I’m not talking about “painting myself into a corner,” or some other metaphorical shooting-of-foot. I’m talking about letting the podiatrist stick a needle full of cortizone and novacaine into a medial plantar nerve in my left foot in what now feels exactly like the vain hope that it will make things better.

So I guess that while there was a literal shot in my literal foot, I didn’t literally do it myself. But two out of three ain’t bad.

Three months ago I banged up my left foot hiking. Six weeks ago I realized it still hurt, and wasn’t getting better. So I did what any sane, type-A guy would do: I rubbed some dirt in it and decided to favor that leg until it got better. (Note: I did not literally rub dirt in it. That is hyperbole.)

Six weeks later I realized it was getting worse, if it was in fact getting anything, and I was tired of looking like a grumpy old man limping around town (literally. No hyperbole there.) So I went to the podiatrist, and that brings us to the shot (I’m skipping the X-ray, palpitation, and diagnosis, cutting directly to the metaphorical chase.)

The nerve is towards the very bottom of the foot. The shot goes in from the top, because needles don’t like calluses, and doctors don’t like patients (hyperbole? You call it.) The last thing you want to hear when you’re gritting your teeth over an injection is “almost there… almost there…” Yeah. My thinking went along the lines of “as long as this doesn’t get any worse I’ll be just fiiiEEEAAAACKING HELL THAT HURTS” (maaaaybe there’s some hyperbole there.) And then the needle came out, the bandage went on, and within thirty seconds I actually felt GREAT.

It was wonderful. For the next four hours I walked around as if nothing had ever been wrong. It did feel like two of my toes were missing, but at least they didn’t HURT.

(For those of you keeping score at home, yes, four hours is about how long it takes for novacaine to wear off.)

For the past three hours I’ve been limping like an eighty-year-old with a shiny, new titanium hip replacement, and I’ve been doing the “thousand-yard-stare” common to those who are not feeling much pain anymore because of the flood of endorphins. Except that I am still feeling the pain.

Obviously this case of “Morton’s Neuroma,” and when I find Morton I’m going to kick him in the teeth.

With my RIGHT foot. In a boot.

Literally.

… and that one is probably John “troutman” Troutman. On to the question!

For years I’ve connected the multiple sources to my low-rez, old-school 27″ tube TV with a very neat switch-box. It has buttons on the front that let the kids quickly switch between DVD, VCR, Gamecube (now Wii), and XBox inputs. We don’t have cable, but if we did we could switch that in and out as well.

It takes composite video and the usual red+white RCA audio cables as inputs, and sends whatever is switched on through the same — a yellow composite video cable, and RCA audio jacks. We feed that straight to the TV, and then take the TV audio out to the surround-sound tuner, which is always switched to “TV” and which, in this configuration, is conveniently silent the moment the TV is switched off.

This same configuration works fine with the Plasma TV I just picked up, and since I don’t have any HDTV sources (no Blu-Ray, no Xbox 360, no PS3) I’m not losing very much yet.

BUT… at some point in the future (maybe my birthday) I want to throw an HDTV source into the mix. Maybe it’ll be a Blu-Ray player, maybe it’ll be an Xbox 360 (no, I won’t bother with HD-DVD, or whatever the “dead” format is) but whatever I pick it will almost certainly have HDMI, DVI, and/or component video outputs.

I’m going to need a new solution for switching. Ideally I’ll find out that some clever boffin has created a version of my current switch-box that offers component, composite, HDMI, DVI, etc inputs for each source, and then passes those along with no degradation to the display. Sadly, I’m afraid I may be stuck buying a tuner that forces my kids to navigate one of those hellish remotes in order to switch between games and movies.

I suspect that within a year we’ll have a Blu-Ray player for digital movies (blu-ray, DVD, and Netflix), an Xbox 360, our existing Wii (is composite the only option here?) and our existing VCR (the old Xbox and DVD player will be redundant). That means I can probably get by with two composite inputs and two HDMI inputs for the next three to five years.

So… what’s the best solution? I want simplicity, and I want great signal. Oh, and low price, too.

So an advertising salesman walks into The Dragon’s Keep and strikes up a conversation. Turns out he’s selling internet advertising — local businesses buy a spot on this site, and consumers come along, look at a page full of logos, and click on them in hopes of uncovering clues for winning $1,000.

I ask him how many page-loads they get per day. No data. They’re brand new.
Ah, a brand new local company. I ask him about funding, and no, he doesn’t know who the investors are, but yes, he thinks they’re VC funded. Oh, cool. They might have money I can tap.
I ask him where they’re advertising their site for launch. The answer? Billboards, TV, Radio, and football games.
I explain to him that I’ve tried to double-click on billboards, and never yet succeeded. I further explain that Google (and lots of other internet advertising companies) can sell ad space based on the consumer’s IP address, so that only locals are seeing the ads. He says “wow, I didn’t know that.”

I look at the sample image map, and see a field cluttered with logos. I ask what the screen resolution is for the screen-cap. “The what?” is his answer. I explain the question. “Oh. That’s something I need to go find out.” Then I get to rephrase the question for him so it’s meaningful to his web developers.

So… a salesman walks into The Dragon’s Keep in the hope of selling a couple hundred bucks of ad space to the owner (who is not in.) He walks out fifteen minutes later having been told how his employers should be running their business, and why they should be buying advertising from me.

The best part? This was done in front of an audience of DK regulars. The general consensus after the salesman left seemed to be “Howard, you should not be allowed to do that, but we’re glad you did.”