It's been a week since I sprained my ankle during the ultimate game last Friday and the good news is that it has shown some significant improvement. I've progressed to doing light workouts on it along with suggested rehabilitation stretches and exercises. I can walk without any limping or pain and minimal discomfort. It's still sore, and the swelling has still not completely gone down, but I'm managing it with ice and it's improving each day. The hardest part, though, is staying off of the field. I was tempted even today to go out to the game but I resisted, even though I'm young and invincible :). I'm going to try to give it at least another week before I lace up the cleats again.

This is the first time I will have gone more than a week without playing a game of ultimate in over a year. Do they have a patch or chewing gum for this?

Argh. It's a given that injuries are a part of participation in any sport and I have dealt with my fair share of them. Various repetitive stress and overuse injuries cropped up during my track and field career in high school and college. Regardless of how many injuries I've dealt with, though, each new one always seems to be equally as aggrevating.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. I sprained my ankle during yesterday's ultimate frisbee game - landing on the side of my foot rather than the bottom of it after going up for the disc. It wasn't a major sprain. It initially didn't swell up at all and I continued to walk around on it with some annoyance during the rest of the day. When I got home late last night, though, I took off my shoes and noticed that one ankle was definitely bigger than the other. After some ice and a night of sleep, I woke up this morning with a very stiff and still somewhat swollen ankle. Awesome.

So I'm on the sprained ankle recovery program: minimize weight-bearing activities, and R.I.C.E. treatment. I've got ice wrapped around it right now, and I'm going to re-apply it every two to three hours or so today to see if I can get the swelling down. I've also taken some ibuprofen and have my legs propped up so that they are elevated. What's the hardest part though? Staying off the field until I'm fully recovered. I've been playing lunchtime pickup ultimate games Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays since I started working here over a year ago last October. In that time period I've rarely missed a game, and haven't gone more than a week straight without playing. I clearly won't be able to play next week, but it's probably not wise to play for at least a week or two after symptoms are gone and I've properly carried out a stretching and strengthening exercise program.

I hate being injured. Somebody hold me back.

So I've decided to give it another shot. My last blogging attempt (along with it's short-lived corollary, my internal Sun blog) was sustained for a while, but quickly faded after I started working here at Sun Microsystems. After much contemplating, though, I think I'm at a point where I can give it another go.

With this decision made, the first order of business was to decide on the location of my Blog2.0. I did consider reviving owenkellett.info, but ultimately I decided to leave it alone and go a different route for a few main reasons:

• As an employee of Sun Microsystems, I do feel somewhat compelled to contribute to the corporate blogging effort that Sun, and in particular CEO Jonathan Schwartz has pioneered.
• owenkellett.info was started before my first full-time employment and has a very limited overlap with my current tenure at Sun.
• I felt the need to start fresh but do not yet want to purge my previous blog's identity.

Considering all of this, I was left with an obvious option: launch a new, public, personal blog as part of the blogs.sun.com community. My only apprehension about this prospect, though, was that Sun's blogging site uses Roller as its blogging engine while I had become particularly attached to Wordpress during my owenkellett.info toils. Having previously explored Roller, I was not left particularly impressed.

It turns out, however, that Roller, while it may be behind in a few features and have less-robust plugin support in comparision to Wordpress, suffers mostly from its smaller user base and less established development community. Thus while Wordpress has a large collection of community developed themes and plugins, Roller has a much smaller set. In addition, it may just be a matter of personal preference, but I don't like any of the stock Roller themes installed for blogs.sun.com. To be vague, they all feel very "Web1.0" as opposed to belonging to the blogsphere "Web2.0" style.

So last night I dug through the Roller docs and cracked open a can of css to see what Roller can really do. I have to admit that I am a fan of the Java/Hibernate combination which makes up the foundation of the back-end engine. Additionally, the use of the Velocity template language to generate the web gui front-end is pretty slick and makes for fairly clean, modular, and simple theme and template code. And while I don't claim to be a css expert by any means, the result of my efforts is the layout of this site. In my opinion, it looks more "blog-like" than any of the stock templates in the blogs.sun.com library. [Although since I do not have a machine with Windows installed anywhere that is readily accessible, I still have not been able to test the layout on Internet Explorer. The structure is fairly basic though, and to the best of my knowledge W3C standards compliant.]

In any case, I'm back. Hopefully I can stick with it this time, and that this blog will help me to keep my perspective on whatever lies ahead.