The last four days have been busy. Three of those four days were spent trying to get my new socket aligned properly.
My old socket was loose on my stump, and I was wearing many stump socks to try and expand the stump to fit the socket tightly.
Bradley made a new socket for me. It was very tight, and it took an hour to get the stump seated all the way in. He worked for hours to try to get it aligned. It would feel OK, then a few minutes later is was not OK. He told me to come back the next day.
The next day we spent a farther 3 hours trying to sort out the socket. It was as if when weight was on the leg, it would change the alignment. He stacked the adjustment adapter, so there was twice the adjustment. I went home, but soon found that walking around the house was just not right. Whenever the leg would swing forward, it would swing to the right, which put lots of strain on my stump.
Also when I took a long step, and just the heel was in contact with the floor, as the weight increased the leg would rotate on the stump. The alignment changed as I walked.
If I took small steps so more of the shoe sole was in contact with the ground, the leg couldn't rotate, so the stump rotated inside the socket as the weight increased. This put torque on my hip and felt like someone was nudging me sideway.
Today I was again with Bradley for over 4 hours. He got out a laser device and checked the original alignment. the fore and aft alignment looked good, but as the weight changes, the side to side alignment would change. (Abduction) He took the prosthesis away, and cut off the end of the stump, replaced the attachment point in a different place, where the laser had said it should be. We then spent a long time aligning the leg from scratch. It got much better.
The fourth day was spent at a Computer Cloud conference. As with most conferences, about 95% was boring, and about 5% was well worth the effort. Also as with many conferences, the main benefit wasn't from the formal lectures, but what was learned over coffee with someone not connected to the conference.
At the risk of sounding brainwashed, "The cloud is the future of IT."
Huge data centers have sprung up throughout the world. Data Centers (DC) house many thousands of computers. You can rent these computers on an "as need" basis. If you want to do a spread sheet, just rent a spreadsheet computer for an hour or so. You get a very powerful computer, with someone else worried about doing backups, maintenance, upgrades, and hard drive crashes.
Companies like Google offer free word processing, spreadsheets, disc drives, and email. Other DC's offer these services for a fee.
All you need are a keyboard, mouse, and screen. Google or the DC,does the rest. This means you no longer need to buy a fancy high specification computer for your house. Your cell phone hooked to a DC has more power than you could probably ever afford for your house.
DCs usually also have very high speed internet connections. So if you have a huge file you want to send to a friend, you send it from your cloud hard drive to your buddies cloud hard drive at unimaginable speeds. On of the DCs at the conference bragged about a 24 GB/s data rate. In South Africa the average DSL line has a 375 KB/s data rate. For the math challenged, that is 64,000 times faster.
Most DCs offer the service of hooking up two separate networks ( your Hong Kong office and your New York office) together into one network. Now intra company communication is lightning quick.
I would like to do a long walk tomorrow, but I have a few tender spots on the stump end. I think a few days rest would help more than a long walk.
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