A day of work today as the sun came and went over the Berkshires. I spent the morning in a coffee shop and the afternoon in a hotel room. If I could have, I would have done all the work in the coffee shop, but giving demos and being on conference calls doesn’t lend itself well to public places.

So I work in my room and flirt with depression. This is a necessary but frustrating part about being in Tanglewood; one is removed from one’s normal routines, for better and worse, and dropped into a new world. Sometimes it feels like being plucked from a stream and heaved vainly gasping onto a dock. Today, I need to see it more as a falling leaf, one of billions that will fall without the world ending.

Successfully evading depression, for me, relies on my ability to recognize the warning signs and turn aside the behaviors. When my normal routines–which function as a daily defense mechanism against the Black Dog–are disrupted, I need to acknowledge the disruption and do whatever I can to fill the void. It’s something that’s done one day at a time.

I was running low on contacts and considered simply calling in an order, but thought maybe I should go and have my eyes checked. Normally I only change prescriptions every few years, but about a year ago I had an eye infection and a more indepth visit. While I wasn’t experiencing any real pain, I thought I should check in anyway.

It was a good thing I did. My optometrist used a number of diagnostic tools to check up on my eyes, concluding with anterior segment photography. She then said, “You have a corneal ulcer.” She went on to explain that my eye infection had recurred in my left eye, and that a slight cloudiness in my cornea was an indication that my white blood cells were fighting the infection and that the surface of the cornea was opened as a result.

She put me on aggressive antibiotics drops, told me not to wear my contacts, and asked me to come back in two days to check the progress. So I’m not out of the woods yet, but the prognosis is pretty good. On the other hand, if I had followed my first instinct and simply dialed in the order for the new contacts, I might have seriously damaged my eye.

If you wear contacts and you haven’t been to the optometrist in a while, you might want to schedule a visit–or at least write them a note. I think they’re underappreciated.

1. Sheath for a toy sword: I had a cheapo plastic toy sword which glowed in the dark, so it became both a medieval sword and a lightsaber. Since it wasn’t a real lightsaber, it needed someplace to stay when I wasn’t posing like Luke Skywalker, so I built a simple sheath for it. You can see the basic symmetry of the Ramagon toys in the photo: they did pyramidal very well, and it was easy to link them together into a strong boxlike structure.
2. Holster for a toy gun: Just as the Ramagon hubs could do pyramids, it was trivially simple to make cubes with them. Add a pyramid at the end to taper the gizmo, extend one end with a square for a belt loop, and cover the frame with the plastic snap-in panels, and presto: very uncomfortable and big holster. There’s a very cringe inducing “action shot” of the holster and the sheath on Flickr; in my defense, it was 1982.
3. Toy gun: This was the coolest of the three toys, and I’m sorry I don’t have a better picture. A combination of a long hex frame and some closely snapped together hubs, and the illustration shows the short connectors (the black piece here used for the “trigger” and to secure the close clusters at the end of the gun) that I had forgotten existed. “Action shot” here (not me in the picture).

Seems like it was an eternity ago. I didn’t even bother to blog on my birthday then–of course it was close to the end of my third semester of business school and I was going nuts. But then, I didn’t realize that I was starting a tradition.

I went back and looked at past birthday posts. 2001, as I mentioned before, wasn’t blogged. In 2002 I turned 30 and reflected on Bilbo Baggins’ birthday benediction (more on that in a minute). 2003 was gearing up for what turned out to be my last Microsoft Christmas party. 2004 was a reflection on over ten years of no one knowing you’re a dog on the Internet. 2005 was my quotation in Business Week over the Sony BMG boycott. 2006, a dinner with friends and reflection on mortality. And in 2007, turning Presidential and lining up my new iPhone.

This past year is definitely a year of change — new website, a shift to linkblogging, killer new job. But my birthday this year feels more like a homecoming. As my sister says, this is pretty much my first Facebook birthday, and the people I’ve reunited with over there are making it a very nice happy birthday indeed. In some ways, I think this is the first birthday in a long time where I’ve felt something like contentment. Probably a sign that vast upheaving changes are right around the corner.

Well, actually … no. As Barack was starting his speech, I was getting 30 electrodes applied to my head and body and having a mask strapped to my face.

I’ve long struggled with snoring. My dad has legendary volume and persistence: a true Heldentenor of a snorer. In college my good friend Don Webb told me that he could hear me snoring through the 19th century brick wall that separated our beds when we were both residents on the Lawn at UVA. But recently it’s been getting worse, according to reliable observers, and to top it all off I’ve had decreased energy and an indomitable desire to nap whenever possible. So I finally manned up and scheduled a polysomnogram, better known as a sleep study, to see if I had sleep apnea. The first study was a few weeks ago, but I hadn’t gotten the results until last night, when I went back to try sleeping with a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine.

The background: sleep apnea is a condition of repeated interruptions of breathing (apneas) during sleep. An apnea is defined as the cessation of normal breathing for 10 seconds or more, followed by a gasping resumption of breathing. The clinical threshold for an apnea diagnosis is 5 or more apneas per hour (5 on the AHI index).

My AHI score was a whole number multiple of the clinical threshold, meaning that I was experiencing oxygen starvation for an average of 2 minutes out of every hour. No wonder I’ve been grumpy and sleepy all the time (not to mention several other of the dwarves).

So last night I slept with a CPAP machine for the first time, and I feel amazing this morning: awake and alert, quick, and in a great mood. This despite the fact that I woke up three times (that I’m aware of) overnight–sleeping with the mask and all those wires isn’t easy.

Apparently I’ll be using a CPAP machine from now on, something that I’m actually looking forward to if it makes this much of a difference in my mood. Plus it apparently stops the snoring, which is a pretty significant bonus.

And yeah, while I’m looking forward to catching up with Barack’s speech, I’m kind of glad now that I skipped it in favor of this study. Both look like they’re going to have a big influence on my life going forward.

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In an alternate universe, where the church would care about “all the ordination standards, rather than singling out just one,” the committee’s alternate resolution would pass easily. But in this universe, where there is a vocal group that out of fear is determined to deny rights to their brothers and sisters in Christ, there’s just no way this effort is going to succeed, I’m afraid.

Make no mistake: this is a defensive move by Nokia in response to the iPhone and Android, not an offensive one. Five years ago, an open source OS for smartphones might really have made the market. Now Nokia’s not even calling the tune any more: with Motorola, Samsung and LG eating them away on the low end, and RIM, the Windows Mobile folks, and Apple eating them away on the high end, pretty soon there’s not going to be much left in the middle.

I enjoyed the Symbian phone that I used from 2003 to 2005, but Symbian didn’t move quickly enough with the OS and it became stale. It doesn’t smell any better now. When you have unnamed senior execs inside Nokia calling Symbian a POS, you’ve got problems.

And what about units? Those 291 million handsets you sold in Q1? They’re legacy products. Apple sold 6 million in the iPhone’s first year as a brand new market entrant even without the benefit of enterprise mail integration or independent developers. Now granted, you can sit fat and happy on your 291 million units shipped, or you can reflect on the fact that you shipped 100 million of them in the last 18 months, and the other 100 million are in all likelihood no longer in use since your European customer base replaces its phones every 12 to 25 months, and the US customer base every 17.6. Is your market really still growing, or did you just sell replacement Symbian handsets to your existing customers?

And I haven’t even talked about Android yet–it’s probably a trainwreck, but it’s from Google so it’s going to exert some market pressure on you too.

And your developers are talking crap about the OS, too. And I can’t blame them. Which would you rather write apps for: an OS that’s forked three ways, requires you to use a crippled version of C++ with weird string handling practices and proprietary error handling, and needs a downlevel version of Visual Studio, all of a sudden the iPhone’s development frameworks and XCode look like nirvana.

So, guys: if your competition is a competitor who’s locked up the enterprise and a user centric market innovator, I’m afraid that open sourcing the OS (the POS OS) is not going to save the company. Maybe if there were already a bunch of really talented individual developers working on creating a great mobile experience, but guess what? They’re on Apple’s platform now, not yours.

What I love about this clip is how the first part makes him look like a stork romancing a tree limb.

The bonus 1965 standup act is also hysterical, though it does make one contemplate a young Woody Allen who looks surprisingly like Peter Sellers.

Miscellaneous notes:

• I’m within striking distance of reaching zero unlistened to tracks in my iTunes library, after almost two years of dedicated listening to ensure that I listened to every track in the library at least once. As of the end of the Great CD Ripping Project that was around 20,000 tracks; it’s a bit more now. I’ve got it down to fewer than 500 tracks that haven’t been listened to at least once.
• I’m starting to like this theme; think I’ll stick with it a while longer. If I get bored I’ll always switch it to Stripped.