Yeah, My Left Arm Has a Hemi

OK so basically I have a major contraption bolted on to my arm. 4 stainless steel pins, two screwed into my hand, 2 in my forearm. Each pin pair has an aluminum block lashed to them, and each block has a 3-4 inch aluminum bar fixed to it. These form two fixed components that are held in some exact position from each other with 2 footlong aluminum bars. Kinda barbaric but kinda elegant in that it gets the job done. (The "job" is to position my hand away from my broken ulna tip until it heals.)

However! I am kind of a mechanical guy and I am quickly finding faults in this setup, and also dreaming up solutions.

Last night I went to my favorite bike shop in 新竹 and asked the owner if he would hack off the extra bar ends with a saw or die grinder. He politely declined. I think he saw the wisdom in my thinking, but sided with the wiser avoidance of a law suit.

However, once I get back to Seattle, I will be trying this tactic again, with my good friend and bike shop owner, Larry. I just need the tools and I could probably do this myself...

See, the aluminum bars are just a little too long and get in the way of various things like riding a scooter around 新竹. I know, I know... But that's what I did yesterday. Had to get over the fear. But boy did it hurt. I could feel every bump in a whole new way.

Then later today I had an idea of how to remove the bars altogether. Just fuse a single, low profile carbon fiber pipe between the aluminum blocks. Just need to find the right guy for such an endeavor.

I actually spent the morning at the hospital talking to my rib doc and my wrist doc. The rib doc gave me the OK to fly home next week. And the wrist doc gave me the OK to chop the bars. But then his colleague said No. But then Ingy said Hell Yes. The docs gave me some new exciting drugs to try in my copious spare time. The funniest part is they actually burned me a CD of all my Xrays. I'll post one or two pics here tomorrow.

In computer/work news I am currently dealing with the need to render any text as an image. Trivial if you have the fonts. Turns out there is no Open Source font that covers all of unicode! What planet is this?? Well ole Ingus has tricks up his aluminum sleeve, but if someone out there can find me such a font, give me a call. Collect!