Little Trolls

Hey friends! Long time no post. I know, I've been battling the pollen and pressure changes. For most people this is just an annoying time when the eyes itch and the sneezing seems nonsensically endless, but for a few of us it means: migraines.

I've "suffered" from migraines all my life. Not as bad as those poor folks who have to seek medical emergency attention, but I've had my bouts on the merry-go-round, as they say.

If you've ever had a migraine (anyone can have one, its just their frequency that makes them chronic) then you know that there's headaches...and then there's migraines. Let me tell you, it's not fun, and unlike a headache, if you've had one, you don't forget it.

Let's do a bit of learnin' shall we? (Why? Cause after seven bleedin' hours of holding my head, I'm awake, it's 1:00am, and I can't sleep! That's why!)

Scientifically, there's four phases of a migraine. Let me put them into a lay-speak perspective:

Phase 1: Prodrome Phase
Technically this is a period of irritability and fatigue which is usually unexplainable, and is frequently accompanied by yawning, mood swings, and insomnia. Similarities to normal daily activity can make this particularly hard to spot.

In layman's terms: You feel GREAT!!! You don't know why, you are really tired, yet you have TONS OF ENERGY!!! You're bouncing around the room, yet the slightest misaligned object, nosey coworker, or stuck pixel, will send you into a flipping conniption fit that borderlines rabid festering, complete with foaming and consumption of massive quantities of liquids. In other words, the only thing worse is a pregnant lady with a craving for something she can't get.

Phase 2: Aura Phase
Technically this is a period immediately following prodrome, where the individual experiences signs indicating a migraine is about to occur. This usually takes the form of optical hallucinations, which is why it is called the "Aura" phase...but if you ask me it should be called either the "Point of LSD" or the "Satanic Ritual Phase."

For those of you who haven't had a real migraine, let me draw you a picture. Following your wonderful prodrome phase, you'll suddenly experience a sensation like your head has been filled with glass. Nothing will seem 100% focussed, and you'll begin to see things. Each person's experiences are different, and you soon learn what things mean what. Like for instance, if I get tunnel vision and pinpoints (tiny bursts of light like twinkling stars) I know a migraine's coming and it's gonna suck. However, if I see a narrow trapezoid patch in my vision, filled with static (like an untuned TV set) which only appears when both eyes are open, I'm in for the mother-load. This is how I know there must be something worth living for in life, because when these things hit, you'd do just about anything to unscrew your head.

Phase 3: Pain Phase
Hey kids, do you like violence?

It is usually at this point that the fun starts kicking in. You're getting a mild headache, but you manage to put up with it. Your behavior is a bit odd, but then you try to sleep and it only gets odder. You're restless. And slowly, like some kind of medieval torture game-show, the little bulb of your play oven warms up, and you're seein' the fireworks! Close your eyes, and you'd swear there's a tiny troll stomping across your head, driving steel nails into your skull with a rubber mallet. (Savor that vision for a second. You can almost hear the little grumbles.) The aptly-named "pain" phase reaches a point where your head is pulsing with pain, and just about anything could happen and you wouldn't care. At the point where pressing your skull and groaning doesn't help, you're now in a state of zombie, complete with moans, glazed eyes, and maybe drooling.

For no apparent reason, you find comfort in the strangest of positions. Once while in college I had a severe migraine and spent about six hours standing, leaning like I was in a hurricane, staring at a wall with nothing in my head by the repeating words "make it stop!" Another time, I found myself standing in my bathtub at six in the morning (apparently so out of it that my body was going through my morning routine all by itself). Scientists say that this is the body's way of keeping control while the brain is wigging out. Personally, it'd be nice if I could stay in the damn bed!!!

This part can be really scary, as the pain is so strong that what's left of your rational thought is split between wondering if yer going to die, and making up prayers to God for your salvation from the torment. You'll find yourself actually begging out-loud, quietly, for the pain to stop, and it's not uncommon to breath heavily, almost like panting.

At some point you pass out, but yer still awake and conscious. You just don't remember what happened. It's kinda like waking up from a dream you can't remember, suddenly finding yourself conscious even though you never really went to sleep at all. You know you've had a migraine, but you feel more like you've got a bad hangover now. You're extremely tired, shaking, and though your head is still splitting, you find it easy to crawl in bed, close your eyes, and go to sleep. What's happened to your head is so extreme that the cortexes of your brain associated with your senses will randomly sputter sensations without cause. Your ears will ring, you'll have a acrid taste in your mouth, an ammonia smell in your nose, and splotches of light will pulse faintly in your vision. If you really cared, it might be interesting to think that all that strange activity was your brain trying to repair itself and reset, stumbling across a thousand random thoughts and sensations that had just previously been exploded throughout your neural net like charged particle emissions.

Phase 4: Postdrome Phase
Technically, this is the post-migraine period, where symptoms slowly go away. Sometimes referred to as "migraine fallout."

Your migraine over, you wake up the next day feeling like you've just been through an incredible ordeal, like waking up the day after you've had a car accident or something. You feel okay, hungry, dry, and your stomach is a block of wood. You have a mild throbbing headache, and as the day goes on you slowly feel worse, and your headache gets worse, too. No matter what you do, the only thing that will make you normal again is sleep. As you suffer the day away, you will eventually reach a point when your body will let you sleep again, and away you go. Next day, you're back to normal (or as normal as normal gets).

The good news is, if you wake up after a migraine and feel terrible, you're okay. Just another wonderful life experience that you got lucky enough to get stuck with, and you probably won't have one again for at least a few weeks, if not months. However, if you feel euphoric and light-headed, it's time to see doctor. That little brain-disco you went to last night just blasted away some of your little gray friends. Not good.

So now that you've read all that, you're well on your way to experiencing your own migraine! Enjoy!

Now if you'll excuse me, there's some fallout I need to enjoy...

Evolution of Insanity

Boy I tell ya. I work for a company where they give lots of vacation hours, and now that I've got a huge stack of them ('cause I'm such a company slug) I can't make up my mind what to do with them! The days are passing by, it's getting harder and harder to save money when each week brings new cool things to buy, and if I don't make a plan now I'll likely get stuck on some projects that have me too busy to use it! Then I'll end up being forced to take it all at once at the end of the year!

I do have two small trips planned in mid summer, though, and I'm hoping to get somewhere for Christmas this year. That still leaves me with nearly a month of vacation left over...Grrr...

The things people complain about, right? :)

One suggestion was that I start taking off days of the work week. Like, take off every Monday next month. That would be kinda cool. There's perks to sticking around the office Friday, but Monday totally blows 'cause of the horrible commute and everyone trying to get going again after the weekend. I could just kick back and relax, or do something I want to do, while everyone else rats around.

I could also pick a time to take a big vacation. I failed to get up to New England this past year for the Fall, so this would be a great opportunity. I'd also like to take a trip out to the west coast, to Monterey, where I used to live.

The problem is funding. I'd rather not chalk everything up on the ol' credit cards, and lately I seem to have been on a bit of a spending spree. Oh well, I'll figure it out.


In other news....Evolution and Aliens.

Like I've said before, I spend a bit of time dabbling with science fiction, and wondering what the future will be like. That of course sometimes tips onto the subject of aliens. That, and extra-terrestrial life.

There's an interesting argument going around about what aliens will actually look like. Sure there's all that creepy stuff from horror and sci-fi films, but what happens when one takes into consideration evolution?

The problem really depends on how you view the process of evolution. Geerat Vermeij, a paleontologist who spends a bit of time thinking about this, believes that aliens will actually end up looking a lot like us. I follow this point of view probably more than any other, though probably not as strictly. Anyway, the theory is that evolution creates animals and plants based on the needs of the environment. Given that life is predicted to only be found on planets with environments similar to that of Earth, it can be logically construed that the same challenges will face organisms living on the alien world. While exact likeness is statistically probably unlikely, similarities are sure to abound. Many things are likely to be very similar, such as plants being predominately green, due to the biological trends of photosynthesis and the development of chlorophyll.

On the other side of the argument is the theory that, if the time-line of the Earth could be rewound, evolution would evolve wildly different than how we know it. This is a theory promoted by the late Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard biologist who also spent part of his time thinking about this stuff. Gould, and those who follow this theory, believe that evolution is entirely random, and that the challenges that faced our evolutionary ancestors could be resolved in a number of ways. The fact that we are the way we are is purely due to the particular random path our evolution took. If evolution started all over, it is entirely possible that things could turn out completely different.

Of course, the problem with the later theory is that there's no fossil proof to support it. We can see life evolving in the fossil records, but in truth more often than not we see creatures mutating into new forms, and survival of the fittest cleaning things up. If there were multiple possible solutions, those solutions would evolve right along side the known solutions, and not only would there be fossils, but there's a very good chance that we'd see more examples of alternate evolutionary solutions coexisting in the same environment. About the closest thing we have to an example of this happening at all might be the existence of creatures such as bats and birds. Both have developed flight as a way of overcoming the challenge of height and distance, yet at the same time it can be argued that both bats and birds fly but they developed these abilities out of different needs.

So what do you think?

All I know is that if we one day make contact with aliens, and they turn out to be just as screwed up as us, I'm nuking everything...

Personally, while I believe evolution will lead alien life down similar paths as ours did, I don't believe that alien life will be "human." I'm intrigued greatly by the idea that sentient life could take many other forms, leading from the same creatures we see around us that, for lack of a better description, "just didn't make it."

The fossil record shows that human evolution nearly ended in disaster several times in our primitive history. At one point there were almost too few of us to form a viable gene pool. (If you ask me, "almost" is being optimistic.) So what would have happened if primates had died off, or primitive man went extinct? Who would be next? This is one reason why I enjoy the concept of anthropomorphism so much. The idea that other animals could evolve into erect, sentient creatures, is a fascinating idea, and personally I believe makes for more interesting people...

Guess we'll just have to wait and find out, huh?

Web Comics 4 You

Since this blog is partially for talking about stuff that interests me, I thought it would be good to maybe do a few random blog postings about things I like to do. Who knows, you might read this and say “Hey! I do that too!” or “Whoa, dude, yer #@&!*%$# nuts!” or more importantly, in the spirit of blogging, “Hey, that’s cool! I need to check that out!”

So here it goes.

I’m gonna talk about my favorite comics. Not comic books, comic strips. I’m a comic-strip fan, and I read probably two dozen different titles religiously. Don’t tell my boss, but while I’m checking the morning email at the office, another browser is busy poking through this day’s comic updates! :)

Comics are not just interesting because of the stories or laughs, either. A lot of times they are very in tune with current events, or help examine social or physics problems, and they are also usually taking advantage the newest publication technology. From the later, in a way comics, or rather web-comics, have become a medium which sort of symbolizes the trend of this information age. Without going into anything from my first blog posting...I’ll move on.

Here’s some of my favorite web comics, definitely in no particular order. I hope you’ll find them as enjoyable as I do.




Ozy & Millie is a fun, down to earth comic mainly focused around two young kids: Ozymandias Justin Llewellyn (Ozy for sanity), and Millicent Mehitabel Mudd (Millie, because it’s quicker to yell). There’s a whole slew of interesting main characters, and just reading their short bios can hook you in.

Ozy and Millie aren’t your normal kids. Aside from the fact that the author (D.C. Simpson) has taken an anthropomorphic license with his characters, Ozy and Millie are two philosophical kids who just like to have fun while examining the weird quirks of the world in their own child-like way.



Unfortunately Ozy & Millie as a comic is hard to describe, so I urge you to go experience it for yourself. I suggest either jumping back a month to get some ground on the current storyline, or going back to the beginning (it’s worth it). DC Simpson has been drawing Ozy & Millie for years, is in a couple newspapers, and has a bunch of books out.






(One Over Zero)
One Over Zero is a very interesting (and sometimes silly) comic that has sadly ended, but has about three years worth of strips. It was done by the mysterious author Tailsteak, and it’s a creation comic. By “creation comic” I mean it starts out with nothing, yep blank page, and builds from there, taking the whole Adam & Eve approach. Well, Adam & Eve, but as you’ll see, it starts out horribly wrong and only gets worse! Not only does the author manage to accidentally kill off his only main character some ten strips in, but the readers are left with a talking rib, rebellious eyeball, and a giant molecule called Manny, who all somehow have to get along in the comic.



While the comic is funny, it’s also intellectual, as the characters and author tend to get into arguments about creation, physics, sociology and all kinds of other nutty venues along the way. So, while this comic may have completed its storyline and ended, it’s still available on the web, and definitely worth checking out.






Free Fall is the kind of comic that will drive you nuts, make you burst laughing, and keep you coming back for more! Probably one of the first online comics I began reading, it is ABSOLUTELY worth your time!

Free Fall is a hugely popular story-based online comic surrounding three main characters who live in the future. Sam, an ethically-astray alien who wears a spacesuit to look human, Florence, an artificially created canine engineer with high ethics, and Helix, a spherical robot who’s missing a few circuits (if he ever had them to begin with). The story starts out with Sam and Helix finding themselves accidentally receiving Florence in the mail. She was supposed to be headed to a mega-corporation plant to be an engineer, but wound up here instead. She finds herself morally and physically stuck with Sam and Helix on a colony world, and spends her time between keeping Sam out of trouble, and preventing Helix from pressing the auto-destruct button on their ship, the “Savage Chicken.”


This comic, too, flops back and forth between down-to-earth humor, and philosophy, with a healthy dusting of good ol’ science fiction.


So that’s a few to get you started! Hope you like them! Maybe later I’ll post some more.

Black Holes, Science Fiction...and Oranges???

Those who really know me, know one of my passions in life is exploring and theorizing the possibilities of the significantly-beyond-now. Also known as: the future.

I like to consider myself an avid science fiction fan, modest creative-thinker, and to a mediocre degree, author. For this, I find myself highly qualified.

1. I have a degree in Astronomy.
2. I've spent more time in an observatory than I'd like to admit. (Sometimes actually observing...)
3. I've had night-long discussions with fellow astronomers and egg-heads about theoretical physics...
4. I've seen Star-Wars.

Okay, so what about the oranges?

Well I was cooking my dinner tonight, which consisted of a delicately simmered duet of chicken breasts, smothered in a special blend of soft spices, with some lemon, and a bit of orange. While I was peeling said orange, I was reminded of a lecture I attended about a year ago from a leading astronomer who was studying the shape of black holes.

Curiously, black holes aren't always round. Didn't know that? Keep reading, it gets better...

Turns out there are basically two kinds of black holes (that we know of). The kind that spin, and the kind that don't.

As we know from physics, things that spin tend to get flatter. The Earth is a good example, as is the Sun. So is clay on a potter's wheel if the potter walks off to discuss quantum singularities while the motor's still running...which I hear they do a lot...

Anywho, back to the black holes.

A scientist by the name of Karl Schwarzschild spent some time in 1916 playing around with Einstein's field theory equations and came up with a little thing we astronomers like to call the "Schwarzschild Radius." Basically this is the distance from a massive object at which any mass cannot avoid collapsing to a gravitational singularity. In plain-speak, it's the point at which an object's own atomic forces cannot keep the object from shrinking any smaller. Our own Sun is kept from imploding under its massive gravitational force, by the outward force of the fusion reactions inside it. If it weren't for this outward force, the Sun would keep crushing itself smaller and smaller until it became what we astronomers call a "singularity" which is a fancy name for a zero-volume thingy where all the mass went.

So if you had a really massive object...like, hmm...a black hole...the forces causing mass to collapse in would be so great that there would be a point at which any mass would collapse towards that massive object. This is the Schwarzschild radius.

Still with me? Great!

Okay, so we know black holes suck things into them. That's not correct phrasing, but pthtptpt!

We call black holes that don't spin "Schwarzschild Black Holes," because they need a name and "Schwarzschild" is cool-sounding. :)

Actually, they're called that because there is a clearly defined point or radius at which matter traveling towards the gravitational center of the black hole both cannot escape, and cannot avoid being crushed into the singularity, despite its own atoms protests. Schwarzschild black holes are great to work with, because they are nice and docile and don't do anything fancy that messes with normal equations...like spin.

Unfortunately, it is theorized that most black holes spin. We believe this because black holes are formed from massive objects, called stars, which were once spinning. It's very hard to stop an object as massive as a star from spinning. You either need another equal-mass star...or a lot of tiny objects...like...trillions upon trillions upon trillions upon trillions of them... That's another physics issue to talk about later, though.

Okay, so we call rotating (spinning) black holes "Kerr Black Holes" after another famous (well, not so famous) scientist, named Roy Kerr, a New Zealander who got this particular bit of fame in 1963.

Roy Kerr is famous for developing some math equations, known as "Kerr metric," that described the geometry of spacetime around a massive object, such as a black hole. The math will kill brain cells and drive you insane, but from the fingerpaint perspective it's cool stuff.

Get to the point.

Okay, so the point I'm getting at while peeling my orange is that black holes actually deform as they spin. Why is this significant? Well, we all consider black holes to be...well...holes... In a Schwarzschild black hole, that's a pretty good lay-speak way of explaining things. However, in a Kerr black hole, you have a ring. (Trust me, this is a lot more fun when beer is involved...)

Okay, so why a ring now? Well, a funny thing happens when a black hole spins. You see, there's this thing call the "event horizon" which is a catchy term for a spherical boundary at which matter and light can no longer escape the gravitational pull of the black hole singularity. This has been popularized over the years by countless science fiction films, and is probably the part about black holes people know best, and actually get correct. Again, there IS NO HOLE IN A BLACK HOLE!!!

When a black hole spins, it develops two event horizons, actually. One is known as the event horizon, and the other is something we call the "Stationary Limit." The stationary limit is another spherical boundary that defines where an object can not only avoid dropping into the black hole, but remain stationary. You have to be going at the speed of light to make this happen, but we won't split hairs. The key here is that in a Schwarzschild black hole the two horizons are one in the same, while in a Kerr black hole they diverge. The Stationary Limit actually bows out at the equatorial point of the spinning black hole, while at the same time touching the poles of the event horizon sphere. It kinda looks like this, if you could draw it:




Wait, Shoobie...What happened to the ring?

Turns out that a spinning black hole's singularity becomes stretched around it's angular axis (the point in the center) and forms into a ring singularity. This is where the hard-wood physics in most people's brains breaks down and they either get really violent, or start drooling. Just don't send me any hate mail, okay?

What does this have to do with shape, Shoobie? This was supposed to be about the shape of the black hole!

Okay, so you may not be able to see an event horizon, or a stationary limit...but you CAN see the effects of it. According to the laws of particle physics, both horizons will have a photon sphere. A photon sphere is a spherical plane where photons gather, either because they're orbiting, stationary, or just entering the black hole. To tick your brain, photons that enter the black hole traveling WITH its spin (that is, traveling in the same direction as all the stuff the black hole is dragging around it), the photon will nest itself in the inner photon sphere, at the event horizon. If it's going the other way, it will circle the stationary limit horizon.

To an outside observer looking at this really bright object, the whole thing will appear flattened. So there you have it. A flat black hole...sans all the explanation of the physics. But wait, I haven't finished tormenting your brain yet!

Here's the cool part. If you could travel FASTER than the speed of light, you could theoretically enter the ergosphere (the space between the stationary limit and the event horizon of a spinning black hole) in a Kerr black hole and according to some theories, you could venture along a path which would allow you to avoid colliding with the singularity at the center, and potentially emerge somewhere else, like another universe, or at a time millions or billions of years in the future. If you want to get really funky, you could theoretically position yourself such that you can achieve time travel, owing to the strange effects of the spacetime warp around the event horizon of a black hole! Neat, huh?

Now...before you go sending me emails about how crappy this post was, bear in mind that it's nearly midnight (again) and I'm too tired to be buggered to go make sure my line is straight through this rant. Now go away, before I explain how you don't have any mass! Good night!

Boredom...

I’m bored. I bought a new ironing board today, and I was excited about it. That’s how bored I’ve been lately. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s the weather or something, but everything’s been very dull and repetitive lately, and I’ve found myself lazing about doing nothing, dreaming about doing even more nothing.

I attribute the problem to a lack of stimulation on two accounts.

1. The entertainment industry (both TV and film) has served up a lot of jack-squat recently. There’s been nothing that has really got me interested. About the only thing I turn on the tube for is nature programs, Battlefront on the History Channel, and endless reruns of “Who’s Line is it Anyway?” which although one of my favorite shows...gets old.

2. Gaming.

I’m not gonna argue about the entertainment industry. I don’t foresee any great upcoming events or shows. Even the new Discovery series “Planet Earth” turned out to be mostly a disappointment. If the entertainment industry can’t provide me with entertainment, I’ll just go somewhere else!

Okay, so...somewhere else is my computer. Which don’t get me wrong, it gives me hours of entertainment in the form of writing, surfing, drawing, 3d-modeling, etc....but a guy’s gotta have his mindless slaughter. All work and no carnage makes Shoobie...very very bored!

So what’s up with the gaming industry lately? There hasn’t been a good new game out in probably six months! At least. In fact, many of my core games that I play frequently are over a year old! I DEFINITELY don’t want to get into a rant about how heavily piracy has actually hit the gaming development community, but what I will get into is the lack of quality in what has been put out recently!

Let’s see. I won’t list the games I’ve bought that are almost a year old or older (like FEAR, SIN, Call of Duty 2, etc). Games I’ve bought in the past few months that are new...

Deus-Ex: Invisible War – I picked this up through Steam for $14 ‘cause it looked cool in the preview snaps. Believe it or not, I never played the original Deus-Ex, so I figured it was about time I got a hint about what this cult classic was all about. Boy was I robbed. Okay, the concept had merit, I was truly impressed by the idea and storyline. However, Eidos, the makers of DE:I, chose to use the Unreal engine to make the game. I have nothing against the Unreal engine, it’s a cool gaming engine that has seen incredible success, but truth be told, Unreal isn’t the world’s best engine for making FPS interactive games. Deathmatch, yes, but when you slow things down the curious, visual and physics intense nature of an FPS, it totally sucks. The interface is very difficult to use, even when you get the hang of it, and at the best of times the game just isn’t anything stellar in both graphics, action, intrigue, or wow-factor.

Okay, so I lost out on $14, so what? No biggie. Although I kinda would have wanted a game that stuck around a bit longer. I played it for a week, and haven’t touched it since.

Medieval Total War II – I’ve never been a fan of the Total War series. There’s two reasons for this. One, even my better-than-average machine couldn’t run it very well, what with all the massive battles, and two, you practically have to BE a military genius in order to kick butt.

Against all my internal processes, I went ahead and forked out the $50 (yes, fifty bucks) for the game, and waited for Steam to get all the files to my machine. I have a brand new machine now, which is a heck of a lot beefier than my last one (which still wasn’t bad) and so this time MTW:II played smoothly, even under the most massive battles. I was happy. The graphics, soldier models, and weapons physics, were top notch, and it really was very trippy getting down on the ground in the battles and pretending to be a general in some famous battles. Although you would assume otherwise, the landscapes and man-made features (like castles) were almost the opposite. The landscapes weren’t very impressive when one takes into account the technologies available today, and the buildings looked like they hadn’t received the same update as the soldiers had for the second MTW release. Sorry, but a fuzzy-shaded box with a slanted roof, doesn’t cut it for a house anymore. It did in the dawning days of Mechwarrior, but not today.

Strategy is what downed me on this game. The world-map view is where you really spend most of your time, because the battles get so petty and repetitive that you get bored with them very quick. Plus if you took the field every time, it would take you about 6 months to win the game. The world-map game-play reminds me a lot of Lords of the Realm 2, which is a game I really loved, so this part was moderately amusing. However, sooner or later yer gonna drop into the big battles, because let’s face it...that’s why you bought a game like MTW:II.

Aside from very minimal training on how to use the interface and command troops, you aren’t given very much instruction on how to actually be a general. Sure the helper dude gives you some tips like “Don’t charge your cavalry into a spear-wall, Sire!” but you’d have to be comatose not to realize that. So unless you were born the reincarnated figure of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, or Benedict Arnold, you pretty much end up making lines of foot soldiers, with archers behind them...wait till a huge mosh pit forms, then charge yer cavalry in and pray.

Personally, while it is nice that I can learn to become a great medieval general by trial and error...I’d rather the game train me to be a general. Just like a nobleman’s son would have been trained by military advisers in medieval times.

So why was this disappointing? Well, aside from a graphics update, it’s still the same game.

Well, I’m off to break my boredom by cooking some dinner. Lemon-pepper chicken aught to do the trick. I wonder if I have any chicken in the freezer...?

Pant, pant, pant...

My second blog posting almost didn't come...

I recently purchased a bicycle. I haven't had a bike since before I finished college, and in that time, even with my other athletic ventures, I've grown insanely out of shape. Okay, not "insanely" per se, but perhaps more along the lines of "pathetic." It's been a while since I've had my heart-rate up this high. Yes, I'm single, too...

So any-who, I bought a bike with the intention of riding several times a week to help burn off fat and get a good cardio workout. I got the bike two weeks ago, and the weather has been terrible, up till this weekend. I've had three days to ride, and all of them so far apart my body isn't coping very well. I just finished my longest ride in probably 5 years...about a mile.

On the plus side, I did get a really cool bike that is rather unique. It's made by Dynamic Bicycles, a US based company that makes shaft-drive bikes. Yes, that's right...SHAFT drive. As apposed to chain drive. It's a pretty neat concept that has been around for many years, but has been hard to obtain and expensive to own, up till now.

Here's the bike I got. It's called the Outback Elite 7:



It's full suspension, with a front disc brake (caliper rear), 22" frame, shaft-drive with a 7-speed gearbox transmission (which Dynamic claims is comparable to 17 gears on a 24 speed bike).

There's a cool little java video on the site, showing how the shaft drive mechanism works, and you can swivel the 3D image around to get a good look at it:

So how good is it? Well, I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I've had a lot of bikes before, both cheap and expensive. What I can tell you from my amature viewpoint is that this is a very well built bike with quality components that fit together really well. Receiving the bike via mail, I had to assemble it, which took some time, but everything was easy. The instruction manuals for the various components and the assembly were written in clear English.

The ride is very smooth. I was endlessly skeptical at the beginning, but after my few rides I am pretty happy with my purchase. As you're peddling, you can change gears using a grip-shift mechanism on the right handle which ratchets you up or down through the gears, same as on a chain bike.

The only difference is that there's no chain clunking away, no grease, and little chance of gear-slippage. If you're keeping a constant peddling rate, gear changes are smooth, however if you're really hammering it, trying to struggle up a hill, the transmission doesn't change easily and you can feel it slipping a little. Sometimes you have to let up a little so that the gears can change. This isn't really that big of a deal, though. One of the nifty things about the transmission, though, is that you can change gears without peddling. So if you're stopped, and find you accidentally forgot to down-shift to an easy start gear, you can just twist the grip and bang, yer all set! Same while coasting down the trail.

I was a bit anxious about the 7 gears. I mean, I've had bikes with 32 speeds, and going to a 7 speed bike seemed like getting a kids bike. However, two things come into play here.

1. I realized I never really used all those gears anyway. I kinda went from whatever gear was easy, to medium, to hard. Didn't really bother which one it was.

2. I'm not Lance Armstrong.

When you ride one of these bikes, you'll quickly notice that the 7 gears really do feel like they cover a good chunk of the gear range on a normal bike. I'd say it's about the middle slice. The 7th gear isn't as tough as I'd like, nor the 1st gear as easy, but there's enough gear range to have a good ride. This is a mountain-bike after all. Speed isn't the name of the game. For me, avoiding sudden death by tree or heart-attack is the name of the game. :P



For those who are really interested, there is an upgrade available from Dynamic for an 8 speed transmission, which gives a slightly wider range of gears. I thought about getting it when I got the bike, but decided that I should experience the new technology before making a $200 decision.

All in all I think I've made a sound buy, and am happy. Sure, I could have bought a conventional bike and received those extra gears and all, but then it wouldn't be unique. I like unique.


On to other news...

Yesterday, as I said in my first post, I journeyed to IKEA.

There's an IKEA in Prince William County here in VA, but from where I am (Sterling) it takes about an hour to two hours, depending on the traffic, weather, and any construction that the government is spending money on for those long lonely roads that really need to have their shoulders in perfect order...

The good news was that it was a beautiful day out! Best weather we've had in months! Sunny, warm, no wind, no clouds! It was awesome! One of those days were you just open the windows and cruise, feeling all warm and good about everything. It was especially good because it's been months since I could get my baby out on the road and really open 'er up, flex that muscle.


Winter is one of my favorite seasons, but the driving sucks. All that ice and salt really puts a damper on things.

Anyway, the trip to and from IKEA was awesome. IKEA, on the other hand...well let's just say I would have better spent my time not getting out and just making a big loop back home. I set out to find some more of these plates I got from there, but they didn't have them anymore. I also was looking for a new lamp for my upstairs but they didn't have anything I liked. I did get a few new cereal bowls which were cool. They're plain glass, and I think they were really meant to be cooking ingredient bowls, but they look cool with cereal in them, and they're big. I hate small bowls that you have to make 20 refills before you get full.

So IKEA was a bust, but at least the day was fruitful insofar as I had a great drive!

Now I need to go lay down and whimper as my muscles cringe in tormented sorrow......ow....

Let there be blog! And there was...

A good friend put me on to Blogger, and since it was a good idea I decided that it was finally time to get my own Blog. While I'm still attempting to sort this new communications outlet out...I suppose it's customary to do something interesting in one's first post... Well, to be honest, I can't think of anything interesting to do. I don't have any videos or cool pictures to show at the moment. I feel rather behind by not having my own blog. Having one seems to be the trendy and "normal" thing to do, but to be honest I haven't really had the desire to post anything to the web. Then it occurred to me that all this time I have been observing the internet and its communications culture as a bystander, letting things happen without my own particular impact. While some might consider this basis for a complex of some sort, I prefer to think of it as conscientious abstinence as a result of curiosity.

The problem in our current social system is that it suffers from an inherent and potentially fatal flaw in its structure: namely the degradation of information which by all rights should not be degradable, and the illusory originality commonly known as individuality. These are the chinks in the mechanism of information transfer and share that all too easily trigger synchronization in our present social structure. This is sometimes referred to as ‘acts of creation in the name of consumption.’

Blogging is a prime example.

In every society there are certain personalities that are sought for. Characteristics sought by the system itself. Most people are completely unaware of this phenomena. In the vastness of the Internet, people unknowingly are searching for information which jives seemingly uniquely with their own particular understandings. As they do so, they are drawn together, driven to disseminate and inherit information evenly amongst themselves. The experiences and traits of one, become equal to all. They do this because they are subconsciously driven towards the notion of collective thought.

There is an interesting perception that there are those who exist purely because the mediums they seek exist. War exists, and therefore so do the soldiers and observers. Alternatively this can be viewed as ‘war exists such that soldiers and observers may exist.’ The same can be said of the Internet. The network exists, therefore there are those who are the creators, and those who exist because of it. This at first appears to hold true when one considers the behavior of the Internet. However, the reality of the situation is that Internet users are really one in the same. Human beings naturally tend to localize upon features which appeal most to their own lust for security and safety, and paradoxically, their own individuality.

Oddly enough it is the search for unity of thought that may ultimately end in Man’s destruction. As more and more people flock to sources of so-called “right” personalities, society grows ever closer to the satisfaction it believes it needs. However, at the same time this is occurring, the very act of unification sterilizes the populace, thereby destroying the organism of Man from within. It is, after all, the uniqueness of the individual that separates the creature of humanity from the machine. As an example, mankind’s quest for artificial-intelligence tends to indicate that creativity and individuality are the hallmark of sentience, and yet at the same time we as humans actively pursue that which makes us uniform.

What does this all mean, you ask? It means that in order for people to continue being individuals in an age where individual traits can be so easily indexed and shared, and information is so readily accessible, people need to be self-motivated towards their own individuality and not that of others. In short, be yourself.

So now that I’ve filled your head with a load of words that will likely cause insomnia, frantic fleeing from this blog, or whatever...I’m gonna go to sleep. Because it’s like, now midnight, and I’ve just filled a page with text for the sheer heck of it, and because I have to get up super early tomorrow to get a head start to IKEA.

And BTW...If you think this post was crazy, try living in the head of the person who wrote it!