Less weak week#
Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:31:49 +0000
More mobile weblogging - hey, catchy name. Could even be shortened - 'moblog'?
Took longer to recover from last Tuesday's RC than I expected, but by Sunday I was feeling like I might just be OK for the Stroll. Yesterday I felt better after the stroll than I had on Sunday before it, in fact - well, apart from having stacked when I got my fleece wrapped around my wheels - damn this recskating clothing - and hurt my wrist quite badly (as in, yesterday I was typing one-handed). So maybe it's just about having something else to focus on...
RC again tonight, though slower than the last one and much more comfortable. 'Confident' is the wrong word, still, but quietly hopeful I'll still be in a fit state to walk tomorrow.
Reading writing#
Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:25:49 +0000
40 ish miles on the bike in Berkshire villages with a mixed LSST skater/cyclist group. Presence of skaters meant we weren't going fast fast, of course, but inability to put much weight on the left hand (wrist is still recovering) would have done that quite effectively anyway. Nice to be out in the fresh air and the countryside.
Leg progress:
- walkable on Wednesday, so I walked the three miles into town without any trouble
- still good on Thursday. I was going to do something [[LSS => Long Slow Skate]]ish in the park, but there weren't enough skaters around that I really wanted to leave my laptop bag lying around out of my sight, so instead spent an hour or so skating up and down on one leg near the beach trying to get a good feel for my hip position and learn my edges again. First time I've been on speedskates in a while.
Stroll tomorrow, if it's not rained off.
8 April RC#
Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:19:16 +0000
Stroll was snowed off. Route check last night (still in crossmax) was comfortable (even at full extension) for the first hour and vaguely twingey for the remaining 20 minutes so I hung back and relaxed a bit. Today - well, I haven't tried walking very far yet, but what I have I would describe as "still vaguely twingey". Not actually painful, though. The speed of RC was not so different from the one two weeks ago, so this is definitely an improvement.
Partitioning is such sweet sorrow#
Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:11:39 +0000
A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart
If you - as I did this afternoon - have a qemu image containing an
NTFS filesystem that you want to enlargen considerably (in my case,
from 2GB to ~40), please note that XP Pro will not boot the result
unless the number of disk heads in the partition table matches that in
the NTFS BIOS Parameter Block (more on that
here ) and
additionally, IME, both are set to 255. gparted and fdisk both seem
to default to 64, which doesn't work.
The basic plan is in the page I linked to and involves qemu-img, fdisk,
ntfsresize and hexedit in approxaimately that order. Some other notes:
- changing the number of heads: I used
sfdisk -l -uS /dev/loop0
to read the existing table, then sfdisk -f -uS -H255 /dev/loop0
to recreate it.
- my first attempt (one of the many that failed) was to boot qemu from
a gparted live cd image. This was a waste of time: if you are
marginally competent with the command line you can do it all from the
host using sfdisk and ntfsresize directly - if you're not then
obviously please ignore my advice to have anything at all to do with
sfdisk as it will eat your babies.
Stuff happened#
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:37:20 +0000
13th April: my Sunday Stroll lead was rained off. I was in the slightly odd position of having to post a cancel on Sunday morning while looking at the 11am bright sunshine coming in through the window, but the weaher forecasts all agreed (and turned out to be right, too, which is gratifying in a way and annoying in another way)
16th April: first Londonskate of the year, I skated in the pack and suffered not one jot (or tittle). Then up to the Batcave to fiddle with the Firebrox
18th April was supposed to be the FNRttC but I was unexpectedly ill at the last minute and had to bail out
20th April, the LSST club race - I wasn't racing, but went along to watch anyway. Seemed to work pretty well
Tonight, LFNS route check; tomorrow Londonskate; Friday LFNS; Sunday my rescheduled Stroll lead.
Sometime when I have a minute, lots of reading on Central pattern generators and neuromechanics - apparently we have reconfigurable neural networks in our spinal cords implementing oscillators, how cool is that? Finally a convincing mechanism for "arms drive the legs" explanations of [[armswing]]
Last night I cleaned my fridge out. It was overdue for it, the icemaking compartment looked like it had been snowed in. I have taken this photo just so I don't keep opening the door and letting warm air in to admire how much better it looks now.
More stuff happened#
Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:42:45 +0000
I'm on a (mostly self-imposed, it must be admitted) deadline to get a work project finished right now, because it has been dragging on way too long. The immediate effect is that I am completely caught up on all my online forums and it's time for another blog entry.
Last week: Tuesday [[RC]] was fairly pacey and I decided to push myself a bit more by sprinting up hills in the second half. Some twinges, no real soreness the following day, so I did the [[LondonSkate]] as a recovery skate and everything was fully functioning on Thursday. Friday was the [[LFNS]] itself, which I marshalled. A few sprints here and there - leg felt fine but either I'm horrendously unfit or FSKs are even slower than I thought they were.
Saturday it was noticeably sore, but not bad enough so that I couldn't cope with a fairly laid-back Stroll RC on Saturday. Which was in speed skates. First time I've worn those in a good long time, and it shows - I now have blisters on my toe knuckles where I used to have callouses. Going to take a few more iterations before my feet get back into shape for speedskates.
On Sunday the Stroll itself was rained off (second attempt this year to lead a Stroll and the second time that rain has cancelled it) so that became an unscheduled rest day. The silver lining to this particular cloud was that the combination of Friday and Saturday's outings had returned my leg to "uncomfortable when walking", so the rest day came at an opportune time. Today it's pretty much OK again, so tomorrow I can repeat the whole cycle...
(The writing team responsible for humorous blog entry titles are on holiday this month. Normal service may be resumed soon)