Category: Uncategorized

Categories
Uncategorized

Neighborhood

Enderis Park

Enderis Park

I live in Enderis Park, a neighborhood in Milwaukee. For the first 7 years of living here I mostly left my home and returned to my home by car. Traveling by car is certainly one way to see things. You see things at the speed of car travel. That might be 25mph in your neighborhood, maybe slower sometimes, and definitely faster for some drivers.

We’d go on the occasional walks now and then, and at a slower pace you can see more. You have time to take things in. You are also not locked into a steel soundproof box, so you hear things, come across people, see dogs, cats, rabbits… feel the breeze and the sunshine.

In 2021 I started walking. I mean, I walked a lot. I would walk one to two hours per day sometimes. Miles and miles.

And in all that walking, I got to know my neighborhood really good. I got familiar with all the streets, the houses, the businesses, and the cemetery. I knew which houses had barking dogs so I could avoid them, which had cats so I could go past them. I saw houses where there was always a TV on at 7:30am and which houses had the best sidewalk chalk artists.

I found all the best Little Free Libraries and knew which alleys were the most interesting (ahem) and basically got to know my neighborhood. I mean, there are people of course, not just stuff. I did my best to say “Hi” to people, I saw Bobby T. a bunch, and saw lots of kids headed to school. I should note I gave kids going to school and any women out walking extra space because I am a large guy and I don’t want anyone to feel threatened or unsafe if they have to pass me on a narrow sidewalk.

As I started biking in 2024 (due to foot injuries) I explored the neighborhood in different ways. Going farther and taking different routes. I saw things at the speed of biking. While walking was 3 or 4mph, biking was closer to 8 to 10mph, faster, but still much slower than by car, and a cruise around the neighborhood by bike covers more ground faster, so there was more to see.

Why did I write all of this!? Oh yeah. Get out. Get out there. Get out of your house. See your neighborhood. Say “Hi” to your neighbors. Don’t you want to live in a neighborhood where people say “Hi” to you, and recognize you, and know you, and don’t you want the same? We are social creatures, and look, I am an introvert, and I love my alone time, but I know that’s not completely healthy.

And now that my spine is fixed I am back to walking around the neighborhood (which I’ve not been able to do all year) as part of my recovery, and once recovered I cannot wait to get back on the bike and see what has changed!

(This whole post was prompted by the fact that on today’s walk I found a section of road I bike to work on that has been repaved for four blocks and I got so excited I walked down the road instead of the sidewalk.)

Categories
Uncategorized

This is the Pain (Post-Op Week 1)

You might want to see the previous update… Okay? Good.

Here’s the good news. I had surgery last week Tuesday. It is now the following Tuesday. I am doing better. I am, of course, cautiously optimistic, but I believe the surgery has solved my problem.

This is big. This is huge! Remember when I got the injections in April and… they did not work. The reason is due to the synovial cyst on my spine that was discovered later.

It’s been a week and the pain I felt is gone. Gone. I do not have the pain I had. That cyst pressing on my nerve was hell. It was hell for five months (and an annoyance for two months before that).

So now comes recovery. I am on limited activity. I cannot bike, or drive, or BLT. BLT? Yeah, I cannot Bend, Lift, or Twist. I’m off work right now and not doing much around the house. I’m a person who likes to keep busy so it’s been boring. I made a joke that I’ve read every post, watched every video, and commented on every comment on the Internet now.

The first few days was basically lying flat in bed (not sitting up) and then standing, walking around the house to get at least some activity. I can only sit for 30 minutes at a time. Car rides? Limited to 20 minutes. No lifting anything over 10 pounds.

Lots of drugs the first few days. I also could not turn over in bed. I mean I could not physically turn over without screaming in pain. I had to “log roll” into and out of bed. I’m still doing the log roll move but I can turn over without too much pain now.

I’m still not 100% there… and probably not even close. I get exhausted easily. I did a 30 minute walk this morning (the longest yet!) and by 1pm I had to take a nap, slept a few hours, woke up exhausted still. I did get 6 hours of sleep last night, which is a good amount for me, but I was up before 4am and could not sleep again, and my body just needs more rest that usual.

I see my doctor next week Monday and we’ll see how I am doing then. I may need to do some PT in the future, which is good, because I love my Physical Therapist. I am really hoping to be able to ride my bike by the end of July if possible, and of course get back to biking to work. I’ve read that 6 weeks is reasonable to start doing “normal” activities after this kind of surgery.

Okay! Thanks for reading, see you next time!

Categories
Uncategorized

A (Personal) Search Engine

Personal Search Engine by jjg

Personal Search Engine by jjg

Back in Goodbye Google Search! I said:

“I think it’s our duty to find alternatives and try them out and see if we can move away from big tech, either by choosing self-hosted alternatives, more ethical companies, or ways to subvert the existing system.”

I also talked about quitting Google (Web) Search, or should I say Google AI Answers? Anyway, Google Web Search is dead, so it’s time for something else. I covered a bunch of options in the last post.

Meanwhile, through some discussions in a group chat I’m in with a few software developers the idea of a “Personal Search Engine” came up. I did a little looking around and there are things with that name, but they are often made to search your own documents locally stored, or web pages you have bookmarked, or they use LLMs (Yuk!) so this idea is more of a Personal Web Search Engine.

Now you need to go read Jason’s post: Personal Search Engines

A Personal Search Engine (PSE) is a search engine that specializes in your interests. It provides personalized search results by indexing only the things you are interested in, not by spying on you. Instead of crawling the entire Web and then looking for what you’ve searched for, A PSE crawls only the parts of the Web you are most interested in and looks for what you’re searching for there. The result is a list of hits that are relevant to your interests that point to websites you are more likely to know and trust.

I love this idea, and want to ramble on about it…

If I were to develop a PSE of my own, I think there are a few things I’d it to do.

Index Everything I Browse:

As I browse the web I’d like to just index every page I visit. This might seem like a lot of pages but honesty it’s probably less than feeding just one large domain to the index. If I am searching for some obscure thing like writing specific Arduino code to do some weird MIDI thing I may visit a dozen or more pages, and I’d like to see those all added to my index. Then the next time I need to find what I found I could just search my own index. Ideally I could “PageRank” my results in some way, either automagically using my PES to do so when I click a link…

Or maybe I could manually set the ranking on a page so it comes up higher in my searches. Should there be a way to manually rank things? Why not? It’s not like you can game your own system for profit or something, right?

Use the RSS Feeds:

I subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds through my feed reader (FreshRSS and NetNewWire) and they provide some searching capabilities, but maybe we can feed those indexes into our master index so our PES can use it. Alternately we add RSS feeds to the PES directly so blogs and any site with a feed can be incrementally indexed over time.

So those are just two ideas I wanted to get out there… I will probably have more.

I think the magic of this is that while I mentioned SearXNG in the previous post, even though it’s a container application and was dead simple to install onto my NAS, it still relies on the indexes of other already existing search engines.

It’s 2026, and while we (still) have a number of options to search the general web, there is absolutely no reason we cannot self host our own personal web search engines.

Categories
Uncategorized

This is the Pain (Part VII)

Screenshot

Previously, in pain, and so on…

Remember when I said:

The surgery could get moved up if I start to lose control of my bladder and bowel…

And then I also said:

I’ve already gone over 120 days in pain, what’s another 70 or so?

Well the good news is, I did not lose control of my bladder and bowel… and I do not have to wait 70 whatever more days! The bad news is, my pain did start to worsen. There was also a scheduling conflict with the original surgery date, and we looked at pushing it back even further, like into August (ugh!) but instead it got moved up to next week!

I’ve already covered the details of the procedure and general situation in the previous post, so hopefully the next post will be about recovery.

Of course with any surgery there are risks, and there is a chance I don’t make it, so this might be the last blog post I publish.

If that is the case I just want to say thank you to all the great people I met along the way. This world can be rough, but having good friends and family (and cats!) to help you through it certainly makes things easier.

Signing off for now. I hope to post again next week. Cheers, and thanks for all the fish.

Categories
Uncategorized

This is the Pain (Part VI)

MRI Images

MRI Images

Since last time (and this) I figured it was time for an update.

I saw the pain management doctor (who gave me the injections) and he said I needed to have part of my spine widened since the injections did not work. The “spine hole widening” is a surgical procedure, so he suggested I see a surgeon. So I did.

The surgeon looked at my MRI and said “You’ve got a senovial cyst!” So yeah, there is a cyst on my spine pressing against the nerve that runs down my right leg, hence the terrible horrible pain in my right leg.

If you want to get technical I need a Laminotomy which is the opening of the space around the nerve, in this case by removing the cyst. (A Laminectomy on the other hand, is removal of part of the spine. Luckily a Laminotomy is a somewhat less invasive procedure.)

It seems plenty of (older) people get these cysts but never even know it because they do not cause any pain. Lucky me!

Other fun things from the diagnosis: “severe lumbar spinal canal stenosis” and “multilevel cervical spondylosis neural foraminal narrowing” and of course “degenerative disc disease” for good measure.

So the good news is I am scheduled for surgery. The bad news is I need to wait for three months after the injection, which would mean the first week of July. The other bad news is that due to my work schedule I can’t take off for the surgery until the last week of July. So as I am typing this it’s over 70 days until my surgery.

The surgery could get moved up if I start to lose control of my bladder and bowel, so that’s fun.

Otherwise I figure I’ve already gone over 120 days in pain, what’s another 70 or so? Are there days I wake up (in pain) and scream in agony? Yes. But hopefully we’ve got a solution to this nightmare.

Fingers Crossed and all that!