The September 2012 Inventory was a beast of a post. There were a number of problems and it generated a whole slew of issues. First the easy stuff.

I located this instrument on the web in the fall of 2012, copied the items to a spreadsheet, entered my scores, added explanatory notes, and presented a hard copy to Dr H. We reviewed it during a September 2012 meeting. I completely forgot about it until July 2013. While preparing the August insurance company submission, I rediscovered it and submitted a printed copy to the insurance company.

I do not know the provenance of this document. I do not know the source location. I have searched the browser cache for both FireFox and Chrome and can find no relevant entries. I have tried a google search on some of the item headers with negative result (I do get lots of hits but none of them relate to the original instrument). I believe it was located on a web site providing various TBI resources but I cannot confirm that. I do not know the correct scale; I thought it ran from 1 to 3 but I find I have entered some items as a “4.” It really needs to go to 11.

In the original spreadsheet there are items which I did not score at all. I do not remember why these were omitted. Items that did not apply were marked as N/A so I suspect that some of the missing items are the result of cognitive deficits and do not represent a rational and considered response to the item itself.

In early August, I went through the items again and entered a second set of scores overwriting the first. So I lost the original spreadsheet data; I still have an original record in the form of the printed PDF but I cannot easily use the PDF to perform a comparison between the recorded data from September 2012 and current data from August of 2013.

And now the fun begins. First, I tried to link the blog to a copy of the PDF. I couldn’t get this to work. Next, I output the spreadsheet file as html and attempted to create an independent web page so that I might link to that. This also did not work. Then I took the html and pasted it into a blog page (WordPress has two basic types of content: blog posts such as you are now reading and “static” html pages). I then attempted to link to that page but this created other problems. Finally, I copied the blog page html and pasted it into a blog post. This did not deliver the desired result as the page html appears to contain code which played havoc with style.css and created display problems for the entire site. Bummer. It took a lot of work to sort everything out. This is the only side benefit to sleepless nights; you have lots of quiet time to devote to bug checking blog posts.

The instrument is problematic in other ways. It lacks any key to permit interpretation of the scores. I have no idea if the scored values are intended to have any relevance or meaning. I also appear to have miscalculated the category totals and these errors are contained in the submitted hard copy. I have since corrected these calculations on the blog post.

But none of this meets my original objective which is to compare my responses from September 2012 with current responses from August 2013. But I already know the answer to this; with the exception of one or two items there has been very little change.