A blog about skating and cycling, or vice versa

World's most expensive shoelaces#

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:56:03 +0000

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 => Seven days like Christmas]] 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.

Firebrox#

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:09:46 +0000

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

The ill-tempered clavicle#

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:05:44 +0000

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?

RSS feed#

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:30:18 +0000

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).

The good news is#

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:53:02 +0000

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.

Clavicle dislocation#

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:05:44 +0000

In summer 2008 I managed to spring my clavicle out of the socket at the wrong end (anterior sterno-clavicular dislocation). Here are some notes I made at the time

I spent $20 on a 24 hour pass for access to papers from Elsevier (greedy bunch of people though they are) and clicked on everything that looked relevant. I shall summarise for posterity. Please note I am not a medical professional. I am even less of a medical professional than I am a coach or instructor, and as I've said elsewhere, I score 0% on the coachometer. Anything you read below is merely my supposition and should not be construed as medical advice.

First off: because it's quite a rare kind of dislocation, there doesn't seem to be complete consensus in how to treat it. Bear that in mind in what follows. Mostly I'm going by "Treatment and results of sternoclavicular joint injuries" by James Bicos and Gregory P. Nicholson, because it's the primary reference on whatever NHS practice guideline site it was I found.

The relevant mechanical details are as follows: although the joint is not an especially good fit in bone-on-bone terms, there are strong ligaments holding it together. Most are behind the joint (posterior), one is in front (anterior).

Dislocations may be anterior (clavicle ends up in front of the breast bone) or posterior aka retro-sternal (clavicle ends up behind the breastbone). The latter kind are really rather dangerous because of all the other important parts in that area (the "great vessels and other significant structures of the superior mediastinum") and generally need immediate expert attention, but also much less likely because of the better ligamentous support behind the bone.

Anterior dislocations are not dangerous in the same way, as all the wiring and plumbing is behind not in front. However, for this reason, most surgeons are reluctant to perform operative treatment to fix an anterior dislocation. A "closed reduction" - that is, manipulation of the shoulder to put the bone back in (usually involves a general anaesthetic) is possible (and recommended, insofar as there's any common opinion on this matter). However, the joint is also likely to remain unstable even if the dislocation is successfully reduced - i.e. it will dislocate again easily. There are even reports of people with completely spontaneous dislocations due to having loose ligaments. That said, "dislocations have little long term functional impact [...] because the upper extremity is still stabilized by the strong muscle insertions of the trapezius, sternocleidomastoid, and pectoralis major muscles" - so the only real downside to this "benign neglect" approach is cosmetic (lump on the chest). In some cases, the clavicle end binds ("adhesions" is the word here) to the sternum in its new position, but that doesn't seem to make much odds either way.

(In my case, the doctor seems to have decided not to attempt the recommended reduction presumably on the grounds that it probably won't stay fixed anyway. Given all the other bruising and muscle strains around that part of my body I'm not completely unsympathetic to his not making the effort)

Some sources say the joint should be strapped to immobilise it (if doing a closed reduction, apparently it should be strapped for six weeks). Doing this effectively is actually very difficult because the clavicle has a great long lever arm, which might be another reason not to reduce in the first place. The hospital gave me a collar and cuff, but more for the comfort than for any therapeutic value.

How long will it take? I still don't know, and couldn't find anything useful about rehabilitating it even in the Elsevier walled garden. Doctor said 6 months for "completely normal", but since I've never really been completely normal anyway, obviously what I really want to know is (a) when I can skate again, (b) when I can skate again with armswing, and (c) when I can put t-shirts on without pain (though that may be the other injuries not the dislocation anyway). So far it's been 12 days, which is not long enough to answer any of those questions from experience. My next followup appointment is in five weeks time. I'm speculating that when I get full movement back, strengthening the trapezius, sternocleidomastoid, and pectoralis major muscles will be a good thing to work on, but I really want to have that confirmed by someone who knows about this stuff before I hit the gym. Not that I'm in any immediate rush ...

Note that for people under 25, diagnoses of clavicle dislocation are often wrong: part of the clavicle called the physis (which is cartilage) does not turn into bone until about 20-25, and injuries to the physis may look like an SC joint dislocation.

Disk gruntling#

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:41:48 +0000

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 *
 *
and so on and so forth. First hypothesis being that someone had pwned it, I pulled out its network and rebooted, to be met by a not-normal noise from the disk and the "Not a system disk" error from the bios. So, probably hardware. Fortunately there was nothing important on it anyway, but it does mean I am bereft of last.fm until I have time to fiddle with USB key distros or something like that.

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.

Assorted battery#

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:58:08 +0000

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 => Watt Support?]] 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.

No external programs required other than ibam itself

Medium verging on short#

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:37:46 +0000

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
- a helper app for firefox for m3u files, so that they can be played on the said media box (i.e. through the big speakers) instead of locally (through the crummy speaker on my laptop). And the reason I'm sharing it with you is that I am ridiculously proud of eventually getting something with (1) only uses a single ssh command, (2) copes with multi-item playlists, (3) leaves mplayer with a working tty so that keyboard controls work. Getting the quoting right was the kind of exercise in bloody-mindednesss that in better purer more previous decades would have been the catalyst for a UNIX-HATERS thread.

R and R#

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 01:19:54 +0000

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
This is the single most fricking annoying thing about live-helper. Every time you change what's going into the image you need to run lh_clean, and then it goes off to download everything again (from, in this case, a squid cache - apt-proxy seemed to have troubles of its own) with the result that in the approx 8 hours out of every 24 that the mirror network is in some way broken you can't do anything.

ROM wasn't built in a day#

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:55:44 +0000

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.

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.

⟪May 2008 Jul 2008⟫