Author: alex

Categories
Running

Running into problems.

Hmmmm. Lately while I’ve been running, after a few kilometers a persistent pain shows up in my right knee on the outer side of my leg. If I stop running, the pain immediately goes away. If I keep running, it’s becomes worse, so bad I have to stop. It’s a real letdown.

I’ve been meaning to go to a doctor, but a search on Cool Running brought me to this description, which fairly well describes what I have :

Iliotibial Band Syndrome

Description:
Pain on the outside of your knee (not usually accompanied by swelling or locking). The pain may be sporadic and disappear with rest, only to reoccur suddenly, often at the same point in a run. Depending on the individual, this could happen at four miles, two miles or just 200 yards. The pain often goes away almost immediately after you stop running.

Likely causes:
This is an overuse injury. The iliotibial band is a band of tissue that begins at the outside of the pelvis and extends to the outside part of the knee. The band helps stabilize the knee. If it becomes too short, the band rubs too tightly on the bone of your leg and becomes irritated. The tightness is usually the result of too much strain from overtraining.

Remedy:
Patience. This one takes a while. Give yourself plenty of rest, reduce your miles and ice frequently. You can keep running, but cut your run short as soon as you begin to feel any pain. Cut way back on hill work, and be sure to run on even surfaces. Look into some deep friction massage with a physical therapist.

Try some leg-raise exercises to strengthen your hips and be conscientious about the iliotibial band stretch. You might supplement that stretch with this one, doing it gently but often:

To stretch the IT band of your right leg, stand with your left side facing the wall. Cross your right leg behind your left, while putting your left hand against the wall. Put your weight on the right leg and lean against the wall by pushing your right hip away from the wall. Be sure that your right foot is parallel to the wall during the stretch. You should be able to feel the stretch in your hip and down the IT band (in this case, along the right side of your right leg). Hold for five seconds and do this ten times. For the left leg, do as above, but stand with your right side facing the wall, and put your left leg behind your right.

Overuse ? Heck, I didn’t even know I was overusing it, my other knee is just fine. This knee is more sensitive, I guess…

The exercices they recommend for this are not exercises for the knee, but for the hips :

Hips and Groin
(To treat and prevent iliotibial band syndrome)
Side Leg Raises
Lie on your side, with your upper leg straight and aligned with your body. Bend your lower leg at the knee. Your lower arm should be under your head and outstretched, aligned with your body. Place the palm of your top hand down in front of your chest for support. Slowly lift the upper leg, leading with the heel, until you’ve reached as high as you can, then slowly lower it to the starting position. Keep your leg aligned with your body, knee facing forward. Don’t let your leg move in front of your body. Do two or three sets of 10 or 20 repeats for each leg.

Inside Leg Raises
Lie on your side, with your bottom leg straight and aligned with your body. Bend your top leg and place your foot on the ground in front of your lower leg. Your bottom arm should be under your head and outstretched, aligned with your body. Slowly raise your bottom leg, leading with the heel, as far as you can and then slowly lower it to starting position. Do two or three sets of 10 or 20 repeats for each leg.

Categories
TechScience Future

Racetrack memory.

Interesting post pointing to the possibility of a new kind of memory called ‘racetrack memory‘ under development by an IBM Fellow.

If this could become a reality within a few years, I agree with the author – this could change the way we look at storing data, heck you wouldn’t mind letting your camera on all day (if your batteries could follow, ofcourse), no worries about storing any kind of content anymore.

Categories
TechScience Future

Detecting Cancer Cells in the blood in your body a.k.a Medical Tricorder !

The Star Trek medical diagnostic appliance called the tricorder is not very far away anymore. In facts, it’s here.

You do need to have a labelling-agent inside you so that only the tumor-cells fluoresce, but hey, the days are still young. A few adaptations and hop, soon we will all have those gadget devices that Doctor Jim had….

Star Trek Medical Tricorder

Categories
Blog News

Tropical mosquitos in Europe

Drat ! Seems like we’re going to get some unwelcome visitors…

Mosquito virus arrives in Europe

A debilitating tropical virus carried by mosquitoes has become established in Europe for the first time.
The Ministry of Health in Italy has confirmed about 160 cases of chikungunya in the Ravenna region in northern Italy.Travellers have been advised to protect themselves against mosquito bites.The European Centre for Disease Control urged pregnant women and those with chronic illnesses to seek medical advice before visiting the area.The villages of Castiglione di Ravenna and Castiglione di Cervia have reported most of the cases.The main symptoms of the patients were high fever and joint pain, as well as headache, muscle pain, rash and less frequently gastrointestinal symptoms.One death was reported in a 83-year old individual with underlying medical conditions.

World first
Professor Antoine Flahault, who coordinates French research on chikungunya, said the Italian outbreak was a “world first” outside the tropics.Writing in the Quotidien du Medecin journal, he said the extension of the virus beyond its Indian Ocean origins was “worrying without being alarming”.He suggested that the very high density of mosquitoes in and around Ravenna had fuelled the outbreak.”The mosquito vectors (carriers) of this disease have been in Italy for several years. All we know is that increased temperatures and humidity make the climate more tropical and favour the proliferation of mosquitoes,” he said. The virologist said the situation in Ravenna was under control and measures had been taken to reduce the number of mosquitoes. Chikungunya gets its name from a Swahili word meaning “that which bends up” because of the arthritic-type symptoms that leave victims stooped. Symptoms usually appear between four to seven days after being bitten and can persist for several weeks.

There is no vaccine against chikungunya.

Categories
Gaming Windows

Bioshock – Frollick City

A smallish update for those readers who read with baited breath my Bioshock adventures – yes, you Kam !

Bioshock is really on par with Far Cry, nay, even better !!! It’s a combination of Far Cry and Deus Ex, leaving you plenty of option in how you want to kill your enemy. (By the way, you can now download an advert-sponsored free version of Far Cry and other Ubisoft titles !).

At the moment I’ve completed (I think) slightly more than half of game, I’m in Frollick City, and this is with just about every other night playing a couple of hours. Phew! It’s getting exhausting. But that’s probably also because I leave no trashcan unsearched, no machine unhacked (due to a tonic, successfully hacking something gets me extra EVE and Health) and no place unvisited; the map is really good for that, showing you stuff you haven’t visited yet. So YMMV and probably you could get a lot faster through the game if you wanted.

My psychic arsenal, because that’s what I have now, is really extensive, ranging from several plasmids (your main powers : telekinesis, wasps, ice, fire, enrage, etc) to a lot of tonics that you can use to improve your chances (more luck with hacking, armoured skin protection, a passive electric defense, etc, some 70 in all apparently, some of them improvements (version 2 so to speak)). I also bought a lot more slots to put plasmids in (you start out with 2 I have 5 now). Some of these tonics interact with the weapons you collect, there is even a whole range of tonics that you can combine to really keep up with the wrench for the more powerful enemies; I am actually hesitating in restarting (after I complete it first) and seeing how far I can get just using the wrench with the assorted tonics.

Coupled with the ‘real’ weapons that range from your trusty wrench to your flamethrower and my latest favorite, the crossbow, you have access to an extensive range of death-dealing, severely destructive means that you can combine in various interesting manners.

You know the game is good when you cuss yourself because you just used the flame-thrower to quickly finish off some splicer and then realize that you had a much more elegant manner of dealing with it (for example, you can freeze the splicer, photograph it to get some more research points -all the while hearing it chatter its teeth and complaining about the cold- and then switch to your pistol to give a coup-de-grace headshot which explodes it into pieces).Heh.

It’s still every bit as ‘dark’ as the game promises, and I still get the ‘frissons’ when I hear a spider splicer crawling on the roof and start looking for it. And Frolick City, where the mad ‘plaster-caster’ artist Cohen hangs out, is really not something for a minor… A very spine-tingling moment is when you go to a special room and
(SPOILER ALERT ! You do NOT want to read this if you haven’t played this level yet, trust me) then realize that all the statues that you passed by when entering the room are in fact splicers covered in plaster who appear in stop-motion.

Really, really scary moment there, yesterday around midnight.

Categories
Blog News

Test NL entry

Heel vreemd, mijn laatste post is niet te zien.

Testje dan maar, ineens in het nederlands.

Ho ! Nu wel – blijkbaar moet er iets mis zijn met mijn categories, als ik er eentje te veel aanklik valt ie weg.

Categories
Gaming Windows

Bioshock woes (2)

Tonight I planned an early start and finish on the Bioshock game, so I could get a decent nights sleep (I need it). When my bootcamped into Windows XP though, suddenly my Bioshock shortcut showed up as not linked (you know, the white square instead of the icon).

Whaddayanow, another problem running this game. Now my AVG antivirus (free 7.5 edition) says the bioshock.exe has a virus in it. This happened after it’s update today. Looking around on the 2K support forums I found one entry with lots of people having the same problems. It seems more to be an AVG problem then a Bioshock problem. Pressing ‘ignore’ does nothing, you still cannot start the game as the message pops up again.

The solution while AVG updates it’s virus list : open your AVG control center, and double-click your ‘Resident Shield’. De-select the ‘Turn on AVG Resident Shield selection’. Click on ‘Apply’. You can then start up Bioshock the normal way. Leave the window open so you get reminded to reactivate when done playing your game. This is very important, you don’t want to get hacked, now do you ?

Some more links

Oh and for those in the game : I just passed the Medical Pavillion and have just killed my third big daddy – fourth if you count the respawning one when going for the emergency access. It pays to search them, they always have a lot of dollars on them !

Categories
Gaming

Bioshock does not contain a rootkit.

Good to know.

Categories
Blog News Gaming

Bioshock – Medical Pavillion (small spoiler)

I’ve just stopped playing Bioshock – it’s very entertaining, and very well thought out. I’m still in the Medical Pavilion, so not exactly very far into the game, but it’s good stuff. You get surprises all over the place, ranging from splicers hiding behind corners jumping you when you pass to collecting stuff and suddenly realizing that you can hear someone else !

That is the most deranging part of it – you see, in any other game I played when a new enemy appeared, he was either silent or bellowing. Here you hear those mad splicers muttering things, sane things that are so out of scene that they become totally weird, and they wander around, not necessarily looking for you.

The most scary part so far was when in the morgue, in a dark passage to a well lit place I saw a shadow of a man working on ‘something’. Stepping back, admiring his work… ignorant of you. So you rush up out of the water and just at that moment… the light goes out(select the white text on the left if you want to know).

Hooboy.

Categories
Blog News

Bioshock woes

The community around Bioshock is in an uproar over several issues (SecuRom, Field of View, broken figurines), and I am starting to get annoyed as well. I stayed up just last night to get the game installed, and it takes a looooong time. Easely lost 20 to 30 minutes just seeing the progress bar inch forward while it consumes about 8 Gigabytes on your disk or so.

Then, after that very long wait time, you get a message that it will update the game by downloading the latest patch. Which takes a slightly less long time by itself. And then it says the downloaded patch is corrupt. Try Again ? Same result.

After four times with the same result and meanwhile long past midnight, I gave up. And guess what ? It automatically deinstalls the game so you have to go through the install process again. Grrrr.

I found a reference to it on the 2kgames forums, but no solution. I’ve asked an official question on the Take 2 Games site, so far unresolved.

Update : This morning I tried again, and surprise, surprise it worked. Let’s see if I can finally play this game!