Ok, so it’s official, I’m getting old. I (well, tried t0) ran 4kms today as part of our nationally held mother’s day run for breast cancer research. I noticed my knees were getting a bit tetchy towards the end of the “run” and now, some 12 hours later, I’m a lame duck!

It’s the same sort of pain I got once when we started doing longer bike rides (I’ve got an old blog about that hiding somewhere on the interweb) and it *#% hurts. We’ll see what tomorrow brings… no DOMS, but plenty of OMKH (ow my knees hurt)

There’s only one thing for it, really…. MORE RUNNING! We’ll see how that goes…

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana”

Well, a few days ago I resolved to devote all my spare time to writing my thesis. This week has been pretty good! Look what I wrote just now…

“Similarly, the shear-dependent production of prostacyclin is also independent of the glycocalyx (Hecker M 1993) (Tarbell JM 2008), highlighting the diverse and independent pathways for transduction of flow related shear forces.”

If I write one sentence a day just like that, then I’ll finish my PhD in what, 12 years? Maybe I’ll have to step up the pace a little…

Wow, it’s totally been 2 years since I posted anything to this blog! I’m amazed WordPress didn’t delete it…

A friend reminded me I actually have a blog today, so I thought I’d log in and write something. Well, today I decided to tear down my Dell D600 laptop and see why the damn thing was heating up so much. I’ve had it for 5 years now, so my chief suspect was dust.

After finding a handy disassembly guide at http://2xod.com/articles/Dell Latitude D600 Disassembly I gave up on trying to remove the bottom half of the case and tackled it from the top. Sure enough, there was a tell-tale trail of dust clogging up the gap between the heatsink / exhaust fan duct and the edge of the WLAN card housing. I gave it a bit of a tug, and a little dust came out. I hooked in there with a screwdriver, and a bit more dust came out.  I then pulled on a tendril of thick looking dust, and this came out:

Dust gremlin!

That might not look like much, but it’s about the same size as the exhaust fan duct when mashed together. Nice!

So, I’m typing this post on the newly de-dusted lappie, and hey presto, it’s running alot cooler, faster, etc etc. Maybe I’ll keep it for a bit longer yet

I just had a hunt on the web for some details about the dodgy goog(l)e logo I posted about awhile ago. This *may* be a bit of backpedalling by Google to try and cover up a whoopsie, or, there’s something I’m missing, which makes me boring, unromantic and generally lacking in creative vision!!

Read Google’s response to international outrage!

Oops, too late.

Work is madness right now. So much going on! Got meetings, projects, ideas, developments and general drudgery to deal with. Good thing I was born with a well developed apathy gland. If not, I’d be wound up tighter than a cat in a full moon!!!

It’s not often a company the size of google would let a typo slip onto the most visited page on the web, right? (don’t quote me on that, by the way).

I was cleaning out my vast store of useless files tonight, and found this little gem that I quickly screengrabbed when I saw it earlier this year. I subsequently completely forgot about it, as usual!

Googe?

Mmm, sounds tasty, right?

Truthfully, I doubt I could convince anyone to make jam risotto, except maybe my wife’s brother who has been known to indulge in a bit of molecular gastronomy. I must confess I’d possibly even give it a try – I guess it’d be a bit like milk rice pudding, but with a fruity twist!!

Anyway, I digress.  The title really refers to the fact that I had my first ‘jam’ (i.e. played music with other people, not just our cat) last Monday, and it was a blast! Oh, the Risotto thing – Tim, the dude whose place we played at, made us Risotto that night. Best Risotto ever? Don’t know about that, but it wasn’t half bad!

So there were three of us, all playing the guitar conducting an aural assault on Tim’s neighbours. There was a bit of sonic confusion going on; at times it sounded a bit like three guitars in a blender, but that didn’t stop the smiles!

Definitely looking forward to the next one! I’m keen to get a band together so we can play at the ward Christmas party… we just have to find a new singer (Tim’s heading off overseas, damnit!) so the hunt is now on. If the ward band doesn’t work out, I think I might look for a band on my own anyway. It’s too much fun to miss out on anymore! I’ve played guitar now for 17 years and only been in one official band. Not good enough!

Mark “Funky” Howard used to work at our Local Bike Shop (LBS), Omara Cycles. Now he works for a Belgian Pro Cycling team as a bike mechanic! Pretty cool, and in a cool part of the world. He’s been putting some cool pics up on his blog, some of which are of places we went to during our trip to Europe a couple of years ago.

Check it out for some Pro Tour cycling action!

 http://markfunkyhoward.blogspot.com/

No, that’s not NAP with a silent Q. It’s the Network Attached Storage box that I was investimagating awhile back. I forgot to mention that we did end up buying it! It’s a QNAP TS-201 with a Samsung Spinpoint 500Gb hard drive hanging onto all the data. I might put up a formal review at some stage, but so far, here are my experiences with it:

- Setup was dead simple. Turn it on, plug it in, format the drive using the web based interface, and start dumping files onto it! Easy peasy.

- Speed is not too bad. I haven’t done a proper speed test, but my I think it’s running at about 10-12Mb/sec on average, which is fair. Not brain-burningly fast, but quick enough for now.

- The iTunes server works a treat! Dump all your tracks into the QMultimedia folder (I created a subfolder called ‘Music’) and iTunes will find them all via your Shared music library. You do have to turn the iTunes server on first though, using the QNAP web interface.

Haven’t done much apart from that. I’ve set up the Twonkymedia server, but I don’t have a client to use with it! I tried to use Windoze Media Player 11, but apparently the only version of it that can talk to a media server is the Vista version. It’ll have to wait.

Anyhow, so far it’s all good. No problems, setup was a doddle and it’s pretty fast! Gets a thumbs up from me!