I arrived at the hospital around 8:00 am and was in the prep room by 8:30. For the next three hours I met with various doctors, nurses and staff preparing me for surgery. I can remember walking into the OR and the anesthesiologist saying, “you are going to feel really good in a couple seconds.” The next thing I knew it was 2:30, I was in the recovery room and I couldn’t move my legs. I was given a spinal block to prevent pain during in my knee and something to put me into a light sleep during the surgery. I was then given something to eat and my first dose of oxycodone. By 3:30 I was dressed and meeting with the physical therapist again, he taught me how to walk on my crutches and how to go up and down stairs. Rachel then called a car and away we went.

Getting up three flights of stairs was one of my biggest worries before the surgery. It turned out not to be a problem at all – I just held on to the rail on one side and one of my crutches on the other and took it one stair at a time. Since I was not given a general anesthesia I was fully coherent, which definitely made the stairs easier.

Rachel spoke to the doctor after the surgery and the doctor said the operation went perfectly. I was extremely impressed with everyone that helped me out during my stay at the hospital. Every person I met with was so nice and made me feel at ease. I was not expecting a bad operation, but I definitely was not expecting to be taken care of so well.

I got home yesterday and got lots of emails, texts and phone calls from friends and family. It was so nice of everyone to remember me and let me know they cared on my big day. Rachel’s parents sent me these flowers with the hope that they help me get walking around quickly like the bionic man, although I am hoping I recover and am more like Dennis Dixon.

I am now in my first full day of recovery and Rachel has been amazing. She has waited on my every need – fixing meals, changing my ice, helping me with my exercises, bringing me everything I need and plenty more. I can not carry anything while on crutches and have no idea how I could recover without Rachel’s amazing care. Rachel, thank you for taking such good care of me!

I would like to thank everyone who participated this year and and extend a very big “Congratulations!” to this year’s top five winners (team name followed by real name):

1. Florida Ray – Ray
2. Jravis Tohnson – Adam
3. sportssuperfan – Rachel
4. Jayhawk07 – Nina
5. travis – Travis

I have decided to get surgery on April 26th. The doctor said I didn’t have to get surgery if all I wanted to do was move in a straight line for the rest of my life (walking, running & biking) and would probably be fine. I, however, would like to return to an active life and don’t want to always have to be worrying that one false step could further injure my knee.

The only decision I really have to make is the what I want to replace my ACL with. I can go with my own patella or get a tendon from someone else. Anyone interested in donating? After some reading, I decided to get my replacement from a cadaver. I read a medical how-to from my brother-in-law and found that I could contract a bunch of different diseases and my knee could be a bit less stable than if the tendon came from another part of my body, but on the upside, I have a lower risk of arthritis and knee pain associated with the removal.

I will keep you posted.

2010 Eightfivethree Classic

Anyone is welcome to signup, but act fast cause the tournament starts soon.

The picture above was taken shortly after midnight from the roof of our apartment. We were up watching the ball drop in Times Square and heard fireworks from the park. We rushed up to the roof to catch a few minutes of the show.

I am looking forward to 2010. Rachel and I had an eventful 2009 – I am mainly talking about the move from laid-back Eugene to go-go-go NYC – and I am looking forward to a full year in the same place. There is so much to do here and I want to take advantage of that this year.

A couple months ago Rachel and I went to the Brooklyn Flea under the Brooklyn Bridge and while I was getting some food, Rachel wandered off and sampled some peanuts from a local vendor. A reporter was there doing a story on the nuts and asked Rachel her opinion and as part of his story asked Rachel her occupation. Rachel then told the reporter a little about Swap-bot and a few weeks later he contacted Rachel to get more information about the site for an article he was writing.

The article hit the streets this morning and features a picture of Rachel.

I was working from home today due to an internet issue in the office and ran across the street to pick up a copy of the paper when I heard we were in it. Rachel heard from the reporter that we were on page 10, but the copy I first bought did not have our story anywhere in the paper. Rachel then reconfirmed that we were indeed in the paper, so at lunch we went out and tried a few more stores and found the edition with the Swap-bot article at about the fifth shop we tried.

Update: After reading this post Rachel made fun of this post. She was really wanting to know if I was excited or not to find the papers with us at the fifth shop. So Rachel, yes, I was very excited to not only find us in the paper but to also have a story about our site in the paper. Who knows what it will lead to next (hint: this a P1-esque hint)?

I have wanted a DSLR camera for a few years and today I finally got one. After lots of research and careful deliberation, I chose the Canon Rebel T1i. I will now be able to take way too many photos in way too high of resolution like the one above of Crusher.

Below is my first self portrait with the new camera. If the jacket doesn’t give it away, I am pretty excited for tomorrow’s Oregon vs. Oregon State Civil War game. You can bet I will take plenty of photos of the television, JPan and the rest of the party.

DMX was actually a very useful tool that didn’t really ever catch on as much as it should have. The premise was simple: “put our ad tag on your site and we will find the highest paying ad to serve”. Seems like a dream come true for publishers, and as the publisher of Swap-bot I can confirm that it was with one exception – not everyone was on the Right Media Exchange. We had a really nice tool for handling advertisers/networks that weren’t on the Exchange, but it required manual tweaking for maximum revenue.

I’m not really sad to see DMX get shut down – Yahoo lost my sympathy when they let me and my team go after we did some great work on their “next generation” ad serving platform – but I do miss the early days of DMX. DMX hadn’t been touched for a couple years and was starting to fall apart. Swap-bot had to stop using DMX a couple weeks ago because the ad blocking tool stopped working and highly inappropriate ads were being shown.

I think real time integrations are fueling the next chapter in publisher monetization tools. Once we get all advertisers bidding on all available inventory the publisher really will be able to kill the daisy chain. Once all the supply on the internet is linked to all of the demand on the internet, publisher monetization tools will be little more than reports, ad tags and creative/brand blocking. Once you get this set up once you will never have to go back unless you want to see how large of a check you will be getting at the end of the month. Of course, this also means there will be some pretty exciting tools for advertisers, but I will save that discussion for the future.

I leave you with a video from some of DMX’s brighter days:

I planned on telling more about my job at AppNexus. We are building applications that give large buyers of internet media the tools they need to make effective buys across a wide range of inventory.

I planned on talking more about the books I was reading on my Kindle. I wanted to finish the book I am currently reading, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, before discussing it, but unfortunately it is quite long and didn’t get through it this month. I will say that book has been eye-opening so far, but hasn’t forced me into any drastic eating changes yet.

Finally, I had planned on talking more about my experiences with Google App Engine. I decided to branch out from PHP and try some other server-side languages and Python was my first new language. GAE provided a great platform to begin playing around with Python web applications because of its solid and useful APIs and because of its simple deployments. Since beginning with Python on GAE, I have strayed away and have begun working with Tornado. Tornado is really fast and runs nicely behind Nginx. I was able to bring up an application I have been playing around with on a brand new machine in about thirty minutes last night. That isn’t quite as fast as a GAE deployment, but still not too bad.

I don’t think I will be able to keep up the daily posting, but I am going to try very hard to past more often than every month. I have enjoyed sharing something different each day and receiving comments.

Here’s a teaser for what you can expect in December:

• I bought a new camera. It’s in the mail right now and should be here by the end of the week. I am not a photographer in any sense, but would like to learn.
• Rachel and I have a couple trips into Manhattan on the upcoming weekends planned. We will be doing some holiday shopping and definitely some holiday sightseeing.
• Rachel, Crusher and I are going to Kansas City for Christmas. I hope to get out to the middle of Missouri for this (and foil dinners) while we are there.
• New Year’s Eve in NYC! Expect Rachel and I to ring in the New Year from our apartment. I can’t imagine going to Times Square, but I sure enjoy watching it.

With the history out of the way, we were able to put the pizzeria’s to the taste test. When we went to Grimaldi’s we got one meat pizza and one plain pizza. To fairly compare the two joints, we got the same at Patsy’s.

I think the overall verdict was that we liked Grimaldi’s pizza better. They both follow the same recipe and are both cooked in coal ovens, so they were very similar, but Grimaldi’s was a bit crispier. I also liked the ambiance of Grimaldi’s better – Grimaldi’s had a more casual, fun atmosphere.