I had such a moment, of a remarkable nature (which is why I'm remarking on it I suppose) last week while I was reading through a Matter article on "The Charisma Coach" (I highly recommend checking out the magazine in general - the long-form articles have not yet failed to be intriguing, and I'm happy to have been in the kickstarting crowd).  Anyway, the topic of learning charisma and people skills is interesting in its own right, and follows a significant trend in moving the concept of successful execution from the extraordinary skills of an individual to the attitudes of connected groups ("Team Geek", "How NASA Builds Teams", "Delivering Happiness", "Tribal Leadership", etc.).  That's not particularly new - this is a trend that's been evolving for a while, and on which I've been keeping a keen eye even when struggling with it myself.  I readily admit that I'm not the most social person, and have primarily attributed/excused these tendencies by way of being deeply introverted ("people time" exhausts me) and dealing with chronic pain (which lent me an attitude that life is too short to put up with some kinds of crap, such as disingenuousness or celebrated mediocracy, especially when there are under-appreciated park benches out there what need sitting on) - which are weak, selfish excuses that short-change others, but I'm working on it.

Anyway, I got to the part about the puppy: a cognitive shortcut recommended by the profiled coach to switch expression and communication modes to something warmer and friendlier by someone otherwise feeing impatient and condescending - in this case, by lending him a puppy. This as a means of engaging different patterns of relating and fulfillment, and making it easier to incorporate the target frame of mind into the desired context, modifying the outward behavior as a result.

That's not new either - this is a form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which frequently uses functional exercises as a means of shifting context to emphasize preferred behaviors and perspectives.  But something about it clicked this time, intersecting with tangents from other reading I've done over the last couple of years ("Willpower", "Thinking Fast & Slow" - this latter one being my favorite of all the cited works thus far).  These books introduce the concept of cognitive energy - and not in a metaphysical woo-crap kind of way, but in terms of literal metabolic respiration, fatigue, and refractory periods.  "Willpower" especially, based on its (sound, well executed) studies determined that there is no great reservoir of human resolve that can be deepened through exercise, strengthened through exposure, or is particularly inherent to character.  This finding runs contrary to commonly inferred attributes of the American Success narrative, wherein one can overcome all obstacles through herculean application of self, and that character is the greatest personal attribute (or collection of attributes).  It's a nice idea because it underscores the idea of being in control of one's own destiny, but it's a fiction (which is not to say that we don't have control [of a sort - luck still probably plays the biggest role], but that the means by which we do so differ).

Instead, those "characters" of seemingly endless resolve have simply created sets of cognitive/behavioral short-cuts that fire automatically: rather than engaging with a situation directly, reasoning, rationalizing, and struggling through it, it's delegated to a pre-established set of mental patterns and tools which can do so with little oversight (a subconscious, or "System 1" behavior in the terms of "Thinking Fast & Slow").  They retain the precious and scarce resource of cognitive energy for other things - ideally, for creating new automatic behaviors in a virtuous cycle of reinforcement (note however that this is where bad habits come from too - caveat empty[sic] and all that).

Right, so, the epiphany?  I've seen lots of CBT-ish approaches to situations: visualization exercises, statements of affirmation, personal ritual, etc.  Often used by well-meaning individuals, probably more often used by sales-dudes and self-help gurus, and most irritatingly used by manipulative bosses and woo-peddlers.  In most cases that I've encountered them I felt immediately uncomfortable: it was obvious that the exercise in question was meant to manipulate context, and more often than not was meant to justify (or remove perceived excuses from engaging in) activities or behaviors which could not possibly be sustained for very long.  Not only living like there were no tomorrow, or whipping up crowd energy and excitement, but creating excuses for pushing too hard - I had a boss once who likened our situation of prepping for a marketing summit as reacting to an incoming ICBM: and in that circumstance, everything other than averting disaster was a secondary and expendable consideration (family, sleep, health, etc.).  Only, of course, there was no missile, and conflating the completion of brochures and organization of media materials with horribly explosive death doesn't exactly square up (or if they do, I would argue that your priorities are probably off the mark as far as functional members of society go).  Unsurprisingly I left shortly thereafter - I wasn't a fan of all the impending apocalypses or what they (unsustainably) required of me (including the marginalization of family - which is just not allowed).

The puppy exercise cued something for me - the concept of the context shift toward desired behaviors that were already established in a low energy mode, thereby preserving rather than extracting energy.  The realization was probably due to this being the exercise and perspective of a fellow introvert, rather than of a crowd-pleasing extrovert, and with the shift-mechanism being a recognizable pattern for me; extroverts I've seen were more likely to introduce shortcuts that worked for them but which were foreign to me, and therefore cognitively expensive and unrealistic.  It sounds straightforward, especially written out, but this created a mental pivot that opened up (and/or connected) several new lines of thinking that are making accessible previously unavailable considerations.

As a similar tangent this made me think of the high frequency of different mental routes from one place to another.  Or perhaps I should say "nervous" routes, since neural networks (physical ones) act more like consolidating grids than strict tree hierarchies, and there's usually several different ways for A to get to B, whether it be in sensory networks or all the way up to the neocortex.  Specifically I was reminded of the experience of Scott Adams, the Dilbert Cartoonist, in his struggle with Spasmodic Dysphonia, and how engaging different modes of thought would periodically restore his ability to speak: by finding different routes from speech center to basal ganglia which were not compromised by the neural dysfunction at that moment (the higher-order rationalization of the re-routing into "rule" sets is fascinating too).

What kinds of pockets of low-cost, context-appropriate functionality are out there to be tapped into?  This is largely the strategy of hypnosis and neurolinguistics, so you'd think I would have figured this out earlier, but I always thought about it more in the abstract terms of establishing desired patterns rather than finding and interlinking existing ones (though I can see some of this in the underlying Ericksonian methodologies).  Thinking about it more at the practical and functional level is fascinating.

Maybe now I can figure out how to manage some "people time" without feeling like I've had to compromise on protection of personal identity (and sweet, sweet, brain juice reserves).  Perhaps I can find ways of dealing with others whose value systems run more contrary to my own without feeling like I've been made to endorse lukewarm insight as genius, or play cloak-and-dagger politics.

Sorry if I've been a jerk - per the above, it's not you, it's me (unless it is you, in which case knock it off already).

The experience of wearing the Rift is transportative, if not outright transformative.  The bulk and weight feel natural in terms of fit and distribution on the head, and the sense of the screen itself quickly fades from view to be replaced by the whatever it's showcasing - it gets out of the way as a platform and lets the content speak for the capabilities.  Its strength as a portal to the work of other creators and designers will hopefully cement its place as a mainstream product and bestow major success and market-share on the Oculus team (and their "just happy to be here, folks!" founder Palmer Luckey, who comes across as a really nice guy who loves what he does - I can't help but wish him success).  Deep pockets can sink early ventures pretty easily, in the event that Sony, Microsoft, or others want to set their sights on the emerging VR market after the hard work of helping it onto its feet has already been done.

Back to the device though: the dev kit is a lower resolution and higher bulk than the target specs for the consumer release, but were still impressive in their own right until you wanted to read something (more on that later).  The stereoscopy is exceptional and provides not only depth but a serious demonstration of the scale of things as well.  A typical trope of first-person PoV in video games relies on making game worlds absolutely massive in order to create a sense of scope and scale to impress (and then let the character run through it at a bazillion miles an hour on indefatigable and inhuman legs capable of bounding over improbable obstacles so as to make it still navigable instead of tiresome).  The Tuscany demo provided by the Oculus team, however, manages to sit right between "comfortable" and "spacious" with a model and world that in any other mainstream title would actually come across as "quaint", a piece of set dressing hardly worth exploration.

This is helped along considerably by the proprioceptive projection invoked by the medium - that is, the sense of the environment meshes so well with the brain's expectations of how "the I that is me" relates to the world, that it (the brain) slips easily into the sense of realty we usually construct from our physical surroundings.  Standing on the balcony overlooking the courtyard and out to the sea, I wanted to crouch down and inspect the stonework of the banister.  Not only did it immediately relate to a concept of my own scale in that environment, but my brain craved additional subtle details it expected but found absent: I wanted my voice to echo off the wall, to feel shifting air and patterns of temperature as I moved from sun to shade or turned relative to wind, even humidity and smells.  I wanted to touch things not only to measure their position relative to myself, but also to become aware of their texture, solidity, and age.

The fact that I jumped so quickly into a realm of subtlety is a credit to the visual experience.  Human eyes are constantly making minute adjustments to correlate for how we bounce ourselves around, even for tiny head shakes resulting from speech.  The very sensitive 120hz positional sampling in the Rift caught and balanced these perfectly, providing a sense of stability and responsiveness unrivaled by any kind of 3d VR experience I've had before this, managing to simply disappear

In fact, the last time I remember anything close to this was the first time I played Doom (when it first came out in 1993, a full 20 years ago), and felt an emotional response to hearing the grunt of an unvanquished Imp somewhere in the level.  In that case the gameplay was engrossing, though not entirely immersive, until I reflected back on it later that first evening: my memory was not of the keyboard, screen, and speakers, but of the environment itself - it had provided enough detail for my brain to fill in the rest and appreciate it the same way it did with its other concepts of space.  The Rift does that up front, so that upon reflection the rest of the subtlety comes in to play.  In fact, I found myself referring to my physical presence as "the real world" as distinct from the world I was experiencing and inhabiting (as opposed to "physical" and "virtual").  My sense of orientation relative to the desk and my developer friend whose kit I was inhabiting, even with his voice providing some orientation, became completely un-grounded - that's just not the world my brain was in at the time.  This young lady's reaction is quite illustrative.

Now to be fair, it does have its limitations.  Content developers are going to have to think a lot about interface - movement is very different when you add head tracking as an additional means of orientation.  The Team Fortress 2 demo does a good job of this, and separates the aiming reticle from the viewport (typically in first-person shooter's its embedded in the center of the screen, and aiming the camera and the weapon are one in the same).  The combination of look + mouse + keyboard for movement was quickly natural, and will hopefully be used as a starting point or template for others.

Other details will also need to be worked out:

• Movement matters - a walking view should feel like walking, complete with subtle shifts in position or bounce as weight changes feet, so one is not impossibly glide-stepping or rolling around the virtual environment in a wheelie chair.
• Image textures are not enough - if a section of wall is simply painted to look like a grate, a 2D interface might let you get away with it.  But in full 3D, the eyes immediately register it as an utterly flat plane, making that image (no matter how nice) look like cheap wallpaper.  Bump mapping will help, but people are also going to want to stick their noses a lot of places they haven't previously, so as much as a person will ever be able to peer through or around will need some life breathed into it.  For that matter, UV registration (the process by which shape and image are matched up) will need a lot of precision work as well - the corner of that brick had better match up with the corner of the picture.
•  Structural integrity needs to be considered - in virtual space an object need not be 2-sided, or even 3-dimensional.  A pane of glass (or a railing, for that matter) can be depthless, and just because a box has 3 sides doesn't mean the others are complete.  But unless the point of the virtual world is to explore Klein-style mathematical constructs, maintaining Euclidean geometry and physics is important for preserving the illusion.
• Eliminate lag at all costs - if no other subtlety can be preserved, make sure that the physical head turn indicators in the headset translate seamlessly into the virtual representation.  Stutter or lag in visual perception is more 4th-wall shattering than anything else, in addition to being more nausea-inducing than awkward and/or rapid movement.
• Reading is right out - the TF2 HUD was a wonderful experience, to have it really appear as though it were floating on top of the rest of the fluid environment, but in order to be viable as an interface it needs large, high-contrast text near the center of the field of view. It's like going back to the barely post-DOS games of yore, and means that textual interaction has to be kept to a minimum and rely on other cues (such as color coding, simple distinct glyphs, etc.).  This will probably be worked out in successive iterations with higher resolution, but for now is a distinct limitation.

I'm excited for what this can do expand the possibilities of experiencing virtual worlds, and not just for gaming.  I've recently begun to do my sculpting digitally, trading in polymer clays for a pen and tablet - way less mess, no set-up and clean-up, and I don't have to bother with planning out all my internal support structures in advance (letting me stay spontaneous throughout the course of the entire project).  An infinite level of detail, independent object addressing, layers, even "undo" are giving me as much freedom in a computer that I experienced when moving photography into PhotoShop.  To combine that with more natural modes of manipulation (still waiting on my twice-delayed Leap Motion controller) and perception will further decrease the barriers between imagination and creation.

Navigating infoscapes is another big one I'm looking forward to, and will have another write-up in that regard soon.

But really? One of the biggest reasons I'm excited for this is due to the McArdle's disease: when I talk about inhuman and indefatigable feats in navigating virtual worlds, that goes doubly for me.   Even with good physical therapy and conditioning there's stuff I just can't do anymore, and being able to strap on a different set of eyes and overcome physical limitations is thoroughly enticing.

I'll eventually counter this by setting up a good studio or getting good enough at notation that I can do it while I'm at the keyboard instead of trying to deconstruct things later.  In the meantime, I tossed a recorder into the mix so I don't permanently lose this one that I was toying around with this morning:

This is a small musical meditation - but also the germ from which larger music can be constructed and derived.  It's the basic element which inspires connections to other components and themes that eventually gets turned into music - I can sit down with this in my head and play lots of other tangents, weed through them and find those that are cohesive to the feeling to be captured, and then develop that into a song draft.  It's always a very organic process.

Most importantly, it's a process I haven't attempted in earnest for several years - glad to see that some of it has matured in the meantime.  This piece is best listened to with headphones, and is intended to be soft and subtle in some passages.  The timing's not nailed down yet, but the subdivision of the rhythmic back-bone has a side effect of slowing down the listener's breathing - it's a nice mellow tune in that regard.

Enjoy!

As we dissected the problem, we found 3 things:

1. This is a fun real-world problem to chew on.
2. It is far more complex than it appears on the surface.
3. There are very good, well-documented solutions to this problem - if you're a mathematician (there's lots of free math out there, but not a good public library of implemented multilateration code).

Seeing as how neither Brad nor I are super big on the mathematics (that's what computers are for, after all), we decided to flip the problem on its head: instead of trying to find the intersection of hyperboles in three dimensions, why not pre-calculate the anticipated signal fingerprints in terms of sets of time-to-arrival differences for each of the sensor locations, and then do a nearest-neighbor calculation in the resulting lookup table?  I'll go through the problem deconstruction and solution in steps so it's easier to see what we were trying to do.

Imagine a grid, say 80' by 60', with one microphone placed in each of the 4 corners A, B, C, and D:

An "audio event" (say, a sneeze, a clap, a code word, etc.) takes place at a random location within our grid, and the sound begins to propagate outward in all directions (rebounding echoes are not shown here, since they will always reach any sensore after the initial sound wave - obstruction based on the direction of the emitter [e.g., which way our sneezer is facing] is also not directly factored in, but has less of a dampening effect than you might think - at least for sounds above a certain threshold):

It's easy to see the distance from this randomly selected point to all 4 corners just by counting rings, but ring counting is not available to us, so we instead use some basic functions and turn the whole thing into right triangles and hypotenuses, so that we may infer from the hypotenuse what the relative lengths are of the other sides and thus our (x,y) coordinates:

We have now assigned our audio event the label E and assigned the intermediate intersections a, b, c, and d (instead of sticking with just x and y because I want to be able to describe intermediate line segments without confusion).  There's just one problem with this approach - we don't actually know the distance of any line segment to E!  We do know what some of them are relative to each other, though as illustrated in the following figure - but since we don't know exactly when the sound was first emitted we have to start our counting when the sound reaches the first microphone:

Our signal starts at -30.494ms relative to A, but we don't know that - all we know is that it was the first to receive the signal, as the closest microphone, and can then count upward from there to the other sensors - which I've listed here in sensor order, rather than detection order.  Going counter-clockwise like this means that, from the first microphone starting at 0, we will always be seeing adjacent-opposite-adjacent corners (with opposite always the highest number as well).

The equation shown next to D is the crux of all this: the value that we record there relative to A is the same as the DE hypotenuse minus the AE hypotenuse as drawn in Figure 3.  This relative value is consistent, and follows a predictable curve (shown here from the perspective of time-of-arrival offset at D):

Switching to a dark background here to make the plot more visible.  The peak and valley are the bounds of the grid - the fixed distance of the microphones.  The slope directly between those 2 points is far more linear, and actual crosses 0 (since AE is going to be greater than DE 50% of the time, some of the values on this graph will be negative, unless you wrap it in an abs function) at the same x on all values, with 0 representing the moment at which the signal will reach both points simultaneously - right smack in the middle.  It's easier to see this from the side:

So we know there's a plot function for creating this kind of value, but inverting that into something like f(80,18.804) = ED is a little trickier than I'm up for.  This is where multilateration comes in, looking for the intersect of 2 such measurements, which requires a lot of propagation along vectors to identify.  This is where Brad and I started to cheat: if we can compute what the signal difference would be relative to all 4 microphones for any x,y point on the grid, why not do that in advance at an acceptable resolution, and then look for nearest-neighbor matches to do a look-up instead?  With the microphone nearest the event always registering 0 (the starting point for counting), you're left with the difference of the hypotenuses for the 3 other corners BE, CE, and DE, which produce a nice x,y,z set of coordinates that can be measured against each other.

In order to optimize our solution, we take our cue from the fact that the nearest microphone always being 0 means that we only have to compute one quadrant of our grid, which can then be rotated (technically we would only need to calculate half of the quadrant, split diagonally, but computers like grids instead of triangles so we stuck with that):

By setting our mapping interval to 1' that's the resolution we're limited to, but for this application is sufficient.  The equivalency of the grid is shown through the following 2 figures demonstrating rotation of the event plot:

Given the equivalency, we only need to calculate the relative values to its peers from the perspective of a single designated 0 corner, and then compensate for rotation (which includes swapping adjacent corners if we've rotated an interval of 90° [but not 180°]).  The real value of this optimization is that it cuts the amount of data we need to scan by 75%.  Another optimization is that, when searching row by row through each column, once the coordinate set we've evaluated begins to increase in distance the search within that column can be aborted.  The most optimal solution would probably be an octree implementation for the coordinate scanning, which would significantly cut the number of neighbor comparisons that need to be made especially on larger data sets - but we didn't bother going that far.

One problem with this approach though, is that when you don't have an equal number of units on both x and y axes, you lose a little precision when doing 90º interval rotation by a factor of x:y. Not terrible, but between the trade-offs in resolution and precision, this solution, simple though it may be, is not for everyone.

Crude though the code may be (I hacked it together in Perl initially, then put it into PHP as a lingua franca for Brad - all while commuting on the train) I offer it for your inspection and deconstruction.  Bon apetit!

• sono.phps: class file containing logic - look at the static test method for hints on usage.
• ping.phps: implementing file showing the most basic functions and routines, requires the sono class.

30 Things About My Invisible Illness You May Not Know

1. The illness I live with is: McArdle's Disease (Glycogen Storage Disease Type V), a congenital inability for skeletal muscle cells to use energy stored in the form of glycogen (see Wikipedia or the Association for Glycogen Storage Disease pages for more information).

2. I was diagnosed with it in the year: 2009, with a very remarkable and unlikely set of circumstances for which I am unendingly grateful - it was like waking up for the first time in years.

3. But I had symptoms since: about age 5, though not persistently until I was 7.

4. The biggest adjustment I've had to make is: recognizing limitations and abiding by them; anyone who knows me knows I'm big on (over)reaching for the stars, on an ambition to do everything I can to enjoy a beautiful world through all its modes and means.  Knowing where my boundaries are, and respecting those boundaries instead of stubbornly pushing myself, will probably always be my biggest challenge.  I'm always thinking that with the right management strategy I can get back to moving mountains, instead of realizing just how much really is out of reach.

5. Most people assume: most people don't assume much at all about me - the disease is invisible, after all.  Speaking more generally, people do tend to assume that if something's difficult, a person can just try harder or have a more concise focus of will and overcome the challenge.  There's a finite limit to this kind of thinking, and a point beyond which more effort is actively and exceptionally destructive to people with McArdle's.

6. The hardest part about mornings are: if it's been any kind of decent night's rest, then when I wake up in the morning I feel mildly euphoric - it's the one time in the day when I am not exhausted, nauseous, or hunched over in pain.  Getting out of bed means I have anywhere from "between bed and bathroom" to 15 minutes or so (30 if I'm just going straight to sit at the computer) before the nausea kicks in it all starts again.

7. My favorite medical TV show is: why is this prompt on here?  I mean, is there even one on right now that is not "House"? (which did a shout-out to McArdle's when trying to identify the source of someone's pain once, but did the not-recommended ischemic forearm exercise test for diagnosis; I suppose that's still a common practice with doctors less familiar with the condition, but they should know to look for the most up-to-date info on the techniques they portray)

8. A gadget I couldn't live without is: there's no good assistive technology for McArdle's, but probably the one that really goes for me is a pillow - anywhere to lay my head and recover from the stresses of the day.  Oh, and a ginormous jetted tub - long hot soaks do wonders for cramped muscles.

9. The hardest part about nights are: actually nights aren't that bad unless I'm in the middle of an episode - or actually manage to give myself an episode during the night (ugh - then there's just no sleeping after that).  At least, I should say that they're not bad now, post-diagnosis - McArdle's affects all skeletal muscle, including the diaphragm, which leads to sleep apnea (which can be exacerbated by metabolic acidoses, a potential side effect of over-reliance on alternate metabolisms that are themselves also a side effect of McArdle's).  Before that was all worked out I was actually developing a phobic reaction to the thought of going to bed, since it was so torturous to wake up as tired or even more tired than going to bed, and be so completely filled with nausea and mental fog in the mornings. Not a pleasant memory for those 15 or so years (the sleep stuff didn't come with the initial symptoms, but built up over time).

10. Each day I take how many pills: nothing related to McArdle's - there's no medication that can help it (ingestion of supplemental myophosphorylase enzyme doesn't help, as it's not transported to the right location in the cells before it's destroyed).  I do drink a fair amount of baking soda to keep the acidosis down and help the kidneys flush things out, and some simple antacids (since acidosis throws off the gastric system too - that being the only natural source of bicarbonate processes in the body which get tapped out pretty fast).

11. Regarding alternative treatments I: think they're a bunch of hooey.  Hooey that can make you feel good - the placebo effect is real, after all, but the mind-body connection does not go much beyond relaxation and endogenous opiates.  "Feeling good" can only take one so far - and if I fail to be aware of my situation, and even my pain, it's a lot more likely I'm going to do something that lays me out for an entire week.  Also, it can be tough to be gracious when being told how much someone's Aunt helped so-and-so with such-and-such and they're sure she could help me with this.  Listen, if it doesn't produce glycolisis it won't help, period - otherwise you just get a McArdle-ite with well balanced chakra, but still a McArlde-ite.

12. If I had to choose between an invisible illness or visible I would choose: visible, but only if it's not also odiferous - don't want to smell bad if I can avoid it.  With visible at least people would be aware that there's a deficiency in place that's being heroically overcome - instead of a pasty guy who just looks like he's out of shape.

13. Regarding working and career: I have been blessed with talents that allow me to pursue cerebral endeavors - I can sit and think, instead of haul wood and be on my feet all day.  I am so very, very grateful for that, otherwise I would be near dead all the time instead of occasionally.  Even then, I still have to take my rests, and retirement can never come soon enough.

14. People would be surprised to know: I have no regrets.  I've given up a lot to McArdle's, things I really loved doing - martial arts, parkour, dance, a lot of out-doors stuff, etc.  But before it made those impossible I did just about everything I conceivably could - I didn't waste my time, and though I may wax nostalgic and miss it at times, I'm not mourning for anything that "could have been", but rather, "man, wasn't it awesome when..."  Good times.

15. The hardest thing to accept about my new reality has been: limitations, as mentioned above, and a recognition that I almost never feel entirely like myself - and this one is difficult psychologically, in recognizing that what I define as "me" is at the whim of so many chemical balances and miscellaneous influences, instead of being a force of will and spirit that can overcome trial.  "Me" pre-nap and post-nap are very different people, with post-nap-Me being more subdued, patient, loving, helpful, humble, etc. - but not being able to clearly recognize that pre-nap.  That, and drinking 2+ gallons of water a day - but that's mostly a matter of knowing where the restrooms are.

16. Something I never thought I could do with my illness that I did was: have a normal day.  They're few and far between, but they do show up from time to time.  I'm careful not to push it on those days and sabotage them, since the normality only extends so far, but there are those days when I feel amazingly normal, and thus amazing.

17. The commercials about my illness: don't exist - 1:100,000 is not a very profitable demographic, especially since only 10% of those are typically diagnosed and there are no treatments to sell to anyone.

18. Something I really miss doing since I was diagnosed is: the meditative state of mind-body connection in physical movement, especially parkour and urban exploration.  There's still many a building I see that I would love to run up the side of and see the different world from up-top.  Oh well.

19. It was really hard to have to give up: assumptions: that extra effort can over-come, and I just needed to try harder.  Helping my wife with more of her projects and ambitions, and sometimes even getting simple chores done.  Oh, and Twister™ - turns out it's impossible to play it with McArdle's without things going badly very, very fast (as in, "5, 4, 3, 2...").

20. A new hobby I have taken up since my diagnosis is: competitive whining? I'm always picking up new hobbies, pre- and post- diagnosis, so this one doesn't count much.  I'll say "cello" for now because that was the most recent.

21. If I could have one day of feeling normal again I would: roughhouse with the kids.  Run.  Climb things.  Wear myself out and just feel old and out of shape, instead of crippled with pain, cramps, and the impending weeks of recovery from damaged muscles and clogged kidneys.  Man, I would fly!

22. My illness has taught me: patience, empathy, and gratitude.

23. Want to know a secret? One thing people say that gets under my skin is: nothing.  Lack of recognition, lack of empathy, lack of awareness is worse than what anyone actually says. Followed by that thing about their Aunt's homeopathy skills.

24. But I love it when people: know that it's so very hard sometimes, and love me anyway.  When they understand that it's not a matter of not wanting to help, and not for lack of trying - but that sometimes I have hit that immovable object (and frequently at force) and need a break (or a break-down) through no fault of my own.

25. My favorite motto, scripture, quote that gets me through tough times is: "...the Son of Man hath descended below them all.  Art thou greater than he?" (D&C 122:7-8)

26. When someone is diagnosed I'd like to tell them: I don't know that I've encountered anyone who's been newly diagnosed - it doesn't happen very often given the rarity of the condition.  But I would say: "we're here for you, and we understand." (speaking collectively of the very supportive McArdle's community).

27. Something that has surprised me about living with an illness is: how very stupid I can still be about it all, and (separately) how often I find myself grabbing or leaning on things in the general course of a day.  When the heck did I start doing that?

28. The nicest thing someone did for me when I wasn't feeling well was: hugged me, put my head in her lap, and stroked my hair (guys like it too).  My wife is awesome.

29. I'm involved with Invisible Illness Week because: this kind of invisibility is not a super-power.  And honestly, if you take number-of-rare-diseases × prevalence ÷ the-general-population you end up with something like 1 in 6 people live with this kind of stuff, so there's a lot people can do to increase their awareness, understanding, and empathy of their fellow man.

30. The fact that you read this list makes me feel: astonished - I'm a wordy person, and this was a lot of stuff to get through.  And grateful that you took the time to read it - words of encouragement (up to and including, "Man up and quit whining Nancy" [no offense to the Nancys of the world]) are appreciated.  Go find someone who needs a hug and hug them.

Getting work done is not enough.

You will not get gold stars for neat handwriting,
complete paperwork, or Playing Well With Others.

Teamwork means removing yourself from the equation,
not splitting the credit.

You are not here to find yourself,
your soulmate, or for the Master to Appear.

Your job is to own the problem,
solve it better than it's been solved before,
and make sure it stays solved.

If you do a good job,
you'll get harder problems to solve.

Success, recognition, and mastery come from results and luck,
not effort. And from results only sometimes.

You fail only when you give up, and sometimes giving up is necessary.

Rinse & repeat.

Most of the versions of this out there are strangely quiet, and while it would be possible to go through the various exercises to transcode it into something I could manipulate and boost the volume, I decided to go a different route and just make a new recording.

By simplifying the song to a single instrument from its component layers it should be much more clearly audible, effectually increasing the volume beyond the literal increase it also received.  We'll be testing it out on her phone (since resonant frequencies with the speaker will also matter), but for now I offer it up for public review:

The recording was made on my iPad sitting on a chair next to me, using the built in microphone.  It definitely flattened the sound a bit, but the quality is surprisingly clean given the ad hoc setup.  If you listen closely you can hear kids playing in the background, but they weren't disruptive enough to necessitate re-recording.  Nor did my stool squeak this time, or the bow scratch (I haven't raised the A string at the nut yet, so this still happens sometimes), or the pitch get too far from target.  All of those other things led to this being the dozenth take or something along those lines, and while it's still not perfect (next time I'm using headphones to give myself a click track) it should serve its purpose as a ringtone just fine.

Oh, and it was transposed to G Maj just to make it easier to get the tonic on a fingered position so I could put in better vibrato.

Cheers!

Recently I had a pretty nasty McArdle episode. It shut me down hard for a couple of days, not really making it out bed for more than the essentials, and struggling through the motions for the next week. It's getting easier, but will still be another week before I can get back into a considerably reduced exercise regimen (which is the recommendation for McArdle people, and also the cause of the problem at hand - apparently my VO2 max is a lagging indicator of exertion and does not work well for gauging level of muscular effort, leading to a dangerously disconnected feedback loop - the whole mess will have to be completely refigured).

The experience pushed me out of the home/career/self perspective I'd been maintaining, and forced me to face the immediate situation and condition. My entire focus necessarily changed to deal with it, and as a result my point of view kept coming back to questions of value - "is it worth it?" and "what's the point?"

Not in any kind of depressed fatalistic resignation, but more of an introspective examination overshadowed by the very strong impression that today, I would be much happier on a park bench than in the office; more fulfilled quietly soaking up the grandeur of the world than perpetuating other institutions, objectives, and deadlines. This may not sound like a very profound epiphany, and I can't think of many people who wouldn't rather go fishing or just be outdoors than sweat and labor (even intellectually). What was/is striking about it is the intensity and immediacy with which it impressed me.

Of course the bills still need to be paid, and the family is rather fond of food, so even though that impression fits well with my long term objectives of retirement (or my really ambitious medium term objectives of retirement) I still have to connect that to the reality of where I am today, and what I have to work with. This is where the more profound considerations are happening, though I openly admit it may still be the afterglow from the episode (and thus not looking as long or as objectively as I think).

A sick day here or there I can handle, but with the prospect of potentially needing more time and/or an entirely different pace (what? not aggravating things to the point of illness in the first place?  What a novel idea!), which is a very real possibility given the nature of the disorder, what level of engagement and personal investment can I realistically commit to? And this, balanced against the needs of the family: how do I tend to them at an appropriate standard of living without killing myself? Or put differently, without committing to a standard of performance I doubt my ability to maintain, or which can be undermined by unpredictable factors?

Nearly everyone faces that same question to some degree, employed by others (even the self employed are really just employed by their clients and the economic climate in which they operate) and trading application of self for remuneration that has a non-zero probability of drying up at any time.  It's possible if not probable that I'm just being skittish because I'm psychologically so close to the idea of that non-zero number right now that it makes it look much bigger, and may be clouding my judgement.

But would it be a bad thing to wish to be independently wealthy? Or that there could exist somewhere in the universe a configuration of work so ideally suited to my talents that I can work half the time and make twice as much (against those rainy days, and accelerating savings toward fiscal independence)?

More than anything else, the experience is forcing me to acknowledge the mortality of my limitations. I'm used to operating under the assumption that while things may be difficult for me, they're still possible using some magical compensatory practice (increasingly "take more naps, dummy!") and may just take a little more work. Now I have to admit the very real upper bounds of my own performance, and put those other ideas up on a shelf I can't reach - rather predictably this is making me anxiously uncomfortable, and nothing is resolved yet.

Click for rear view (decal of my own making)

Full size ("4/4" in string instrument parlance), slightly sparkly (they called it "metallic" in the listing) glossy sheen, and only some assembly required (bridge setup - and apparently I'm fond of parentheses today).

I brought it up to tune and spent a few weeks conditioning the strings - tuning, playing, cleaning, repeating, etc. - until they came into temper and can hold their pitch. Only, as I was going through my scales and exercises I noticed there were a couple of notes that for whatever reason, I could not get to come out without a horrible sound. It would be either a scratchy rattle, a dry reedy sound, or in one case a harmonic (meaning, at an offset from the base expressed note - not "in harmony" in a melodic sense) squeak. Careful study and experimentation determined that, while I was still definitely amateur, these horrible sounds were not actually my fault.

The fingerboard (area beneath the strings used for altering pitch) is supposed to fall away from the fingered position of the string rapidly, having a uniform (though subtle) concave curvature along its entire length. Only, for this one, that's only true for about the last 2/3 of it. The first 1/3 is inconsistent and almost convex in a couple places - I tried taking a few shots looking down the board from the perspective of the nut (where the strings enter the peg box) but they just didn't turn out; apparently a longer depth of field and stereoscopy are required to appreciate the dimensionality.

Anyway, this meant that the string was staying in contact with the fingerboard for a couple inches in some cases, and it was that flush positioning that was causing the rattle and most of the pitch effects. To compound that, the C string (lowest of the bunch) was almost 2x the height from the board that it should have been. Taking measurements across the length I determined 2 major corrections were in order:

First, file down the nut under the C string to bring it closer to the fingerboard (making it possible to play a C#). I did this with a jeweler's saw (since I didn't have any rounded files), and as evident from the picture didn't bother to re-stain the wood after my handy work - I wasn't sure if more changes would be necessary. This changed it from almost 4mm down to about 2mm, making the fingering a little easier and the sound much better.

The second problem was the string height relative to the fingerboard for almost the entire length. In fact, at the end of the fingerboard where the strings are supposed to be considerably higher (usually about 2x their starting height as measured at the nut, as I understand it), they were all basically level and in the case of the A string, which had given me the most trouble, was actually closer. I wasn't about to replace the fingerboard (and/or neck), and I have neither the tools nor the expertise to sand it to shape and re-finish it, so I had to change the relative height a different way.

The answer this time was to raise the bridge itself - which meant carefully dropping the tension on all the strings again, ensuring the sound post stayed positioned, and finding a good way to increase the height of the bridge while still keeping good contact with the face matching curvature and transmitting sound effectively).

I used some chipboard salvaged from the backing of a pad a parchment Rachelle was using for some projects. It was 2mm thick, had a consistency similar to wood, and was able to conform to the surface and footing. I took my measurements and cut several thicknesses which I layered under each foot of the bridge, raising the C side 6mm and the A side 4mm (although I'm still thinking about upping that to a full 6mm, but it hasn't needed it yet).

Brought the strings back up to pitch and restored the temper (much faster this time), and the timbre has been much approved across the entire range. Fingered C string notes still don't have as much resonance as those played on other strings, but at least they sound clearly. Dramatic improvements could also be made by putting decent strings on it instead of those it shipped with, but I'm not about to drop $240-$300 in strings onto a $190 cello.

It's still a student grade instrument, but decently playable now and I've been having lots of fun with it the last few months. I'm getting more comfortable moving beyond first position, and will be picking up some instruction books with progressive exercises to hone those basics into something presentable (one may notice the lack of audio evidence presented along with this post). For now I can play along with Rachelle and Ashley on their violins, and make OK work of a hymnal, and most importantly enjoy myself.

Sorry it's synth-ish.  I played each layer individually on my Akai EWI USB, but the Garriton sound fonts it comes with leave something to be desired.  I'll try to fix this with real performances when my cello arrives in a week or so (so it's a Merry Christmas to me, too!).

Thanks to everyone for an awesome year!