Wabbit Season April 29, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Bicycling, Moozak, Stuff I wrote.add a comment
No, I haven’t been watching Warner Bros cartoons again, but we have been hunting! Hunting what you say? Well, houses.
Let me take this opportunity to say that house hunting is a fairly depressing pursuit in the current Melbourne real estate market! Prices seem to be ballooning, most unlike my salary, which is seeming more and more inadequate as each day passes.
That said, we were out looking today, and saw a house that seems to fit the bill quite nicely. By that I mean, we both kind of like it. Usually I hate it while my wife loves it or vice versa. It’s being sold at auction, and goes under the hammer on the 12th of May. Assuming we can get our finance sorted in time, then we might finally say goodbye to this renting gig! Yippee!
It’s been awhile since my last post, so I should update the blog with what I/we’ve been up to:
- My abstract to the brain monitoring conference in San Francisco got accepted! woohoo! Now I have to wait and see if they want me to present orally – yep, that means getting up and speaking in front of loads of people far more clever than me – or sending a poster to put up on the wall that describes the work. It’s really expected that you’ll present orally at some stage in your life, so the pragmatist in me is resigned to the fact that I should just get it over with. Conversely, the optimistic scaredy-cat in me hopes that it doesn’t get accepted for oral presentation and that in time, noone will care either way. Methinx it doesn’t work that way. Let’s just wait and see!
- As mentioned above, lots of house hunting. We’re totally over renting and that besides, Amy needs more space in which to work. She works from home you see, and it can be a bit depressing when your loungeroom is your office is your loungeroom, I’m sure you understand. So, we’re outta here. It’s just a matter of when and where to!
- Also on the research front, I got a paper accepted to the European Journal of Neurosurgery! Also known as Acta Neurochirurgica. It’s their ‘local’ journal so it’s no Nature Neuroscience, but they do publish lots of work that’s relevant to what I do so it’s good from my point of view. It means that all the people who I want to read my work will get to read it, and that’s good. Or bad, if it turns out that my work is crap!! haha. The same journal have also provisionally accepted a separate paper I wrote, that I’ve spent the last couple of weeks refining at their request. They reviewed it, and decided they liked the basic premise of the work, but wanted more detail here, add some figure there or another table, etc etc. It’s a better paper now so I’m happy with the reviews I got. In the past some reviews have been frankly pretty poor, so it’s nice to get good solid critical feedback! So, that paper is now off with one of my co-authors being read and refined by him before we send it back to the journal again. If that gets accepted that’ll mean I’ll have 3 first author papers! Yeah!
- Been seeing the physio still, a couple of times a week at least for my knee. I had a strength retest at the 6 week mark, which was about a fortnight ago now. My quads have increased in strength by about 5%, and my hamstrings by over 10%! It’s hard to tell what difference it’s made to my cycling because I lost my speedo, whoops! Last ride home from work felt really good though, so I think it’s helping.
- Have organised a jam with some of the guys from work for tomorrow night (Monday). It’s been ages since I got a chance to play the guitar with anyone else, and there’s a couple of dudes at work who can sing or play the guitar and they’re keen to have a jam. I’d be up for regular practise sessions if they were, so we’ll just have to see how it goes. I’m quietly excited about that! I can never get enough of playing music….
- I’m halfway through the game ‘Phantom Mansion’ on my mobile phone! Now *that* is exciting 
- Speaking of games, I finally cracked ‘Cowboys from Hell’ in expert mode on Guitar Hero! I was being just a little bit facetious on that last bullet point, but this time I’m deadly serious. When I realised I’d finished the song, I squeezed the neck of the plastic guitar so hard while pumping the air, I nearly broke it!!! You have NO idea how hard that song was. The stars were in alignment! Minimal skill, maximal luck!
- Entries for ‘Around the Bay in a Day’ are opening again soon, and I’m going to have another go at it! I’m also trying to convince a friend of mine to do it with me. He’s proving a tough nut to crack, but I think his resolve is weaking in the face of my witheringly strong arguments for doing it Amy has decided she’s going to ride the 250km route this year (she loco!) and I’ll either do the 100km or the 210km. Which distance I attempt all depends on my friend and whether I can con him into having a stab at the long one. I’ll keep you posted…
I think that’s about it. Sorry it’s been so long since the last post. As you can probably gather, it’s been a bit crazy busy around here. In a good way though 
Hope you’re all well!
Cheers!
Radio Spam April 3, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Stuff I wrote.1 comment so far
Funny thing happened tonight… I wrote a couple of emails to a nationally-broadcast radio station called Triple M, on which a radio program called “The Spoonman” was airing, and both of them got read out!
I`m gonna have another go tomorrow night! Should be interesting
Sa-study-turday April 1, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in My outer geek.4 comments
Hmm.. if all you do is read the last bit of that heading, it looks a bit off! However, what I’m getting at is, that this Saturday evening is filled with brain-mashing. I’m trying to write a research paper at the moment, and my sieve-like noggin does its best to offload all of the more useful facts and figures (faf’s) that would help me in my quest.
So, lacking in any better ideas, I decided tonight would be a good night to restuff my head with those same useful faf’s that I constantly forget.
Mind you, I personally consider it more than reasonable that I forget the nitty gritties of ’spectral coherence’, ‘autocorrelation’ and ‘wavelet decomposition’. Aren’t they just things you learn when doing your geeky uni course and then forget? Never to see again?
Apparently not…
Speaking of research, I submitted an abstract to present some of my work at a major conference in San Francisco. I’m still waiting to hear if it got accepted!
It’d be a nice excuse to go to the US mainland for the first time and be able to claim it all on tax 
Night!
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…
