The Audi's fucked up...
http://picasaweb.google.com/bradley.j.fitzpatrick/CarCrash

(got hit on the left side... maybe my fault? maybe his? maybe both?)

Good thing everybody's okay and the two propane tanks in the back seat (seat-belted in) which I was heading out to refill didn't blow up.

Couldn't find non-emergency number quickly, called 911, they said just exchange contact info and insurance. Did that. Police did show up and took down info and mostly just stood around and watched as me and the other dude had it almost wrapped up by then. Other guy needed to be towed (to his friend's body-shop) but wasn't sure how he was going to pay (no credit card?) so I paid the $200 to the tow-truck driver just to get things moving. Hope that isn't an implicit admission of guilt. Tried to call State Farm to report it but no answer. I drove home, despite the left side doors not opening. Car seems fine.

But I got new propane tanks afterwards on the way home ... who wants to come celebrate a delayed 4th of July tomorrow night at my place? Burgers and hot dogs!

My ankle: http://pics.livejournal.com/xb95/pic/002kbscr/ ...

I won't post it here, in case people aren't into big nasty bruises. Oh and take this and multiply the surface area by a couple factors and that's my left inner thigh, too. Didn't post a picture of that. Pretty sure my tailbone/lower back look similar, but didn't take a snapshot.

Interestingly enough, I guess you can tell it's a deep bruise by how long it's taken to be visible. It was not there last night. This morning when I got up you could see it, but it was half the size of what it is above. I wonder how big it will get.

Whee.

Donated breakfast (half a bowl of cereal) back to the porcelain gods. Oh well. Think it was probably because I took the vicodin on an empty stomach. The pharmacist said I should always take it with food, but I was in a little too much pain this morning to really care.

Also, I'm going to be working this week! Keeps my mind off of stuff.

PS, I am probably going to be somewhat spammy for the week. Oh well.

Couldn't sleep more than about 1.5 hours at a time last night. Kept waking up because I'd move and it'd hurt myself awake. But then I'd have to pee, too, and so I'd hobble to the bathroom.

I have learned something interesting. Your body, when exposed to extreme amounts of pain, will shiver uncontrollably. At least mine does. My left ankle is now a three inch circle of solid black. The bruise is amazing. My left inner thigh is mottled purple and black.

My right ankle hurts almost as bad and will probably be blossoming its own bruise at some point. My back is ten times worse than yesterday. My left arm is starting to hurt now too.

Standing up/sitting down and walking are the most agonizing things I have ever done. Janine got to watch me hobble to the bathroom this morning alternately shaking uncontrollably and blinking the tears out of my eyes because it hurts so much.

Not really very fun, I must say.

...

Oh, someone found the police traffic:

0589D0707 9:39AM Traffic Collision - Minor Injuries WB SR84 JWO NEWARK BLVD Hayward
ADDITIONAL DETAILS
9:49AM 2ND 1182 - 2 VEHS INV
9:48AM 1039 CENTRAL
9:46AM #1 LANE BLOCKED
9:45AM PER FSP WB 84 AT NEWARK IN CD
9:40AM 1039 1141
9:40AM RIDER LAYING IN CD
9:40AM MC ON RHS
9:40AM MC VS WALL
9:40AM MC VS SIL FORD ESCORT

Wow. Apparently my bike made it to the right-hand shoulder... across three lanes of traffic... no wonder I didn't see it.

Today:

* Micah learned that she likes watermelon.
* Niko had a mid-air collision with my face.

Here's what happened.

I was westbound on 84, on the section in Newark where it's going up to the Dumbarton Bridge. If you are familiar with that section, there's a bit where they're doing construction on the left to widen the roadway. It's three lanes at this point. You get to the end of the construction, and a carpool lane appears out of nowhere, making it four lanes. That's roughly where this took place, right passed the construction, where the carpool lane opens.

It was 9:45 AM, today. I was in the left lane, doing prevailing speed (55 MPH at the time). The carpool lane opens up. I do my typical three part check:

1) Look in the lane I'm about to go into, up the direction of travel, see what's there. Check - nobody in the lane for a good 1000 feet or more.

2) Look at the cars in front of me, do headcounts, try to determine if any of them are likely to jump into the carpool lane. Check - the three cars I could see in directly in front of me were single occupant.

3) Look in my mirror (then headcheck!) to ensure nobody is next to or coming up behind me. Check - it was totally empty!

So. I did what any enterprising rider who wants into the next lane does. I signaled for a second and then pulled over (while headchecking again), and started accelerating. Then I point my head forward again, and then the crap hits the fan.

Sequence of events:

1) Carpool lane completely clear, I pull into it, begin acceleration. (And by 'begin' I mean, I told my wrist to start twisting. This all happened so fast I didn't *actually* accelerate more than a nudge.)

2) The instant I pull into the lane, the two cars that were in front of me in the other lane cut to the left and emergency braked, simultaneously. And by emergency brake, I mean, they were slowing down hard, foot jammed up that brake pedal until it saw engine block. I distinctly recall the cars dipping forward severely.

3) I started braking (hard) and did similar to them, yanked the steering to the left, trying to prevent a rear end. (I felt there was no way in hell I was going to stop in time, given how close we were at this point.)

4) I made it to the left side of the lane and that's when I went down. Keep this in mind, steps 2-4 have taken MAYBE a second. That's it. It was nearly instant, or at least it felt that way to me.

5) The bike goes down, but it didn't go ahead of me. I honestly don't know if I high sided or if the bike slid to the side, but it wasn't ahead of me, I never saw it again. I hit the pavement on my left side, and I distinctly recall seeing that car that I was trying to avoid to my right, still working on stopping.

6) I remember pushing myself and trying to change the direction of the slide away from the car, and hit the concrete divider. (That big wall of concrete to the side.) And that's mostly what I was hugging as I slid to a stop.

7) As soon as I stopped, I looked up, saw that I was still bodily in the carpool lane (albeit way over) and saw that I was at the end of the concrete. I got out of there on hands and knees, scrambling off of the roadway.

8) When I hit the dirt/grass on the side, I flopped down on my back, spine/legs/arms straight, and stayed there until the paramedics showed up.

That's about when the events that were omg-so-fast stopped. I was on my back in the dirt. First thing I did was a generic body check: ten fingers all wiggling, arms moving, ten toes all wiggling, legs moving. Head ... well, I can gently turn it, but didn't want to get too fancy, because who knows, I'd be afraid of exacerbating any injury.

Some people showed up. The first was someone from a car who stopped, and looked very confused. I believe it was the guy in front of me, but he didn't say that one way or another really. Anyway, I pulled out my phone (it was fine, didn't scrape that part of me) and dialed Janine, handing it to the guy to talk to her. He proved inept at this, so I took it back from him, and talked to her myself.

Then some construction workers showed up and one, guy named Steve, took charge of the situation. Said 911 had been called, asked what my problems were ('none, really') and went from there. Eventually the paramedics showed up and we went through the whole thing again. They got my helmet off, put a neck brace on, stuck me on a body board, and hauled me away in the ambulance. (Oh and at some point in all of this, a CHP officer took my statement.)

The ambulance ride is uneventful. They didn't use their sirens since I wasn't critical. They put an IV in, started a saline drip. Did lots of talking to me, making sure I was good, etc. Then eventually we got to Eden Medical Center up in Castro Valley. Wheeled me into the Trauma Center. About 10 people descended on me like angels (or demons) and poked, prodded, repositioned, and asked questions. It was pretty crazy.

Later I went through a CT scan (CAT scan? dunno), they looked at my head/neck/organs. They did more tests, blood stuff, gave me a tetanus shot (couldn't remember when my last one was), and blah blah blah. Lots of stuff. All in all, I think they did a really good job, and I'm really happy to have landed in the arms of the people I was being taken care of by.

Janine showed up at some point. They took the neck brace and body board out. I got a prescription for some vicodin. I got to go home.

I'm bored of writing this entry, so I think I'm going to wander off. Read a book or relax or something. Pretty fucking sore, and everybody tells me tomorrow is just going to be worse.

genx_xslacker
For everyone born between 1965 and 1976, your commnunity is here.

localgrr
The home of Local Girl's Day in Pictures.

oh_my_tatt
A place for showing off and discussing tattoos.

Yay!
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/07/protocol-buffers-googles-data.html

(and don't worry, I'm working on Perl support... :-))

Update: Join the Perl group if you're interested:
http://groups.google.com/group/protobuf-perl

Bike wrecked, freeway at 55mph, my fall was broken by the concrete. Gear saved my skin. Nothing broken. On vicodin, left ankle and lower back are pretty fucking sore.

Bike is totaled. I never even got to see her down. RIP, Green Power Ranger.

It’s fairly well documented what to do if you have a subversion repository and want to develop on it with git. What if you have a project you started in a git repository, but now need to publish it to a subversion repo?

After several attempts and resets, this seems to be what you have to do to check a project you built with local git into an arbitrary place in a subversion repository.

1. Make a new git repo: mkdir ~/import; cd ~/import; git init
2. Make the new remote directory in the svn repo: svn mkdir http://example.com/proj/
3. Link up with the empty path using git-svn: git svn clone -T '' http://example.com/proj/
4. Add your original repo as a remote: git remote add dev file:///home/username/work/proj
5. git pull dev master to pull in all the original git repo’s commits.
6. git svn rebase to rebase all the commits on top of the svn commit.
7. In my case, the rebase halted on some commits in the git history where I added files. I had to git add the files manually, then git rebase --continue.
8. git svn dcommit (or with -n to check… but it’s just a list of commit IDs, so it sure didn’t make me feel that much better about doing it)

You can then really check it worked by comparing the subversion content to your git repo:

1. cp -R ~/work/proj proj-git
2. rm -r proj-git/.git
3. svn export http://example.com/proj/ proj-svn
4. diff -rub proj-svn proj-git

As usual in UNIX, silence is golden.

Went on like our 7th house boat trip to Shasta over the long weekend, had an awesome time.

Highlights:

* Skiing 4 times, getting up on a wake board my first try.
* Excellent food
* Very relaxed crowd
* Crazy air tankers skimming the water like 100 feet away from us, taking off again, then bombing fores fires... every ~30 minutes.

Weather was great and I got a ton of sun. Skin feels kinda crispy but I think it's mostly just dehydrated. I woke up early this morning still on houseboat time, which is good for productivity. My arms are incredibly sore and don't really bend that well, but hopefully that'll be fixed by next week. :-P

From Poznan to Königstein outside of Frankfurt.

distance: 790 km, 490 miles

time: 5 hours, 50 minutes

time gps said it would take: 8 hours

average speed: 135 km/h 85 mph

top speed: 225 km/h 139 mph

car: volvo s40 2.0 diesel

The route

Note to Americans: learn how to drive (Autobahn is safer than the Interstate system), not a single time:

Did someone overtake me on the right side

Did someone enter my lane without indicating

Did someone hog the left lane

Only one person tailgated me

My parents came up today and while here my dad took a look at the R50. When we had it running he asks for a long screwdriver. I asked "why?" and he replied "I want to listen to the engine." I looked at him like he was nuts and fetched a screw driver. He pressed the tip against the valve cover near the rocker and put his ear to the handle. Mechanic's stethoscope, neat! I then talked him into taking it for a spin (this wasn't hard) and fitted him with all my safety gear, which caused some grumbling until I pointed out that not only was he riding the bike for the first time, but it had new as yet untested brakes. He took it up and down the street a couple of times and came back with a huge grin.

Later I took the bike out myself so I could go visit my nephew who has grown so much in just a couple of weeks. He's just figured out how to use his eye brows and it's seriously cute.

Anyway, the bike definitely runs better with the new air cleaner and the plugs show that the engine is burning a lot cleaner. Now I just need to fix the timing and maybe adjust the valves.

gordonmessmer came over again today and we finished up the brakes and replaced the ignition cover slide. It's amazing how much work was involved in both of those jobs, but the results were worth it. The brakes seem to work pretty well (haven't road tested them yet) and the ignition switch both looks and works better now.

We also replaced the air cleaner and the rubber o-rings that were supposed to be around it (one was missing and the other was more of an almost-o-ring) as well as the rubber rings that the air intakes fit into. When I finally fired the engine up I think that it was running a bit stronger than before. The old air filter was probably a bit clogged and I think contributed to the rich running of the engine.

When we got into the headlight bucket to work on the switch I discovered more non-original features of the bike. I know that the speedo is not right for the bike, but I didn't know about the ring around it that raises it up... turns out that the speedo was too deep for the bracket that holds it in place so at some point in the past someone took a piece of plastic pipe, cut it about 1/4" thick and covered it in electrical tape. This then went around the speedo setting it up and out of the bucket. Also the wiring needs serious work involving a soldering iron. There's one piece of wire that appears to have shorted in the past burning off all the insulation.

Tomorrow my parents are coming up so I think that my dad and I will see if we can't tune in the carbs. Should be fun.

( Before and after pics of the front brake mechanism )

Facebook Notes don't even let you choose to post a Note fully publicly (as in Google can index it). Privacy settings are a good thing, LiveJournal certainly has shown that, but not having the option to create content in a public way is just frustrating to me as a Facebook user.



Joshua Porter write more about this over on Own Your Identity.

That's how long it took gordonmessmer and I to do a brake job on the R50 today. We started a little after noon and finished a just past midnight. That was for just the front wheel. You can't buy new shoes anymore so you have to re-line the old ones. This is easier if you buy molder OEM liners, but I wanted more braking power which means drilling and countersinking the material yourself. We ran out of time to adjust the brakes so I have no idea how well they work yet. I'll get to that tomorrow. I think that the most disappointing part of the whole operation is that no one will be able to see what a good job we did nor how well we cleaned up the old parts.

Also, in order to do all this work I had to spend a bunch of money on tools*. This is not a bad thing. :)


* Woo! Bench grinder!

I attended the monthly meeting of the Vintage Motorcycle Enthusiasts tonight. It was totally awesome. There were something like 100 motorcycles there, mostly vintage but plenty of modern bikes as well. Plenty of people were interested in my bike as it appeared to be one of the oldest there. 3 people even took pictures, which made me feel pretty damned good.

I'm also happy to report that the bike can do 65 mph just fine. Though I'm unlikely to ever get a speeding ticket on while on the highway. I'm going to get the front brakes relined before I take it out again though, I think that the old pads are breaking down faster now that I've adjusted them.