A blog about skating and cycling, or vice versa

Good Work at Goodwood#

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:00:00 +0000

Been slack about updating this diary lately; sorry. Goodwood Roller Marathon was the usual mixture of speed and recreational skaters - many doing it for charity. The former category was dominated quite heavily by LSST people, to the extent in fact that the lead pack was mostly a team pack with a few other people who we gradually shook off one by one. Was fun.

Last year Goodwood was my first ever marathon: I don't think there's anthing actually meaningful about comparing my performance between last year and this, but the thought that I've gone from 2:01 to 1:25 (and fourth place) gives me some sense of satisfaction that I've got something right this year. I don't need to count my own laps any more :-)

Goodwood this year was organised by the Camberley Skaters for the first time: despite including such must-have features as chip timing and online registration that previous years didn't have, the event still had the same relaxed and informal air about it as last year's. I'd still recommend it to anyone as a first UK marathon or social marathon. Very impressed.

Able was I, ere I'd sore elbow#

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:00:00 +0000

Additionally other sore elbow, and sore knees, and a shoulder that's slightly painful when arm raised above head height, and a sore back.

First elbow and shoulder was from Tatem, as mentioned previously. Other elbow and both knees acquired road rash from meeting diesel while attempting a rather tight snowplough stop on a downhill during the LFNS the other day. The remainder is just general muscle soreness after the Goodwood Roller Marathon - at least some of which is probably from doing Goodwood while still aching from Tatem, at least some of which is from doing Tatem before recovering from all that Brox pedalling last weekend. It's a bugger on the uphills, especially when it slips gears (it should have a SRAM 1:1 derailleur, but nobody seems to have them - so with its present cheap Shimano the gear indexing is basically way off). Anyway, it's basically (long past) time I took a few days off and let all this stuff grow back, whch is what I'm doing now and I hope to be well rested for the LIM this weekend. I should buy shares in Johnson & Johnson, the amount of Compeed I'm getting through.

I've entered (at least, I think I've entered - I've not had an email confirmation yet) the St Gallen 111, two weeks after the LIM. Which means I will probably not be going Wedel, as that's on the weekend between them.

Oh, if you're in (or can get to London) there's champagne on offer in our competition to name the bike (you have to get here to pick it up, cos we're not delivering). It's all a cunning ploy to get people to sign up to our mailing list, really.

Camberley Skaters#

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:03:34 +0000

These guys

:external

LondonSklaters Speed Team#

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:26:20 +0000

content moved to [[LondonSkaters Speed Team]]

toe flicking#

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:30:34 +0000

... is bad, mkay?

LSST#

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 02:01:36 +0000

[[insert Londonskaters Speed Team]]

LIM#

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 02:03:09 +0000

[[insert London Inline Marathon]]

London Inline Marathon#

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 02:29:18 +0000

The first four London Inline Marathons were 26 lap races around the Eastway Cycle Circuit in Leyton. The course is variously described as "technical", "challenging", or "a bastard" (depending on the audience) due to the exciting up- and downhills it contains. For the last few years it's also been the occassion of the British Marathon Championships.

In 2007 it will have to move venue, because that track will become part of the Olympic Village for 2012 and is due to close late in 2006.

There's lots more information at http://www.londoninlinemarathon.com, to which I now commend you, but that site lacks anything approaching the pithiness of the opening paragraph of this page.

WoW#

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 02:30:36 +0000

[[insert Week on Wheels]]

Face Off#

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 13:00:00 +0000

The novelty of landing face first seems to decrease as rapidly as the frequency with which I do it increases: on Sunday I was not even skating hard - I just slipped on some wet leaves (cosmic irony: I was putting my wristguards on and not paying full attention), ripped the scab off my elbow - it had until them been healing nicely - and gave myself a bit of a smack on the face (graze on chin, bump on cheekbone, mild headache). Yay helmets for not doing very much of use at all.

So, it is Time to do something about this.

What I have been doing, though I don't know if it'll solve anything but I know I really should do it anyway, is learning to turn left. There is something very lopsided about my balance such that I can parallel turn right and crossover left, and not vice versa, so all my skating time in the last few days has been on noddy drills like two-footed slalom down hills, or turning 180° on a left foot outside edge (other foot trailing on toe wheel) - which demonstrates again that my weight is often too far forward. And, more recently, two foot slalom on the level (with a push on each side). It seems to be evening out a bit (at least I now actually can push both sides, which is an improvement on yesterday), but I'm really feeling it in the left shin. I think I'm still lopsided and using too much brute force to push on that leg when my body's in the wrong place - I daren't look down too often, but it doesn't seem that I'm getting much of an edge as far as I can tell, or perhaps it's also an indication that my left shin is unused to the stress of doing it properly.

I feel like such a gumbie. Oh wait, I am. That'd explain it, then. Still, it's progress of a kind.

Lisp placeholder page#

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 18:33:36 +0000

It might be a little while before I write about Lisp again, but in the meantime you can find older Lisp blog entries at telent.net

Waiting for the other Sok to drop#

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 18:54:16 +0000

I'm now, I think, about halfway through porting the whole thing to Soks. Some of this has been swearing at CSS to rip off the Blogspot look and feel (minus the blatantly Web 2.0 rounded corners), some of it has been learning enough Ruby to do effective cargo culting, and some has been finding my way around the Soks code.

On the basis of the very little Ruby I have had to learn thus far, I would expect a Perl programmer to feel very much at home, a frustrated Perl-using Lisp hacker to be impressed by the marginally greater usability of irb over perl -de 1 (and the much smaller amount of boilerplate necessary to create new classes), and the contented Lisp user to pay it not very much attention. And if you're a contented Java programmer, you probably lack the intellectual curiosity to bother learning anything new, so don't bother writing in and asking.

Comment support is missing at present, and unlikely to be added (I get few comments and I always had to hand-approve them anyway due to spammers), but feedback by mail is always welcome. If you don't know my email address, Google IYF. If you don't know my email address and can't use Google, I'll set up and publish a dedicated new one as soon as I've thought through the spam filtering issues.

lfns#

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 19:01:12 +0000

From the web site

The [[London Friday Night Skate]] is a ten to fifteen mile street skate around London, every Friday (hence the name). We do a different route every week - one week we might take in famous central London roads and sights, another week we'll head for some long fast downhills in Camden or Putney, or even a trip to the countryside out at Barnes. The roads are blocked as the skate passes by our expertly co-ordinated volunteer marshals (on skates), and we even have our own portable sound system on a bicycle

The LFNS is not a protest! We're nothing to do with any political organisation, we're not environmental protesters, and we're not Critical Mass. We're faster than Critical Mass.

The same team of volunteers behind the LFNS also run its little sister the [[Sunday Stroll]] - a sedate 5-7 mile skate around town on a Sunday afternoon suitable for most skaters who can stop/turn/cope with hills.

London Friday Night Skate#

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 19:01:49 +0000

There are LIMits, you know#

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:23:00 +0000

I apologise first to anyone reading this who's also on the WoW list, because unless the editor changes it I will be using exactly the same pun in the title of that article as I did above

Yesterday morning there were two things I really didn't want to do, but knew I'd have to: the first was get out of bed, and the second was skate the LIM. That negativity was to stay with me all the way through warmup, the start, the first corner, to the bottom of the downhill, where someone clipped skates with me at 40km/h (guessing) and I went flying. At which point, having scented blood (admittedly all of it was mine, exiting through scrapes on my chest, thigh and elbow) I developed a bit more of an Attitude and went off looking for someone to take it out on.

So for the first third of the race I was skating mostly solo - had a couple of short drafts from a line including George, and a couple of laps working together with Alexandra Geen[1] (Birmingham Wheels), and then I saw my chance when the lead line came up the hill behind me on about lap ten, hopping on the back as it went past. Then it really became great fun: there was a mix of teams and a couple of individual skaters there, and it was nice to be able to learn from a competitive paceline at close quarters, but secure in the knowledge that as I was a lap down and thus posed no threat, nobody was going to make me fight for my place ;-)

Dropped off the lead line again on their last-but-one lap on one of the breakaways - I wasn't going to burn myself out when they had 1.5 miles and I had 2.5 miles to go. Eventually finished in 8th place with 1:32:12 (winning time was 1:27:35) which I think is Not Bad for a race which included a fall, and in which my only real goal - indeed my only reason for entering - was to better last year's DNF.

Sad but true: If I had joined FISS I could have had a podium (third place, British Championships Senior Male). Bah. On the other hand, it's the only FISS event all year I was interested in (the rest is all track stuff) and there's unlikely to be any more either, so thirty quid for a single medal is probably not that compelling. What's more distressing is seeing the amount of toe wheel wear on my right skate - I didn't think I was toe flicking, but clearly I still need to work on my fore-aft balance a bit.

fn1. Got some grief for this, in fact, since we apparently both passed my teammate Tanya - competing for the same category as Alex - during these laps: if I'd left Alex sooner, we could have had an LSST second place there instead of third. Gah

No Eleven#

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:28:27 +0000

You may be wondering why no report of the One-Eleven. There were two reasons: (1) (objectively, anyway) it was the worst race I've ever done, which stopped early for me after I lost two teeth to the tarmac; (2) I broke the old blog a couple of weeks ago, and hadn't yet finished importing its entries into the new one. However, if you're reading this now the new one is online, so normal (FSVO $1) service will resume asap.

Tech changes afoot#

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:32:24 +0000

I’ve had a skating blog at blogspot for about eight months now. Before that I kept a blog-like thing for a few years on my own server, using scp and emacs sgml-mode and lashings of elisp, and it dealt mostly with Lisp and specifically SBCL. (Before that I was on Advogato

It’s time to change technologies again. There are two reasons for this

Three reasons. “Amongst our weapons are …” So the current plan is as follows:

If you’re reading this, stage 1 has been successful: please adjust your bookmarks. I will add a redirect if I can figure out how to make Blogger do it. Stage 2 you’ll hear about when it happens. If it happens.

Edged out#

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:03:58 +0000

What's so great about the outside edge anyway?, I asked yesterday. In the interests of forestalling replies pointing out the bleeding obvious, let me be a little more precise.

The outside edge is important. If you're skating on an outside edge with shinbones and frames aligned, then unless you have some quite extraordinary body geometry, your centre of gravity is either directly over your skate or completely outside the area covered by your skates. Until a skater is confident doing this he'll not be able to skate well on one foot - which means no effective push and no parallel or crossover turns. So the effort that instructors make to get people happy with their outside edges is well-founded, insofar as it's actually about getting them to be happy (a) skating on one leg, (b) balancing their gravitational and centrifugal[1] forces to go around corners quickly. So, that's what's so great about an outside edge.

But how did we get from there to "Even when you're just standing around talking to someone you should be working your outside edges instead of standing in a pronated position"[2]? Wish I knew. Everything I have previously said about setdown is [[here => mountain a la maison]], which saves me ranting about it again and allows me to get straight on with the incidental part of this blog entry: as follows.

"Pronating" is not just another word for "skating on inside edges". Pronation is the inward (medial) roll of the foot, and it's a normal part of walking which everyone does. See e.g http://www.footmaxx.com/clinicians/principles.htm. Overpronation of the foot is one possible reason that someone might be skating on inside edges, but it's by no means the only possibility - if we're talking about novice skaters ("A-frame gumbies") it's far more likely that there's nothing wrong with their biomechanics at all and they just haven't got the confidence yet to be balancing on one skate not two. So, from now on I will not be using the word "pronate" unless I actually mean it.

fn1. Yes, I know it's a fictitious force. But I'm assuming a rotating frame of reference, so nuts to you

fn2. http://www.nettracing.com/step1.htm, in which it has to be said that he doesn't exactly look on top of his setdown skate even in the "correct form" animation.

Ice#

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:08:51 +0000

The SOLSKATE was rained off, so we went ice skating at Queensway instead. Very different (though I can see how it might help): pushing through any part of the blade other than the very back (in the supplied hire skates, anyway) led to instant spinout - I'm really not used to that much rocker.

My abs ache now, which is unusual. I think all that turning left - I spent most of an hour trying to get all the way around the end of the rink with only one crossover (more or less easy depending on how kids are in the way) - probably gave them more exercise than they usually get skating on streets. That or it's my cold. I tell, you, if two colds in the same week are the result of my (subtle and understated) dietary improvements, I'm back to junk food tomorrow.

A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Lump That Sits On My Medial Malleolus#

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:43:33 +0000

Sorry to go on about it so. And actually, I noticed today that it's not ever-growing, though the longer I rest it the more it looks like it - skating actually makes it shrink. So I spread some more ibuprofen gel on it to see if that would make it smaller when it grows back. Anyway, no, no new boots yet - how did you guess?

RC Tuesday was cancelled due to weather, so we did it this evening instead. All the roads were still there (including one that claimed to be closed, but wasn't). Some other roads are also still there (and will feature on a forthcoming Stroll) and some roads are not the roads I thought they were, but will do anyway - I took a right off Eaton Square (I almost always approach that road from the other direction) where the map said I should have gone left, and ended up back at Victoria when I was not expecting to. But that's OK, we'll leave that bit in for tomorrow.

Also tomorrow I'm going to wear my GPS (and Sunday, lend it to someone skating with the pack) just so we can find out how fast the LFNS actually goes. My money is on "about 8mph"

The Law and The Lore#

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:07:14 +0000

I get told all kinds of stuff about the legal position of skating on the roads, and almost all of it seems to be blind assertion with no authority other than "my instructor told me", "my mate told me", or "my brother-in-law's a policeman". Well, my brother-in-law's a policeman too, but that doesn't qualify me as a lawyer. Please note that previous sentence again: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

With that in mind, let's review some basic facts which my extensive research (thank you, Google) has revealed -

And now some supposition

And finally, some of the usual well-meaning and slightly hypocritical advice. The policeman who stops you for jumping a red light on Marble Arch while drunk and clad in black from head to foot (I'm not saying whether this ever happened to me) is unlikely to (a) know all the above, or (b) care overmuch. Skate safe, skate predictably (e.g. doing what a reasonable cyclist would do) and be visible, and if you do get stopped (or even just get slowed down), be suitably contrite and they'll go away sooner.

But when skating alone or in small groups I still continue to treat red lights as indications that I should to give way to any cross-traffic, rather than as instructions to stop right now and not cross the white line.

[ skating log: home on Tuesday night, to work yesterday, then route check for this week's LFNS. Lift home as ankle bones sore again - I must be pro/supi/somethingnating lately: I'm sure those boots used to fit properly. Today's a day off, so more money down the gullet of Transport for London to get me to work and back ]

[Edit: on the subject of pavements, Tony Raven on uk.rec.cycling had this to say -

For England Section 72 of the Highways Act 1835 defines the offence as "shall wilfully ride" (i.e a horse) "upon any footpath or causeway by the side of any road made or set apart for the use or accommodation of foot-passengers or shall wilfully lead or drive any carriage of any description upon any such footpath or causeway " and was extended under Section 85 of the Local Government Act 1888 to include "bicycles, tricycles, velocipedes and other similar machines".
]

Retrospeculating#

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 22:22:34 +0000

I realised the other day that it must be about two years since I started skating (unless you count the four or five times I went out on them back in 2000).

In a very odd sense it seems that I have come full circle: in February 2004 I started a job in London involving a 5km journey each morning (preceded by an 80km coach journey; I was living in Oxford) and decided to do it on skates. In January 2006 I live 5km from work and (at least for the last three days) am again commuting on skates. The difference, perhaps, is that that journey was taking around 40 minutes and this one takes 10-15 minutes depending how wet the ground is. Funnily enough, I believed then, as I continue to pretend now, that traffic congestion is/was what prevents me doing it faster.

Fallen in St Gallen#

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 11:53:01 +0000

The article title really doesn't work. For one thing, Gallen rhymes with "talon" not "fallen", and for another, I actually fell about halfway around the course from St Gallen, after 64km or so. And it wasn't just a fall, it was an assisted fall - at least, the guy in line in front of me was already lying on the ground when I hit (him and) it.

So. I went out on a line that would have been about the right pace for a marathon, and because I was working fairly hard and concentrating on things like staying on the road around the wet downhill bends, omitted to take any food or water. At around the 45-50k mark I got rather impatient with the "arms in the air and legs all over the place" approach to hillclimbing that half the line were displaying, so foolishly decided to attack, and died utterly when I got to the top. My body was clearly saying "ok, you've done a marathon, the race is over". Which was obviously going to be a problem, this race being more than twice as long as a marathon.

So anyway, plodded along very slowly (like, about 12km/h slowly) feeling miserable to about 50k, where I picked up an energy drink and after about a third of that began to feel more normal. Jumped ("lumbered" would be a better word) onto the next line that went past, skated with them for 10k with utterly useless back - alternately standing up and leaning on my knees - then hit the guy in front and fell over him when he fell somewhere shortly after 60. With a faceful of road and a mouthful of teeth (I exaggerate: actually only one and a half teeth came out, and the half wasn't even a real tooth - though there's another one which I think may have been loosened), I decided I'd had enough.

Swiss hospitals are pretty good, though, and didn't charge me for stitching my chin. UK dentist charged through the nose[1] for doing the dental fixup ,though.

The experience really left me smarting all over - metaphorically and literally. As learning experiences go, that one was degree-equivalent and probably wound up costing only marginally less than a term's fees. Eat!

fn1. figuratively speaking

Northern Waste#

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 12:38:49 +0000

Yesterday was the "Mac 2 North Region Inline Marathon", a.k.a 28 laps around a 1.6k track in Preston Sports Arena. Yes, I know that's more than 42k ... there was some kind of misunderstanding. Nice flat track, beautiful surface, good organisation, even good weather (not sure this was due to the event organisers, but nice to have anyway)

I'm going to chalk this one up to experience (by which I mean that I pretty much bollixed it up). The first few laps felt very very slow, as the entire field (there were only 18 of us there for the full marathon) was formed into one paceline and that was proceeding at a "nobody wants to pull" pace.

After a few laps of this the Powerslide team near the front of the line obviously got bored and decided to make a break. I saw the break as it happened and tried to go with it, but was being overtaken on both sides by faster people and was fairly clear I didn't have the pace for it. Once things had settled down again there was Matthew (a chap from Birmingham Wheels) ahead, and fellow LSSTers Alastair and Ed slightly behind, so formed a three-man paceline with them. Ed dropped off, Alastair and I caught Matthew, and we went round for a few laps together, but after a few laps we lost Alastair and after a few more with Matthew apparently flagging and me doing the bulk of the work I decided that if I was going to be leading all the time I might as well skate on my own anyway. So I pushed on a bit and lost Matthew. I think that was somewhere around lap 8 or 10. The rest of the "race" was mostly just a matter of going around and around saying hello (and sometimes "nice to see you again") to people.

Came in sixth - lapped by the two leaders Hans and Vinnie, but managed to stay on the same lap as the third, fourth and fifth placers. Once I'd finished and stopped I was seized by the sudden worry that I should have done one lap more, so I did. Luckily this was unnecessary, as it wasn't a very fast lap ...

Lessons learnt: work harder to stay with the break at the start. Or stick to races with more people in them. Other things I wish I'd known: I finished only 6s behind the guy in fifth place - if I'd realised he was so close, I'd have worked a bit harder. Doh.

Finishing time 1:32:13 for a 44.8k race, or about a 29km/h average. (Winning time was 1:28:44). What did I say last week about being unlikely to break 1:15 at Preston?

re medial arch#

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:06:59 +0000

So, one of the recurring themes in this blog (and my skating generally, to the point that everyone's probably getting quite sick of hearing about it) is my ankle pain. When I last wrote about it I thought that the neoprene thingies had mostly fixed it - or at least limited it to one lump in four (left foot inside) - but after further skating, this proved not to be the case. Definitely worse on that side than the other, though, so I thought it might be a frame placement thing on the left boot and maybe the other parts were just hurting because I was skating on it in a funny way to minimise left side pain.

I hate frame adjustment. Typically, any attempt to adjust my frames is doomed from the moment I first loosen the bolt: the best outcome I can possibly hope for is that I'l be able to put it back the way I found it and it'll feel no worse than before. Often even I don't manage that: I put it back as it was and it still feels uncomfortable and different. Anyway

Observations made yesterday were (a) when I stand in skates on my left leg and bend the knee, the knee bends inwards instead of straight ahead, whereas my right leg does the more usual thing; (b) actually the same thing happens when I'm not in skates if I stand normally on the left foot. If I wedge something under the right side of the foot so it's angled out a bit, the problem goes away. So at that point I was thinking about the possibility that I have a fallen arch that side - and of course, instantly became acutely self-conscious about how I was walking, which seemed to involve putting that foot flatter on the ground than the other.

Today I see that my unshod footprints after getting out of the shower actually look pretty similar on each side, so I'm not as sure that's a valid self-diagnosis. I'm continuing to be acutely conscious of how I'm walking (so probably not walking normally even for me) but am sort of observing that my toe push is not as strong left as right, so perhaps I have weak plantar flexors on that side (it is possible that something odd happened to my gait about a year and a half ago when an accident[1] left me limping for three weeks and off skating for three months). Which is even better news than the fallen arch if true, as at least I can fix that through exercise.

Yeah yeah, I should stop speculating and find someone who actually knows about this stuff who can look at it and tell me what's actually going on.

fn1. I say it was an accident. Really, it was my own fault. I knocked someone over when failing to heelbrake (the pad was more worn than I'd realised) and she fell and sat on my outstretched FSK-encased foot, resulting in a large lower-leg haematoma where the boot cuff dug into my calf - but fortunately, no injury to the other party. Who said heelbrakes were a safety measure?

[ skating log: not a hell of a lot, for primarily this reason. LFNS Friday, then route check on Saturday, which left me in an obscenely bad mood and almost relieved that the rain all day Sunday made it necessary to cancel the Stroll; nothing since. I hope to be out on Friday whatever transpires with my ankles, as I'm riding the music bike ]

Mountain a la maison#

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:10:31 +0000

Ingredients: one molehill

It may not be as bad as I thought: in fact, my earlier posts between them correctly identify the problem: I'm setting down with a deep outside edge and my body canted over at approximately the same angle as the skate underneath it. Which means I have to travel for ages before I can get it onto the inside and start pushing properly.

Anyway, my recent video review indicates that I'm still doing this (although, I think, at a less extreme angle than before). The difference is that in the pursuit of a slower cadence I'm now travelling much further sideways on that outside edge before rolling the foot over the centre edge to inside: this is, I can't help feeling, counterproductive. And probably explains why my anklebones hurt, which I guess is good news - all I have to do to fix that is, uh, not do it any more.

So, deemphasize the slow cadence practice and concentrate more on what I believe is that "falling from the hips" stuff. At least, some "moving the hips in the opposite direction to the pushing leg, in order to sooner get the skate onto its inside edge" stuff - less of a catchy name, but (I hope) more accurate.

Outside edge setdown: let's put this one to bed. Comments from club members seem to establish the following: (1) nose, knees and toes should be vertical and aligned at setdown, pretty much - an inside edge setdown is to be avoided as it probably means you don't have your weight over the support leg; (2) once you've got the skate on the ground you will soon be wanting an inside edge to start pushing, so you don't want a deep outside edge either; (3) but: a small amount of outside will tend to steer the skate outwards a bit, which is probably a good thing as it helps to get a bit of horizontal displacement between CoG and the wheels, which you'll need to start the push.

It's not really surprising, but it's interesting how much speedskating technique eventually comes down to "ways to more precisely control the direction that the pushing skate is pointing in". Even the humble heel carve: it's effective because it means you get a narrower angle therefore more mechanical disadvantage[1], not because it makes a rasping noise on the tarmac.

Other stuff from the video review: I'm now setting down too early, and I'm continuing to recover and setdown with toe pointing outwards instead of straight ahead. But my kneebend is improved on what it was, and (despite everything said above) my cadence is slower. One thing at a time, I think, and the first priority is to find a skating technique that doesn't eat my ankles.

[ Skating log: most of tomorrow's LFNS route, just to make absolutely sure I know where it goes. 20km? Decided it was too cold to enjoy skating home afterwards, so I didn't ]

fn1. Yes, disadvantage. A mechanical advantage (at least, a MA greater than 1) turns a small force over a large distance into a large force over a small one. What we want is the opposite.

Dog/vomit#

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 02:44:06 +0000

The only downside is that initial testing says it's utterly utterly useless. On a random sample of four spam emails (three of which spambayes said were spam and the other it said was 80% likely to be spam) spamassassin utterly failed to assign any of them a score exceeding 4.2

And for this level of service it wants to eat 18 of the 80MB RAM in this virtual machine? Get real. I need that space for, uh, the Ruby instance running this blog.

It may be, of course, that there is a configuration option for "actually do something useful" which I have not yet found, and which is turned off in the default configuration to satisfy the needs of those users who just install this crap because they like the intellectual challenge. It wouldn't surprise me.

Debian, less of an operating system, more of a self-assembly operating system construction kit.

Kneecap recap#

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 02:46:05 +0000

I had planned to write an interesting and comprehensive post covering everything I've been thinking of lately, but when I started trying to work out what should be in it, I got distracted by reading all my past blog entries for the year. Something of a death knell to getting anything done.

So let's keep this strictly factual.

The targets between now and Berlin are (1) to get comfortable on my left foot outside edge; (1b) to get my fore/aft balance actually correct - some 111 photos say I'm still too far forward; (2) to heal; (3) having backed off from any kind of "dangerous" skating - fast skating and marshalling - in the interests of (2), not to lose whatever fitness I currently possess. Which is going to be either difficult or tedious, and along with the rest of them frankly impossible until my knee is better.

In the "grateful for small mercies" and/or "look how far we've come" departments: having wasted too much of this evening reading old blog entries, it gives me great pleasure to remind myself that my left knee now bends forwards not sideways when I squat, that I don't ever hear my knees creaking any more, that anklebone pain is a thing of the past, and that the blisters I picked up at Le Mans are gone, buried, forgotten and have not made a reappearance (just as well, as I have managed to lose every single roll of zinc oxide tape I've ever bought). So there is progress on some fronts, it's just that I forget the things I used to have problems with when the problems go away.

Oh, and (brief techy bit) Soks does not do Stupid things when I press C-d to delete the next character.

⟪Jul 2006 Sep 2006⟫