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This is it – tomorrow's my Achilles tendon surgery, and afterward I begin the long, drawn-out road to recovery and being able to walk/skip/run again with my kids.  I'm actually looking forward to it, for that reason.  My only concern is the silly one that I have used to title this post – I'd rather my surgeon didn't go cuttin' where he's not supposed to!

So anyway, since they're putting me all the way under tomorrow (along with a local for the more severe pain when I awake) I'm assuming tomorrow and the next day are a complete wash.  If I actually come out of a daze enough to get around, I'm probably not going to be in any kind of mental state for writing anything.  We'll see how I'm doing by the weekend, but don't be surprised if I just spend some time to recover and come back at you on Monday of next week.

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Alright, listen up you whippersnappers.  You don't know how nice you've got things nowadays.  Your lives are too easy, too good, too plentiful.  Let me tell you, when I was your age:

• We didn't have any of this "motion-controlled video game system" crap.  When we jerked our controllers up to make Mario jump just a little bit higher on the screen, did he jump higher?  No sir-ee bob, he did not.  If you didn't hit that A button, Mario would get bit by that turtle and you'd lose a life, simple as that.  Oh yes, we'd be waving that damn controller all over the place, but good luck having it do anything more than give you a psychological benefit in the game!

Sometimes it felt like this…

• Ketchup packets were just that – packets of ketchup that always contained too little ketchup and were damn hard to open.  None of this "Dip & Squeeze" crap that Heinz is coming out with now.  You bit your ketchup packets to open them because your hands were too greasy to tear open that serrated edge of the packet and that was that!  And if you were in the car, good luck keeping ketchup on your food and out of your lap!

Squeeze

• Forget about cell phones, text messaging, instant messaging, email, twitter, facebook or skype.  When you wanted to get in touch with your friends, you picked up the house phone and called their house!  Or more often, you got on your bike or walked over to their house, rang the doorbell, and asked if they were home and could come play!

Ok, it wasn’t quite THIS primitive…

• When we had to do a report for school, the first place we went was the CARD CATALOG in the LIBRARY.  Then you'd have to find BOOKS in the stacks and READ through them to find information!  Google and Wikipedia searches didn't exist. If you wanted to find out when Picasso painted Guernica, you had to look it up the hard way.  It built character, and ruined our eyesight.  That's why we all wear reading glasses now, dontcha know?

I actually loved looking things up in the catalog…

I could go on and on about all the ways you kids have it too easy today, but it's time for me to go watch some Olympics on the DVR.  Then I have to go read some of my feeds on Google Reader and follow it up with a "dance party" with my kids to the custom Pandora music stream I set up specifically for when we want to boogie on down.  But hear me on this: you kids are SPOILED.  Appreciate what you've got, because the next generation certainly will take it for granted…

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You may have noticed that yesterday broke my self-imposed blog silence since last September.  (Well, not so much self-imposed as forced on me by a crazy work project schedule that left me virtually no free time to do anything but eat and sleep, but that's besides the point.)  My crazy work schedule is over, I'm back home, and that means, in addition to spending lots of time playing with my kids and hanging out with my wife, I should have some time to catch up on some projects here at home (which includes getting back into writing here and elsewhere).

So the good news? I'm back.  The bad news, however, is I came back about two weeks before I had planned, because I hurt myself.  More specifically, I ruptured my Achilles tendon.  And how, pray tell, did I commit such an injury?  Was I snowboarding?  Was I rescuing small children from a raging house fire?  No, it's much more embarrassing – I did it dancing.

Das Boot

Yes, that's right.  I now have to undergo surgery and a long, drawn-out recovery process because I went out dancing with some friends.  I wasn't even doing anything THAT bizarre – much the same stuff I'd do dancing with my kids at home, just a little bit wilder.  But apparently it was enough in just the right combination to tear my Achilles tendon through-and-through, leaving me hobbling to the emergency room.  And me without even a good story to tell about getting hurt! (Although I heard someone might have video of the incident, in which case I might have to get my hands on it to really embarrass myself.)

So I've got surgery scheduled for Thursday of this week, and until then I'm laid-up on the couch wearing this bulky-yet-strangely-comfortable boot.  I've got crutches and can actually get up and help out around the house, so I'm trying not to be too much of an invalid and at least giving my wife breaks from taking care of the kids periodically.  I'm sure it's a downer to her, expecting to get me home healthy in a couple weeks and finally have a break from the full-time stay-at-home-single-parent role and instead, getting the equivalent of a(n older) third child.  I'm trying to do all I can (and not doing too bad a job of it) but it's definitely not the same as having a healthy spouse there to help out…

The doctor says that the Achilles tendon, the biggest and strongest tendon in the body, has virtually no blood vessels amongst it, which means although it is insanely tough, it takes forever to heal.  I'm looking 7 days after the outpatient surgery before stitches come out, then back to the boot for 4-6 weeks.  Near the end of that, I'll start doing early motion and attempt to walk on it.  2-4 months after the surgery, I may be walking without any assistance, although I'll be weak and tentative with my walking.  (I foresee a lot of physical therapy, either structured or on my own, in my near future.)  The chances of a 100% recovery after this kind of injury and surgery are very likely, but it could be up to 12 months after surgery before I get there!  That means no running for a good long time, and the same kibosh on any other strenuous high-impact activities.  I may have to take up swimming at the Y just to stay in shape (and stay sane).

But every cloud has a silver lining – I'll still be working (as soon as I'm recovered from the surgery) but it's unlikely that I'll be back up to the Minnesota plant site any time soon, since it'll be difficult to walk around there in my recovering state.  So back to the office, working 40 hour workweeks, which means plenty of time to hang out with my wife, my kids, and of course, all of my Vox blog buds!  Look out for some new posts from me on stuff I've been meaning to write about, and I'll be cruising around and leaving comments here and there as well.  It's good to be back folks – I missed you all while I was away!

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A few folks have emailed me or left comments on various posts on my blogs letting me know that WordPress now supports Vox blog imports directly.  Seems the code wranglers over there were tired of waiting on my slack butt to get things ready and decided to go ahead and just do it on their own!  And you should probably be glad they did, because my work schedule ended up being something I wouldn't wish on anyone, and left little-to-no free time for me to do anything, let alone work out the kinks in the alpha/beta versions of the tool I was working on.  (Luckily that's pretty much past for now, so I'm returning to the keyboard and back to the blog starting with this post!)

So anyway, WordPress.com blogs can now import from a Vox blog.  Once you have a blog set up over on WordPress.com, you can go under the "Import" tab of the Tools menu and choose to import from a Vox blog.  You enter your blog hostname, your user ID and password, and they pull ALL of your posts and comments over into your WordPress blog.  Private posts are kept private, but I believe everything else becomes public (so you'd want to go through and change privacy notifications if, for example, you have everything on your Vox blog set as neighborhood-only).  The service will even email you when the import is complete, so you don't have to sit around and check the status of the import continuously.  Once it's done, you can go in and configure the settings how you'd like, modify entries, delete comments, etc – everything you could do when the content was on Vox, but now over on WordPress.com.

The importer has some great benefits, such as:

• Imports posts AND comments.  Comments are captured exactly as left on Vox, and the link to the commenter goes back to their Vox blog URL.
• Imports photos from Vox into WordPress.  Yes, photos will be native to WordPress, so they won't just link back to a photo hosted by Vox.
• Imports tags from your blog.  No option to turn this off, but all tags are carried over and used as tags on the WordPress blog.
• Imports ALL posts, not just those made "public".  Adjust privacy settings before or after you import to account for the fact that WordPress doesn't have all the privacy modes that Vox does, but you get all your content carried over when you import!
• Maintains formatting from your Vox blog – bullets, numbering, centering, font colors, etc all carry over 1:1.  This may cause some minor issues on your WordPress blog if the layout doesn't support (e.g. white font on a white background), but you can edit this after the fact to suit.

There ARE some caveats to their importer, though:

• Does not import media except for pictures (videos, audio, books, collections don't seem to carry over).  You'll notice in the WordPress blog that these simply link back to your Vox blog where they are still hosted.  If you want to do a true transfer over with any of these, you'll actually have to download all your files (or have saved the originals) and upload these into WordPress directly.  It's very nice that the pictures carry over, but you may need to adjust some formatting on posts where pictures are involved to get them to wrap and/or fit in the borders of your layout since the entries will still have the Vox picture formatting.
• May screw up your formatting.  I have heard from some others that it worked fine, but at least in my case the formatting on the WordPress blog made it so there was a carriage return at the end of every line so that instead of wrapping naturally, it cut off each line and added some strange line breaks in the middle of the posts – something that I didn't purposefully put in my Vox blog when typing up the entries.  Not sure where this came from or whether it's a parsing issue, but means that I would have to manually hit up each entry in my history and correct to make it appear to be formatted correctly, which sort of defeats the point of an export.  I've followed up with a guy from Automattic who was in touch with me about Vox exports last fall to see if there's anything he can do about this, and he's looking into it.
• Only works for WordPress.com blogs (for now).  The latest revision of self-hosted WordPress.org blogs still appears to not have an option to import from Vox (if it ever will).  This is probably not a deal-breaker though, as you can import into a temporary blog on WordPress.com, and then export from there to a WXR file and import into your personal WordPress installation.  The biggest issue here is that most self-hosted installs only accept .xml files up to 2MB in size, and your export may be much bigger, in which case you'll have to manually split it up into smaller files that can fit the import process.  Again, the guy from Automattic is looking to work this into self-hosted installs, but it may be later rather than sooner due to development cycles and trying to get stuff like this included in the base code.

Overall though, it looks like the folks over at WordPress/Automattic did a VERY nice job of creating a means for locked-in Vox users to export their blogs to another platform.  From WordPress.com you can go to self-hosted WordPress blogs, Blogger, and any other blogging platform that can process the seemingly ubiquitous WordPress WXR export file.  So whether you're looking to jump ship or just back up your blog somewhere a little more….reliable….I'd recommend you give this exporter a try. 

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