Brace yourselves… March 19, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Bicycling.1 comment so far
Went for another bike ride on the weekend (er, to the pub and back), and wore a brace on my knee. It helped enormously. It still let out a nasty CRACK when I hoofed it across an intersection to avoid a red light, but it cracked a whole lot less than usual.
The physio reckons that wearing a brace simulates the effect that improving quadriceps strength will have. Good news!
Tense Liquids March 16, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Moozak.4 comments
I found out one of the guys at work is seriously into his guitar playing. When quizzed about his musical preferences, he responded with ‘prog rock or prog metal’ and explained that it’s generally dudes being experimental with guitars and trying to do fancy stuff with weird time signatures and the like. One band he mentioned was called ‘Liquid Tension Experiment’. Nuts!
I asked him about Mr Bungle, but according to his definition, their stuff doesn’t use ‘weird time signatures’, more like ‘complete chaos’! 
I personally disagree, but that’s neither here nor there. It was cool to find out that someone I work with (a training neurosurgeon no less!) is a keen musician, so we’re hopefully going to jam sometime. I’m hoping he doesn’t make me look bad… I’ll have to practise my sweep picking so I can play like this guy!
Knaughty Knee March 16, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Bicycling.1 comment so far
My right knee is a bit of a mess right now. Lately any time I’ve gone out on the road bike, every pedal brings forth a buildup of pressure until – CLUNK my knee kind of resets itself and the pressure-building starts anew.
I’m seeing a physio to strengthen my quads at the moment, which is apparently the best medicine for a clunky knee. The original prescription was for 6 weeks of isokinetic muscle training, where you’re limited by a fancy machine to a certain speed of flexion and extension. It’s pretty cool actually, the machine resists you proportionally based on how hard you push and pull, so the harder you push, the harder it pushes back! The other cool thing about it is that, unlike when using a free-weight system, the load (force required to push it) is kept fairly constant from the beginning of the stroke, right to the end.
Anyway, the physio says it’s the best way to improve strength. I’ll believe her! However, when I told her about my ongoing clunky knee she said I’ll (k)need 12 weeks, not 6 as originally planned. Good thing I work in a hospital, hey!
Hardware NAS-tiness March 15, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in My outer geek.2 comments
Shopping for computer hardware is tricky. As soon as you move beyond a basic level of comprehension, you become overloaded with concerns about futureproofing, feature/cost ratios and that sort of thing. It was much easier when all you cared about was how much it cost!
Right now, I’m shopping for a NAS: Network Attached Storage device. Basically, it’s a hard disk or disks in a little box that you can connect to the network, and use it as a shared hard drive that’s always available, no matter whose computer is switched on or off at the time.
So far, there are three serious contenders:
1.) Maxtor shared storage II 500Gb
2.) Buffalo Linkstation Pro 500Gb
3.) D-Link DNS 323 enclosure (can take two disks) and a 500Gb drive.
Each one has its definite pros and cons. They’re all pretty zippy (according to the reviews I’ve read) but each one has a definite something that the others don’t have, which I’d like to have!
- The Maxtor has an iTunes server, and allows USB connection of extra disks. However, it’s HD is built-in, meaning you can’t upgrade it later on.
- The Buffalo is a screamer, but has no media serving capabilities, and also doesn’t support swapping of disks later on.
- The D-Link comes with two empty drive bays, so it’s completely upgradable, *and* it has built-in media serving capability, but the USB port doesn’t allow adding extra disks that way, as it’s set up to recognise printers only. So far, this gets my vote because of the empty drive bay feature, but not being able to plug in our existing 500Gb USB disk is a major letdown. It’s a waste of existing gear!
Why can’t someone just make the perfect device?
Midnight Musical Madness March 13, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Moozak.2 comments
I (try to) play the guitar a bit, and one of my greatest failings as a musician is my incredible lack of output. I fool about on the guitar heaps, but I ‘produce’ precious little. That’s not to say that anything I produced would be listenable, but that’s by the by.
Anyway, I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that from time to time, I’ll have these nights when I can’t sleep (you know those, right? stare at the ceiling, every tiny itch drives you mad and serves to make the insomnia worse) and my mind is all abuzz. Occasionally on these nights, my mind is all abuzz with music. Not other people’s music (I think… see my previous comment about ‘ideas cooked until well done’), but my own. Here’s the thing: In my head, this stuff sounds really cool! Well, to me, anyway. I hear melodies, sounds that could possibly translate to lyrics if I thought about them long enough, and lots of other musical phenomena that just don’t happen in my head when I’m completely awake and trying hard to write a song: key changes, bridges, etc etc.
I had one of those nights last night – I even tried to translate these wordy kind of sounds (phonemes?) into lyrics to see what words fit well.. some of them sounded pretty cool at the time, some sounded completely absurd. Anyway, I thought I was onto something. Maybe I could finally start to turn this midnight musical madness into something useful!
Do you think I could remember any of it this morning?
Mountain mayhem March 13, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Bicycling.2 comments
Kelvin’s comment about cycling reminded me of the old cycling blog that my wife and I kept while we were training for around the bay in a day, that bike ride where you punish your body over a distance of 220ish kms for dubious benefit. Well, it was in my case anyway… I suffered! Badly! Nevertheless, an adventure it was, and being the reckless type I think I’ll give it another go this year.
Since then, the cycling has continued, although my wife has kinda crept ahead in the fitness stakes. I turned into a bit of a lame duck after the bay ride, copping a nasty right knee injury, which seems to be an exacerbation of a previous posterior cruciate ligament injury I sustained in a motorbike accident. In any case, I took a couple of months off to let my knee settle down, while my wife trained like a madwoman and subsequently conquered Mount Buller, one of our local ski fields. It’s quite a climb!! Anyway, she made it to the top, ’smoked’ a bunch of people on the way up and I have to say I’m pretty proud of her!
Comedic Suicide March 12, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Crap Humour.3 comments
No, this isn’t a post about depression. This is a post to warn you all I’ve decided to put my bad sense of humour on the internet.
So I’ll kick it off with a kinda sorta funny but bad pun kind of quotey-thing I thought of while emailing someone before…
“I hate the past, it makes me tense”
Ok, I’ll go now…
And the geek shall inherit the earth March 12, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in My outer geek.add a comment
Ooerr, I’ve been having a bit of a play with the themes available in the WordPress dashboard. This one is nice, don’tcha think? Let me know if it sucks… I never did claim to have a solid sense of style!
Ok, so apart from the fact that I’m now ‘mooning the world’, I’ve chosen my new WordPress theme because it provides a convenient tabbed interface for any pages I add, without filling up the side navbar with pages, sub-pages, sub-sub-pages.. you get the idea.
I’ve put up a page to document my frustrations and successes with Microsoft Access, the database application everyone loves to hate.
Check it out, mate
Uh-oh… a second post March 11, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Stuff I wrote.4 comments
I’m on a roll here, I only just finished my first post and I’m writing a second! Next I’ll be posting links to news articles, linking to friends’ blogs and putting my innermost thoughts into the public domain.
Or, I’ll just tell you all about the party we went to last night…. A 70’s and 80’s themed 30th birthday! I went as your typical 80’s tennis nerd, complete with clear plastic visor thingy, sweatbands made from old socks and a pair of disturbingly tight and high-riding white shorts. The thing that set it right off was the pimpin ‘Eagle-eye’ sunglasses! Yeah baby! rock on. Well, it was rockin’ until I arrived and saw that three other people had the same idea.
That’s a recurring theme for me… good ideas cooked until well done, mostly by other people and mostly years before me! I’ll keep trying. Meanwhile, feeling a bit seedy from the booze. Methinx a pancake will cure my ills!
Bye!
Wot I said… March 11, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Stuff I wrote.5 comments
Yay me! I’ve got a blog. Now what? I have no plan, I’m just ‘getting hip with it’ and joining the blogging revolution. Sooooo time will tell as to whether I have anything worthwhile to say. I guess the first thing should be to explain the name….
Aikenthum… a bit of a b@stardisation of ‘Aiken Drum’, a character from the Julian May quadrilogy ‘The Many Coloured Land’. Aiken Drum was an impish Scot with a gold coat and a penchant for mischief. I identified with that, and have been using the name as my online ‘nick’ ever since. So, occasionally when I try to register or log into some website and Aikendrum is taken, I’ll pick ‘Aikenthum’, ‘Aikenglum’ or ’Aikenbum’ if I’m really running out of options! 
In this case, Aikenthum seemed appropriate because, worthwhile topic pending, I’ll be mashing my fingers on a keyboard belting out my personal brand of gibberish in a fierce bout of bloggery!
Ok, explanations over. I’ll see you at the next post!
