My Weird Elbow

In September 1990 I joined a karate dojo, and sometime in the spring or early summer of 1992 I took part in a demo for a women’s group. During the demo I was thrown and landed badly on a concrete floor. Instead of slapping the floor with my right hand, I slapped the floor with my entire forearm. My elbow was sore for several days. About a week later, as near as I remember, I had dinner with a couple I was friends with and when he shook my hand there was a popping in my elbow and a sharp burning pain.

By the next morning I was hardly able to move my arm. I didn’t have a primary care physician at the time so I took it to my chiropractor. He treated the injury like a sprain or strain and used ultrasound to help it. Later we rehabilitated it with electric stimulation. At the time we did the ultrasound he explained that if I’d broken or fractured my elbow at all we’d know immediately. Apparently fractures and ultrasound don’t get along.

The result of this series of injuries to my elbow has been two-fold. First, I can’t straighten my arm. I get about 95% of the way there and it just stops. Second, the ulnar nerve, what people call their “funny bone” is displaced from its channel. There’s a notch in the outside of the bend of your elbow where this nerve is located. On my left arm the nerve is recessed, on my right arm it is outside of the notch. It feels like a thick cord under the skin.

Other than some really impressive pops sometimes when I straighten my arm it hasn’t bothered my much in the last 20 years. I’ve grown used to it not being straight.

Just under two weeks ago, while pulling myself up from a reclined reclining chair, there was a sharp pain in my right forearm, just about an inch below the creases on the inside of my arm, dead center in the mass of tendons that start at the elbow. Within a few minutes there was a reddish bruise there and my arm was very sore. For the next couple of days I wasn’t able to straighten it at all – not even to the reduced limit I normally have – and I wasn’t able to bend it enough to touch my head.

I iced it and used Motrin and Aleve to reduce the pain and fight any swelling. Over the course of the first week it got better and the red mark disappeared. This week the improvement has stopped however. My range of motion is still reduced at both ends – not as straight as normal, and not able to fully bend it.

This afternoon I saw the doctor and she promptly took an x-ray of the joint. Within a couple minutes she came into the room, carrying the x-ray films saying, “You’ve got a weird elbow.” So weird in fact that she showed the films to her partner in the practice.

The bone in your upper arm is called the humerus and the lower end has two knobs know as epicondyles. The medial (inner) and lateral (outer). On the x-ray of my elbow there is a very clear curved line above these processes that shouldn’t be there. My doctor’s best guess is that this is a congenital feature that I’ve had my entire life. The upshot of the x-rays is that I’m going to get an appointment to see the orthopedist.

I’ve annotated the second copy of each image below to highlight the arthritis calcifications and the mystery feature.


RVM and Xcode 4.3

During the installation of Xcode 4.3 you are given the option to remove previous versions of XCode and the XCode installer. You are warned that the entire /Developer directory will be deleted. One of the hidden implications of this is the loss of various command line tools. The *gcc compiler for example.

After installing Xcode 4.3 on one of my machines I tried to install a different Ruby build using RVM. The install failed since no compiler could be found. Fortunately I had seen an article about Homebrew and the new XCode command line bundle and I rightly figured that installing those tools would allow RVM to complete the installation of new Rubies.

To add the command line tools, open XCode 4.3 (it’s now an application in your /Applications directory) and then open Preferences. Under the Download tab select Components and then click on Install for Command Line Tools.

Update: The Command Line Tools bundle may not be 100% complete. I wasn’t able to use bundler to install the default set of gems for Octopress. A google search on the error led me to the rb-fsevent issues page, where one of the comments suggested using a pre-compiled version of rb-fsevent.

I changed the line in my Gemfile to look like this:

gem 'rb-fsevent', :git => 'git://github.com/ttilley/rb-fsevent.git', :branch => 'pre-compiled-gem-one-off'

and then my bundle install command completed successfully.

Digital Signature in Mac OS X Lion

Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, adds an annotation feature to the Preview app which can be used to “digitally” sign documents. Instead of

• Downloading the form
• Printing it off
• Signing it
• Scanning it
• Emailing it

You can

• Download the form
• Annotate it with your digital signature
• Email it.

Here’s how.

##Capture your signature
Launch the Preview app, and from the Preview menu select “Preferences”. Click on “Signatures” and then “Create Signature”. Write your name on a piece of white paper and hold it up to the camera in your computer, align it on the blue line in the “Signature preview” pane, and click “Accept” to save it.

You can have multiple signatures saved, for example I have one where I’ve printed my name, and one where I’ve signed it.

##Using the signature
Open the PDF you need to sign. (Don’t forget that you can convert just about anything to a PDF using the Print dialog and “Save as PDF…”.) Click on the Annotations button (a pencil icon) and then the Signatures button (looks like a capital letter S). If you have multiple signature saved use the drop down triangle next to the Signatures button to select the one you want. Use the crosshair to draw a box where you want the signature positioned. Once the signature is where you want it, save the PDF and it’s ready to be used.

Bonsai Tree Houses ⧁

Beautifully detail miniature worlds wrapped around bonsai trees.
(vai @kurafire)

Fear Index

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I enjoy a good audio book and Fear Index was very good. It centers around autonomous machine reasoning and a hedge fund algorithm which combine to make a pretty good thriller. In many ways this story reminded me of one I read 30 years ago called The Adolescence of P1 which was about a computer AI programmed to be greedy and fearful. Both books work in part because their respective authors are smart enough to not try to explain the intricate details of how AMR or AI might work. Rather they leave that up to the reader’s imagination. I highly recommend Fear Index. And The Adolescence of P1 too, if you can find a copy.

Visualizing the iPad 3 Screen ⧁

Rumors about unreleased Apple products are just that, rumors. Still this visualization shows just how huge, in terms of pixels, a Retina Display iPad would be. Specifically it’d be 41% larger than the 1440x900 pixel display on my 15" MacBook Pro. In a word, hubba.
(via: @jblanton)

Taken

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I have been a longtime fan of Robert Crais’ books, and Taken is a good example of Crais at his best. I basically read this book in a day as I was unable to put it down. The Elvis Cole/Joe Pike books have assumed the mantle left behind by Spenser and Hawk. Taken is a bit darker than some of the series, but very well told. The only problem is that I’ve finished it and now have to wait until the next book to be published.

Cell 8

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A very powerful story about the death penalty, with a bit of a surprise ending. European, well, Scandinavian, authors are all the rage these days it seems, and Roslund and Hellström are well worth the attention. I will be seeking out their other books at the library.

Retail DNA

I had three retail store experiences yesterday. After returning home I realized that the pleasurable experiences both shared some common traits. Some retail merchants have similar DNA and it serves them well.

First up I visited an Apple store. The experience there actually began the night before when I reserved the phone I wanted to purchase and selected the time I wished to pick it up. When I arrived the store concierge, upon learning I was there to pick up a reserved item, directed me to one of the available clerks. In a matter of a few minutes the sales transaction was completed – without even a need for them to ask my name. I signed the terms and conditions agreement, swiped my card, signed my name again, and the phone was mine. When I said yes to a printed receipt the clerk merely reached under the display table and pulled the ticker tape off a concealed printer there.

When I visit an Apple store with no purchase in mind I am allowed to wander the displays and use or play with all the devices. I’ve read emails, downloaded and installed open source software to see how it looked and performed on computers different from my own, and generally had fun being there. You are invited to linger, to sample, to enjoy.

Next I went to a music store as they are the authorized dealer for a particular brand of cello bow that I am considering buying. The bow manufacturer has three models and I indicated I was interested in the middle model, valued at approximately $750. I was taken to a tiny room which was filled beyond capacity with stringed instruments and show a single sample of the bow. No offer to play it in the store was made. No offer to take it home on approval to play on my instrument was made.

My final merchant visit was another music store, again to look at cello bows. Within moments of my arrival I was comfortably seated with a $7000 cello to play and a case of a dozen $650 ~ $1000 bows to try. Except when I asked a question of the clerk assisting me I was left alone to play and sample and enjoy. Without any prompting from me the store offered to let me take two or three bows home on approval to try with my instrument and with my teacher.

I’ve visited this particular string instrument store before and have always been invited to try instruments, to wander around and explore, to feel at home. When I got to thinking about it, I realized that what I liked about this store was the same thing I liked about any Apple store I’ve been too – a sense of welcoming and inclusion.

The second music store has the same retail DNA that Apple has infused their retail stores with. Stores like the ones Apple has created approach the relationship between customer and store as two people working together toward a common goal. Stores like the first music store have an almost adversarial flavor to them – if the customer is savvy enough they may get what they wanted, but not through any assistance from the store. The worst examples of this adversarial style approach are car dealerships or furniture galleries.

When I am ready to buy a new bow, my thousand dollars will be going to KC Strings and not Meyer Music.

Aurora Borealis From ISS ⧁