Chris Curtis Web Site

Trish was very excited to see a pcture of Nathan in the local paper. He is in Accident and Emergency, where he has been on placement, writing up someone’s notes. He has his stethescope around his neck and looks every inch the junior doctor.

They have been pleased with him there – giving him top grades for his two week placement. Next stop – the other end of the world.

I have bought a Creative (Nomad) Muvo NX – 128Mb. It is small, about the size of a cigarette lighter, plugs into the computer so you can put music on it then it plays it back through headphones. It even comes with an armbamd holder so I can wear it while working out or running. It works extremely well for these purposes – no weight to notice and on the arm means that I do not get tangled up in the earphone leads.

It is very easy to use, the sound quality is excellent and I get about ten hours out of a rechargeable AAA battery. I can fit 2 CDs worth of music plus a few extra tracks and could manage more if I did not mind losing a little quality. All I want now is the nice people at creative and audible to get the firmware right so I can listen to audiobooks on it too.

I have some Sony “comfort” earphones, except they are not – they sound brilliant but make my ear canals sore. They do cut the ghastly noise of loud pop music out at the gym, much better than the “over ear” ones I was using, but they are certainly not comfortable.

Fitness and some injuries have been a problem for weeks now, so with the summer holidays here, it was time to embark on a serious training schedule. Doing this while still suffering some stiffness and pain in the lower legs is quite a challenge.

Thankfully, the local gym has some good “non-impact” aerobic machines, like eliptical trainers and steppers so I am now trying to go every day (most days so far!) and do at least 40 minutes aerobic at around 150 bpm heart-rate (officially 95% of my age-related heart-rate, but I know my max is around 180 so more like 80-85%). The non-impact stuff feels great – it works better than anything to relieve the stiffness. I am aiming to reintroduce running very carefully. Yesterday I did 5 minutes on the treadmill – 3 of which were running. This was fine – no noticeable effects, though starting to run I felt like I was rusted up or something – nothing at all moved smoothly. By the end I was running freely. The plan is very slight increases until I am running well on the treadmill, then begin some gentle work on grass. Hopefully, I will be running smoothly by September.

To complete the workout, I am doing some general strength and some very specific leg and especially hip work that does seem to make a difference already.

I am also aiming to work on “recovery” as well as stamina. Orienteering requires fairly short bursts of speed and short stops so I am using more “random” profiles on the machines – do the kind of training most like the event you want to do. With stiffness problems I am also doing lots of flexibility work – this is already paying off.

I guess I have to accept that at 46, I am simply not as bendy as I used to be, and will have to work at it.

I started playing with “taf decoder” again, and decided to add a translation of the “Metar” (current weather report) as well as the “TAF” (forecast) for the airport. What we now have is

WEATHER DECODER v:1.0

Weather decoder is a php script that will run on any php enabled web server. A little simple editing will allow you to present the viewer with a list of airports. On submit, the script fetches the details of the weather for that airport from the National Weather Service in the USA and translates the coded formats to display a current aviation weather report and the aviation forecast. Although these are a specialised form of weather report and forecast (e.g. no forecasts are made of temperature or amounts of rain because these are not very relevant to aviators) they are detailed and usually accurate and the data is easily available.

The script is open source – mostly written from scratch by me, but borrowing from previous similar projects by others (details in the readme and commented in the script).

To see what it does: click here. To download the script and readme in zip format: click here

Please feel free to comment!

I have done a bug fix so it now handles RADZ (rain and drizzle) and RASN (rain and snow = sleet) correctly. I will post 0.4 for download when I get a second.

Nathan says he got three B grades for third year medicine – a very good pass – but he is a little disappointed that he did not get a distinction and is going to check the detailed marks – some others with 3Bs got distinctions.

Whatever happens, he has passed the critical exams and is on to his fully clinical phase. He comes home on Saturday for a couple of weeks working in A & E at East Surrey before going to the Falkland Islands to work for the summer (their winter!)

After the run at the Hawth on Saturday I felt OK. Then on Sunday, I was sore above each knee. Then Monday and Tuesday I was a little stiff in both legs, and yesterday and today I am in a lot of pain, mainly in my right leg about 1/3 of the way from my ankle to knee on the inside face of my left leg where the calf muscle “stops”. It is very tender to the touch like it is bruised and it hurts when I walk or jog. I have similar but much less pain on the right, in the same place.

My tentative diagnosis is tendinitis or even inflammation of the periosteum – too much too soon on Saturday I suppose, but I can’t work out why it took so long to emerge. looks like O on Saturday is out unless it clears up.