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The day I (almost) died

June 25, 2009. I had just called my grandfather to wish him a happy birthday. The rest of the day is somewhat blurry, though, because of what I did after that.

I have had anxiety most of my adult life. I think this stems from my father dying while I was living with him, my stepmother, and half-brother in England during high school. My father was an alcoholic, who drank nearly every day of his life, up until the day he was rushed to the hospital with a respiratory infection. So my addictive personality could also be hereditary.

I am saying all of this to preface that I was taking Xanax XR, an anti-anxiety medication. And I was taking a lot of it: 2mg twice daily.

Calling my grandfather is all I remember from that day. My next memory is waking up in St. Petersburg General  Hospital, with tubes stuck down my throat. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a respirator down your throat, but it isn’t the most pleasant feeling in the world. I would constantly be pushing on it with my tongue, trying to push it out, not realizing that I could not breathe on my own (and couldn’t for nearly 6 weeks after that).  I also was put on kidney dialysis, because my kidneys had failed. I also had a bladder catheter, a feeding tube, and a rectal tube. I also had a heart attack at some point before the ambulance came to take me to the hospital. The temporary lack of oxygen to my brain caused anoxia, which made me have to re-learn everything, almost like being a baby again. I had to learn how to walk, talk, and eat all over again

After it was determined that I had, indeed, swallowed the better part of an entire bottle of Xanax, I was promptly given a drug called a benzodiazepine antagonist, to try and get the medication out of my system.

So I spent nearly 5 weeks in the intensive care unit at St. Pete General, then I was in a physical therapy hospital (HealthSouth) for 10 days. Then I had tachycardia, passed out while on a standing machine, and was rushed to the hospital again, this time to Largo Medical Center for 10 more days while they tried to figure out why I got the tachycardia and fainted. It was finally determined that I had a very serious infection, and was promptly given antibiotics.

After quite a bit of fighting with the insurance company, I was re-admitted to HealthSouth.

While at HealthSouth, I underwent speech therapy (I couldn’t talk louder than a whisper, as I hadn’t spoken for roughly 6 weeks), occupational therapy, and physical therapy. They were re-teaching me how to feed myself without choking or putting the food into my lungs.

There are very few places where I live that my health insurance will pay for a young person like myself to go for rehabilitation, to prepare me for going home. But as it still took 2 people to move me from my wheelchair to my bed, and because I still had the stomach tube in, I was then transferred to the Rehab Center of St. Pete for a month of additional therapy.

 

 

 

On October 20, 2009, I finally came home.

The reason I am going into so much detail about what happened to me is with the hope that I may be able to prevent other people from going through what I did. When you are on Xanax, the drug makes you feel invincible. And even after everything that I went through, I cannot say that if it were offered to me, I wouldn’t jump at the chance to take it again. That’s how addictive it is.

Visual Snow An internet diagnosis between psychiatry and neurology

Download Visual Snow An internet diagnosis between psychiatry and neurology

This is a paper that Ben Wigmans and his father Gerard made about a little known condition (and one I also happen to suffer from) called visual snow. There is as of yet no known cure for visual snow. It causes snow or television-like static to constantly appear in the person's visual field, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Also this paper is a translation, but there is still a lot of great information in it.

Here is an excellent forum on this condition, which I also happen to administer: Visual snow or static forums  

 

"Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line"

"Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line" is how Bill Clinton once described the way people pick presidential candidates.

And that is exactly the reason that we will likely wind up with Mitt Romney winning the Republican nomination this year. As much as I would love to see someone like Jon Huntsman, or even Newt Gingrich get the nomination, or heck, even Ron Paul, it will likely never happen. Not so long as the Republican Party insists on giving the guy whose turn it is next his due. And it is definitely Mitt's turn, after losing the Republican primary in 2008 to John McCain.

Though I suppose an argument could be made that it is Ron Paul’s turn, seeing as how he has run twice before. But I am certain that most Republican voters see him as unelectable, and they’re right. Can you really see a man who is believed to be a closet racist running against the first black president?

I suppose there is always a chance of a last minute entry, by someone like Jeb Bush. But after 8 years of his brother, and 4 of their father, I think the country is a little tired of that name, especially where the presidency is concerned. Not to mention he was the governor of the state that literally handed the presidency to his brother.

But I am not a conspiracy theorist. Nope. Not in the least.  To say nothing of all of the convicted felons who were incorrectly still listed as not being eligible to vote.  Okay, I kind of got off on a Bush tangent there. I apologize. But I mean seriously!  By some estimations, Gore actually won the state by 662 votes. But since nobody likes a crybaby, Gore had to concede, even though he may have actually won the election. And then September 11 happened, conveniently taking America’s mind off the 2000 election debacle. But that’s a whole other story. And one I intend to go into at some point on this blog.

The apocalypse that wasn't

It has been approximately 24 hours since the world was supposed to end. Or, rather, the rapture was supposed to have begun. I don't know about you, but I'm still here. And I'm pretty sure the rest of the world is, too. For all the hype about a global earthquake, there was one, tiny, insignificant earthquake yesterday, in San Fransicso (where they average about one earthquake a week), and another one in New Zealand. But nothing on the scale that we saw in movies like "2012" or "The Day After Tomorrow."

What I hope we all learned from all of this is that: A) Harold Camping is one gigantic quack. And B) his followers are even crazier than he is. Some of them actually donated their hard-earned money to this fruitcake. And even more spent money buying up billboards, passing out flyers, and the like.

"But what about all of the religious people who didn't buy into what Camping was selling?" To that I say, good for them. The world really needs more skeptics. Especially when it comes to religion. But, I'm not going to hold my breath on that.

 

(Idol's) 10th Season is a charm

It is now the 10^th season of this world’s most popular singing talent competition. Replacing the acid-tongued Simon Cowell and Kara DioGuardi is Steven Tyler (of Aerosmith) and Jennifer Lopez. Randy Jackson remains. Ellen doesn’t even warrant a mention in this post because, well, she was only on the show for one season, and she sucked at it.

For me, the best part of the season is the auditions. This is where we get to see the laughable, and the occasional bursts of true talent. I have to say, I think the Idol producers have struck gold in their new casting decisions. Tyler emerges as an excellent replacement for Cowell, as he provides some excellent tips for the aspiring artists. And J.Lo shines as an excellent substitute for DioGuardi (who replaced Paula Abdul). Unlike Kara, Lopez has actually sold a lot of records in her day, so she is pretty well-qualified to be critiquing other potential artists.

It will be interesting to see how this season plays out, as there is a lot of decent talent out there. Will any of them be as good (or successful) as my girl, Carrie Underwood? Only time will tell. Also, the new team seems to have a lot more fun than any of the older combinations of judges.

 

 

Raising the Bar... er... Hope?

Raising Hope. This quirky comedy airs on FOX, and was created by Greg Garcia, the same man who came up with another of my favorite shows, "My Name is Earl."  Lucas Neff plays Jimmy Chance, a man who has a one-night stand with a woman who winds up on death row for murdering her previous boyfriends. Baby Hope is only six months old when her mother is executed. Jimmy, along with his family, winds up receiving full custody of Hope. Martha Plimpton plays Jimmy’s mother and Garret Dillahunt (of Terminator: The Sarah Connor  Chronicles) plays Jimmy’s dad. Rounding out the cast is Cloris Leachman, who plays the not-all-there Maw Maw, and Shannon Woodward, who plays one of Jimmy’s co-workers at the local grocery store. The show is incredibly funny, and pretty off-the-wall.

Much like “Earl,” this show focuses on your typical working class family. Well, except for the part where Earl won the lottery. Okay, I guess it’s really nothing like “My Name Is Earl.” But you should still be watching it.

 

 

What I've Learned in 15 Years of Online Community Management

Everyone knows the basics. Attract users, keep them engaged, keep them coming back for more. But over the course of my experiences, I've come across so many little things that can help foster community. VIP programs are great, but they're a dime a dozen. People involved in those rarely feel special, they just feel they're being rewarded for helping out the company (for free, I might add). My question in this article, is given the ROI and impact superusers and VIP users have any given community, why not pay them?

I'm not advocating putting them on the payroll - but some form of recogniztion beyond a... mousepad... would go a long way to keep these users coming back. Not only that, the word of mouth they spread is equal to thousands of dollars in good PR.

Something simple would work. Say one community has a superuser with 45,000 posts. Obviously the client cannot simply ignore them, so what should be done about it? Paying them would create all sorts of legal issues - but rewarding them in other ways will not. Say the superuser works for Intel; why not give them a $100 gift certificate to the company? They'll be happy, and will continue to help out in the community. Other superusers will see this, and thus will work even harder in the hope that they, too, will get some form of prize. The ROI for a program like this pays for itself. Employees are much more productive, and with a $100 gift, the company could be seeing thousands in productivity

I've seen this tried at companies before, without much success (due to management), but I think a well-educated program like this would really help increase productivity, and lead to a much more friendly work environment.

Another thing I've learned is to keep your mouth shut when nobody is really listening. That, and warm fresh coffee.

Online communities and how to gague visible ROI

(taken from Mark Hinkle)

Maggie has a great set of statistics from her ROI of Communities Series. Pardon the total duplication of the stats but I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose these numbers.

• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T, 2002)
• 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004)
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
• In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
• Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKinsey, 2000)
• Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKinsey, 2000)
• 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
• Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)

As a community manager I myself I am always looking for concrete statistics to help explain why there is value for companies to build online communities.

I also found The Online Community Research Network (OCRN) from Maggie’s comment feed. OCRN is a collaborative effort of online community professionals to better understand the principal challenges of building and managing online communities .
The also offer the following free reports that are helpful

- Online Community Metrics (free download)
- Online Community ROI (free download)

Lots of data to digest but very good stuff.

Confessions of an amateur photographer..

So, I recently got fed-up with my tiny digital handy-cam, and decided it was about time for me to move up in the world. So, I went out and bought a brand new Nikon DSLR camera. I have to say I'm fairly impressed with it so far, but back to the amateur point, I truly suck at editing and touching up the pictures. So I figured I'd start by beginning to post some of my photos on here, and with some luck, perhaps some of my readers could give me a little insight on how to improve them.

Here are some of the first pictures I took - any and all feedback is welcome!

Do away with the CAPTCHA!

I'm sure most of you are wondering what the heck a CAPTCHA is. You know whenever you go to pretty much any website, have to register, and you're asked to look at a graphic and try to decipher a string of characters hidden behind lines and other images. I just now had to figure one out, and it took me four tries. That's a CAPTCHA. (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart - yeah I don't get the acronym either). FOUR TRIES. This is done, of course, to keep out spam bots. Fair enough. But with all the advancements in internet technology over the years, why are we still stuck with these pieces of shit? Surely there is a much easier way to tell humans and robots apart than this.

Why are the innocent folks like you and I being forced to go through all of this unnecessary hassle just because others choose to exploit the system? I think Mozilla or some other respected company should start an open source project on a system to replace the increasingly annoying CAPTCHA. It's gotten to the point now where I won't even bothering to register for a site after I've failed the CAPTCHA test more than once or twice. "Is that a 5 or an S? Oh well, one way to find out....... nope, it was an S. Time to fill everything in all over again." I know there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people out there who feel the same as I do. Yes, spamming is a problem, but there just has to be a better alternative than this. Something like, say, making the user click a couple things in order, or perhaps just doing a simple math problem. Naturally, the spammers will eventually find a way around those. I'm no expert at designing these types of things, but come on, we can do better than this.

This is a normal CAPTCHA: View this photo

My particular favorite alternative: http://www.hotcaptcha.com/

Oh well, maybe some day my dream of a CAPTCHA-free internet will come true. But until then, I'll just continue to damage my retina's by trying to tell the L's and 1's, 5's and S', and B's and 8's apart.