In a sling – update!

Right, saw the doc and physiotherapist (as well as some research online).

What I’ve done is a biceps tendon tear at the elbow. Pretty rare injury apparently but the symptoms are classic; a “pop” in the elbow as the injury occurs, initial swelling in the front of the elbow, and weakness when bending the elbow. The bump in the upper arm and the gap I can feel nearer the elbow is caused by the biceps muscle and tendon recoiling and shortening.

Although repair is best effected by an operation within 24 hours, there’s a window of some weeks before the muscle and tendon stiffen up and make a repair difficult or impossible.

The bad news is that as I’m not a top class international sportsman the NHS is likely to say live with it, as there are other muscle groups that pick up the load and so 80% or so of the strength should come back in the next three months or so.

However, I’ve got a referral to the consultant, though that will no doubt be some weeks away, and will make a point of emphasising the need to lift heavy weights (ie motorcycles!) as part of the job. If it can be fixed, I’d rather it was than rely on a partial recovery.

Ho hum!

Still, in the meantime I can at least start taking bookings again!

Time’s up for the bike test

If you’ve not been living under a rock for the last eight years, you cannot have failed to notice that as of yesterday all candidates for the motorcycle test will have to undertake an EU-mandated compulsory off-road element before venturing onto the roads with the examiner in hot pursuit for the on-road element of the bike test.

Or rather, there is every chance that they won’t be taking any bike test at all!

It’s long been recognised that many riders will have to make unfeasibly long journeys to the test centres, but with the new booking system in place for several weeks on the lead up to the new three part test, it seems it’s already in chaos, with some areas apparently having “part three” on-road test availablity but no “part two” off-road test availability, without which the on-road test can’t go ahead.

The issue was being hotly debated in Parliament last Wednesday.

Mark Williams (Lib Dem MP for Ceredigion) reported that as late as the week before last, Rider’s Edge, which operates from the Royal Welsh showground in Builth Wells, had been unable to book a single off-road test under the new rules, just two weeks before the new test was due to go live.

Motorcycle trainers up and down the country are furious that the DSA have failed to address the widely predicted problems they were likely to face from the introduction of the new tests.

The DSA originally proposed to introduce the new test last September but after industry representation delayed the launch by six months because only 38 of the planned 66 multi-purpose test centres (MPTCs) were ready.

Paul Clark (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Transport) said in response to questioning in Parliament last week that 66 sites are now available, but on further examination it appears that only six new MPTCs have been added, with the remaining test locations being either temporary sites or weekend-only centres.

The DSA claim that 88% of the population are within 45 minutes’ ride of a testing facility. Leaving aside the fact that the DSA’s estimate of time versus distance is hopelessly optimistic, that still leaves 12% (or to put it another way, over 7 million people) who aren’t within the 45 minute cut off. And many of those people are hours from the nearest centre.

Mark Williams further pointed out that there will be no MPTC in Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire or Powys, a huge area of the country.

Steve Manning, of Advanced Rider Training near Crawley in West Sussex, is quoted on the BBC website earlier this month as saying he is already struggling to book the new tests and he expects to lose business.

“There just aren’t enough of the promised multi-purpose test centres available to deal with the volume of tests we do.

“I would hope to do 10 to 12 module one tests a week. On average I’ve got six or seven module one tests a week, which is going to cut the availability of our courses in half.

“If people can’t get the test at the end of their training they’re not going to come and do their training with us.”

Mr Manning says he will only have one test centre within a 20-mile radius of his training school, compared with seven which he currently uses.

What’s more, there are already stories circulating on the internet about two crashes, one involving broken bones, after the very first day of the off-road exercises. I’ve not been able to find confirmation of this but I’ll update as soon as I know.

The day of the simple “get trained, pass a test” route to a full motorcycle licence might well be at an end.

Staying connected on the move – Acer Aspire One

My Sharp MMC1100 sub-notebook has finally died. The hard disk has gone the way of all HDs, with increasingly frequent disk errors requiring re-formats, and last week the recovery partition also died, so now it won’t recover. Some hours searching online revealed an unusual pin arrangement on the 1.8″ HD, which means the current drives don’t fit. I may be able to use it by booting from a USB stick, but it doesn’t seem to want to boot off a CD.

So, looking for a replacement, I spent several hours researching current netbooks.

I looked at the Dell Mini 9 (more on that later) and the Mini 10, as well as a Compaq which had a really nice keyboard but a fuzzy screen, an Advent and a couple of others I can’t remember. None of them were quite as nice as my Sharp. And at the top end of the market, they’re starting to get quite pricey.

After much playing about with the display in PC World, I walked out with the least expensive option, which was a Linux-powered Acer Aspire One at £180.

Externally, it’s a nice shiny machine, with a compact 1024 x 600 8.9″ screen defining the size of the unit. It’s a bit heavier and thicker than my Sharp which was exceptionally light at under a kilo, but the smaller screen means it’s more compact over all. Internally, although it only has 16Gb hard disk, that’s more or less the same size as my Sharp’s HD which in practice I didn’t find much of a limitation. In fact, as a solid state disk it should be robust enough to travel on the bike, plus one of the card slots acts as ‘transparent’ extra storage – stick an SD card in, and it’s instantly and seamlessly added to the visible free storage space.

I fiddled about with it over the weekend, it was a nice little machine to work on, nice screen, good keyboard layout and action – I could type on it quite quickly.

The main drawback was the operating system, a flavour of Linux called Linpus. Though I’m not a complete novice when it comes to Linux, I’m hardly an expert, but even so I found the configured desktop ridiculously simplistic, with most of the important functions hidden away by design. I can understand that a netbook like this is aimed at keeping people away from the settings of a OS they’re not familiar with but OSs can be friendly as well as simple.

After a few minutes research online, I quickly found the tweak that gave access to the full dropdown menu and the system settings but it’s somewhat irritating that you aren’t given the option in the visible settings. Even when you get there, there’s not much behind the scenes.

Beyond the desktop, I was very disappointed with the limited customisation of the installed applications. They worked… but are seriously dumbed down, and as soon as I tried to use the machine seriously, I hit a major problem. I couldn’t find any way to display dates in UK format – seems Linpus is US only.

It may not seem a big deal but I use mail an awful lot and I don’t want dates displayed about face.

And although I had changed the desktop font to something less suited to Mr Magoo, I couldn’t find a way to configure the display font for the email program likewise, with the result that the “Outlook Express” style window took up the entire screen if I wanted to see it all. That makes a windowing GUI rather pointless.

More frustrations came from the inability of the mail program to send CCs or BCCs, desktop settings that didn’t appear to “stick” through a reboot, drag and drop via the installed file manager that seemed only to work on certain directories and not others.

Rather more importantly, as I use the laptop to show trainees movies as well as onbike video footage of themselves riding, I needed a decent media player. The installed one had problems with some of my files. I could have re-encoded them but it seemed easier to install a better media player with codecs built in.

Cutting a long story short, the installation of the recommended application from Acer’s own “add-on” site fell over on “missing dependencies”.

Now, call me picky, but I expect an install to work out of the box. I’d not be happy if a Windows set up fell over blaming missing files, and I’m not Linux-smart enough to decode the error messages and work out where to go to fix the problem.

So at this point, I had a vague mind to install XP on it, as I have a couple of spare licences, but in the event I never got that far…

…because it suddenly locked up when shutting down.

On reboot, it wouldn’t display the GUI – the screen showed the Acer “splash” screen, then flickered a few times and got no further than displaying a black screen with a cursor in the middle.

I tried rebooting several times, no go.

So I tried to find an equivalent of “safe mode” in Windows to see what the problem was – there doesn’t appear to be one, I couldn’t even find a way to get a basic terminal mode up. There’s no relevant documentation either with the manual (had to download to the desktop that cos it’s on the machine!!) or online in the usergroups that I could find.

So I tried booting via a CD drive. It wouldn’t boot off the supplied Linpus recovery disk, and neither would it boot off a Puppy Linux live CD which worked fine on desktops.

Running out of options, I did manage to get it to recognise and begin to load a WinXP installation CDROM, but it quickly fell over with a “missing file” error.

I searched the net for the WinXP error message that came up and I got three possible causes:

- damaged disk
- damaged or dirty CDROM
- faulty RAM

I know it’s not my hardware/CDROMs because I have two external drives and two XP installation disks, and all run fine in any combination when plugged in to two desktops!! So I guess it’s the latter, a failed RAM chip. That might explain why it got part way through the boot into the GUI then stopped with a black screen.

So off back to PC World this morning with it back in the box. I explained the problem and then there ensued a short “customer rights” argument with the stroppy bloke behind the counter:

“It’ll have to go back to the manufacturer for testing, we can’t give you a refund”.

“Oh no it doesn’t have to, and oh yes you can give me a refund”.

After they fired it up on site and didn’t get it to complete booting, I got a refund without further argument, but it is frustrating that they try to fob you off after a few days-old machine fails.

I did consider doing a swap. I’m sure I’m a bit unlucky, although it’s far from reassuring when the word “build” is mis-spelled in the BIOS screen, but I decided I couldn’t live with the Linpus OS, and that it would make more sense to have a laptop that ran my favourite XP-based portable applications from my USB stick straight off, without worrying about synchronising mails or running Windows emulators.

I could have gone for an XP installation on another Aspire One, but given the hassles with this one, I wasn’t confident the install would go smoothly, or that a return would be quite so easy if the original OS was missing.

So I have now ordered a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 , which I get tomorrow.

From my research and hands-on time in the shop, the main drawbacks of the Dell are:

- tiny SSD – just 8Gb, so not much will be left after XP is installed, though apparently the “hatches” in the bottom make swapping a bigger one in a genuine plug and play action
- small keyboard and awkward placing of some of the keys, but I’ll guess I’ll live with it
- worryingly for such a low powered machine the in-store demo unit runs red hot. You could fry an egg on it. I’ll keep an eye on this but if it really does run that hot, it doesn’t promise much for the processor life.

At least there is a thriving user group, so I’ll have a read, keep an eye on the heat situation and see if it does cause problems or if it’s me worrying unnecessarily.

In a sling!

I’ve just had the unexpected luxury of a fortnight of (relative) leisure.

On the Thursday evening just before Easter I moved a bit awkwardly and felt a “pop” followed by stabbing pain where the bicep abuts the elbow on my left arm.

As it was rather worse on Friday morning, with me unable to flex the arm without a lot of pain, it was off to the local minor injuries unit. A couple of x-rays and hours later, the diagnosis was torn muscle! Which was what I suspected. I was provided with one of those wonderful cheesecloth slings and prescribed rest and anti-inflammatories!

As I was in no state to ride a bike, I had to cancel two days training over the weekend – fortunately I managed to get hold of the trainees to do so before they set off.

The good news was that the weather was pretty good down here in the SE corner, so managed to get out and do a bit of walking (nothing too serious!) at the coast or up on the Downs with the friends that were down for the weekend and got a chance to play with my new “crossover” digital camera (memo to self – read manual!).

The latest update is that I’ve been signed off from the injuries unit and the inflammation has now gone down. Unfortunately that means I can see and feel a very distinct “dip” about the size of a marble in the bicep on the inside of the arm, which is slightly alarming – presumably where the muscle tore.

I’m still struggling to lift or carry anything vaguely heavy where the forearm needs to be flexed (lugging a laptop lefthanded is still painful). I’ve not tried riding the bike yet, I still can’t pull on the handbrake on the car though I can just about change gear.

This could be a longer recovery than I feared. Ho hum.

I’ve got training provisionally planned for the coming weekend… I’ll update people as I can. Watch this space!

First Peaks training session of the years hits the good weather

After last year’s soaking on the way up to the Peak District for the first of the annual “Survival Skills on Tour” training events held away from our normal bases in Kent and Oxfordshire, this time I loaded the bike in the people carrier and headed up on four wheels with the heater and radio.

Almost predictably, the weather changed almost overnight from “chilly for the time of year” to warm spring weather. Not that I was complaining!

The trip started with a day’s training in Oxford, with a guy who did the Bends course in France last year, and came back to do the Double Bends day. He was kind enough to say that he’d found his cornering skills much enhanced and on his holiday in the mountains he really saw the benefit of what I showed him.

I had been planning to get up to the Peaks on the Wednesday evening but due to last minute hitches I hadn’t been able to confirm the B&B, and so had to go up on the Thursday morning. Fortunately, the traffic was reasonably light and I arrived on time to greet Mike, and we had a good day out doing a “Confidence Builder” for a newly qualified rider on some great roads.

On Friday I had Scott (who had also done a Bends course last year) and his buddy along. Now this course needed a bit of sorting out… as his buddy hadn’t done the Bends day, I did a 90 min solo session with him, a bit of theory over tea and cake, then did around three hours 2 to 1, to get the both up to speed on the bends skills, then followed up with some of the topics from my “Double Bends” course to give Scott something new to play with.

Unfortunately, the fog had come down during the night, so they were a little late, and the first hour or so of training was made slightly difficult by restricted views, but it cleared nicely by 11am.

So it was a long day, and made rather longer by the tractor driver whom I had to follow for 12 miles before I could get past. And by a wrong turn where a new exit off a roundabout that confused me and the Sat Nav so that I ended up on the M6 rather than the M69 after a diesel stop.

The weekend was spent back in Oxford, doing a 2:1 course for a couple of friends, Dave and Wil. We spent the Saturday getting the core “Bends” skills in place, then the Sunday working on the Double Bends day. Aside from a kamikaze driver in a 75 grand Mercedes who decided we were too slow and tried to run Wil off the road, a good day riding out over the Cotswolds and back was had.

I’m looking at another trip up there towards the end of April perhaps 27 and 28th of April. Drop me a line if you fancy taking a training day or two in some of the best scenery in England.

Why take advanced training?

I snipped this one from the recent post bag as I think it’s worth putting up for perusal.

“So, if I do more than average miles a year, ride reasonably quickly, and don’t have accidents or scare myself and I take the time and effort to think about my riding, why should I get advanced training? How do I tell that the bloke teaching me is going to any good, or even have anything relevant to tell me?”

“Why should you take training if you think you are good enough” is a reasonable question.

So ask yourself honestly; have you never read a book about any subject at all and thought “I never knew that… never thought about it that way… never considered that might happen”?

Or an alternative question to ponder; how would you like to go about doing more or less what you did before, but with bigger margins for error – after all, riding is arguably a ongoing exercise in disaster management!

In some ways I don’t try to teach “better” riding. Once the core ‘advanced’ skills are in place, I teach riders to have a greater awareness of the pros and cons of what they do, and then to be able to use that knowledge to bend the odds in their favour.

And how do you know if the trainer can teach you anything? Well, can they ask you questions you can’t answer? That’s a good start if you’re not going to rely solely on certificates.