The Home of Tom & Morven

I was discussing this new doom movie coming out soon, the other night. Based on the minimum system requirements to the PC game, I’m guessing we’re going to need at least 5GHz brains to be able to watch it, and even then, we won’t appreciate all the special effects unless we have bio-genetically enhanced vision systems. Then, if you want to be able to understand the plot along the way, such that the ending of the movie ‘fits in’ with the beginning, then we’ll need to share our brain memories in parallel (such as with distributed computing) to get the jist of things.

But here’s the website of the new Doom movie, and reviews of it here on the Internet Movie Database.

EDIT: Okay so I saw it with Paul and Paul last night. Verdict: pretty average. The plot was kind of interesting (although I could tell it to you in 30 seconds), the array of weaponary was enjoyable to say the least. However, the novelty factor of the movie being based on one of my favourite computer games wore off somewhat quickly, and the movie wasn’t even as scary as the game. 6.5/10

Not entirely sure about the point of this post, it certainly isn’t going to be anywhere near politically correct.

My sister is perhaps considered to be in the “highly likely” category of getting “knocked up”. It has come to my attention that many of her work colleagues, family, and friends, are all looking at her as if she’s pregnant, and seem to want to be the first to know whether she actually is carrying or not.

I’m under the impression that my sis is becoming increasingly annoyed about people asking her about her current pregnancy status. So, without further aberration, let’s consider various indicators and tell-tale signs about how to tell if Nai has been knocked up or not. My dear friend Erin, soon to be a doctor of medicine, has been highly useful for various facts outlined below:

1. Radius of belly: This is typically understood by unknowledgeable people in the field of getting knocked up, to be the most obvious sign of pregnancy. However, it’s not. The major flaw to this parameter is that the woman could just be getting fat. For example, since my sis has moved out with her new husband, they’ve been eating themselves silly. More specifically, not actually eating themselves, but consuming large(r) amounts of food.** Erin says:
   

   not sure where I’m going with this one yet, but you’re not actually “eating for two”… really you’re eating for you and a peanut, so you only get to eat like, an extra m&m a day if you don’t want to start stacking it on….

   I don’t think Erin is aware how much crap these guys eat on a day to day basis, and multiply crap eater by crap eater what do you get? One mega crap eater. Basically, my newphew/neice is going to be a fatty, eating lots of food. This kind of information may have lead to Erin giving us different medical facts. Also according to Erin, radius of abdomen will not increase until at LEAST 13 weeks post conception (ie just over 3 months), by then they usually tell everyone. This of course is highly irrelevant as using the information on this website, you’ll be able to tell within 3 days as Nai’s mood and food consumption changes drastically. Which, leads me on to the next topic…

2. Random pubic bone fact: Erin has also told us that:
   

   if you measure from the pubic bone up towards the bellybutton, the height of the fundus (round bit) of the uterus increases at about a cm a week after 24 weeks…
   So at 25 weeks the height is 25cms, at 26 weeks it’s 26cms (plus/minus 3cm)

   So for my nephew to be able to qualify under US regulations as short enough to be an astronaut at zero years of age, it must be born within roughly 190 weeks, or 3.6 years. I’m guessing this shouldn’t be a problem. Of course, this calculation is probably not very medically justified, I just made it up to make you laugh. A little. C’mon, admit it, it made you laugh, right!? heh.. thought so!

Now below I have compiled some of Google’s Images best looking*** pregnant chicks, that Nai may or may not quassi-resemble when she gets fat pregnant.

** Amount of food: Here we consider the amount of food as a multi-parameter matrix including volume and density (i.e. mass), the effective stomach filling capacity of the food (i.e. how filling the food makes you feel, which is inversely proportional to MSG), the viscosity of the food (i.e. if it’s a liquid meal, you’re not likely to put on as much body mass due to the food’s ability to ‘run’ through the digestive system), and so forth.
*** Best looking: Here we don’t actually consider pregnant chicks to be good looking, but merely say that they are good looking for political reasons, and for their own self-reassurance, yadda yadda yadda…

Thanks to James for this one!

Click here for the link to the Dancing Hoff.

Maximum respect to Mike getting a HD in an ultra crazy exam: Photonics III !!

It was recently brought to my attention by Erin that my website photo gallery went BAAAARRRRRRRRRRR.

So, I donned my 1337 haxxing cap and debugged the situation. I had just upgraded xampp (my server package) for security purposes, and it turns out that the latest version of PHP has reference variable issues. So, how to overcome this until the devs sort their stuff out?

All I needed to do, was on line 649 of mg2_functions.php change

$name = substr($name, 0, -strlen($ext)) . "_medium." . end(explode('.',$name));

to

$name = substr($name, 0, -strlen($ext)) . "_medium" . $ext;

This in total took me about 17 minutes to work out. Sometimes I even impress myself

Sure there has been several years of ‘talk’ leading up to this latest challenge, although I’ve finally done it. I ran a marathon.

You may notice there has been a two week gap between my last post about what I’ve been up to, and it’s purely because I’ve been spending every spare moment concentrating on nutrition, flexibility, eccentricity of my legs, racing stratergy, and of course lots of last minute training.

You can go to my photo gallery of the day here. “Provisional” results can be seen here, although they seem fairly wrong by a few minutes, so I’m hoping they get fixed promptly. Here are some random statistics:

• I placed 373/1561 overall mixed, or 335/1224 overall in mens, in a time of 3:28:50.
• This places me in the top 24% overall, or top 27% in mens.
• I was 10th in male under 25’s, and 12th in mixed under 25’s.
• The winner completed it in 2:23:29, so I was 65:21 behind.
• I did it in about 46% more time than the winner.
• Stephen Moneghetti as a comparison took 2:55:59, and my time was about 18% more than him.
• The winning female runner took 2:50:32.
• I averaged about 3.5 m/s, or 12.6km/h.
• I burnt approximately 1.95 million calories.

I’m not really sure why I like running, in fact I don’t think I do. I merely enjoy the fact that every time you push your body it gets better at being pushed. Also, it’s a rad feeling being able to go for a four hour run through the Adelaide hills, making up where to go as you go. Having said that, I often go too far without packing enough water and become dangerously dehydrated, but it’s all for my new motto I like to think I made up myself: “Go hard, or GO HOME!” So anyway, I’ve been running for a few years on and off, and wanted to do a marathon for a while. I’ve done so much training that running to Mt. Lofty has become ‘boring’. I was aiming to do the Adelaide marathon this year, although ilio-tibial-band friction syndrome (left knee issues from road running on the right-side) and influenza kind of screwed me over for that, so I thought I’d go all out and cruise over to Melbourne to get it over and done with.

Friday morning: Wake up at 4:30am, catch plane to Melbourne. Go to my Aunt’s house, eat lots of food, and sleep lots, then go to bed.
Saturday: Sleep in, eat lots more, stretch, sleep some more, stretch, pick up race kit, realise there is a 5 hour cut-off time for this marathon and freak out about that for a while, eat more, sleep, stretch, eat, drink ridiculous amounts of water, then go to bed. Resting heart rate -> 103bpm. Not kidding, it was seroiusly around 100bpm. It seems I was a little nervous.
Sunday: 4:00am wake up, eat, stretch, get all my stuff together, get Aunt to drop me into city. 6am catch bus from the finish line to the marathon start line. 6:50am freak out hardcore about the fact that I’d been in a bus for fifty minutes, and thinking how much I’m going to have to exert myself to run all this way. Next time, I’m going to wear a blind-fold on the transport from the finish-line to the start-line, or just go directly to the start line!! 7:00am - get off bus into the absolute FREEZING air, around 3 deg C, with intense wind and rain. I’m wearing shorts over my little running shorts, a t-shirt over my running singlet, and a flimsy loose jumper - this is bad!!! The clouds were all grey, and no sun anywhere - no possible way I can warm up, I’ll just have to keep walking around so I at least don’t cramp up. 7:40 - decide to empty bladder - realise there’s no way I’ll be able to with the queue of several hundred people, so go for a job to find someones front yard to water dasies for them. I know it sounds yuk, but this is serious business, how can someone run 42km without an empty bladder!?

• 8am/0km: Kick-off.
• 3km: Get hit by car. Not kidding, I was running in the main pack, which was quite dense, and I realised I needed to go a bit harder if I’m ever going to warm up. That’s when I moved out of the pack, and in the process smacked my hip into the side mirror of some random car. I have absolutely NO IDEA where it came from, or what it was trying to achieve driving through several thousand marathon runners, but a massive “F^&* (*@” to whoever was driving it, I’m still quite bitter here!! Grrrrr…
• 10km: Realise I just ran 10km without even thinking, and that my left foot is slightly numb from the cold, so decide to “up the pace”. Why is everyone around me going to slow I thought, I mean I’m well aware the reasons for pacing yourself, but this is irritatingly slow. Bring on the pace. Run past several hundred people.
• 17km: Urinate behind a bush on the side of the road. Fair enough I thought.
• 18km: Realising my body is seroiusly not used to consuming high amounts of electrolytes from pb sports drinks, I suddenly become overwhelmed with an upset stomach, and took full advantage of a public toilet - a bit of an upgrade from a bush
• 20km: Start to feel tired like I usually would after a 20km training run.
• 30km: Right quads SNAP with cramp, the most intense I’ve ever had. Ever. I drop to the ground, and try to stretch, but as soon as I try to stretch the quads, the hammies snap up with cramp as well. So I try to stretch the hammies, and then the quads cramp up again.. I try switching between the two for a few minutes, with no luck. Meanwhile, I’m getting all sorts of horrified looks from spectators as I wriggle around on the road helplessly trying to stop the cramp. I figure this is exactly the sort of thing a spectator wants to see! I give up on the stretching, and resort to massage to get my leg working again - seems to work enough to get me to the next drink station, where I skip the electrolyte drink this time, and down a litre of water.
• 35km: INTENSE AGONY is all I felt from my quadriceps, like a machette being stabbed into my femur bones from the front of my lower quads. This is hell, but I love it!! I’ve never been this close to the edge of the limits of my body. My heart rate is dropping down to 160bpm, which suggests my energy levels are going down. (I mean obviously they would as I’ve just ran 35km, but they wouldn’t normally go down like this, again, not that I’ve ever ran this far before ) Fortunately for me, there was the next aid station, and I take about 400mL of electrolyte energy fluid. From here onwards, I start to see all these kids on the side of the road, dishing out lollies to the runners. I jump on this opportunity, and combined with the electrolyte drink, I get a massive explosion of energy. It was like turbo rocket boosters engaging. The crowd was becoming a lot more dense now as the course kinks in towards Melbourne.
• 39km: It’s funny, 3km to the finish line seemed like such a long way all of a sudden. I’m on an extremely fine line with my right leg cramping up again, I can feel every swing of the leg being dangerously close to causing me to drop to the road. From here on in, there are hundreds of spectators along the road, just watching us all in agony make our final few kilometres to the finish. I’m loving it.
• 40.5km: I decide to finish this run sooner rather than later, as I’m just tired of being tired. I pick up the pace ever so slightly, causing myself a world of pain. Like, as in MORE pain! Lots… lots of pain. Pain everywhere!!
• 41.5km: See the finish line, and hear what seems like thousands of people around the finish area cheering on the finishers. From here on, I sprint to the finish. I’ve never felt my legs perform under pressure like this before. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever felt my body be completely out of fat supplies to burn, and run completely on muscle conversion. In finish the damn race, grab my medal, food, and drink, and gorge myself with a bananna, orange, protein drink, and two litres of water.

Heart rate curve (click for bigger image):