We are the mundane
Seems you can’t go anywhere without getting your picture taken these days. This just showed up on Facebook last night.
Over the fourth, I ran into Gary and Katie Gray downtown with a bunch of their family and friends celebrating the 21st birthday of one of their sons. I had just come from a Fourth of July party which had a hat theme (and yes I did win the prize for best hat).
I briefly mentioned in a comment on Steve’s Battle Creek post that I was having wrist surgery. Here’s a follow up with more details.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had numbness in my right ring and pinky fingers for over six months. I first noticed it sometime after my pneumonia bout. I wasn’t sure if the numbness perfectly coincided with the pneumonia or not because there was enough other things bothering me that a little finger problem was easily overlooked by me.
At some point in the process of regaining my health, I noticed the numbness. At first I thought it was from spending too much time on my computer – since that’s about all I could do (I was thinking carpal tunnel syndrome but it turns out carpal tunnel affects the other fingers). I tried a couple of home remedies but they didn’t work. At my two month checkup with my doc, I mentioned the problem. He diagnosed it as probably ulnar tunnel entrapment (he was dead on there).
It turns out that there are three likely spots that the ulnar nerve can get entrapped – the wrist, the elbow and the neck:
My doc said that the rapid weight loss that I had could have caused some things to shift around and caused the nerve to get pinched up by my elbow (turns out he was off on the location). He said to wait until I gained the weight back to see if it would go away. If it didn’t he’d send me to a specialist.
Well it didn’t go away, so he arranged some additional tests. I had an EMG (Electromyography) where they stuck a punch of pins and needles in me to run an electric shock up and down the nerve path to figure out what was getting through to where.
The EMG showed that the problem was in my wrist which was a little unusual in that most times the blockage occurs at the elbow. In a way that was good news because it’s a lot easier to get at the nerve in the wrist than it is anywhere else. The bad news was that physical therapy can’t do much for the wrist problem and surgery is pretty much the only course (waiting it out to just hope it goes away is another).
So I went off to see an orthopedic surgeon who confirmed the diagnosis and scheduled the surgery. BTW – my surgery was done by Paul Suhey, the brother of longtime Chicago Bear running back Matt Suhey. The operation was Tuesday a week ago. Basically, what they do is to partially cut the ligament that’s causing the pressure on the nerve. Scar tissue will eventually fill in the gap in the ligament but it should reduce the tension in the ligament enough that the pressure will no longer be on the nerve and it will regrow.
Unfortunately, the regrowth is a long process. The doc said the nerve will probably regenerate at a pace of about 1mm per day. Since I’ve got about 5-6 inches of affected nerve that means it could take 5 months or so to completely heal (1 inch equals 25.4 mm, so 6 inches would be 152 days).
The surgery was done on an outpatient basis and I was conscious the whole time (although they didn’t let me watch the actually cutting of the wrist). It was kind of weird because I could feel him doing something down there but there was no pain involved.
The whole procedure only took about 10-15 minutes and I was good to go. They wrapped my wrist up in kind of a brace and sent me off. I had some oxycodone as a pain killer but only took that for a couple of days. I basically had no restrictions in what I could do. The doc basically said that the brace will prevent me from doing anything that could actually damage the wrist. His quote was “If you can do it, it’s ok to do it”.
Here’s a little video of what I’m walking around with at the moment.
This is a photo of a friend of mine shaking hands with the President. It comes from a Russian site and I don’t know what the caption says.
You may have heard that Obama was in Russia early this week. One of the things that he did there was speak at the graduation of group of students at the Russian New Economics School.
One of the founders of the school is Barry Ickes, who is an econ professor at Penn State and one of my golfing buddies. Barry and I played golf Friday a week ago, then he left the next day for Russia (he heads over there about once a month) for the school graduation and to meet with Obama. Kind of funny that he has to go all the way to Moscow to meet our President.
I caught a couple of minutes of JR and Natalie doing “Stand By Me” on one of the music stages during the State College 2009 Arts Festival. I’m still amazed by the quality of both the video and the sound – I have to keep reminding myself that this is a PHONE.
Natalie used to be a cashier and cocktail waitress at the Tavern and JR’s opening remark about her learning to sing there was because Pat Daugherty was sitting in the first row.
Here’s a clip that I shot later that night from Natalie singing with another of my favorite local bands Maxwell Strait. I’m pretty amazed that anything came out of this as it was taken in a very very dark local bar called the Phyrst – the sound is distorted in this one because I was standing right in front of one of the speakers and I think it overwhelmed the little mike in the iPhone.
This little test has me convinced that I should be able to get some acceptable video of me doing some of my magic tricks around town. I just need to find someone who can work the phone while I’m doing the tricks. Every magician seems to have a gorgeous assistant – maybe I need to start a talent search for one. 
Actually broke down and purchased my first Apple product last week – an iPhone.
I must admit that I’m pretty impressed with the technology. One of the more impressive apps is one called AutoStitch which stitches together photos taken with the phone enabling you to produce some pretty good panoramas with the phone. Here are some photos I took at yesterday’s Spike’s baseball game.
The phone also take some pretty decent video. I decided to try out the video feature for the first time when one of the Spikes came up to bat in the eighth inning. I got pretty lucky as he hit the game winning home run.
And incredibly, I hear you can even make phone calls on this thing (although I haven’t tried that yet)
Ron, Steve and I attended the Battle this past week end. I am happy to say that not only did I retain the Fall Family Championship and the shirt, but I am also co-champion of the Battle.
It really wasn’t much of a match for the shirt this year as I posted 2 scores of 83 (net 67) in the early rounds. It was decided Saturday night that the 4 top scores in the Battle would play together Sunday so match play was not an option for the shirt as I was the only one of the three of us in the top four. Ron and I decided to just go with a net score for the Fall championship.
Starting Sunday’s round I was not sure how far behind I was for the Battle championship. I was told it was around 11 or 12 strokes. As I was also giving 12 strokes per round to the leader I knew making up 23 or 24 strokes was a long shot. After 9 holes I shot a 50 and the leader had a 55. I now had 9 holes to make up 18 or 19 strokes. At that time I figured it was over and was just hoping to hold onto the shirt.
Well, after another 8 holes things looked a bit different. I didn’t really know where I stood, but I knew it was close. Unfortunatly, the pressure got to me. I pulled my tee shot into the woods, chipped out, laid up (still behind a tree in the left rough), knocked one on, and then 3 putted. So much for stepping up like a champion.
As it turned out I shot 45 on the back and the leader, Dave Milner, shot 64. We still didn’t really know who had won and had to wait for Rick to add up the totals. Obviously, I was 12 back when the day started and not 11. First time in the history of the Battle there are co-champions.
As for the shirt, Ron shot something in the 100’s so that wasn’t very close. I keep the championship until the next challenge.
So, set your plans for next year and you can all challenge me for not only the Fall Family Championship, but the Battle of Battle Creek Championship.
I am not exaggerating – the very FIRST site that I checked in my reader this evening was this one which turned out to be featuring this video.
It’s starting to get freaky weird.
After hearing the song, I did a little follow-up on the kids – they are an internet sensation.
This is the video that got the kids rolling when Tori Amos stopped by to hear them sing (about 18 months ago). She was moved to tears when they did one of her songs and later sang with the kids
More of the Tori Amos visit with the kids (and other PS22 vids) are here on YouTube.
Hang on, this is going to be another one of my long story telling posts.
I’m going to at least assume that everyone has heard of Facebook. Two years ago that wouldn’t have been true and I would have had to explain it but I think it’s gone mainstream enough that everyone in the family should know what it is.
I was an early adopter and got into Facebook through kind of a loophole. Facebook was originally set up by some guys at Harvard who originally created it just for their dorm. Pretty soon, they expanded it to the whole campus. Kids at Harvard adopted it so quickly that the founders thought it might catch on at other campuses so within just a few months they expanded to other schools.
Originally, Facebook was somewhat of a closed system. There was a kind of a club atmosphere about it because you could supposedly only join if you were in college and you only could connect with other people on your campus. The way that Facebook controlled it was they would only allow you on if you had an authrorized email address from your school. That’s the loophole that I exploited.
The Penn State Alumni Association has run an email forwarding service for years. Members can sign up for an alumni email address – mine is larryfall@psualum.com. You can then set up that address to forward your emails to whatever your current real email address is. Years ago this was a handy service for recent alums because their email address would often change as they changed jobs.
Somehow, I found out that Facebook was accepting the psualum.com domain as an authorized Penn State address in addition to the university’s psu.edu domain, so I jumped on it. I signed up using Uncle Larry as my name.
One of the earliest things that I did on Facebook was set up an “I have seen Uncle Larry’s Invisible Deck” as a Facebook group. Whenever I would do my invisible deck routine to some students downtown, I would encourage them to sign up for my group even often handing out business cards with the group’s name on it (consider it a form of “personal branding” even before that became a hot buzzwords). I’d add a few people to the group every weekend and I soon got up to around a 100 members or so. I’m sure part of the novelty of joining the group and friending me was the fact that I was an “old guy” on Facebook (for the longest while, I was easily the oldest Penn State guy on Facebook – there were only a couple of people whose class was even within 30 years of mine).
One of the problems with my “Invisible Deck” group was that only people who were on the Penn State Facebook Network could sign up for it. I would often do the trick for someone who was on Facebook but part of another network and they couldn’t join my group. Eventually Facebook solved that problem by creating Global Groups that were open to everyone. At that point I created another “Invisible Deck” group but made it global and started pointing people to that one as the preferred one to join.
In the meantime, Facebook was experiencing explosive growth and they decided to expand beyond colleges. When they did that, I knew that it would take off among the general population to so I signed up for another Facebook account using a non PSU email address and my real name. I figured I’d use the Larry Fall Facebook account for my friends in the real world while continuing the Uncle Larry persona for students that I ran into doing my downtown magic routine.
That worked well and good for a while until Facebook somehow found out that Uncle Larry and Larry Fall were one and the same person. To this day, I’m not sure how they figured that out (you’d think that they would have better things to do). My best guess is that it was part of their campaign to eliminate a lot of the fake accounts that people were setting up. The basically disabled both accounts and contacted me saying that I was violating their terms of condition by maintaining two accounts.
I tried my best to convince them that “Uncle Larry” was a “stage name” that I used doing my “street magic performing art” and that I ought to be allowed to maintain the two accounts. They weren’t buying it. The only thing that I got them to allow me to do was to say that I could continue using “Uncle Larry” but it would have to be under just one account. At that point I had to make a decision and I went with my real name and gave up the “Uncle Larry” account.
Somewhat interestingly, Facebook eventually somewhat embraced the concept of having alternate identities. While they still want everyone to only have one account, they do now allow you to set up PAGES that are connected to your account. What the pages are typically used for are to promote someone’s business – bars and bands being very big. When FB created the Pages concept, I went out and created two that are attached to me – one called “Uncle Larry” and one called “UncleLar”. I did it as placeholders as much as anything. I’ve never built up either page nor have I ever promoted either (still, I can tell from the stats page with the accounts that almost every day someone lands on one or the other pages – whether they are actually looking for ME or not I can’t tell).
This is all background for what I really wanted to talk about. Around a month ago, Facebook announced that they were going to allow members to claim vanity or user names. Previously, if I wanted to direct someone to my Facebook account, I’d have to sent them to a url of something like www.Facebook.com/48535683, something that’s not very user friendly nor easily remembered. With my own defined username, I could tell someone to go to www.Facebook.com/LarryFall or www.Facebook.com/UncleLarry.
One problem though. Again, you could only have ONE username. That meant that I’d have to make a choice between LarryFall, UncleLarry, UncleLar, or whatever else I might come up with. I’d also have to be the first to claim it too. The gold rush for names was scheduled for midnight last night.
I did have one potential out to my dilemma. In addition to allowing vanity names for users, Facebook wisely announced vanity names for the aforementioned PAGES. That meant that I could claim LarryFall for my user name, while also nabbing UncleLarry and UncleLar for my page names.
One catch. however. There was a temporary restriction placed on the Pages. In order to claim a name for your page during the first two weeks of availability, your page would have had to have been created before May 9th (that’s the day that they announced the vanity names function and FB didn’t want people creating a bunch of pages just to grab up vanity names) – no problem for me I was on the Page thing at least a year or so ago, AND the page must have at least 1000 fans – oops, maybe I should have promoted those pages after all. I still had an out though. After two weeks, FB was opening up Pages to all so as long as UncleLarry and UncleLar didn’t get grabbed up early I could still claim them.
So at the witching hour last night, I sat down to claim my vanity name. Not surprisingly, LarryFall was available – and, just to check, so were UncleLar and UncleLarry. Last chance to change my mind (FB says there’s no going back on your decision – what you pick stays with you – they’ll have to figure out what to do about divorcees later).
I actually went with larry.fall as my username. Somewhat interestingly, I discovered this morning that larryfall and larry.fall both redirect to me (as does Larry.Fall etc – evidently capitalization doesn’t matter).
But now comes the bad news. Some jamoke picked UncleLar so I’m not going to be able to grab it in two weeks. Bah hiss. UncleLarry is still available so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. On a face-to-face basis, more people know me as Uncle Larry than UncleLar. On an internet basis, the reverse is true. People on the web know me as UncleLar not Uncle Larry. Oh well, life can’t always be perfect (at least I own UncleLar.com – which btw, I’m finally getting around to doing something with in my spare time).
I am putting up this long winded post for a reason. Facebook is around to stay at least for a while (and probably an eternity in Internet years). I would encourage everyone in the family to go out and join even if they don’t think they will ever use it. You just might change your mind down the road when it will be too late to grab your own name.
As I write this – MarilynBergquist, SteveFall, KenFall, GaryFall, and RonFall are all still available (some of the second generation Falls are already gone – ChrisFall and Shannon Hill for example – although our Chris is friends with the other Chris).
Go get your names!
BTW – it’s a good way to connect with old friends like from high school. There are 25 people from my HS graduating class on Facebook. Marilyn – there are 44 from your class some of whom’s names l recognize like Lindy, Steve Breffit, Marilyn Shriver, etc. Steve and Ken – there are 57 from each of your classes. Ron and Gary – I don’t remember your graduation years so you’re on your own.
This past weekend was the annual Penn State Coaches vs Cancer golf tournament run by the Nittany Lion basketball team. I used to play in it but the cost has gotten a little prohibitive (I was ok at $250, still played when they went to $325, but when it jumped to $500 three years ago, I elected to retire from competition). My contribution is now limited to volunteering to help out on the course.
You can catch me making a background appearance at the 6:30 mark in this video (I’m the guy in the bright red volunteer shirt – wearing three layers I might add so despite my earlier post about putting weight back on I’m not quite as big as the video would suggest).
The guy who shot the video also took this photo which he just sent to me (I’ve got FOUR layers on here – the weather wasn’t cooperating much). The girl in the photo was my partner on the hole that we worked for the tournament. She is the daughter of a girl that I used to live with (platonically) in Pittsburgh in the late 70s.
