I’ve known that I had type 2 diabetes for 2.5 years now. I’ve gone from taking 2 medications (Metformin and an ACE inhibitor) to taking 6 different medications  for sugar control, insulin resistance, cholesterol, and blood pressure. Every time the doctor wants to add a new medication to the mix, it’s always the latest and greatest patented brand name-only drug that isn’t covered by my prescription plan. Odd coincidence, huh?

The doctors will send you to the Diabetes education class where you receive very generic and watered down  information. I think I knew more about the causes and treatment of Erectile Dysfunction from watching commercials on TV than I did about Diabetes when I finished the class. The class I went to at the hospital was sponsored by manufacturers of diabetic food products. Guess what their advice was? Yeah, eat expensive special foods for diabetics.

In 2007, I started with a fasting blood sugar of over 330mg/dl when diagnosed then experienced a brief drop to 169mg/dl (7.5% A1c) for a short period. However, for the past year I’ve been extremely frustrated with daily fasting readingss of 220-230mg/dl and my A1c shot back up to 8.8% for my last test in December. All of this despite my efforts to follow a “diabetic diet” and exercise. It’s hard to stay motivated when all of your efforts show absolutely no results!

I came across this website, bloodsugar101.com, a few weeks ago via the discussion forums at Sugarstats (the tool I use to track my blood sugar, doctor visits, etc). As I was reading the site, it was like I was learning about my disease for the first time. Why wasn’t it explained this way in the diabetes education class? Why have I spent the last 2 years feeling like I did this to myself, despite knowing there’s a family history (obesity is a symptom, not a cause)?

I’m happy to report that after following some of the advice on the site and making just a few minor tweaks to my diet, exercise, and medication regimen that  my fasting blood sugar has dropped over 50 mg/dl in just a few weeks. I have not finished absorbing all of the information available on the site or implementing all of the suggestionss, but for the first time in a long while I’m optimistic that I can get control instead of being controlled by it. Yes, I’m motivated again!

I know I have a long way to go. I have get my blood sugar down further and keep it from from spiking over 140 mg/dl at any time in order to avoid doing more damage. I have to break the insulin resistance cycle that is causing my beta cells to work so hard. In other words, I’m shooting for the 5% club.

If you know anyone that is concerned about their blood sugar then tell them about this. If they are diabetic, pre-diabetic, or just have a family history, tell them to read bloodsugar101.com or buy the book.

The past few weeks while I’ve had quite a bit of vacation time, I’ve worked on putting some of our family’s genealogical information online. I installed PHPGedview and ask my mom, who is the keeper of the official genealogy for the family, to provide me with a GEDCOM file to try it out with.

It took quite a bit of effort to get the initial file imported. I think it’s because of the size of the file and the limitations of the shared server I’m hosting it on. It kept running out of memory, but once I figured out how to increase the limit,  it seemed to go okay. After some initial testing, we opened the site up to the rest of the family to review their records and make corrections. It was all going okay.

Once people started making changes, the question came up of how do we take changes people have made and get it back into my mom’s official record in Family Tree Maker. I decided to let her approve all changes and use the change report to select just those records that had changed, create a new GEDCOM file which could be re-imported. The only problem was that the change report seemed to be broken in the version I was using.

I decided to upgrade to the lastest version, but it has a bug in it which doesn’t allow you login with Internet Explorer. I filed a bug report, but so far nothing. Meanwhile, things kept trucking along.

The major problem came in when one of our relatives sent an entirely new GEDCOM that contained all of the information for that branch of the family. My dad imported the file into Family Tree Maker and tried to do an entirely new export of the entire database to overwrite the information in PHPGedview so that it would include the new data. That’s where things went wrong. I’m not able to import the new file and I’m no longer able to import the original file that worked before.

I have no idea how to proceed at this point. No matter which file I try to import or how I do it (fiddling with the memory limits), the import fails with a 500 server error. I even tried creating a virtual machine with VirtualBox and a LAMP appliance to do the import and so far it’s not worked either. It’s weird that it gets to 16% or so and then the progress meter goes back to 2% and starts counting up again.

Maybe I should give up on PHPGedview and try something else.

I’d like to wish everyone a joyous and memorable Christmas. I’m grateful to have this time with my family so that I can  try to make each and every Christmas one that my children will remember and tell their children about. Our family traditions are unique to us and, while they may resemble traditions other families share, we have grown them with our own special flavoring. The seeds of these traditions began with those that my wife and I each had with our families as we grew up. We’ve taken these and made them into something unique and special to us.

• We always follow Santa on Norad’s Santa Tracker using Google Earth. As Santa makes his way along his route, the kids’ excitement builds and eventually come to tell us that they need to go to bed so that Santa will come to our house.
• We always watch A Christmas Story at least once, but sometimes it just stays on in the background as TBS plays it in their yearly 24 hour marathon. I first watched this movie in elementary school as the last activity we did before school let out for Christmas break. Everyone said Ralphie looked just like me and I accepted that as a compliment, though you might be surprised that I’m quite not so cute anymore.
• The kids always try to convince us to open a gift Christmas Eve and each year we insist that they should wait until Christmas morning and open all of their gifts at once. Inevitably, though, the kids win the argument against our feeble protests and we let them open just one.
• The kids always bake cookies for Santa to eat along with a tall glass of cold milk. The last couple of years, though, Santa has requested sugar-free cookies and skim milk.
• We always try to get up before the kids so that we can have the camera ready so that when they come wandering out of their rooms wiping the sleep from their eyes and squinting at the bright lights, we can see their expressions as they gaze on all of the things that were left under the tree for them.

These are just a few of the hundreds of little things we do to make this holiday our own. This year will be the first year that we don’t have to travel at all to see family. We’re so excited to be able to spend all of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day together, playing with our new toys.

I was appalled when I realized the other day that the most recent post I made was on January 4, 2009. I find it (Alanis Morissette) ironic that the first (and almost only) post of the year was about my goal to become a more social person. Go ahead and read that post (or just find it on the main page, you won’t have to scroll very far). I’ll wait.

So, how did I do, you ask?

Small talk was one area that I actually felt like I improved. I made a point to speak with people I randomly met in the elevator and to ask acquaintances about their families or some other event in their lives that I knew about. I still need to work on this, but it helped to learn how to break the ice.

Engaging in debates with people in subjects that I’m only moderately versed in or about controversial subjects is still something I need to work on. I did make an effort to do this with people I was already comfortable with and had a good idea of how they would react, but I didn’t go much beyond that.

Out of all of the areas that I identified to work on, I thought online conversations would be the easiest to tackle. It turns out it was the most difficult. I know that my blogging suffered greatly because of lack of time (or initiative) and what little I did have was taken by short posts to Facebook and Twitter. Even then, those were primarily one-way conversations and my goal was to increase my interactions with people.

It turns out that I’m of two minds about online social interactions. One one hand, I love the openness of everything and ease of finding whatever information you could want. On the other hand, there’s privacy to be concerned about as well as the very real threat of saying or doing something wrong. Anonymity (well, perceived anonymity anyway) makes people a lot bolder when they decide to express themselves online. They’ll say things online that they’d never say to your face. I try to treat people online the same way I’d treat them in person (the online version of the Golden Rule?), but I’ve been around long enough to know that not everyone follows that philosophy.

I desperately want to express my views  about any number of important (to me), but controversial topics. I don’t get much of an opportunity in the offline world to do this either (my wife puts up with occasional grumbling and not much else). The whole “don’t talk about religion and politics” thing has been ingrained into me. For example, what if a potential future employer Googles my name, finds my post on the controversial subject of the mating habits of Northern European red-tailed barn swallow? He or she may take the exact opposite view and decide that anyone who believes what I do on such an important subject could not make a good employee. Opportunity lost. It could happen!

Okay, so what does all this mean for 2010? I plan to continue the momentum I’ve started this year with becoming more social. To up the ante just a little bit, I’m going to try my best to blog at least once a week if not more often. You’ll just have to skip those posts that you don’t agree with and tell me what a great job I did sticking to my goal.

This week I finally sat down and tackled a project I’ve been meaning to get to for at least 6 months. The project was to revamp my blog and create a site which would essentially become the hub of my online presence. A single place where someone could find out about me, connect with me, and get to know me. In other words, a lifestreaming site.

The idea first started when I registered a domain of my own, digitalcraig.me. I started by making it simply a redirect to a storytlr site, a hosted lifestreaming solution. I kept my blog over at wordpress.com and the storytlr site would still pull in posts from the blog so that everything would be centralized, right? In reality, it didn’t feel centralized at all. Wordpress.com and storytlr.com were just other sites that I joined that provided a service, nothing different that Twitter or Facebook or Flickr. I still felt I needed something of my own before it would truly be centralized.

This point hit home even further when storytlr announced that they were shutting down operations on December 31, 2009.  Although I give them credit for shutting down in an orderly fashion and providing tools to export my data, I was still a little shocked to realize that 3rd parties owned every piece of my online presence. If all of them suddenly shutdown or decided to sell all of my personal information (I’m looking at you suspiciously, Facebook) then there isn’t anything I can really do about it.

So, here we are. A brand new blog on my very own webhost under my very own domain. As an added bonus, this page contains links to my profiles on over a dozen other sites. If you want to know more about me, look me up on any of those sites. If you want to know what I’m currently reading, find me on Goodreads. If you want to know what news I’m reading, find my Google Reader shared items. If you want to know what short witty comments I’m making on Twitter, you’ll find a link to me there.

You may also notice a link at the top of the page called “Lifestream”. This is the page that aggregates all of my activity on those other sites into a timeline on a single page. It lists every Twitter post, every movie I rented at Netflix, every blog entry I write, and every news item I share.

On the other hand, you may not care. Either you don’t know who I am and don’t care or you simply aren’t into the minutiae of my life. That’s fine, it’s there if you’re interested and you can ignore it if you’re not.

One of the goals that I’ve set for myself for 2009 is to be a more social person. I’ve always had a problem making “small talk” in situations where I’m not entirely comfortable. If the topic or situation is one that I’m extremely interested or discussion is in an area I consider to be myself well versed in, I usually don’t have a problem speaking up and being heard. However, if I’m in a completely social situation or there are discussions of a topic that I don’t know very well I tend to clam up and just listen.

This tendency that I’ve noticed in myself also extends to online conversations. I tend to be more of a lurker and rarely jump into the conversation unless I can speak with absolute authority on a subject or I know lots of people from the community really well. Out of the dozens of forums I formally belong to, I post on two of them with any regularity. The same goes for Twitter and Friendfeed; I lurk and rarely jump in with my own comments.

I have sat down to write a new post at least a dozen times since my last post and probably a dozen times before that. The main reason I never did it was because I found myself wanting to discuss the election or politics since that was what was mostly being discussed anywhere. I am very confident in my beliefs and thought processes about politics, but that is the area I feel the least comfortable discussion with total strangers. So, I opted to keep quiet and just listen instead.

It’s not that I’m shy, if someone asks my opinion I’m glad to give it. It’s more of a control thing. I want to know how each person is going to react to what I say. If I know the subject really well or I know the people really well, I can gauge their reaction and make my response as non-controversial as possible. Otherwise, I feel out of control of the situation so I’d rather not saying anything.

I’ve come to realize that I’m probably missing out on some great opportunities to learn new things, explore ideas I’m not familiar with, and most definitely I’ve missed out on some great networking opportunities.  I attended a training class in December and won a book on breaking the ice. The book made some great points on what can come out of being bold enough to break the ice and talk to total strangers.

I plan to start slowly and working to increase my comfort level with jumping into the fray with people I don’t know. I hope that will translate into blogging more often (maybe starting a new blog), posting more meaningful posts to twitter and friendfeed, and even striking up conversations with random people I meet on the street. What trouble could that possibly get me into?

Money matters are certainly on a lot of people’s minds these days. Concerns about a recession and possibly a depression, government bailouts of financial institutions and automakers, the holiday retail season , and a dozen other things. Our household has been no different.

It tough for me to admit that we’ve made lots of financial blunders, even the same ones over and over again. Of course, I thought I had it all figured out in college until the credit card offers started coming in. I fell into the trap of thinking that I needed a credit card to ‘build credit’ to buy a car or a house later. That’s where it all went wrong.

The Debt Myth

Dave Ramsey points out that credit is one of the most aggressively marketed financial products ever. It is so pervasive in our society that most people could not fathom living without debt of some kind. The reason is that it plays to our instinct that we’ve got to have more stuff. We’ll figure out how to pay for it later, just give me more stuff. Think about all of the “0% interest” and “No payments for until 2040″ ads you hear or see on a daily basis.

I’ve talked to people who have elaborate systems for transferring their debt from one credit card to another every few months so they can keep paying low interest. No doubt it works, but it’s clearly walking a tightrope and eventually you will make a mistake and fall. A lot of people are finding themselves in similar situations because they bought way more house than they could afford at low interest rates thinking they would sell or refinance before the interest rates went up. Only the value of their house went down faster than their equity went up and they’re upside-down and default.

Is Debt Free?

I’ve been ‘debt-free’ several times in my life. I’ll work like a dog to pay everything off, but because my spending habits and basic philosophy about money hasn’t changed, I end up doing it all over again. It’s like a smoker claiming that they quit every time they extinguish a cigarette.

This time, though, I’m vowing that it will all be different. After reading, The Total Money Makeover, my wife and I sat down and discussed the principals and our goals of where we want to be. The first goal is to be debt-free except for the mortgage and the student loans within 12 months. This is quite aggressive when you consider that this includes some medical bills, a loan for a piano, and two cars.

Fortunately, we already recognized that we were getting killed by credit card payments and took steps to consolidate those earlier this year with a 401k loan that is paid directly from my check. This may not have been an ideal move and one I may not have done if I had been listening to Dave Ramsey before I did it. However, the 401k loan has a definite end date, a significantly lower interest rate (which I’m paying to myself), and the payment is less than 1/4 of what the combined minimum payments were. I’m not counting this loan in my ‘debt-free’ goal as it’ll take care of itself.

The Budget

Before we could start the baby steps, we had to do two things: commit to never using credit ever again and develop a budget.

I’ve done budgets before. Simple, right? Take a guess at how much you need to spend in each category and make sure you don’t spend in total more than you make. Doesn’t work, I always overspend. The trick that no one ever tells you is that I need a 0-sum budget. Every single penny of income must be earmarked for something.

What we discovered works for us is that we first make sure there is a minimum amount in the savings account for the emergency fund and a minimum amount in the checking account so we don’t have to worry about overdrawing if we get stupid for some reason (shouldn’t happen, right?). If either account is below the minimum, we get them to the minimum before spending anything.

Then we start subtracting committed expenses for the month (electricity, mortgage payment, water, cable TV, cell phone bill, etc). Then we budget for items that we will need to spend (gas, groceries, entertainment, etc). Then we take out minimum payments for debt (piano, student loans, medical bills) so they all get paid. Then, and here’s the important part: anything that’s left gets added to the Debt Snowball.

Cash is more painful to use than writing a check or swiping the check card. So, anything that we’ll be spending throughout the month is taken out in cash and placed in envelopes marked with what they are for. If we run out of cash in the grocery envelope, we either have to take it from another envelope (e.g. entertainment) or not buy groceries until the next month. The result is that no one needs to carry a checkbook or check card around with them for any reason. Anything in the budget that can be paid through online billpay is directly taken out of the account and everything else is taken out in cash.

The main reason budgets didn’t work for us before is that we tended to leave a ‘cushion’ in the account to make sure we had enough to get by until the next paycheck. The only problem was that as the next paycheck got closer, this cushion became ‘free money’ and tended to get blown on things we didn’t need. There’s no way to do that when you are budgeting every penny.

The Debt Snowball

We’ve taken all of our debts and listed them smallest balance to largest balance regardless of interest rate or other considerations. When we complete our written budget for the month, we take anything that is left and send it to the smallest debt. Once that debt is paid off, the minimum payment that was going to it becomes extra and gets added to the debt snowball.

If I’ve done my calculations correctly, we can easily make our initial goal of paying everything off except the mortgage and the student loans within 12 months. We will continue the same process and I’m hoping it will only take us another couple of years to get the student loans paid off. Once we do that, it’s off to baby step #3.

Intensity

As I mentioned, we are in a slightly better position than a lot of people starting this process because we already had an emergency fund started and we had recently reduced credit card payments to the point where we could actually start a debt snowball just by creating a budget. However, we were fully prepared to get extremely intense and we had worked ourselves up to quite a state before we actually sat down and realized that we just needed a proper budget.

We were prepared to cancel all forms of entertainment except for the Internet, sell one of the cars, turn off the cell phones, and seek additional employment to make this work. That’s how committed, intense, and fired up we got after reading what’s possible by following this plan and becoming debt-free.

We’re still having to make sacrifices and plenty of them, but fortunately we don’t have to go to quite the degree we thought we would. That makes the victory that much sweeter.

I’ve known my wife now for 15 years. One of the things I love about her is that she is a talented story teller and writer. Whether it’s a fictional story or a story about a funny thing that happened to her that day, I think she has a knack for unfolding a story in a funny and entertaining way. She tells me I’m biased, but I’m not the only one to tell her that she should be writing for a living. She also has a pretty healthy ego and confidence about herself, but when it comes to her writing she just refuses to put herself out there in any real way. I’m not sure if it’s the fear of rejection or whether she really doesn’t have confidence in her work, but she will only share her work with a few people and some of her writing she won’t even share with me.

I’ve tried for years to convince her that the Internet is a good place for her to familiarize herself with sharing her work in a semi-controlled way. Several years ago, I set up a completely anonymous website for her to post her stories and get comments and feedback from people. No one would know it was her work, but she could get some valuable insight into whether her stuff is any good beyond what her loving husband says. As blogs, podcasts, and social media sites have come along, I’ve tried again and again without much luck to convince her to give it a shot and go “online”.

The closest I got was for her to agree to record an audio version of one of her books and let me serialize it on a podcast, but in the end she backed out when we started discussing technical details like what to call the podcast. For someone who will tell every stranger we meet on the street our life story, she claims she doesn’t want to share anything about herself online. She refuses to sign up for Facebook, saying that if she wanted to connect with someone she knew, she’d just call them (yes, honey, I know). Even dismissing the whole writing angle though, I just think it would be cool if I could send her messages on Twitter.

So, the other day when my lovely wife walked into my office and announced, “I want you to set me up with a blog,” I think you can imagine just how long it took me to recover and pick my jaw up from the floor. Even more shocking was that she passed the “what do you want to call it” seriousness test. So, I helped her create a Wordpress.com account and configure her very first blog.

I can’t promise you’ll get to see the results of her great American novel, but she’s already posted a couple of stories. One is the background story for the name of the blog and the other is her take on a funny incident that happened last night. Before I sent you off to read it, let me give you something to compare it against. My post to Twitter regarding the incident last night was, “just spent 20 minutes chasing a small bird around the house. Caught him with a towel over the cat litter box and let him go outside.” Now, keep in mind that Twitter purposely limits messages to 140 characters (why it’s called microblogging) and go read my wife’s tale of the same incident. See if you can’t see what I see.

The other day I watched the video for “It’s Pitch Black” by MC Frontalot which is a tribute to text adventure games. The chorus is, “You are likely to be eaten by a Grue. If this predicament seems particularly cruel, consider whose fault it could be. Not a torch or a match in your inventory.”

This brought back some of the old text adventure games I used to play. I remember Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Goddess of Phobos, and several others I remember but don’t recall the names. I remember sitting for hours every day after school trying to solve the puzzles and typing endless commands like, “pick up book” and “put book in backpack”. It was like reading a book, but one that you could interact with and control the outcome of to a degree.

In some cases, I bought the Infocom hint books. These books contained clues to get you past the more difficult parts of the game, but they allowed you to control how much information and how quickly they gave you hints. Each question was answered first with vague answers and then they got more specific, finally just outright revealing the answer. The innovative part is that you’d use a marker to reveal the answers one at a time as you needed them.

When I was in college, the Internet was more widely available to me, and I discovered multi-player text adventure games like MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, and others. One particular MUD was responsible for me ducking into the computer labs between classes to kill goblins and shrews. I spent many, many hours building and scripting objects in more than one MOO and even ran my own MOO (LynxMOO) where I met some lifelong friends.

If you Google my name, you’ll find me listed in the credits for enCore, a distance education project using MOOs. If I remember correctly, I scripted an overhead projector object which the professor could load with pre-prepared slides and as she advanced to each one the text would be displayed to all of the students at the same time. The enCore project still exists and they have switched their focus to providing a web-based interface for text-based MOOs.

I suppose you could say text was the basis for my fascination with MMORPGs. I’ve played at least a dozen different MMORPGs over the years and I’m currently active in two. I play Tabula Rasa every day with a great group of friends from my time in Neocron and Neocron 2 (where I was also a volunteer GM for 2.5 years). I also casually play Eve Online. Tabula Rasa is very fast paced and intense so Eve provides a calmer, more social experience when I’m in the mood for that.

Back to text. Surprisingly, text is not dead. You can find plenty of places to play text adventure games online, including the original Infocom games. There is still an active community for MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHes. In particular, I revisited a MUD a co-worker introduced me to almost 5 years ago called Medievia. They just celebrated 17 years of being online and they are still adding features!

They now have a special font which allows them to easier draw ASCII maps of the world and sound triggers that can be configured to play specific .wav files when certain events happen in the game.

I was surprised how quickly everything came back to me. I remembered where things were in the world, how to cast specific spells and when. What dangers to avoid and where to go to level. Strangely enough, it was like picking up a book you haven’t read in a while and finding new details you never noticed before. I think I’ll pop in from time to time to see how things are going and maybe kill a goblin or two.