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Well, ... it's been a day. In my last entry, I confessed to breaking my finger by shutting it in a car door (or rather, getting it shut, but the difference is academic). Turns out, it's not actually broken. Took for bloody ever to find out, but it's just a bruised tendon by the looks of it, so no worries.
Lewes Hospital is to be commended, by the way, for running an excellent Minor Injuries Clinic, which is kinda the baby brother of an A&E department (I have a Thing about bothering Accident and Emergency departments when I'm not actively bleeding, spasming or dying, so this turns out to be exactly what I need). In, examined, X-rayed and out in a little over an hour (in other news, twisty-hand is even twistier inside than out, it seems - I'm missing a joint on my index finger, which turns out to be because the entire piece of finger that should be between two of the joints is telescoped into a tiny triangle between the other two). I'd love a copy of the X-ray, but didn't think quickly enough to ask for it.
Anyway, enough of that. From bed to University Health Centre to Lewes and back by 1215, busy start to the day. From there, I proceeded to the house/workshop of a friend and fellow larper, Will Segerman (who is cool and makes many interesting things). He lives up an ENORMOUS hill behind Brighton Hospital (which houses the A&E I would likely have ended up in had it not been for not wanting to bother anyone). The walk up said hill gave me more exercise than I really wanted or needed, but the end result is lovely, a part-built prop for a New Year's Eve Thing that I should hopefully be able to finish at home, assuming certain parts arrive before then and the postal service don't mess up. More details later, probably.
From there to Portslade via the number 1 bus for games night, and that's the day. It's been interesting - I've visited a lot of bits of the surrounding area that I've not seen before, all for the cost of a little shoe-leather and a well-worn bus ticket. I recommend it, especially at this time of year, when the centre of town is so crowded.
Most importantly, I still haven't broken any bones in my life, ever. This will, of course, be my cue to fall off a kerb and break my hip or something STUPID over the Christmas period, or something. This is the way life works.
A friend of mine is putting together a LARP based on what is essentially a post-apocalyptic Wind in the Willows. It is quite cool, and merits your interest. There was a playtest in Oxford on Saturday (where we get together and run through things to exercise the rules a bit and find the bits that need oiling, or duct-taping, or similar.)
It was fun, and I have successfully added to the number of strangely-dressed photos of me on the Internet. Yay.
I may have broken a finger by getting it trapped in a car door (grabbed the B-pillar just as someone was closing the relevant door, I've no-one to blame but myself). I'm going to catch hell from the organisers for not reporting it at the time - there were first aiders present, and had I told them about it, they would probably have come to much the same conclusion as I did. A break right at the tip, while inconvenient and a little painful, isn't really critical or something that can be improved by treatment short of microsurgery - all the joints work, and I've a full range of motion and strength. I'm going to see the medics tomorrow morning (first realistic chance I get), and I'll see what they have to say. I'll be amazed if they say anything other than "take painkillers and don't overstress it", though.
Such is life. More than anything, I'm worried about the telling off I'll get from the organisers, and irritated that I've finally broken a bone. Since it seems to be the common childhood injury, and I've avoided it till 26, I was kinda hoping to continue doing so. Oh well. Perhaps now I'll grow up.
Yeah, right... :)
Last fencing session of this term tonight. The club may or may not keep running over summer break, but with so many of our members moving back home for the summer this weekend, it gets harder to justify. So, we got a little ... spirited here and there.
By 'we', of course I mean 'me and Ben'. We're both built like battleships (he's got the muscle, I've got the mass), we're both epeeists, and we enjoy a good fight. Tonight, we wired up and went at it properly, in a way that, while never unsafe, was extremely energetic and likely to attract the attention of the ref, had there been one.
About halfway through, Ben landed a nice hit on my lower abdomen. Due to my being in a really strange position at the time, I briefly tried to guard it with my foot before remembering what I was doing, and in that time the blade passed neatly through my sock. Blaze of momentary pain on my right shin, and a blade that travelled unsettlingly through the sock from front to inside-leg without doing any serious damage. It's just a graze, and more than anything I'm pissed off that the first proper wound I get from fencing in several years is entirely covered by my now-traditional combat trousers!
Now I need a new pair of long socks :)
Also, it's Download Day. Help Mozilla set a record for most downloads of a piece of software in 24 hours (*downloads*)
EDIT: Well that's freakin' hilarious. The Firefox 3 installer for linux requires a newer version of the GTK graphics toolkit than I have. This is the price of running 'old' linuxes, I guess (Slackware 10.2, current version is 12.1: it's about four years old). Have to see if I can find a package at some point.
Well, the research for the paper continues apace. It looks like it'll be a paper about Flexray-MilCAN bridging, a subject about which I know plenty since it was the core of my MSc project. I'll basically be talking about my experiments to date, then introducing a new hardware platform that I think is better suited to the task at hand.
Aside from the fact that I can't find half the papers I want to reference, I have another major problem: I haven't actually started using the new hardware yet, so that part of the paper will have to be speculative. Additionally, despite being version 1.0.2 of the hardware, this new unit has a known problem in that it entirely fails to initialise its communications controller about half the time. This isn't very useful behaviour in a communications-bridge, and the only known solution at present is a device reset. *sigh* Why me?
On a slightly lighter note, this evening we had a pretty good barbecue at one of my labmates' house. Barbecue, then ground clearance by means of carefully controlled fire, which was fun. Firesculpting for the win.
I've been cycling to work (and indeed here, there and everywhere) for about a month and a half now, and keep half-expecting to have a minor accident at some point. So, today, true to form I decided to pole-vault (sort of) off a low wall in the dark after the fire. Carefully planting the pole in the air, and swinging... There was just enough time for one of those "...oh." moments before my head and I bounced smartly off the concrete, and now I'm covered in little scuffs and grazes. Fun.
Interesting weekend, I suppose.
The Fencing Club had a seminar, basically a concentrated session with less people in which we talked about such high-brow things as tactics and timing as well as the fine art of poking people and getting away with it. This was tiring, but interesting: I have learned, for example, that I have a long way to go before I become a halfway-competent epeeist. Looks like some more training is in order.
Since the next day was Sunday, Fouad, Dom and I went off to Ditchling Beacon for lunch. The food was ... okay, nothing special and a little pricey, but quite edible, and the views were lovely.
I have spent most of the evening wrestling with the Linux logical-volume-manager, a tool that allows partitions to be split or combined across multiple physical devices. I am using it to assemble an 80GB partition and a 120GB hard disk into a single device. We shall see how this turns out.
The parts of the evening which the LVM did not occupy were mainly occupied with making cookies (yum) and puzzling over the sharp thing in my boot. Many theories were advanced when I told people of it, but they were all wrong. Some may remember the toenail incident a little while ago: well, now I have no nail whatsoever on that toe. It just broke off. No pain at all. Weird.