On Friday I snapped a lace in my right boot just before the LFNS. After unsuccessfully trying a shoe bar and one instance of John Lewis for a replacement on Saturday afternoon, I remembered the Powerslide skates I bought two years ago and have almost never used since. Didn't like the boots, the wheels are rubbish, and the frames are 5x80 therefore definitely unfashionable these days - though my 4x100 frames are not exactly modish either now - but hey. At least the laces make it all worthwhile.

Friday: LFNS (20km) plus cycling there and back (16km). My second-best bike is making strange clicking noises that I cannot identify, which slightly creeps me out after the Firebrox cracked frame incident a few weeks ago. Saturday off. Sunday Stroll to Victoria Park then up to Leyton for a barbecue then home again (34km). Leg basically fine. Still focusing on right foot carve, which is coming a bit more naturally, maybe perhaps.

The Firebrox is the mobile sound system of the LFNS: built on a Brox Compact chassis, it sports a 2kW car amp, two Celestion SR1 PA speakers, a pair of tube-shaped subwoofers, and a boxing glove.

Official web page at http://www.lfns.co.uk/bike.php

Let's write the whole story down in one place, shall we, and save having to repost different bits of it on a million balkanised forums.

On Wednesday evening, on the way to the Londonskate, I was skating in a straight line down Clerkenwell Road , when a following driver decided to overtake me too closely and/or to pull in before he'd finished the maneouvre. His wheel clipped my right foot wheels while I was standing on them: the situation very swiftly became such that I was no longer standing on them or on anything, instead lying in the road having contacted shoulder, head and knee.

Damage to head was just a graze and a headache (but oh boy, those things leak blood worse than British motorcycles used to leak oil), damage to knee is mostly road rash and some swelling, damage to shoulder is an anterior dislocation of the clavicle, which means I have a lump on my chest (more or less under the throat) where the end of my collar bone is lying on top of the sternum instead of joining it. Plus much bruising and tender spots and some amount of whiplash.

Some passers-by stopped to offer phone numbers and varying amounts of help (including one kind gentleman who walked with me to the nearest hospital and waited while they put a dressing on my head - in the unlikely event you see this, thanks again). I also exchanged numbers with the driver, who if I recall said something like "you went straight into me" - which is definitely a different interpretation of events than mine and only reconcilable if by "you" he actually meant "your foot". Wich frankly, he shouldn't have been close enough to touch. I can only really commend to him the advice of the Highway Code's Rule 163

Five hours in A&E, during which time I had an x-ray, a question about whether my tetanus was up to date (pretty sure I had one in Switzerland not so long ago), no further treatment for the head wound (they were going to glue it, but it stopped bleeding on its own) and a collar & cuff for my arm to stop the clavicle moving - apparently the standard treatment is to let it knit in its new position, which I suppose is fair enough if I retain full ROM in my shoulder. The collar, however, causes more pain than it alleviates - either my arm rubs against my chest on the sore bits or hangs from the back of my neck on the strained bits.

When I got home I cut my cycle top off because it hurt too much to get it over my head. Fortunately it was only a cheap Decathlon one.

Bit tetchy am I?

I hacked an allegedly-rss feed into coruskate (mostly so I could syndicate it on facebleurgh). It's at http://www.coruskate.net/news.rss and it validates on 50% of all known rss validators (the other one complains about an illegal character " in a URL, but then points at something that's not a " and isnt partof a URI either).

I'm back from this morning's appointment at the fracture clinic, and the good news is that according to fresh xrays my collarbone is not fractured as well as being dislocated, just dislocated. Reduction/surgical intervention is very unlikely: the choice, as explained, is between a cosmetic lump on my chest if they leave it alone and the possibility of trapping some serious vein or other and/or a major artery if they don't. It might resettle itself - presumably if it does it knows how to go around the plumbing - or it might fix where it is now, but they say either will be OK mechanically speaking.

In the meantime I can continue to use the sling for comfort (what comfort it affords, anyway - in practice it's more useful for sympathy) but shouldn't expect it to do anything to immobilise the joint as it can't have that effect, and I can use the arm for anything that doesn't actually hurt it. If I rest my palm on the corner of the keyboard I can even type two-handed again, at least for the keys within finger reach from that point.

They said six months to return to completely normal, though refused to be drawn on how soon I can have partly normal. "Completely normal" will be a novel experience for me anyway. Apparently, arm movement that crosses the chest (can you say "skating arm swing"? bah) is the last to return.

Picture was taken yesterday. It's yellower today if anything.

A moment's panic this morning when I sshed into my media box (my old laptop, plugged into stereo and TV) to find that it seemed to be in the middle of deleting all its files

dan@buggles:~$ firefox 
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
dan@buggles:~$ ls -l .Xauthority 
-rw------- 1 dan dan 106 2008-06-02 15:47 .Xauthority
dan@buggles:~$ rm .Xauthority 
Bus error (core dumped)
dan@buggles:~$ dmesg
/usr/bin/python: can't open file '/usr/lib/command-not-found': [Errno 2] No such file or directory
dan@buggles:~$ cat /proc/kmsg 
-bash: /bin/cat: No such file or directory
dan@buggles:~$ cd /
dan@buggles:/$ ls
-bash: /bin/ls: No such file or directory
dan@buggles:/$ echo *
big bin boot cdrom dev etc home initrd initrd.img lib lost+found media mnt opt proc root sbin srv sys tmp usr var vmlinuz
dan@buggles:/$ cd bin
dan@buggles:/bin$ echo *
 *

Bruising is calming down again - still looking a bit mustard-coloured but not nearly as garish as it was. Pain-free ROM is I think improving (I'm spending a lot of time with hot packs pressed to my neck), but I haven't really been taking notes.

I bought a new battery for my laptop (the working one, not the old one with the bust disk) quite recently, but having not left home with it much lately it's been running mostly on mains power ever since. Initial impressions are that the upgrade from three-cell to six-cell has taken battery life from about two hours to somewhere in the region of five. But I haven't really been keeping track.

After ten minutes looking for battery monitors that don't demand I change window managers, convert to Gnome, convert to KDE, convert to Islam or convert to metric, I gave up and wrote my own. Well, sort of.

• install ibam (it's in debian)
• create a sawfish command to call it and print the result

  :; cat ~/.sawfish/lisp/ibam-battery-monitor.jl
  (require 'rep.io.timers)
  ;
  (setq blank-ibam-timer nil)
  (defun ibam-show-battery ()
    (when blank-ibam-timer 
      (delete-timer blank-ibam-timer)
      (setq blank-ibam-timer nil))
    (let* ((s (make-string-output-stream))
           (e (x-events-queued))
           (p (make-process s)))
      (call-process p nil "/bin/sh" "-c"  (format nil "ibam"))
      (let ((str (get-output-stream-string s)))
        (display-message (substring str  0 (- (length str) 1)))
        (setq blank-ibam-timer
              (make-timer (lambda () (display-message nil))
                          0 3000)))))
  ;
  (define-command 'ibam-battery-monitor (lambda () (ibam-show-battery)))
  (provide 'ibam-battery-monitor)
  

• enable the i-in-a-circle "key" on the laptop's touch-sensitive strip (apparently this is supposed to take one to the HP Info Center)

  xmodmap -e 'keycode 245 = XF86VendorHome'
  

  (245 is the code that xev says is produced by pressing that, XF86VendorHome is any keysym in /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB that's not in use for something else)

• run sawfish-client and (require 'ibam-battery-monitor) - and put the same text in a sawfish startup file for next time
• use sawfish-ui to bind the new key to the new command

No external programs required other than ibam itself

I am having an interesting (in the Chinese proverb sense) time making Debian live-helper do what I want. It's one of those applications where the simple uses are really simple and the marginally more complicated can require all afternoon to figure out why it's not behaving how you want. Yes, actually it is constructed entirely from shell scripts, how did you guess?

The end goal is to get a USBkey-based installation for my old laptop that has everything working correctly for media playback, and I think I'm now most of the way there - though, frankly, everything I've been trying to achieve this evening has been firmly in the hard 10% of the 90-10 rule. A full writeup will follow soon (if for no other reason, because otherwise I'll forget what I did) but in the meantime I wanted to share this marginally-related snippet

 #!/bin/sh 
b=/tmp/$$.`basename $1`
xterm -T minimedia -e ssh  -t -t user@192.168.1.10 echo `base64 -w 0 $1` \| base64 -d \>$b \; mplayer -playlist $b

Work on my media box continues. While in bed this morning I decided that I wanted to use it to play Stunt Car Racer - since I have an ADF image and a Kickstart 1.3 ROM image lying around (entirely legal! I think, anyway. I seem to be on the Cloanto mailing list for something or other, I'm pretty sure it was for buying Amiga Forever some time in the past), this should be dead easy, right?

No. Despite having SDL support, UAE doesn't work with the vesafb console SDL driver. I think this is because said driver misreports the screen size. Eventually I found that it does work with radeonfb, but this is of limited use because mplayer doesn't. So my eventual conclusion is "screw this, let's install an X server - at least there's a reasonable chance more than four other people in the known world will be using the same configuration then"

W: Failed to fetch http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz  Hash Sum mismatch

If anything can be said to be nice about this particular traumatic injury (that's a medical term, not a value judgment), it's that it heals fast enough that over the course of a few days I can see the difference. Compared to, say, an adductor strain, that's a novel and welcome experience.

Currently:

• can move my arm straight backwards to full range: uncomfortable but possible
• can abduct it (straight out sideways) to about 20 degrees above vertical (hmm, that's better than yesterday)
• can swing forwards to slightly better than 45 degrees from vertical.
• if I hang onto something such as the top of a door, I can get the arm right above my head.
• as of three days ago I am again able to don a t-shirt without having to hang my hand on the doorhandle. And I can type with both hands again.
• full and very nearly painfree ROM in the neck
• the arm supports the weight of a paper plate loaded with tuna salad

So, things are looking up in general. Most of the painful bit right now is the top of my shoulder/side of neck- guessing this is the trapezius muscle.

Back from the Le Mans 24Rollers event on Monday night, where I spent 18 hours standing at the pit wall with a stopwatch noting the times of all the LSST veteran team skaters. I decided earlier this year I wasn't going to actually race but that it would be fun to go along there anyway (since I subsequently nadgered my shoulder, this was probably fortuitous), and pit crew seemed like a reasonable thing to be doing. Capsule summary as follows - advantage: less effort; disadvantage: less down time; after-effects: sunburn, slight hangover, really sore calves from all the time spent standing on (my) toes, two new t-shirts.

Shoulder update: everything I said last time, plus now getting to slightly above horizontal in the forward direction and can kind of do a skating armswing provided it is not too vigorous. T-shirt donning ability has improved to the point that I can now put both arms in first and then get it over my head. Bruising nearly all gone. Can now tie my shoelaces with no more than moderate care.

It still hurts carrying any significant weight, or even holding the arm straight out for more than a few seconds, and if I stretch my arm out sideways I can't bring it around in front of me without pain - which is noteworthy because (as above) I can get to the same out-in-front end position if I start with my arm down.