You have no phase shifter.

This is how it feels when I sit down to work most of the time. Usually I give up. Sometimes I’ll work all day, only to look at my work the next day and realize that instead of removing bricks I’ve just been rearranging them. Occasionally I sit down and plow straight through the wall, getting more done in a day than I have in the last month.

There’s been very little progress lately, because besides emptying a hoarder house, running an estate sale, selling the house, selling a car, buying a car, renting a house, and preparing to move — breathe — I now have nearly daily headaches from my neck, along with the lack of sleep, constant fatigue, and depression caused by this situation. I’ve been through physical therapy, 5 chiropractors, & therapeutic massage – all seem to help only temporarily.

When I was seven, I fell 6 feet out of a tree and landed on my back. My memories are blurry, but I remember struggling to breathe all night. I was never taken to a doctor. Was that the beginning of all this?

Two months ago, I got a new symptom: tingling & numbness shoot down my left arm several times a day, and I now have constant numbness in my left thumb. Finally, after many delays caused by waiting for doctor appointments, X-rays, and MRI, I got in to see an orthopedic surgeon yesterday. This is 2 months after the latest symptoms started, and quicker than usual since my wife works in a doctor’s office.

I need neck surgery. Soon.

 
I have degenerative disc disease, and unlike the image on that page, my disks are bulging on the spinal cord side of the spine. They are pressing into my spinal cord in several areas. I also have bone spurs and narrowing of the neural pathways. I was surprised to learn that I have no reflexes in my left arm and very little in my right. My reflexes are zero on this scale

This brings up many emotions, and questions:

• #1: A hearty F*# You to the orthopedic specialists at Stanford Hospital, who gave me the classic “its all in your head” line
• I wonder if my sleep problems and fatigue were caused by my neck all along, and not my gut issues?
• Did I do this to myself, by sitting with bad posture for the last 20 years? I’ve sat in kneeling chairs and on exercise balls, in expensive ergo chairs and on the side of a bed. My last job had 2-4 hour chairs instead of 10 hour chairs.
• Will the surgery be a success? Will I finally get back to full productivity after this?

I’ll see you next month, and to steal a line from Pink Floyd,

Tear down the wall.

Update

I’m scheduled for a fusion of C5-C6 on Aug 5th. The Orthopedic Surgeon said that without surgery, I could eventually end up with no feeling in my hands. Here’a pic from the MRI of the disc impinging on the spinal column. I have compression of the spinal column on the right, and compression of the nerve root on the left.

Update 2

The surgery was a success, I should be back at work soon!

In the post 15 Years I went into the 15 years (now 17) of gut problems and chronic fatigue I’ve been through after the initial release of Jetpack. I’m happy to say now, most of that is finally behind me. I am finally, after 17 years of 2am pain, absolutely pain free! I still have some fatigue and – spoiler alert – still going to the bathroom too often (I was hoping these would go away with the pain), but my situation is much better than it was 2 years ago. I give about 10% credit to the 10 doctor’s I’ve had over the last 17 years – most of my success has come from internet research and other people with similar problems. I thank the doctors only for filling the prescriptions for things I wanted to try. I credit 3 things about equally to solving my gut problems:

• A Sucralfate/Carafate regimen
• Removal of my gall bladder
• 4X dose broad-spectrum probiotics

Sleeping Disorder

The gut pain would wake me at 2am every night, and after 17 years of that I was left with a sleeping disorder. No matter what I did, I could not get more than 4-5 hours of sleep per day – I would always wake up early. Finally I found that low dose Amitriptyline would help me stay asleep, but it gave me awful dry mouth (that alone wakes me up 4 times a night) and if I stopped taking it the sleep problem returned. I decided to experiment by gradually tapering the dose over 3 months, and it worked! I am now getting 7-8 hours of sleep every night and only taking 1/4 of a pill. I’m pretty confident that I’ll be completely off of it soon.

Here’s my theory about what my problem was/is:

I developed stomach ulcers from a high stress situation (involving a girl!), possibly complicated by a bacterial infection. Since I had no health insurance I was relying on OTC antacids to combat the pain, and the condition went on longer than it should have. The acid damage extended into my small intestine and damaged my gall bladder. Multiple conditions made the case very difficult for doctors to solve – their skill seems to lie mainly in matching multiple symptoms to a single cause. Reducing acid didn’t help because my gall bladder would still cause pain and the ulceration was extensive. Sucralfate finally helped with 50% of the pain, because it combines with hydrochloric acid to form a paste that adheres to damaged tissue. The gall bladder removal didn’t seem to help much because ulceration or infection continued in the lower small intestine. Somehow high dose probiotics were able to finish off the rest of the pain.

 
It’s amazing how after 17 years of pain every night, you don’t even seem to notice when it goes away. But I do notice that I’m feeling better, and hopefully the progress will continue. I hope my story helps someone else who has these problems!

It’s very late and I have work in the morning, so I’m going to keep this short and sweet. Please let me know your thoughts on:

Feedback & Testing

• playability on a real level – this is a real game level with no enemies, so gameplay should be mostly representative of the final game.
• bottom panel events & sample achievements: getting all treasure, & artifact
• bg staining – when you use your jetpack it burns the background
• minor scrolling – this is a test of scrolling in a narrow game window, which will be required on a few websites.
• The new jetman, thanks to Eric F!

Updates

• Shiny new UI panels
• Death & level completion
• Misc physics improvements – tripping is still an issue, but it’s been reduced
• The industrial graphics theme now closely matches the original Jetpack graphics
• The 3d effect has been refined – much less bevel, a bit more shadow
• New sound effects

Back in 1992 I would sleep 10 hours (generally from 2am to noon) and code 12+ hours every day.  I created Jetpack in 4 months.  I wrote Squarez Deluxe in 1 month.  Now, and for the last 15 years, I have been getting 4-5 hours sleep per day and suffering constantly from chronic fatigue.  My short term memory and concentration are shot.  I’ll be excited about a project and fired up to work, but when I try to code my abilities slip away and I’ll forget everything that was in my head.  I usually end up zoning out on TV or playing video games.  It’s a constant struggle to get things done, except on the rare days, maybe 1 or 2 a month, when my brain decides to work.

A couple years after this started, I finally got a job with health insurance (in Seattle), and over a year I saw 5 different doctors.  They were all completely useless – one actually listened for 3 minutes then told me to take Metamucil for the rest of my life – he spent more time asking me computer questions than trying to diagnose my problem.

• I’ve had these tests: upper gi, small bowel series, endoscopy, colonoscopy, food sensitivity test, fat absorption test, ultrasound.  The only abnormality in my blood tests was elevated Gliadin IgG
• I’ve tried 10 different diets, including vegetarian, no lactose, no fat, no salt, & celiac for 3 months
• I’ve been to 10+ doctors, including gut and back specialists, chiropractors, massage, and acupuncture
• I’ve taken countless drugs and herbal remedies, acid reducers, antibiotics, glutamine, hyoscyamine, etc, etc, etc.  Once I took a bad combination of anti-yeast herbals, went a little loopy, and ended up in the hospital.

Now I’m in Boston and the doctors seem a little better here.  Recently, thanks mostly to the internet and in part to my doctors, I’ve found 2 things that help my pain about 50% – Sucralfate/Carafate (bonds with hydrochloric acid to form a paste that allows intestinal ulcers to heal) and Dicyclomine/Bentyl (smooth muscle antispasmodic, stops intestinal cramping).  Now I find it easier to sleep, but after 15 years of this I have a sleep habit of waking up after 4-5 hours.  My latest doctor has also found that my gallbladder has some serious issues – but most of my pain is on the sides, not near the gallbladder.  I may have it removed soon, and I hope that turns out to be the cause.

In conclusion, I want to make 2 points:

• This is why there is no Jetpack 2 yet
• Universal health care is a basic human right.  No one should be excluded because of preexisting conditions, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick.  A friend of mine recently had her coverage revoked after being diagnosed with cancer – the reason?  She hadn’t disclosed a high blood pressure test 5 years earlier.  The decision to deny care should not be made by people whose jobs depend on maximizing profit – it’s just that simple.

The problem is not that ad blocking software exists, but that the design is severely flawed. I like the idea of being able to block annoying ads. But surprisingly, of the dozens+ of ad blocking programs out there, not a single one will let me do that! They are all set to BLOCK EVERYTHING BY DEFAULT – including the inoffensive ads and the sites you use daily and want to support. Some let you “whitelist” sites where you want to see ads, but this is a red herring. The harmful flaw of this software is due to the power of defaults. No significant number of people is going to go through this process for every site they want to support: [disable the ad-blocker, find out if a site has inoffensive ads, enable ads on that site, reenable the ad-blocker]

While researching this issue I installed an ad-blocker with no intention of keeping it – but I liked it, and now I understand the problem. You want it for that damn 5% – those annoying websites with popups and flashing ads. But being an ethical person I want to support the other 95% of sites I like. When you install an ad blocker, it’s a real eye opener to see how differently a sizeable chunk of people are seeing your website.

At worst, ad-blockers hurt the free web. At least, they are ripping us off. People who use ad-blocking software are being subsidized by people who do not. Everyone who runs this software (MILLIONS of people) is leeching off the free web, and depending on those who do not leech to keep their favorite websites free. There are no good estimates that I could find as to how much revenue is lost due to this problem (it’s very hard to measure), but since the number of users is in the millions (just one program boasts 1.35 million subscribers), I would guess that between of 10%-30% of revenue on free websites is being lost due to leeching, most of which is not the fault of the users but software makers who have no vested interest in fairness to free websites.

The logical extension of this problem, if everyone installed today’s ad-blocking software, is that large portions of the free web would dry up, either going subscription-based, or out of business. That makes this flawed software hostile to my business. But where is the public rage, or at least the mild annoyance? This issue is not in the public consciousness. It is mentioned on a few public forums, where virtually everyone is in support of the ad blocking software. I think this reflects a real misunderstanding of this software’s effect.

One potential solution I came up with is to convince companies to change the paradigm from block everything, to block ON DEMAND. I think this option would be popular, because it lets the user lack the smack down on bad websites, while being much more friendly to the good ones. It’s the way I would like the software to work, speaking as a user, not just as a website owner. This active censorship could even have the effect of discouraging annoying ads from being run in the first place.

I wrote to a few developers of the largest ad blocking products to suggest this change, and I was greeted with indifference and even rudeness – not surprising. They already know their software is costing us money. Maybe the proper negative attitude toward software with this flawed design will eventually convince these companies to listen. This issue needs better public awareness. Webmasters that rely on ad revenue to stay in business should be aware of the harm being done to them personally by this software.

Related Articles

Browser Makers Warned Against Ad Blocking
“The end of free Internet content will come when Web browsers start blocking online advertisements by default, a DoubleClick executive has warned.”

Is Norton Blocking Your Internet Marketing Efforts?
“Even though these products are sold as “Security” THE DEFAULT IS SET TO BLOCK ADS”

Norton Antivirus 2004 Ad Blocking – Tough Call?
“If banner ads fail, more and more sites will be forced into a pay model, and the days of the “Free Internet” will be almost over.”

Wikipedia – Ad Filtering

Legitimate products

These appears to be more legitimate products, only blocking popups and adware, but not stripping ads from webpages.

Stopzilla
Pop-up Stopper

I will post some SWF technology tests as soon as SWF encryption software is released for ActionScript 3 – should be within a month.

Do me a favor and link to JetpackHQ if you have a website, help spread the word!