When I moved to England, my GP switched me to a cheaper statin, Simvastatin, which turned out to have side-effects on my muscles (a little soreness, just enough to be annoying, and the time it takes me to cycle to work went up quite noticeably), so they switched me back to Rosuvastatin, but the side effect continued.

So I stopped the statins altogether for a few months, to flush the effects out of my system, and have recently resumed Rosuvastatin; I’ve cut back on exercise for a few weeks to let my system get used to it, then will see how I get on with it.  It’s possible that I had the side-effects from Rosuvastatin the first time round, but didn’t notice them so much as I wasn’t cycling much at the time.

And the moral of that is… don’t chop and change medication just to save money; many recent drugs aren’t understood in enough depth.

(Also, this is an excuse post, for why I haven’t been doing my planned levels of exercise and don’t have exciting fitness progress to report on.)

You can surround one or more s-expressions with parentheses by giving the number of expressions as a prefix argument, then typing M-(

Further tip: if you’re at the end of the expression or expressions that you want to parenthesize, use a negative numeric argument.

Example:
You’ve just entered
sum(x)
in some programming language, and you want to turn it into sqrt(sum(x)). The cursor is just after the closing parenthesis. Type
M-- M-2 M-(
(that is, Meta-minus Meta-2 Meta-OpenParenthesis)
and it will place the parentheses around the expressions, and leave point just inside the new parentheses. Now you can move back one character (C-b), or, if you’ve switched to thinking in structure-related commands like I have, M-C-u (move up one level of parenthesis) and enter the outer function name.

Taking mechanical drive to the third axle is quite complicated, and I had already been thinking about making the vehicle into a diesel / electric hybrid as a later project. A while ago, I realized that I can treat these as “problem and solution” rather than as two problems: my plan is to keep the existing 4-wheel transmission on the front two axles, and initially leave the third axle as a trailing axle while I plot (and save up for!) the next stage, to fit an electric motor and batteries to drive the third axle.

As we discussed the project on the way to Doncaster, the plans became a little more ambitious, and what I have actually ordered is a 170″ chassis, that is, a 130 with an extra axle. This gives more room for packing in batteries under the floor, and more room for general fun and joy.

Apart from lengthening it and adding another axle, it’ll be very much the same vehicle; all the present parts will be used, apart from the chassis (which has been patched quite a few times by now; the bodywork is aluminium alloy and has negligible corrosion) and one propshaft.

Starting from the front: the front bodywork will simply transfer over, as far as the back of the doors. (The present form is a “hard top”, that is, the three-door model, with one row of forward-facing seats in the front, and the back door opening into the loadspace.) Behind that will come the middle section of bodywork from a 5-door donor vehicle, with doors and seats, and 20″ of that vehicle’s loadspace. Then behind that will come the back part (load space) of the original bodywork. The batteries and motor and controller, when I do the electrification, will probably go partly under the floor and partly under the second row of seats. (That won’t be for about two years from now, I expect; the components available then might be more compact than the current ones, so I’ve specified a versatile mounting arrangement so I can leave that part of the design open for now.) The most similar vehicles I can find on the web are described on this page — search for “Phil Martin” for the nearest. Mine will have 20″ extra just behind the second set of doors compared with the one in those photos.

I’m having everything I can think I might ever need in the chassis built into it from the start, as it will be galvanized, and welding things to it after galvanization is a bad idea for several reasons. So, although I’m not currently planning to fit a roll cage, I’m having the mounting points for one built in. The mounting for the electric drive system is some long flanges with a row of big bolt-holes in each flange, and I’ve specified a couple of jacking-point tubes to be welded to each chassis beam for attaching other equipment underneath. (The 130 or 170 has the worst breakover angle of the Land-Rover designs, that is, it can get stuck on its underbelly on a ridge more readily than the shorter ones. Here’s a video of some people taking vehicles to the limit of their breakover angles. If this turns out to be a problem, I might want to attach some small crawler tracks just below the bottom of the chassis rails, or even screw drive augers, a smaller version of the drive of this Russian vehicle.)

Now I’ve paid the deposit, and they quote a turnround of 4 to 10 weeks. The actual rebuild will be some time in the spring, as I don’t want the vehicle to be out of action in the winter (especially if it’s like last winter!).

I was surprised to find that the chords for letter combinations come to my finger memory more readily than those for single letters,

I typed this post, and the previous one, on the Twiddler.

I find I get particularly fascinated by infrastructure, enjoying tracking down and tracing power lines, with their thin or non-existent traces of wires and rows of thin shadows of poles made visible by the sharp angle of early or late sunshine.

Another kind of object that catches my eye is the tennis court, a distinctive pattern of lines that would probably be ideal for experiments in automatic feature detection. I don’t play tennis myself, and don’t have any interest in it; it’s just that I can be mapping something else and oooh look there’s another tennis court! I do sometimes wonder what an alien would make of us lot, and what aliens (if there are any) do for hobbies.

And it’s a nice thing to do while waiting for slow compiles, target reboots, etc!

Update: here’s a picture of the equipment I made. It’s made of leftover timber from the bookshelves behind it; I originally made them for a larger room, and when I moved there were some bits left over. The shiny bar is from a weights set.

I can use it for elevated pressups, let-me-ups, and seated dips. You can see that the furniture really isn’t well-shaped for such exercises!

So tomorrow I’m setting off for a week’s holiday in Ireland, and I hope to make it across to camp on the Great Blasket Island this time!

This is also a step in trying to get up in the mornings a bit earlier, and I also went out to my `oratory’ (which came with the house in the form of a summerhouse) for prayer and meditation; let’s see whether I can build some better habits.

I’m not going to the few evening classes that are on over the summer, to give me more freedom for cycling to work (I don’t like leaving the recumbent parked in town); next term, I’ll resume the ballroom dancing, and I hope resume Krav Maga, which is due to start in Cambridge later this year.