Sleepypete's Pillow

Lol – I had serious misgivings about posting the one with the white shirt 🙂

It still fits … Just 🙂

PS I have seen batters that were rounder than I am at the moment – and they were a real pain in the butt to get out too 🙂

its always dangerous and exciting to post pics of your self on the blog.

I wish I had the first clue about this game of yours, no such thing here in the colonies

🙂 Internet still working

A few recent events have got me thinking about protection again, gotta admit it’s mostly sparked off by watching the girls in the Women’s Cricket World Cup. A lot of the girls surprise me by not using a helmet when they bat, to the point where while seeing a pretty lady’s face is a sight I definitely appreciate, it makes me wince when the pretty lady’s face is under a floppy hat instead of guarded behind a helmet grille.

At the same time, wearing too much protection can lead to the injuries it is supposed to prevent. While I was playing cricket, I’d go out to bat with the following around my person :

My helmet’s down the bottom there, with grille adjusted so a ball can’t go between visor and grille. And that can happen if the helmet isn’t set up properly. Standing up you’ll see a pair of solid cricketing pads, you’ll get a reference in a picture or two for how big they are. Below the knee roll, the vertical lines define where a series of wooden strips provide the basic ball stopping power. There’s also a Lot of fabric based padding behind the white front. The pads are held on by velcro straps and you can sprint quite happily in them.

Between the pads is the (second!) most piece of protection and that’s the bat. Ball can’t hit you if you’ve whacked it to the boundary 🙂 Saying that though, my two whacks on the head were down to ricochets from the edge, same story with the near-miss that hit my shoulder. Above the pads are the batting gloves, which is one area where protection is a fine balance against hinderance. You’ll see the reinforcement on the right glove (right of pic) and the chunkier thumb guard. If the ball bounces slightly more than expected, then the padding on the gloves is the only thing preventing a broken finger, which is an injury that almost all cricketers will have had.

Hanging on top of the bat is the most important piece of protection 🙂 Believe me though, it still hurts if you get hit there. Especially for the opposition batter I saw in a game once who misjudged a ball from our fastest bowler. A couple of minutes after being hit, he fished out the remains of his box. And then he recovered the other half of it. OUCH !

Here’s me modelling the gear, see how that pad comes up to almost my hip. Good to see my bum doesn’t protrude as much as that belly 🙂 Spot the right thumb on the lower hand, that extra padding is right in the firing line if a ball bounces slightly too much. There’s not much can be done though with one that hits the end of the thumb, batting gloves are a compromise between stopping the ball and being able to play.

Some players will also sport arm guards, thigh pads and chest protectors. I tried an arm guard but got rid of it because it was annoying and didn’t offer any protection. I have been significantly hit on the arm twice, once on the end of the elbow (bone chip occasionally locks the elbow) and once on my wrist. The blow on the wrist accounted for one of my watches …

I never wore a thigh pad because it would have restricted my movement too much. To bat well, you need to move your feet to a position that lets you get a platform for steering the ball. I’ve never been that good with feet movement though – too much power in my legs and not enough subtlety, gives me two left feet when dancing too. I got pinned more than a few times on my thigh but would have been hit more if a thigh pad had made that movement problem worse.

Urg – that piccy is a horrible example of batting craft – with the shot on show, the forearm and bat handle should be describing a straight line. It’s not because I’ve squished myself down a bit to get more in the shot. Here’s a better one :

This is before I changed top to an old cricket one and put the pads on. There’s a nice high elbow in there as I’m more in a “waiting for bowler to send ball down” stance 🙂 The position of the hands on the bat is also a lot better, although I appear to open the blade up a bit there. I’m always curious about my technique, mainly because to improve you need to know what your mistakes are so you can correct them. And without an impartial external observer, you can’t totally evaluate what you’re doing. It’s the same with my bowling, I’d love to have seen footage of what my bowling action was like pre-shoulder injury.

Finally, please spare a thought for the family and friends of Natasha Richardson, who was taken from us last night as the result of a head injury sustained while skiing. On hearing the news of Natasha, it brought back to crystal clarity the second time I was hit on the head by a cricket ball, that time may well have seen me carted off to A&E (aka the ER) as it got me in a far less solid place than the first time. Instead, it tinged off the helmet and I was able to continue batting, albeit rather groggily and with a fair bit of nausea.

If someone you know has a head injury, PLEASE please PLEASE keep an eye on them. Head injuries can be a lot more serious than they appear at first. The brain is a very fragile organ and damage can take time to show.

To close, here’s the blooper piccy taken as I was getting used to the timer function on my camera …

Oops … My defence is that I’ve never used the timer function on the camera before 🙂

PS That white shirt is probably 20 years old and both shirt and owner have seen better days. Surprised it fit around my shoulders let alone my belly !

Hello, NetChick sent me.

Good to see that your Internet is working again…at least for now.

PS Dustbusting – definitely needs to be done … And I need to put the side panel back on the main PC after taking it off to put a wi-fi card in there 🙂 There doesn't seem to be much dust inside the PC though, it's all on the outside :->

I think the interference clicks may have come in from the internet cable running past the power supply for my speakers … It’s a big chunky power supply and the cable was running straight over it. I bet touching cable to the earth on the modem was creating a loop between the psu and the modem.

The cable running over the psu was probably picking up the magnetic field and having a current induced into it and when the current was interrupted by the cable being grounded, that’ll be when a spike clobbered the bit I think got fried.

I’ve moved the cable now, it doesn’t touch that psu any more 🙂

Modem’s still going strong, Internet Bloke was actually glad to see one of that type – the newer ones aren’t very good apparently. Linksys seem good, although my dad’s one needs fixing again.

Yeah… being without the internets is death.

Oh… I cleaned up my Blog a bit so I invite you to check it out though it’s mostly just my ‘rants’ for being religious and feeling rantish.

I wonder what happen on your tech issues. Having something make noise on the speakers when you’re working with your network. You may want to try a good solid air cleaning of your machine (I highly recommend an air compressor… some caution water/oil can get in but just let it run for a bit before turning it on your PC… it does wonders and smells much less than air-in-a-can.) It’s possible you’ve got a piece of metallic dust that’s shorting something on your mainboard out.

Another thing is to consider a new modem. I know my cable modem is VERY old and I use Vonage as well as a Linsys router on the ‘inside’ and have noticed it fails at times, which is very annoying on the phone. Depending on your ISP they should replace it for free.

No post for a little while, which has been part out of lack of inspiration, part from me breaking things !

My current router annoys me because I have to power off/power on it every few days to make it go, so I thought I’d move my modem across the room to where The Next Router lives. I figured something might be a little screwy when I was plugging in the cable internet lead. When I touched plug to socket, there were quite loud (for interference crackles) clicks coming from my speakers … Not a good sign, although mysterious due to there being no obvious connection.

Anyway – to cut the techiebabble, I plugged it back in on Friday evening and … no internet. Tried putting it back where it was to start with and … no internet. So I was on Internet Cold Turkey from Friday night to Monday 🙁 And this is someone who :

Keeps pressing F5 (refresh page key) on the hit counter to see if there’s visitors.
Is permanently logged into MSN Messenger.
Has gotten used to being able to answer popup questions by Google.
Peeking on Imdb to see why I recognise that guest star.
Trolls various forums.

Internet-Bloke appeared Monday evening and proceeded to scratch his head, attempting to fix the problem by changing various leads and plugs. He got it going but it did the usual Annoying Problem thing of breaking again 20 minutes after he left. Cue a Sleepypete going a little nuts trying to get the internet going again until leaving for gaming !

No joy. But, as is usual for me and some time away from a problem, I figure out another way to attack it by the time I get home. Looks promising so far, just one connection glitch in the modem logs in the last 20 hours. Still have to see how my main PC adjusts to the change though, as it has migrated to connecting by wi-fi instead of a cable … And that was a change that caused more stress than it needed to !

I’ve also been keeping an eye on the women’s cricket, I’m still fascinated by the differences here. The women aren’t as physically powerful as the men but adjust by putting more energy in. The description “keener than kittens with wool” came to mind when watching how they pounce on the ball when fielding. However, these girls are closer to tiger cub than ginger kitten. Some excellent catching too, better than what was on show in the last England v W Indies men’s Test Match.

They also compensate by being more accurate and precise although, as in all sport, there are some more precise than others. There’s a few Perfect bowling actions on show and some of them put truth to the “has the ball on a string” saying. One coaching technique is to put a small coin on the pitch on the ideal length and line and tell the bowler to hit the coin. It’s tough … At my best I was close to being that consistent (story coming!) but only at my very best. One of the England girls would have been hitting the coin every single time. Impressive stuff and the stats equalled that.

So what happened when I did the (virtual!) coin thing ? It was a practice session at school (i.e. way back 🙂 and the fella batting didn’t really know what was about to hit him. First ball of the sequence – shapes in nicely and pins back his leg stump. Cue embarassment for the batsman and a “you got lucky that time”. Next ball, same thing. And the next and the one after that … I thought I’d go easy on him for the fifth by bowling it a little slower, which just made things worse 🙂 A little more swing, a little more accuracy and another Ting of ball on metal practice stump.

I think I made the poor fella give up any thoughts of playing cricket after that little sequence 🙂 In my defence, I will say that I had broken into the men’s team by this point and was attempting to repair my bowling action after injuring my back the season before. So my technique was probably as “pure” as it ever got and as it was practice, I wasn’t straining for extra pace, just for more smoothness.

So that’s part of what I’m getting from watching the girls play cricket, I’m kind of watching how I used to play. Since dislocating my shoulder 12 years ago, I’ve had the occasional glimpse back to how I could bowl when I was fully intact. Watching the girls gives an excellent reminder that you don’t have to be 6 foot 8 and built like the proverbial outhouse in order to do well at your chosen sport 🙂

Plus there’s a lot to be said for watching highly athletic young ladies running around a field doing something they are getting a lot of enjoyment from 🙂

PS This post will lead to another one … but I’ll need a bit of help before I can answer the question “Do women batters wear the same protection as the men”. Bit of idle curiosity triggered there and I’ll leave it for readers to wonder exactly which bit of protection I mean 😉

European servers would cause trouble. Interesting though, UK must get a choice cause one of my good online buddies was in the UK when I met him. It was hell for him to line up ‘times’ to play with us, but he did it.

Yeah… one thing I’ve always appreciated with the Paladin class was my ability to diversify which they’ve really strengthened in WotLK.

I healed from 1-63 and that was a bit of a mistake (healing is not so good for leveling by yourself as I’m sure you’ve endured with your priest). Then I went Protection (tank) spec and found myself really enjoying being the WALL everyone else hid behind. Nothing like taking 100-200 damage from something that would do 800-900 damage to someone else, not to mention I dodge, block or parry enough to take less damage than that.

Lately I’ve tried my hand at our Retribution spec which is for DPS and have enjoyed it thoroughly. Nothing like dropping a monster with 10K health in about 10 seconds.

*nod* I hadn’t heard about the 2h weapon 1handed… I faintly recall some rumors of it but that’s a pretty awesome bonus. You do need to try a Death Knight if you haven’t yet. Being a class who is used to BOTH of my status bars depleting in combat there’s something about being able to go… and go… and go and only worry about health (which they worry about very little). They are also superb at dealing damage and I pitted my lvl 61 against a lvl 63 elite last night and had him to 500 health (from 30K) before I croaked.

If you have some guides you’d like to share I’d be more than happy to accommodate you on the forum (I built the site) which is the ONLY working link on that first page (upper left). When you sign up you have to wait for an admin approval so please just use a name I’d recognize and I’ll approve you and set you up with moderator rites. Honestly having a ‘guest’ writer would help and I’d be willing to accommodate you so that the website wouldn’t be so ‘guild’ based so you could bring in your own friends as well. Actually using phpBB (the underlying software) the sky is the limit. I could give you your own forum.