Therapy for Cabin Fever
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Ok friends, I need suggestions... Feb 7th I fell on a path of ice in Virginia. Broke my right ankle and a bone in my lower leg. Spent Sunday through Wednesday evening in a hospital and now I'm back home in Mississippi. I will be unable to work for a minimum of 8 weeks. I'm a hobbyist programmer (VB), not a professional developer. I drive a truck for a living and I'm accustomed to being out and about all the time. I am going berserk here at home. Books and movies are already starting to bore me. So I need input. Put on your thinking caps and send me some links for some interesting / bizarre / funny / informative websites. My usual menu of websites is quickly becoming redundant. An idea for a VB project would be good, too. Anything to keep my house from feeling like a comfy prison. :wtf:
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Alan Burkhart wrote:
An idea for a VB project would be good, too. Anything to keep my house from feeling like a comfy prison
I think that falls under the category of "cruel and unusual punishment".
I rather like VB, probably just because I started playing with Basic years ago (all the way back to the TI99-4A). But I'm also stuck in a trap with C#. There's a (registry ?) bug that prevents some machines from creating new .cs files. I searched high and low for a fix and the only thing I found was a .bat file that royally messed up my machine. Microsoft has assured me that they don't understand it either and as far as I know they've quit hunting a fix. Only affects perhaps 1 out of 10,000 computers. Maybe I should spend some time looking to see if there's a new fix. At least it'd be something to do...
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Stories from the industry that are mostly humourous: www.thedailywtf.com[^] Addictive one handed time killer games: www.orisinal.com[^] Project idea: I hae a friend who's a large haulage driver. Always says it'd be nice to have a shared database of shortcuts as well as unsuitable roads for all drivers to contribute to and view. In the current days of GPS and wikis, the demand's dropped a bit but with your background you could finda new angle on it. Backreading old threads in the Back Room is pretty funny too. Depending on how your mind is you might want to look at http://www.regexlib.com/[^] and see if you can come up with something better (please do!)
"...and see if you can come up with something better (please do!)" There's an idea. I've got quite a few Regex patterns I used for pulling info from the WordNet database. I'll see about adding them to the mix. Tried playing "Cranky Crabs." Gonna have to brush up on my yo yo skills.
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Ok friends, I need suggestions... Feb 7th I fell on a path of ice in Virginia. Broke my right ankle and a bone in my lower leg. Spent Sunday through Wednesday evening in a hospital and now I'm back home in Mississippi. I will be unable to work for a minimum of 8 weeks. I'm a hobbyist programmer (VB), not a professional developer. I drive a truck for a living and I'm accustomed to being out and about all the time. I am going berserk here at home. Books and movies are already starting to bore me. So I need input. Put on your thinking caps and send me some links for some interesting / bizarre / funny / informative websites. My usual menu of websites is quickly becoming redundant. An idea for a VB project would be good, too. Anything to keep my house from feeling like a comfy prison. :wtf:
I am quite addicted to http://notalwaysright.com/[^] -Saurabh
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Ok friends, I need suggestions... Feb 7th I fell on a path of ice in Virginia. Broke my right ankle and a bone in my lower leg. Spent Sunday through Wednesday evening in a hospital and now I'm back home in Mississippi. I will be unable to work for a minimum of 8 weeks. I'm a hobbyist programmer (VB), not a professional developer. I drive a truck for a living and I'm accustomed to being out and about all the time. I am going berserk here at home. Books and movies are already starting to bore me. So I need input. Put on your thinking caps and send me some links for some interesting / bizarre / funny / informative websites. My usual menu of websites is quickly becoming redundant. An idea for a VB project would be good, too. Anything to keep my house from feeling like a comfy prison. :wtf:
Quite funny from time to time: http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/[^]
Assumption is the mother of all f@ckups
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Ok friends, I need suggestions... Feb 7th I fell on a path of ice in Virginia. Broke my right ankle and a bone in my lower leg. Spent Sunday through Wednesday evening in a hospital and now I'm back home in Mississippi. I will be unable to work for a minimum of 8 weeks. I'm a hobbyist programmer (VB), not a professional developer. I drive a truck for a living and I'm accustomed to being out and about all the time. I am going berserk here at home. Books and movies are already starting to bore me. So I need input. Put on your thinking caps and send me some links for some interesting / bizarre / funny / informative websites. My usual menu of websites is quickly becoming redundant. An idea for a VB project would be good, too. Anything to keep my house from feeling like a comfy prison. :wtf:
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Quite funny from time to time: http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/[^]
Assumption is the mother of all f@ckups
Oh man... that's a funny website. Now I've got go to Wal-Mart, get on one of those little electric scooters, and sneak around with my cell phone camera. ;P
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Try learning C, just for the hell of it. Failing that, I find anything involving the Russian ladies curling team a fine way of staving off bordom.
And people wonder why we yell, HARDER. :)
Chris Meech I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar] In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. [Yogi Berra]
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Move on from VB to C#, add collections to that and it'll strech your brain for a bit.
Join the cool kids - Come fold with us[^]
I'd go to C# if I could ever figure out why my machine won't let me create a new project. I've seen a few other people with the same problem but neither MS nor anyone else seems to have a solution. At least not since I last searched, which admittedly has been a few months.
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Oh man... that's a funny website. Now I've got go to Wal-Mart, get on one of those little electric scooters, and sneak around with my cell phone camera. ;P
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And people wonder why we yell, HARDER. :)
Chris Meech I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar] In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. [Yogi Berra]
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Wear a brightly colored track suit and then go home and see how long it takes for your visage to show up on the web site! :-D
"Wear a brightly colored track suit and then go home..." Let's see... Canary yellow track suit - Check Red galoshes- Check Tiger-striped bandanna - Check See ya at Wal-Mart! :cool:
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Ok friends, I need suggestions... Feb 7th I fell on a path of ice in Virginia. Broke my right ankle and a bone in my lower leg. Spent Sunday through Wednesday evening in a hospital and now I'm back home in Mississippi. I will be unable to work for a minimum of 8 weeks. I'm a hobbyist programmer (VB), not a professional developer. I drive a truck for a living and I'm accustomed to being out and about all the time. I am going berserk here at home. Books and movies are already starting to bore me. So I need input. Put on your thinking caps and send me some links for some interesting / bizarre / funny / informative websites. My usual menu of websites is quickly becoming redundant. An idea for a VB project would be good, too. Anything to keep my house from feeling like a comfy prison. :wtf:
orsm.net (not safe for work or anywhere really) -the archives provide unlimited amounts of entertainment Strong Bad Emails dealspl.us You could make: -A game (tetris, brick break, ...). -A text editor with a custom background image. -Random visualizations (like drawing each pixel on the screen by calculating its color based on the coordinate, and to make it more interesting make time a factor so it animates). --I've found trig functions (SIN, COS, ...) to make cool visualizations. If you can still navigate in your house, you could always make some tasty food. Get a dart board and a bunch of spare darts so you don't have to get up often. A bouncy ball, a floor, and a wall could also work. Start drawing, even if you're bad at it. Find people/things to draw. It can be fun and can distract you for a good amount of time.
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orsm.net (not safe for work or anywhere really) -the archives provide unlimited amounts of entertainment Strong Bad Emails dealspl.us You could make: -A game (tetris, brick break, ...). -A text editor with a custom background image. -Random visualizations (like drawing each pixel on the screen by calculating its color based on the coordinate, and to make it more interesting make time a factor so it animates). --I've found trig functions (SIN, COS, ...) to make cool visualizations. If you can still navigate in your house, you could always make some tasty food. Get a dart board and a bunch of spare darts so you don't have to get up often. A bouncy ball, a floor, and a wall could also work. Start drawing, even if you're bad at it. Find people/things to draw. It can be fun and can distract you for a good amount of time.
Gotta watch the "tasty food" since I can't jog at the moment. ;-) I did write this weird VB program yesterday similar to the "Mystify" screen saver. Spent about a half hour watching it run and then it was old news. Did a couple of doctored images allowing Godzilla to visit places he's never eaten before - lame but fun to make: http://www.alanburkhart.com/Gzilla_DrillingRigLunch.jpg[^] I'm probably being a pest over here right now but everyone's been great to come up with ideas to help me stay sane. I built a thesaurus from WordNet awhile back. Might post it up here. That'd be almost productive... Thanks AB
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Gotta watch the "tasty food" since I can't jog at the moment. ;-) I did write this weird VB program yesterday similar to the "Mystify" screen saver. Spent about a half hour watching it run and then it was old news. Did a couple of doctored images allowing Godzilla to visit places he's never eaten before - lame but fun to make: http://www.alanburkhart.com/Gzilla_DrillingRigLunch.jpg[^] I'm probably being a pest over here right now but everyone's been great to come up with ideas to help me stay sane. I built a thesaurus from WordNet awhile back. Might post it up here. That'd be almost productive... Thanks AB
Alan Burkhart wrote:
I built a thesaurus from WordNet awhile back. Might post it up here.
Do it! I've been wanting to build a dictionary and/or word lookup application that has a search box in my tasbar. I did find some old dictionary data, but I haven't gotten around to parsing out the data yet.
Alan Burkhart wrote:
I did write this weird VB program yesterday similar to the "Mystify" screen saver.
This was probably the most fun I've had making a visualization (that GIF will run slow while it loads, but then should run faster). The cool thing is that animation can be tiled and looped.
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Alan Burkhart wrote:
I built a thesaurus from WordNet awhile back. Might post it up here.
Do it! I've been wanting to build a dictionary and/or word lookup application that has a search box in my tasbar. I did find some old dictionary data, but I haven't gotten around to parsing out the data yet.
Alan Burkhart wrote:
I did write this weird VB program yesterday similar to the "Mystify" screen saver.
This was probably the most fun I've had making a visualization (that GIF will run slow while it loads, but then should run faster). The cool thing is that animation can be tiled and looped.
Do it! I've been wanting to build a dictionary and/or word lookup application... Sounds like a plan. I've got a little single-file text editor I can drop it and also a spell checker in. I'll cobble it all together and submit it here in a day or two. I'll reply to this thread again when it's up. :-)
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Ok friends, I need suggestions... Feb 7th I fell on a path of ice in Virginia. Broke my right ankle and a bone in my lower leg. Spent Sunday through Wednesday evening in a hospital and now I'm back home in Mississippi. I will be unable to work for a minimum of 8 weeks. I'm a hobbyist programmer (VB), not a professional developer. I drive a truck for a living and I'm accustomed to being out and about all the time. I am going berserk here at home. Books and movies are already starting to bore me. So I need input. Put on your thinking caps and send me some links for some interesting / bizarre / funny / informative websites. My usual menu of websites is quickly becoming redundant. An idea for a VB project would be good, too. Anything to keep my house from feeling like a comfy prison. :wtf:
Sorry this is kind of long but I feel very strongly about this and what else have you got to do right now but read it anyway? ;) A *very* similar thing happened to me years ago. I was living up north just off the Alaska highway, it was the dead of winter and I broke my right ankle and bone in my lower leg slipping on ice in my driveway while carrying cross country skis out to my car to go skiing. I was working from home programming so work wise it made little difference at all but I know all about the cabin fever because my ankle failed to set properly for far longer than it should have taken. I had sat around the house doing very little at all but sitting at the keyboard and sitting on the couch watching tv and it was one of the most depressing times in my life. The cast was supposed to come off in six weeks but it was very painful and clearly not healing properly and another xray showed it was all but still broken. Almost no healing at all. I was both worried about that and very angry that I had an unknown time to go if it healed at all. They said they would pin it or something if it didn't start healing within the next few weeks. I got seriously pissed off and decided that I wasn't sitting around any more so I bought these little flip down ice grabber things for the bottom of my crutches (you can flip them down to get a grip on ice and up when your indoors) and started taking long crutch walks (in -40 weather), eventually I started getting brave enough to ride my mountain bike with one foot pedaling and almost immediately after starting exercising again the pain and swelling went down and within a couple of weeks it was healing up nicely. I've since learned what I should have realized from that at the time is that one of the worst harms you can do to your body is to stop exercising at all and be still for too many days in a row. Inaction is terrible for the body and slows all your systems down including the ones responsible for healing. I know how you feel and I sincerely urge you to find some way, any way, to get as much exercise every day as physically possible. Be creative as you have to to work around your leg but do something that will get your heart rate way high for 20 minutes each day. Particularly pay attention to your healthy leg as well, there's good research that shows exercising the uninjured limb helps the injured one through some process that I can't recall off the top of my head. If it were me right now in your position I'd do pull ups, push ups, pistols (one legg
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Sorry this is kind of long but I feel very strongly about this and what else have you got to do right now but read it anyway? ;) A *very* similar thing happened to me years ago. I was living up north just off the Alaska highway, it was the dead of winter and I broke my right ankle and bone in my lower leg slipping on ice in my driveway while carrying cross country skis out to my car to go skiing. I was working from home programming so work wise it made little difference at all but I know all about the cabin fever because my ankle failed to set properly for far longer than it should have taken. I had sat around the house doing very little at all but sitting at the keyboard and sitting on the couch watching tv and it was one of the most depressing times in my life. The cast was supposed to come off in six weeks but it was very painful and clearly not healing properly and another xray showed it was all but still broken. Almost no healing at all. I was both worried about that and very angry that I had an unknown time to go if it healed at all. They said they would pin it or something if it didn't start healing within the next few weeks. I got seriously pissed off and decided that I wasn't sitting around any more so I bought these little flip down ice grabber things for the bottom of my crutches (you can flip them down to get a grip on ice and up when your indoors) and started taking long crutch walks (in -40 weather), eventually I started getting brave enough to ride my mountain bike with one foot pedaling and almost immediately after starting exercising again the pain and swelling went down and within a couple of weeks it was healing up nicely. I've since learned what I should have realized from that at the time is that one of the worst harms you can do to your body is to stop exercising at all and be still for too many days in a row. Inaction is terrible for the body and slows all your systems down including the ones responsible for healing. I know how you feel and I sincerely urge you to find some way, any way, to get as much exercise every day as physically possible. Be creative as you have to to work around your leg but do something that will get your heart rate way high for 20 minutes each day. Particularly pay attention to your healthy leg as well, there's good research that shows exercising the uninjured limb helps the injured one through some process that I can't recall off the top of my head. If it were me right now in your position I'd do pull ups, push ups, pistols (one legg
Good advice and well taken. I've been using my tool box for a weight (it's crammed full of hand tools) and doing curls with it (don't laugh - it works!). It's fairly heavy so at least it provides some resistance. And I'm doing a lot of stretching exercises per my doctor. Watching my diet is 2nd nature because I'm a diabetic and I'm already a bit overweight - although I've dropped close to 60 pounds over the last several years - weighed just over 300 lbs when I was diagnosed as Type II. Now I'm 242. The goal is 200 but it's coming off slowly. And - I'm getting out of the house today. A buddy of mine is coming by later so I can do some grocery shopping and get some fresh air and sunshine. The little electric "scooters" at Kroger are actually kind of fun to ride. :-)
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Good advice and well taken. I've been using my tool box for a weight (it's crammed full of hand tools) and doing curls with it (don't laugh - it works!). It's fairly heavy so at least it provides some resistance. And I'm doing a lot of stretching exercises per my doctor. Watching my diet is 2nd nature because I'm a diabetic and I'm already a bit overweight - although I've dropped close to 60 pounds over the last several years - weighed just over 300 lbs when I was diagnosed as Type II. Now I'm 242. The goal is 200 but it's coming off slowly. And - I'm getting out of the house today. A buddy of mine is coming by later so I can do some grocery shopping and get some fresh air and sunshine. The little electric "scooters" at Kroger are actually kind of fun to ride. :-)
Alan Burkhart wrote:
I've been using my tool box for a weight (it's crammed full of hand tools) and doing curls with it (don't laugh - it works!)
I would never laugh at your choice of what to lift, I use military duffel bags filled with sand myself because I'm too cheap to buy a proper barbell set but I also lift rocks, logs etc, however the curls are a bit funny to me because I'm totally not into bodybuilding at all, just fitness and curls are good for glamour muscles but not much else. ;) When you go out shopping I highly recommend you get a couple of dumbbells, they're cheap, available at almost any department store like Walmart etc and you can do functional stuff like overhead presses and a ton of other stuff that you can't do with the toolbox. Good for you for the weight loss, I peaked at 230 and am now down to 195 but there's a fair bit of muscle in there now and muscle burns fat like nothing else. Best of all though is the fresh air and sunshine!
Yesterday they said today was tomorrow but today they know better. - Poul Anderson
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Alan Burkhart wrote:
I built a thesaurus from WordNet awhile back. Might post it up here.
Do it! I've been wanting to build a dictionary and/or word lookup application that has a search box in my tasbar. I did find some old dictionary data, but I haven't gotten around to parsing out the data yet.
Alan Burkhart wrote:
I did write this weird VB program yesterday similar to the "Mystify" screen saver.
This was probably the most fun I've had making a visualization (that GIF will run slow while it loads, but then should run faster). The cool thing is that animation can be tiled and looped.
As promised, here's the thesaurus: An English Thesaurus for Windows Forms Applications[^] It's my first c/p article so be gentle on me. ;-)
