Once the skin was softened and the muscles were relaxed, the foot binder would curl the child’s toes down towards the sole of the foot as far as the bones would allow. The binder would then curl the toes farther than the bones would allow, snapping the toddler’s phalanges and forming a kind of twisted foot-fist. Damn Interesting
Secular Humanism … is a secular philosophy that embraces human reason, ethics, and justice, and the search for human fulfillment. It specifically rejects religious dogma, supernaturalism, pseudoscience or superstition as the basis of morality and decision-making.
Found in Tesco, £1.05 a tin. It tastes genuinely wonderful and I’ll be buying more though at that price it’s 4x the price of my usual caffeine loaded tipple. And not only does it taste fantastic (by far the best “energy” drink – and I’ve drank them all) it has a super juicy 46.5mg caffeine/100ml. That’s 50% higher than my usual caffeine loaded tipple. Love it.
I’ve probably mentioned my right shoulder before with pain / limited movement. Today I got the physio appt. Part of the exam was her – a much smaller lighter lady – telling me to push against her hands while my arms were in different positions. In most I was fine but with one my right arm had no strength at all. She pushed and my arm just went with her. Very odd. A couple of others there was weakness and discomfort but at least I could try and resist those. That plus prodding around the upper arm means I have a series of exercises to do several times a day and another appt in 3 weeks. She gave the green light to the splints I use for the wrist/hand which was good.
An excellent assist for burning palms are steel bottles, ice and water.
I use a 40oz and a 27oz Klean kanteen steel bottle along with the Orb above. Fill with ice and cold water and you have a great way to cool the hand down to a more comfortable temp. Much more effective than a plastic bottle. Totally recommend the Orb bottles too – they fit the hand perfectly.
I’ve had rsi for a while now and I know what makes it worse – not wearing a splint at night, working fast and not talking proper time away from the computer. The wacom tablet helps but not as much as it did and that is because it moved the problem.
The main original pain was shooting pains in the wrist/arm, swollen and super-sensitive finger pads and initially the tablet worked well. It was a new set of muscles and the work was moved away from the mouse finger. I did use a full mac keyboard – the one with the number pad on the right. That meant the wacom sat quite a way right so I would twist from the elbow – result was less wrist pain but more forearm and upper arm pain. So I got the little mac kb and the wacom sits closer – but it’s still a twist in the arm. Of course it doesn’t have to be but making major muscle movements when smaller ones are ingrained is hard work. I’ve tried the tablet sitting just before the kb but my arms need to stretch just that little bit too far. Instead of my elbow angle being close to 90° it’s close to 120° and that can’t be good. It does make me sit up straighter though. But using my right hand has to stop or at least be massively reduced. The main focus of the pain now is the upper arm, forearm, the hand and main knuckle area but a new splint is helping there. The pain in the arm is losing me sleep too. Not good. Painkillers are not an option. They do work very well but then you just keep on damaging that which is already damaged. So I’ve stuck the wacom tablet on the left.
This of course solves just the immediate pain – I moved it yesterday and pain has reduced. But I now need to work out how to hold the pen, change my posture, not just twist my arm to use the pen. That’s quite a lot of work. And learn more shortcuts. The hardest part of this so far – and which I know will irritate – is doing things so much slower. I don’t like slow.
I buy another drive and the dead one breathes again (gave it power to test a plug as another drive appeared dead). It is seen and repaired by the mac and ‘appears to be ok’. So I have 1TB of backup hanging off 1 machine and 1.5TB off the other. Nuts, absolutely nuts. Offline I am disorganised. The phrase “Yes I know it looks a mess but I know where everything is”** applies here. But on the machines it is tidy and organised. Spotlight can’t look anywhere because it’s all set to Private (if I really need something in a file I use Easyfind but that is rare indeed. So all that space is going to stay just space. You can’t backup backups esp when the important stuff is backed up online already. Play around with photo libraries maybe.
And I write this while praying at the Altar of Apple. Much pain through the night at my coccyx and I can’t do anything without it hurting. So I am kneeling at this desk, elbows raised and tapping away. So to the casual observer I am worshipping much white plastic. I don’t think so :)
**Everywhere J goes is clean and tidy. Not fair to live in a bombsite for her. Probably explains why this room is a Health & Safety problem. 19 plugs off 1 socket? What’s wrong with that?
On July 3 2002 Blizzard released Warcraft 3. Over the weekend I loaded the original game from cd into a macbook pro that was made some time in 2009. That’s 7 years difference in technology and yet the game made the machine run at blistering temperatures. Not just hot – Youtube does that – but skin burning hot, Health and Safety hot. Why? Why is the mac so hugely inefficient at running code that was written over 7 years ago? (I have a Starcraft cd from the same time which just won’t run). And this was on the prologue when you learn the controls/control panel. Hardly anything was going on. What happens when I get to construction and battles? Does it melt? Do I need to put it on ice? I remember running this on my PC and the fan just rolled around normally. Nothing burned, nothing fried, nothing gave any cause for concern. That level of heat cannot be good for a computer, any computer, even one that was first designed to look good and a far far second to work well.
So I can’t play consoles because of my left hand, I could play with the brace and my right hand but not if the machine is going to cook itself to death. Looks like I’ll be buying a Windows laptop that can handle games (Warcraft 3 through to Civ 5). Nuts.
Edit: Downloading the latest from Blizzard. Also have seen that the ASUS G73 is the one to go for. I find it for around £1700 though which is just a little pricey. And I’ve found the Starcraft Installer for OS X.
I was upstairs as normal, Jacqui was downstairs as normal and D was watching a film on her laptop – she wears headphones for that. I see a UPS van pull up and knowing that D was downstairs I didn’t go straight downstairs for the package – I usually get down there quick to keep the dog quiet. I head down after a minute or so. I find a wet, dirty and shaky Jacq being helped back to the table by D. At some point – and despite me saying to leave the outside bins for me – J had stepped outside. Then she had fallen over and she cannot get back up. She can’t anyway even with rails or the right sized chairs. How long she was there we aren’t sure but thankfully the UPS delivery happened and he found her. She was understandably incredibly upset, crying and more, D felt guilty as she was downstairs. She’s okay now, there was no physical damage but the incident hurt in other ways. So tomorrow we head out to find some sort of pendant/bracelet which she will wear and a box that makes noise for me. Checked online but if you are disabled then items become ugly as hell, bigger than they need and several times as expensive. A wireless doorbell might even work. But as it is something she will now have to carry all the time it’s only fair she gets to choose which is the least ugly of the ugly bunch. The worst part of this? She did not disagree when I said we needed the pendant thing.