

Most Enjoyable and Thought-provoking Book : Neverwhere

I’ve been reading a little more now that I’m not staying up to the early hours of the morning on the computer anymore, and this was one of the books I picked up (my wife’s, actually). I like Neil Gaiman, and I also read American Gods this year too, but I particularly liked Neverwhere, for multiple reasons. I really liked the through-the-looking-glass version of London and the dark humour, but I also really liked the message at the end, about normality and how we perceive it. A great book that manages to be both entertaining and thought-provoking.

Best Musical Come-back : Er…

I couldn’t decide on one favourite here, it seems to have been a year for come-backs. Supergrass’s Diamond Hoo Ha was a feisty, confident, more mature album from a band that got stereotyped too much in the 90’s. It still got largely ignored though, which was very much undeserved. Oasis’s new album Dig Out Your Soul has a number of tracks I like - a little heavier than their older albums, but once you get used to it it’s very good. The Verve of course famously got back together again for the album ‘Forth’. When I first heard it I was underwhelmed, but I’m starting to like it now, especially since the release of the second single (Rather Be), so I may well buy it. Finally, REM released their first really great album in far too many years, Accelerate, which seemed to throw off some of the cobwebs that had been accumulating on them recently and brought back some of the old spirit. All in all, it’s been a good year for some of my favourite older bands.

There were loads of other moments, such as releasing Ogre 1.6 and OgreSpeedTree, attending Siggraph, going to Sweden for the first time, and more. 2008 was certainly a busy one! I hope 2008 has been good for you, and best of luck for 2009. I think we’re all going to need it!

Keen to ramp up the self-treatment of my recurring back problems, I hunted about for a good book on personal spinal therapy. I picked up a book a little while ago on pilates but found it next to useless, and although I’ve dabbled with yoga, so far I found the results a little random, and with seemingly little focus in these resources on the kinds of back issues I’ve been getting, I came to the conclusion that non-targetted application of these techniques was a very hit-and-miss affair, with potential to injure as well as assist. What I really needed was a resource that helped me deal with the very specific issues I was getting - and with backs, there seem to be a number of different things that can go wrong.

I found Sarah Keys’ book, The Back Sufferers Bible, through various review sites, and found a large number of people with what sounded like much more serious issues than I have highly recommending it. Sarah specialises in backs above all else, and has written a number of books on the subject over the past couple of decades. This book seemed like the ideal self-treatment text, so I ordered a copy, and it arrived a little under a week ago now.

I’m already quite impressed. The book goes into a large amount of detail about how the spine works, what can go wrong, and how to recover from it - more than any other book I’ve read, and contains much more information than I’ve got out of my various physio/osteotherapists in the past. Even better, I found within its various chapters an exact description of the recent problem I had, something she calls an ‘acute locked back’. Having had physios prod me and tell me my (latest, mid-back) problem was fairly unusual and hard to pin down, it was a great relief to see it described in such accurate detail - right down to how it felt immediately before, after, and longer term. Having seen so many articles that just focus on lumbar pain, I was so glad to find an author who clearly understood exactly what I had, and had exercises laid out specifically to deal with it. The text actually agreed with my most recent physio’s eventual recommendations, but what’s nice is that it has a much greater range of exercises to do, with more detail as to the kind of timescales involved, and when it’s safe to graduate from one type of exercise to another, and focussing on long-term recovery. It’s nice to see someone saying that the spine can get better too, and that it’s not inevitable that I’ll be on a downward slide for the rest of my life, provided I tackle it the right way.

One thing that the book also taught me was that dehydration was a risk issue. I’ve never been one to drink as much water as you’re supposed to in a day - for some reason I just don’t get that thirsty, and when we’re on holiday in a hot country my wife is always telling me to drink more, even though I don’t feel like I need it most of the time. Such a metabolism might be efficient in arid countries, but lack of water is one of the things that over a prolonged period of time can cause disc degeneration. So as well as my exercise I’m trying to remember to stay more hydrated.

So far, I feel quite a bit better. I’d dipped last week, which I now believe was mostly down to some over-enthusiastic drumming, but I’ve done some moderate drumming this week too, I’ve just been a little more sensible and combined it with the book’s exercises (as well as my daily walks), and I find that besides a little soreness, I’m able to cope much better and most of the stiffness, tenderness and most importantly the red-hot knifing pains, are gone. The exercises seem to be targeting my specific injury more effectively than other things I’ve tried in the past, and also allow me to start strengthening up my various trunk muscles again without putting adverse pressure on my spine; one of the problems I’ve had in the past.

It’s early days, but so far, so good. If it carries on like this, this book will have been a great investment.

Apologies in advance for another dull post about my varying spinal health. But, I figure friends, family and some people in my various online communites are interested in contextual stuff like this, so here we go. Hit up some other bookmark now if you’re bored

Since my epiphany 6 weeks ago I’ve been on what I realise is going to be a long road to recovery, and generally each week I’ve been improving, barring the odd minor blip. That was, until the middle of last week when I seemed to go backward a couple of steps, ending up with pain and stiffness in the middle back area which I associate with my most recent problem (as compared to the lower lumbar pain associated with my lingering problem from about 4 years ago). This has persisted all week - better some days, worse others - meaning that I’m having to be extra careful. I’m not sure exactly what triggered the relapse - it might be that Rock Band 2 came out and I did 2 hours of solid drumming one evening, it might have been the time we spent playing Left 4 Dead, it might have been that I’ve been playing my new guitar with a strap (extra weight on the shoulders), it might have been that I took a particularly brisk walk last Tuesday as I was in a rush to get back to work (and at that point my back was feeling great) - or something else.

What is frustrating is that the risk of relapse seems connected to almost anything I do. I sometimes feel trapped - that I can’t work as much as I want, can’t do many things I enjoy, can’t be too active, can’t be too inactive - it’s like I have to be afraid of doing anything because of the risk of setting it off again (except that of course doing nothing also makes it worse). Yesterday this really started to depress me a bit, and I’m generally a pretty hard guy to depress, being as defiantly optimistic as I usually am. I got over it, partly because of my wife, partly because we had a social evening last night which cheered me up, and partly because my ever-reliable sense of logic eventually kicked in and pointed out in no uncertain terms that feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to help, and I was just wasting time.

So, I’m opting for a more scientific approach. I’m starting to keep a weekly record of how well my back is feeling, and noting down relevant events, and how much work/gaming/exercise I get during each week to try to correlate what’s helping, and what’s making it worse. I went back over my diary & blog to add a bit of history (higher numbers are better):

Obviously too much hunching at the desk was bad, as probably were long-haul flights. The games are mostly on there for interest - with the exception of heavy drumming on Rock Band 2 I don’t think any of them put any particular strain on my back, although Left 4 Dead is at the desk so I should keep that fairly light. Trips to the physio/osteo clearly help short-term but the only real way to conquer this long-term is to keep learning how to rehabilitate myself, and quick-fixes aren’t the way.

The positive note to take from this is that despite the last week, I’m still on an overall up since mid-October. As my wife keeps telling me, I need to resign myself to the fact that this is probably going to take a very long time to put right properly. Frustrating when you have a head full of projects (Ogre & otherwise) wanting to see the light of day, and when you just want to lead a ‘normal’ life without being in pain, or feeling afraid of what you can and can’t do. But, as ever there are plenty of people far worse off than I am in the world, and I have the benefit of a very understanding wife and a flexible working environment (I don’t get sick pay, but I can at least take breaks when I want and set my own workload), so I should stop wingeing and get on with it. I’m going to choose to be grateful that my red line is averaging an upward trend, and work on trying to keep it on that course as best I can.

I’m the kind of person who likes to keep busy; not in a ‘mad about DIY / the garden’ kind of way that tends to be the most socially acceptable form of being a ‘project oriented person’, but I always have a bunch of things on the go and never seem to have enough time to do them all. I’m always ‘working’ evenings & weekends, but a lot of the time I really don’t think of it as work, because a large portion of the time I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

If you’re anything like me you’ve had difficulty explaining to your wife / significant other that in our kind of world, there’s really no discrete black-and-white transition between ‘work’ and ‘not work’ that starts at 9am and ends at 5pm every day like clockwork. In fact there are a multitude of subtle levels ranging from ‘definitely work’ (e.g. something I don’t particularly want to do but someone has paid me to do it), to ‘not really work at all’ (e.g. having fun with technology that as a spin-off might help make a living now or later). Unfortunately these subtle graduations are invisible to the casual observer, often leading to discussions which begin with ‘You’re working again!’, ‘Not really…’, and from then on get complicated.

In the end, it’s probably not a solvable problem, but one thing that does help is taking the odd break, where you at least pretend not to think about what others would deem ‘work’ for a while. Holidays are obvious candidates, but also a good trigger for maybe taking a weekend off or something is recognising a milestone, or a cluster of milestones.

OgreSpeedTree and OgreSpeedGrass emerged from beta this morning, with official 1.0 versions being released. I’m pretty damn pleased with the result, and that’s a fairly unusual situation; I normally have a list of things as long as my arm that I consider ‘unfinished’, but in this case I’m very content with stamping a 1.0 badge on them. My attention can now switch to finalising Ogre 1.6, which is currently at the Release Candidate stage.

It’s also 2 years since I made the decision to give up having a regular day job and try my luck as a free agent / start-up. My initial measure of success was not to go broke (either personally or bankrupting the company) in the first 2 years, and I’m pleased to say that hasn’t happened. It’s certainly had ups and downs, and probably given my prior senior tech position I’ve undoubtedly earned less personally as a result, but the company has still grown, I’m still paying myself a wage that isn’t too insulting, and the benefits have easily compensated for that. Besides the flexibility and the satisfaction of knowing I’ve found and earned every penny I’ve made (which somehow makes the money feel more valuable than a guaranteed monthly paycheck), it’s been good for my personal development to mix it up a bit. And most importantly, I’m not bored

It’s also almost 8 years ago that I wrote this fateful message in my (very old, very manual) blog:

“18th October 2000: Exam done! Work on OGRE will restart soon. First, web site revamp to be done.”

Inauspicious, but that was the seed - the time when OGRE as we know it swung into full development and started this whole crazy sequence of events off; if I’d known the significance of it at the time, I wonder whether it would have affected how I did things?

Laozi was right when he said “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”. Those words motivate me to this day - that no matter how big or challenging something looks, the most important thing is to start. My experience certainly tells me that genius and raw talent / ability is often not the most important factor when it comes to achieving things, it’s usually more about taking that first step, and having the tenacity or pure bloody-mindedness to keep going for as long as it takes. That’s particularly good for me since even if I might not be as smart as some, I’m probably more stubborn. And that in turn feeds back into what I was talking about at the start of this post.

But, stopping occasionally to admire the view is good too Maybe I’ll do that this weekend.

I’ve had a long-running back injury (a twisted vertebra in my lower back) which I’ve figured out how to manage through experience - a bit of stretching here, avoid certain types of activity etc. It’s a bit inconvenient but after a while you get used to living with it, and it’s not that painful most of the time provided I don’t go nuts.

However about 2 weeks ago, not long after getting back from LA, I was doing something quite simple (moving a coffee table back after a Rock Band session), when something in a completely different part of my back suddenly hurt really badly.  We had guests at the time, so I quickly took some painkillers and did a quick bit of my usual stretching upstairs, but that didn’t seem to work very well - I ended up just gritting my teeth most of the evening. While I don’t like the existing back injury I have, at least I ‘know it’ and how generally to cope with it, but this time it seemed different - like someone randomly knifing me in the middle of the back, just below the shoulder blades (et tu, Bruté?), rather than just by my right kidney like the old injury always was.

Stubborn git that I am, I gave it a couple of days of fairly frequent hot-poker agony before giving in and making an appointment to see the osteopath. I cancelled it once because it started feeling a lot better before the appointment came up, but then I wrenched it again while doing the grocery shopping of all things (damn you BOGOF offers, you basket-filling temptresses). Luckily I remained on my feet and avoided shouting the foullest obscenities in my repertoire at the top of my voice; no doubt the years of Brit cultural training to avoid making a scene at all costs - stiff upper lip and all that, what? - helped in that regard

Anyway, I finally made it to my second osteo appointment today, although again it had started to recover quite well so I felt a little bit stupid; “that used to hurt like hell” doesn’t have quite the same impact after all. Luckily as a professional he could still tell what I’d damaged even without me yelping, so next came the expected ‘manipulation’ - which basically means ‘beatboxing with your bones’. This time the targets of choice were the Thoracic vertebrae and the attached rib heads, and they can clearly make some quite interesting sounds when properly motivated.

I’ll be sore for a while but with a bunch of new stretching exercises it looks like this one probably won’t be a long-term issue. It’s likely to be linked to the number of hours I spent hunched like a troll in economy class in the last month so hopefully it’ll prove to be a one-off.