I've been debugged!

Related link: http://extra.schematron.com/available.html

"You're so somatically focussed!" said my mate, a Siberian doctor, over coffee. I had just told him that I felt like something was growing in me. Next night I was in the emergency ward in St Vincent's hospital, pumped full of morphine, doctors canalizing everything in sight and prodding everything else not insight. And summonsing next of kin. Something was growing indeed in me, but not cancer and not anything any of my doctors and specialists had actually seen before. Dr Dick, my GP, on the first day said "Its not a heart attack, its something funny", and the diagnosis didn't get much more useful than that for two months.

Those who saw my talk in Amsterdam at XML 2005 may have wondered why I only talked for for 25 minutes: it was the week before the dramas started.

It turned out to be easily and completely treatable, though only by accident; I recovered a long time before they figured out why I was alive and why the mysterious mass in my chest had disappeared. A sign of the straw-clutching by the doctors was that they even tested me for an infection associated with Siberian bear hunters (jokingly suggested by my aforementioned mate). When another doctor poo-pooed the TV show "House", I pointed out that it exactly corresponded to my experience: a lot of red herring chases on changing secondaries, with the primary cause remaining elusive, made trickier still by minor complications such as pneumonia and pneumathorax.

So I tidied up my affairs, and I went to recuperate on a banana farm in Coffs Harbour, a resort town in the East coast. The dog chased bush turkeys and wallabies all day, dozens of different birds sang and displayed all day (it is spring), the backyard koala burped all night, and I cooked two of my best recipes: fresh bug in sesame miso soup, and fresh mulberry, pecan, almond, ricotta and cumquat marmalade pie. The only entertainment each day was to go to the local beach (which as summer progresses becomes nude) and watch an enormous shark's head decompose. You have to make your own fun in the country. Oh, one day I saw a seahawk catch a gull; the next day, I saw a gull from the flock attack the seahawk by buffing it underneath. Tough guy. (And absolutely no work; I slipped and posted to XML-DEV once I think: the flesh is indeed weak.)

Now I am debugged, recuperated, relaxed, and feeling like a thirty-year old. (And very grateful to the doctors, nurses and staff at St Vincent's hospital Sydney.) I have been told there is no reason to expect a relapse.

So I find myself in an interesting inflection point. I have tidied up my affairs: gave up the house, sold the car, left the dog gallivanting after the longsuffering wallabies, and phased myself out of (my software company) Topologi's day-to-day operations. What to do next?

I feel like I have been given a fresh start, and I want to take it up. So I am free and available for new work. My resume and overview can be found here. Tim Bray has given me a nice recommendation here, which was very kind. If you have something that I might be good at, or you know of someone, please feel free to let them or me know.

Topologi will be releasing a new round of versions of our utilities and editors before the end of the year, which is pretty exciting for me, and I will still maintain a close involvement with them.

The other thing that has been set back by all this has been my implementation of ISO Schematron. I am starting to work on it again, taking some ideas from James Clark's Jing implementation; it will be API compatible with the 1.5/1.6 skeleton, and accept schemas with both the old and new namespace.

Buddy can you spare me a dime?