The last week has been dominated by a single event, and I haven’t yet mentioned it here. So here goes… Ten days or so, I began feeling a little twinge in my lower back, just inside the left hip. I took it easier than I would have liked, leaving several garden jobs unfinished, but by the end of the workday on Monday, it was all I could do to move. It took me nearly fifteen minutes to make it the hundred feet from my office desk to my car, and the ride home was terrible I stopped on the way at a pharmacy and struggled to make it in and out of the store. A man stopped me in the parking lot (well away from anything to lean on) and asked, “Your back hurt?” When I nodded yes, he began to tell me all about his back and wondered if I had any suggestions for him. I tried to be polite, but probably failed when I told him that if it was obvious by looking at my that I was in terrible pain, then maybe I wasn’t the best person to be asking for pain relief suggestions. And then I discovered a cruel joke played by the drug: store – all the back pain medicines were on the bottom shelf. [Note to self: remember them when you’re evil overlord.] I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at home, mostly in bed. Things started getting better, but I discovered that sitting down caused the problem. Laying down took the weight off, but standing actually seemed to improve things. So, Thursday and Friday I was back at the office. I set my laptop atop two large boxes stacked on my desk and stood all day. I worked slowly on the farm this weekend, doing enough to get by, but still leaving plenty undone. I’m back to sitting at work today, but only for a half-hour or so. Things are slowly improving. I’m still wondering what it was exactly (my guess is a muscle/tendon pull on the inside edge of the pelvis) and I now know that if I begin to feel it again in the future not to sit down. Also, even though I’ve never seen mention of this on the exercise charts, wincing can apparently give you a good workout. Even though I ate the same and worked out less, I managed to lose ten pounds last week. Two pairs of jeans that I bought a few weeks ago, already on the small side, now need a belt to stay on.

Folding chairs have a long and glorious history dating back to at least ancient Egypt, and designboom is there to tell us all about it. With pictures!

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk : English, United States, Athens, Royston, Eric, Male, 31-35! For more information on this sytem of indexing weblogs, visit http://www.blogchalking.tk/.

What do you get when a fellow with a questionable voice scats over the top of gospel and lounge classics? Shooby Taylor! Yes, there are MP3s.

A recent top-secret web project of mine went live this morning. I won’t link to it directly, but if you’re interested in locally grown natural produce, send me an email and I’ll share the link. If you’re in the Athens area, you can use it right away. If you’re not in the area, you can still look, but you won’t find it all that useful. If we started shipping our produce, it wouldn’t be “locally grown”.

While playing around with Hit or Miss’s tools, I found another Matt put together. To hear it in action, call 1-800-555-TELL and when the recording begins press 130662. It’s Kestrel’s Nest, read to you over the phone. Program your speed dials now!

I’ve updated the “a few favorites” section over on the sidebar. It’s dynamically generated using the Daily Crawl utility written by Matt at Hit or Miss. He’s als owritten a script that automatically includes what his TiVo’s recording on his weblog, but I lack all sorts of connectivity to manage that.

Alton Brown, host of Good Eats , was on NPR’s All Things Considered this weekend, talking about such things as cooking Tuna on the grill and smoking salmon in a trash can. You can watch and/or listen on NPR’s website. (They’ve backed of on their linking policy, so it’s OK for me to link this.)

Virulent Memes, welcome to Movable Type! Looks like you’ve got things up and running quite well.

A new version of Movable Type, the system I use to maintain this weblog and many other portions of my web space, was released over the weekend. Among the steps forward are support for MySQL (an open-source database that has become a standard for web applications) and something entirely new called TrackBack. It’s hard to describe what this actually is, but it may revolutionize the weblog format. It allows a threaded discussion between sites, so that (for example) a weblog author using MovableType could post an entry mentioning my blackberry story. That entry written by someone I may not even know could then be inserted into my own commenting system. Or, if I were to add a category structure to my farm’s site like, say, recipes, I could allow other weblog authors to post to both their site and mine at the same time. There’s other uses for multi-site threaded discussion that will sort themselves out over time. Could be really neat, it could never get used. We’ll see.