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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater Sun, 25 Jan 2009After my crash last Monday, I decided in the afternoon to get myself in to the doctor. The pain in my hip seemed to be getting more intense, and taking on the edge that says, "This isn't just muscle pain, suckah!" In the mean time, I crammed myself full of ibuprofen (which didn't help a whole lot) and Liz came down at the closing whistle to take me home -- I clearly wasn't going to ride home in that condition; I could barely walk. The doctor visit came and went, with the doctor expressing the desire that I sling myself into an MRI machine to see what sort of clever rearrangement of bones and tendons I'd managed to effect. I called up, and got myself set up for a scan the same day, in the afternoon. After a very pleasant but painful day slacking on the couch with Liz, we trundled down to the Swedish campus for the test. She was dropping me off, to go tend to her own errands. To my delight, I found a free wheelchair at the entrance and with a nod from the information desk, plopped myself into it. Suddenly I could move much faster than before. On foot, I was making a step every second or two. Give that a try if it doesn't impress you -- it's damn slow. And I wasn't taking big steps, either, these were like, "shove foot forward 12 inches; pause; try again." Little baby steps. So the wheelchair was a most welcome addition to my life, however temporary it might be. I wheeled myself over to the elevator, and discovered that one of the many joys of the wheelchair is that they take a lot of room in an elevator. On the appropriate floor, I signed myself in, and after 10 minutes of paperwork and a mere additional 15 minute wait, was on my way into the lair of the MRI machine. Here I was instructed to slip out of my clothes and into the obviously much more comfortable dressing gown my helpful assistant pointed out. "Let's see, you're pretty tall," he said to himself, then, pointing at a pile of dark green gowns, said, "go ahead and slip into one of those." After several minutes of very very slowly divesting myself of my garments, I pulled open the dark green gown to find it was roughly the size of a three-person army pup tent. I extended my arms fully to the sides, and grasping the corner of each gown flap, wrapped it around me. I asked Liz later, and she said that if a person doesn't fit into one of the two sizes of MRI machine they have at the hospital (ie, someone who'd need the full extent of my tent-gown), they have to go to the MRI machine at the zoo. The tech laid me out on my techno-slab, and I was slowly trundled into the machine for roughly 40 minutes of lying perfectly still in a coffin-like tube while something that sounded like a broken bilge pump rat-a-tatted at me at varying pitches. This was the 20th, inauguration day, and the tech had given me headphones on which I could listen to KUOW, the local NPR station, as they covered the Obama-related festivities. (Suffice to say that I didn't make it to any inauguration-day festivities myself that day, but I feel I had a pretty valid excuse.) I felt exactly like I was trying to sleep on a small, becalmed sailboat, in a quarter berth which was a bit too small, and next to the bilge pump which would. not. shut. up. The first test they did was a location-scan, so the machine could figure out (or show the tech) exactly where I was situated. It apparently involved the highest power of the machine, and felt very much like tiny imps were plucking at all the muscles in my lower abdomen. It was a very odd sensation. Every once in a while, the tech would say something like, "Ok, the next test will only take 11 minutes," only he'd forget to turn down the radio, so what I actually heard was this sort of dream-like confusion of voices as whichever NPR reporter would continue with his story, while a discontinuous voice would meld in with weirdly-unrelated news. The headphones were all-plastic, piping the sound in quite literally, through plastic tubes -- magnetic headphones would have been ripped off my head fast enough to remove my ears, I suspect. Eventually, about 30 tests later, I was done, and surprisingly warm. The tech explained, after I asked, that yes, in fact, an MRI was roughly the equivalent of a precisely-metered microwave oven. (He didn't say that, I extrapolated it from his explanantion about stimulation of hydrogen atoms and radio-frequency energy.) I asked for and received a chance to review the pictures they'd gotten. It was a bit like looking at a black-and-white picture of what my lower abdomen would look like if you cut it cleanly off at whatever point we were looking at. If he panned quickly through the layers, you could make sense of the shape of legs and hips and such. Pretty interesting -- my legs looked like nicely marbled steak, which I guess is about what they are. He said he wasn't allowed to do any interpretation, but he did point a noticeably-larger pocket of fluid inside my right hip joint that wasn't there on the left. And with that, I was trundled out and on my way. No more paperwork to fill out, etc. Here's the elevator, off you go! All told, I'd only spent an hour and a half there, and I had entirely expected to wait two hours before even getting into the machine. Crazy! The joys of going when they're running on schedule, I guess. The next day, I got a cryptic phone call from my doctor's office. "Dr. Flooblejabble [not his real name] said to tell you that there are minor changes shown on your MRI," said the woman on the phone. "'Minor changes?'" quoth I. "That's all he said," she explained. Uh-huh. "Thanks," said I, and hung up. I'll be having a little talk with the good doctor about his willingness to do things like discuss my results with me on the phone. Trying to figure out his cypher left me with a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the day. However! The excellent thing about that morning was that the night before I'd had my first anti-inflammatory pill. The good doctor looked slightly appalled when I told him how many ibuprofen pills I was shoving down my gizzard every 4-6 hours, and set me up with "the maximum dose you can take" of some prescription anti-inflammatory. "So that way, we know you're at the maximum and don't have to worry about your liver exploding," he said. If he'd had reading glasses on, he would have looked over them at me severely. And indeed, I had awoken that morning feeling noticeably better. I was definitely still broken, but I was walking much faster, and it no longer felt like someone had gone after some key muscle groups with a cheese grater. I was able to sit at the computer and pretty much work a normal day, albeit at my house instead of at the office. Each day after that, I'd wake up feeling noticeably better. Walking got easier and easier, until today, when I feel very nearly normal again. There's still a bit of soreness there, and I can tell that certain motions will be rewarded by more or less searing pain, but it's pretty cool to feel mostly like a normal person again. Hooray for anti-inflammatories! So, if you've been sitting on the edge of your seat for the last week, that's what's been happening. I'm scheduled to see Dr. Floobenjabble again on Tuesday, when I might have definitive word on what exactly "minor changes" on an MRI might be. Hopefully we can also sort out a better arrangement regarding certain peripheral issues such as speaking in plaintext over the phone. Posted at 17:37 permanent link category: /bicycle Mon, 19 Jan 2009I was riding into work this morning, thinking whatever thoughts I normally think on my ride into work. There had been frost on my deck, but the roads seemed clear, so I was buzzing along at my normal clip. Coming down N 50th toward Fremont Ave, I downshifted a couple gears to take the turn as I normally do, slightly annoyed that a car had just passed me too close. I was peripherally aware of a biker standing on the sidewalk, but I thought he was waiting for the crosswalk or something. I turned into the corner, and with extreme consternation noticed that my bike was no longer under me. I hit the ground before I had any clue what was happening, and tumbled, noting in a sort of detached way that my helmet was scraping along the pavement. There was a bloom of pain in my right hip, and suddenly something heavy plopped down in front of me as I slid to a stop -- my shoulder bag, I realized. I lay there trying to disentangle my thoughts, testing bits of myself to see how damaged I was. The pain in my hip was subsiding, but it was obviously not going to be happy in the near future. Nothing was obviously broken, so I started getting up. "Oh, I wish I'd seen you," said the biker on the sidewalk, "I just did that exact same thing. There must be ice there." Thanks. I picked myself up with a severe limp on the right side, my hip explaining in bright flashes of pain that it was, in fact, extremely unhappy at the abuse. I got my bike onto the sidewalk. I didn't spare it much attention, but nothing seemed overtly broken. Slightly Helpful Biker asked if I was ok, obviously about to get on his way. He'd taken a moment to scoop some dirt out of a nearby planter and spread it over the area where the ice probably was. I said I was probably fine, but that my hip hurt. "Ok, I'm off to work then," quoth SHB, and rode off. I sat there, my glasses entirely fogged over (all the heat I'd generated in riding rising to coat them), and just stretched out on the sidewalk for a minute to see if I could stop shaking. I tried to assess what had happened. I came around the corner, and the bike just went away. Obviously, it was ice, or something so like it that quibbling over definitions was pointless. I bore the brunt of my fall on my right hip, although my shoulder was also unhappy. I could move, and I didn't seem to have broken any bones. I painfully hoisted myself back on the bike, after several false starts getting my leg over the seat. Fortunately, the path ahead of me was entirely downhill, and so required practically no effort. The worst part was limping up to my office to check into the meeting that caused me to be on the road 30 minutes earlier than I normally would have. Now, several hours and 1200 mg of ibuprofen later, my hip is the obvious casualty. There's a little bit of road rash on my patella, and my shoulder occasionally twinges (amazingly, I don't appear to have broken my collarbone), but I've got a patch of road rash on my hip that I can just cover with an open hand, and I walk at a highly comical and halting .3 MPH or so. Fortunately, sitting upright is completely pain-free, it's just standing upright and walking that sucks. Even more fortunately, I don't seem to have impaired my normal computering abilities at all. So, what did I do right? Helmet, baby. That helmet absorbed what would have been a painful if not deadly sideways whack, and kept the side of my face off the ground as I slid to a halt. Conveniently, I was wearing long pants and a slippery windbreaker that I believe kept me from getting worse road rash than I did. What did I do wrong? Well, I have a hard time classifying it as "wrong" exactly, but I didn't anticipate the black ice. The road had been clear of ice that I could tell, and I had no indication there was ice around this corner. I was complacent about road conditions, when I knew it was cold enough that ice was a possibility, if not likely. Given that the two-wheel crashes I've had now were both low-sides, and both landed me on my hip, I'm starting to think that some padded biking shorts are called for. They would have materially reduced the injury I received today, and would have made my racetrack motorcycle crash less painful, although that crash didn't result in any lasting injury. I find it interesting, although predictable, that my motorcycle crash caused me less damage than my bicycle crash. On the motorcycle, I was going about 70 MPH, but I was also riding a tiny bike (ie, I sit close to the ground) on a racetrack (ie, no curbs, cars, gravel, etc. to deal with), and I was leaned way over, so that my butt was inches from the pavement. On the bicycle, I was only going about 18 MPH, but I was sitting at least 3.5 feet off the ground, and wearing less protective clothing. The difference between less than 12 inches and over three feet is considerable, and that's where the real injury came from. So, I have a feeling I'll be working from home for the next few days, and may investigate getting some variety of cane or crutch so I can walk at a speed faster than a snail's pace. Hooray for dangerous pursuits! Posted at 11:13 permanent link category: /bicycle Thu, 15 Jan 2009I just called to confirm: University Honda on Capitol Hill is going out of business. Today was their last day. me: I'm calling to dispell a rumor. her: I'm afraid it's true. me: Augh, suck! Why? her: I'm afraid we can't pay our bills any more. So, if I've harped on you in the past to buy your helmets or whatever locally, so the local shops don't go away? We failed. Posted at 17:34 permanent link category: /motorcycle I was asked to take official pictures for Blind Spot, Annex's latest production. It was a lot of fun, taking both bio pictures, and media pictures. I hope I'm not ruining anyone's fun by posting this, but I was particularly fond of how Ellie McKay's picture turned out: 
To see the rest of them, you'll just have to go see the show, which opens tomorrow night. The bio pictures will be on the wall in the lounge. Posted at 14:54 permanent link category: /theater Mon, 12 Jan 2009Put on your super-nerd hat: I just got back the analysis from my latest Ninja 250 oil change! Sounds like either my engine's not "maturing" quite right, or they're not experienced enough with little motorcycle engines. I'd believe either. If I can remember, I'll change the oil again at 12,350 miles and see what difference that makes. Posted at 14:57 permanent link category: /motorcycle Sat, 10 Jan 2009About a week ago, mother nature dumped another load of snow on Seattle. I wasn't having any of it, though, and levered my studded tires on my bike, bound and determined to get to work the next day -- I'd spent too many days stuck at home between holidays and the previous snow storms. But then, once I had the snow tires on, it wasn't all that late... And I had this new camera I got for Christmas... So I shot a little snow-ride video. I had a terrible time getting the AVI file generated by the Oregon Scientific ATC-2K into a format Final Cut Express would use without losing the end of it (apparently the "30 fps" claim by OS is... optimistic, but they leave it in the video headers, which screws up conversion software). Finally, though, I found the answer: MPEG Streamclip, a free video conversion utility. It was able to take in the AVI file and spit out a DV file that actually included the end of the video. Posted at 10:30 permanent link category: /bicycle Tue, 06 Jan 2009
Woot! Soundtrack 1.5 works again!
So, when I upgraded my Intel MacBook 13" to the latest Mac OS X (10.5, aka Leopard, he said, loading up keywords for other worthy Google-searchers), suddenly my copy of Soundtrack, the sound editing software that comes with Final Cut Express HD, stopped working. It would just hang, spinning the flaming beachball of doom at me, as soon as I tried to do anything. It was making this odd clicking or buzzing noise at me. And it made me want to punch things, which is, of course, never a good thing. I've been toying with different ways of fixing it, but none of them worked at all, it would always do the same hang as soon as I'd hit play or record. This morning, despairing that I was going to have to buy the new version when I'm otherwise happy with what I have, I stumbled across this page: Soundtrack Pro 1.1 may quit unexpectedly with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Misleading title aside, it contained the answer! I followed the instructions there, and turned off this "Switch Hardware Sample Rate to match Document" option. Instantly, the clicking/buzzing noise went away. I enabled a track to record, and hit the record button. Woo! The track started filling up with me making ridiculous noises! And then, bliss, it played back, too! So, if you've been suffering from this vexing and otherwise undiagnosed problem, give this a try. No guarantees, but it solved my issue. Yay! Posted at 18:36 permanent link category: /misc Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. |
