That, I think, was when I felt the slight strain, almost like stretching a muscle after exercise. Gentle, no twinge, just a bit of resistance.

By a few hours later, it was rather sore and by Sunday morning it was all locked up & painful. On Sunday arvo I was applying heat creams and a friend of ours who does sports massage came over and worked up my shoulder. I could barely get on the massage table let alone turn myself over.

We figured I’d over-exerted myself and my muscles & tendons were registering their protest. I was only getting a few hours of sleep at a time on Sunday night and the pain was as bad (if not worse) on Monday morning, so I started taking some Ibuprofen & pain killers to see if that would make things bearable while my arm sorted itself out.

On Tuesday, I made an appointment with the doc as things just weren’t getting better. The lady I saw thought it was my tendons, put me on Voltaren and sent me for ultrasounds. She wanted to check that there weren’t any tears. The ultrasound revealed bursistis in the shoulder area (inflammation) and fluid in the sheathes around the tendons. Yup, nasty, but not a surgical situation. Whew!

A few days later I called the doc as the images & report should have been in. Reception told me she’d read them and marked my case as closed ‘cos it’d be fine within a few days. Erm, no, pain persisting and in some areas getting worse. I came back and wound up seeing a different doctor who examined me and asked “What’s this lump here?” pointing at the spot where my clavicle meets my sternum.

It takes me a few days to get scheduled (maybe I was kidding myself it would settle down of its own accord? :) but then I’m back for more ultrasounds & x-rays of that spot. This time the radiologist said “Don’t wait a few days for the results to go by courier, take them now and go see your doc again ASAP.” She said she thought I might have popped my clavicle out of its joint with the sternum. Yup, that makes you feel a LOT better, doesn’t it? :)

The next day the doc took a look at the results and immediately sent me off for a CT Scan. Later that afternoon I was having my first ever CT Scan and got to see seven sheets of little images that all said I had a real issue, apparently :)

Back with my doc and the assessment is that while I’ve not dislocated or fractured anything in there, the left sterno-clavicular joint has expanded and the surrounding tissues are swollen. She finds a good orthopaedic surgeon who specialises in shoulders and writes me a referral. I call the clinic and am told they’re booked out until September but can take urgent cases by the end of August (I was calling in early August). The lady gets me to work through what happened, where I’m at and what movement/pain I’m experiencing. On hearing the news, she double books me for the next week and tells me to come with lots of reading material as I may be waiting a while.

The day comes and I’m in reasonably quickly. The surgeon checks it all out, runs me through the what/how/etc and sends me for blood tests. We meet again two days later and he confirms the likely diagnosis:

Costochondritis / Tietze Syndrome

Costo-what???? :)

Costchondritis is where the rib/sternum joints get inflamed and swell, causing localised sore spots and some pain. The Tietze Syndrome is associated with it and leads to referred pain through the nerves, typically around the chest wall and into the arm. This can often lead to reports of pain similar to angina/heart attack. Charming.

In my case the costochondritis is in the clavicle joint and top one or two ribs. It was probably brought on through a series of micro-traumas built up over time (eg: from crewing/flying hot air balloons (packing away especially), lifting stuff and generally over doing it a few times). As a result of this I’m getting pain under my shoulder blade, in the front of my chest, up into my neck, across the top of my shoulder and down my arm – all on the left side.

Coughing, sneezing and yawning can lead to rather intense pain in those areas while moving the arm feels similar to when your muscles are protesting after a hard workout. If I try to do anything against resistance (eg: lift the shopping, pull/push a door, change gears in the car, etc) then pain can be experienced too, often associated with a “nerve tingle” and/or numbness immediately afterwards.

Not pleasant at all :(

The only real solution is rest and not aggravating things by doing any lifting. As such, I’m grounded from any form of ballooning for three months or so. Not happy about that at all! :(

We’re trialling some new anti-inflammatories and I’m off the pain killers as we see where things are at. So far, not good. The pills are helping a bit but not doing a lot for removing the pain when I move my arm, etc. Will have to check with the surgeon re: taking other pills as well (would prefer not to), using a sling, etc.

This sort of thing is all very new for me as I’m normally a pretty active person and enjoy running around being involved in lots of things, doing IT work and being outside working with aviation. I’m now coming to grips with the fact that even just sitting at the computer all day is painful, let alone travelling into the city to an office. As to flying, the surgeon’s asked me to wait a while before I try going off flying fixed wing with friends (let alone aerobatics) and I shouldn’t contemplate setting up or packing up a balloon until this has all cleared up.

Bugger :(

Watch this space for more news as things develop.

This is where a spammer takes a comment from your blog and tries to repost it (usually against the same entry) in the hopes you’ll think it’s a real comment and allow it through. In the process they include a site URL that gets recorded as a link in your site if their comment gets through.

Yes, it’s the “website promotion” bastards again. These are the folks who say “Pay us some money and we’ll make sure your website gets promoted around the ‘net, gets lots of links and rises up in the search engine results.” The concept is that by having lots & lots of blogs out there pointing back at a site, it makes it look more important to seach engines plus people click through to it from the various blog comments.

First they tried to string fake messages together with random selections of words, but that was pretty easy to spot. Then they tried to make semi-real messages saying how cool your blog and/or blog post was but they got easy to spot when they’d appear against your daily twitter summary post.

So now they’re finding a random comment from a post’s history (remember, this is all done by automated systems) and re-post it so you’ll be suckered into publishing their comment. Nice one!

Of course, the other side effect of this is that on most blogging systems, once you’ve had a message published, your email address is in the clear and you can post any message you want. Hello, the doors are open, come on in and go nuts.

Fortunately most of us have spam filters that help weed these idiots out. Still, makes for an amusing moment or two when I go and check what the filters have dredged up :)

It also seems that many of the sites I visit during the day have decided that Google’s products are pretty good and are using Google Analytics as wel as displaying adverts supplied by Google.

With so many sites & people making Google a central part of their online experience. perhaps it’s no surprise that I’m frequently seeing the phrase “waiting for google.com” in the status bar of my browsers. Given it’s all free for a non-advertiser like me (so far :), I shouldn’t be complaining about having to wait, but it seems that whenever I’m thinking “Damn, this is taking a while” I see “Waiting for google.com.”

So long as it all stays free as it currently is, I’m willing to put up with it. Certainly wouldn’t want to be paying for it, that’s for sure.

Oh well, at least I had a stack of aviation podcasts to listen to under my tarmac worker quality hearing protection.

I’ve been willing to put up with the boring hassle of mowing the lawns, even when the spring & autumn seasons meant rain and grass growing at a rate you could watch all day without having to pretend you saw movement. Sadly, however, today took me over the edge. I’ve spent today mowing lawn, ripping out crap from flowerbeds & driveway edges and otherwise trying to make the space look acceptable. What makes it worse is that we’re moving out of here next week and all this is just to ensure that the place doesn’t look too run down/dilapidated when the contractors come through to renovate the place.

After a day of mowing, bending, ripping, carrying & dealing with pissed off insects & arachnida, I think the next gardening tool I buy will be a flame thrower. Screw this “beautiful looking garden” shit – it’s either paved or the place comes with a gardener who gets paid to make it look good while I get my weekends back.

Things went quiet for a while until I wrote a couple of articles for aviation magazines, one on the Albury Airshow in 2002 and the other on a session in a full motion 737 sim. They were both back in 2002/2003 and aside from various blog posts here or at Fly Me Friendly, I never really produced any further articles.

This all changed today when Shashank Nigam published my article on his very well read Simpliflying site. The article provides a background on the birth of Jetstar, its growth to date and how it is destined to consume more of QANTAS’ mainline routes & aircraft.

Head on over to Simpliflying and check out the article.

Thanks to Shashank for giving me the opportunity to gain further exposure to the global aviation world and helping to promote PCDU, it’s very much appreciated :)

When I was a kid, we used to move house every 3 years or so and the longest I stayed in one city was 5 years in Palmerston North, New Zealand. Then we moved to Brisbane, Australia and still wound up moving every year or two as places we rented were sold (DOH!).

I wound up staying in Brisbane for 10 years but kept shifting around even after moving out from my parents (actually, they moved out on me, but that’s another story :). Eventually I moved to Sydney and bounced from place to place there as circumstances changed.

After a few years in Sydney, I moved to Boston for work, then back to Sydney a few years later and then within 8 months was off to Buenos Aires for a couple of years, again with work. From there I wound up here in Melbourne where I’ve been living for 13 years, the longest I’ve ever stayed in one city in my life. It’s also appproaching the longest I’ve stayed in one country in my life.

The joys of having a kid and wanting to give him some stability, I guess.

Nykolai and I lived in an apartment for over 6 years and Kitt moved in with us there over 4 years ago. Now it’s time to box everything up again and move about 500m up the road to a place that’s on the other side of the school.

The house is full of boxes, things are disappearing off shelves & book cases, plans are being made, friends begged for assistance and a truck rented. With luck we’ll stay at the next place for a few years before having to move again ‘cos I for one am getting totally over this relocation thing… :)

He got back this evening and is currently blissed out in his bed following a hot shower and a good meal. He was also very happy to be back to a “civilised” toilet :)

We’ll be hearing all the stories for the next day or so as he returns to reality, all while making the most of his Christmas and birthday presents over the next few weeks of school holidays.

Yes, it’s great to have him back.

To say it’s amusing to read the article’s comments is an understatement. For a religion that professes to be based on love, these folks are certainly destroying that brand image.

Aside from an amusing read at 03:00 in the morning after weather forced us to cancel this morning’s scheduled balloon flight, it also inspired me to make this observation:

Religion is like underwear – it says a lot about who you are, shapes your actions and can give you a comforting feeling, but if you keep showing it in public you can get a really bad name for yourself.

Hah!

An hour or so later, I received an SMS from Steve, my partner in PCDU saying there was a problem with the podcast’s feed. Yup, the feed’s text was there but the mp3 files couldn’t download.

I ran the feed through the Feed Validator and it confirmed that the mp3 file had to have a full path, not a relative one. Damn – looks like the updated PodPress is to blame.

With a bit of effort I picked up the previous version of the plugin, deleted the current version from the site and loaded the previous version. NOTE: WordPress makes it easy to load updated plugins (and themes, and WordPress versions – for which we’re all extremely greatful :) but there’s no easy way to roll back to a previous version. Oh well.

Once rolled back, I then spent a while getting the FeedBurner feed sorted out (took a ping to get it to refresh) and did the same (ping) for iTunes. After that it was just a matter of “Check for Updates” on the podcast in iTunes and everything started working fine again.

Whew!

The lesson learned: Don’t upgrade to the latest version of a plugin without checking to see a) how long it’s been around and b) whether anyone’s hit any snags with it yet. Also a good idea to not upgrade when you’d rather be spending the day chilling out & relaxing :)

Usually I’d bang out some snide email or fax to the minister in question, often with cc’s to other ministers and the PM to boot. I’m sure many of you have done the same.

Well, guess what – while doing that may help vent some anger, it is very likely that it won’t have much impact on the idiots in question. Sad but true.

If you really want to get noticed and cause a problem, follow Bernard Keane’s guide to writing to Ministers over at Crikey. It’s so essential for everyone to read this that they didn’t put it behind the pay wall. Excellent.

So, please go and read this now, learn its simple key points and then use them in all your letter writing to the Government. It’s time to make the bastards honest and do the work we elected them for (you know, listen to the electorate, think beyond their own selves, make decisions that are for the greater good rather than the next election, etc :)