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Sometimes, when I eat a massive Californian burrito vegetariano and drink a lime Jarritos all in less than five minutes, I get to feeling pretty full. Full enough that I can imagine my stomach bursting open and everything inside of me exploding outwards.

Summer is here f’real, and it’s doing me good. I am so lucky that something as simple as the 23.4° tilt of the Earth’s axis of rotation brings me such rejuvination. I’m back to work wrenching at the bike shop full time, I’m staying up late and waking early, and I’m returning to a schedule that brings me all kinds of health.

I’ve also started riding my bike again. Yesterday was the first day I had ridden in a little over 9 weeks, after getting approval from my physical therapist. “If something hurts real bad, don’t do it.” Riding my bike hurts, but only a bit. On my first ride back in the saddle I was imaging all these elegant ways of describing how good it felt to be cycling again, but by the time I got home all the words had melted.

But this is what it looked like, anyway.

Also, here’s another mix for the internet to enjoy. I think I’d like to make this a regular thing. This one is titled Sharp Warm Hands.

1. Dukes Up by Modest Mouse
2. Gone Gone Gone by Ghost Mice (feat. Eric Ayotte)
   {taken from video available at If You Make It}
3. Heaven’s Gonna Be My Home by The Crooked Jades (thanks Diana!)
4. The Coney Island Song by Hop Along, Queen Ansleis
   {taken from video available at If You Make It}
5. Reeks and Seeks by Oh No! Oh My!
6. Sing Songs Along by Tilly & The Wall
7. Arpeggiator Demo by Fugazi
8. The First Five Times by Stars
9. WANDA WANDa from the Katamari Soundtrack
10. Oh My Darling by Madeline Adams
11. Portions For Foxes by Rilo Kiley

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NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander touched down on the Martian North pole this afternoon. This is awesome. It was the first soft-landing of a craft on Mars since the Viking 2 landed over 30 years ago. Soft landings are awesome.

Entering the atmosphere traveling over 12,000 mph, Phoenix burned off some heat shielding slowing itself to nearly 900mph. A parachute deployed and in a few seconds the craft decelerated to a mere 250mph. It’s at this point that the little planet-hopping robot started scanning the ground below with radar and other instruments, and planning the rest of it’s own descent.

Around 3,200’ up, the lander disconnected from the parachute and began to free-fall again. Retrorockets fired to ensure proper orientation, and eventually bring the Phoenix lander to a soft landing. Awesome. The last time this kind of landing was attempted, by the Mars Polar Lander in 1999, the thing cratered.

So here’s what Mars looks like.

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As I work to regain flexibility and strength in my leg, I’m trying to learn how to walk again.

For the most part, walking around and balancing upright on two legs is performed without conscious control. We command ourselves forward and on we move, our legs smoothly keeping pace beneath us. So many muscles working in concert to propel us forward, always falling and catching ourselves with elastic bundles of fibrous flesh. .

As my leg is currently restricted in it’s freedom of motion and load-bearing abilities, the autopilot motion of walking is running up against some painful barriers. As a result my body has learned a way of walking. Partly the trained result of seven weeks crutching, and partly a reflexive aversion to pains, I’ve got quite the limping swagger. My left leg tries its best to keep rigid and straight, and my hip rises to allow it to swing out and forward with every other step. But this is no fluid gait and it does little to restore flexibility and muscle mass to my weaker limb.

So I’m trying to walk more naturally, even if it hurts a little. Making sure to bend my knee back, trying to match its swing with that of my stronger leg, these are ways I can override my body’s reflexive pain-avoiding limp. I mean, I can totally understand why pain avoidance is a useful trait for big careless creatures like myself. I just wish that I could command my leg to toughen up, get with the program, and fall in line.

There are so many motions we internalize and allow to drop below the conscious level, like walking, riding a bike, typing, putting food into our mouths. I say “allow” as if the natural state of things were that we controlled, sensed, and knew everything about our bodies and their interactions with the world, but this gives consciousness far too much credit.

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Celebrating the last of my final exams for the semester, here’s another muxtape mix. Tracks are as follows.

1. I’m So Tired - Fugazi
2. Expect The Worst - Defiance, Ohio
3. Body Below - Mirah
4. Justin Destroyer - El Guapo
5. Tiny Birds - Yo La Tengo
6. O feed us! O fend us! - Chorused the Animals of Perfect Light
7. Messes of Men - MeWithoutYou
8. The Monkey’s Back - Menomena
9. A.M. 180 - Grandaddy
10. Either Way - Wilco

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I got my cast off this morning, after seven weeks. This is what the most recent X-rays show:

The patella (upper right) still clearly has a fracture running through it, but has begun to stitch itself back together. The doctor estimates it’s about 3/4 of the way to being as strong as it was before my crash. While there’s no longer any risk of my kneecap spontaneously tearing itself to bits, the doctor recommended I don’t crash my bike again for at least six weeks. Sure thing.

While my skeleton seems to be making progress, my muscles, tendons, and even my blood vessels are going to need some work. My leg has been locked in full extension for nearly two months and all of the normally exercised flesh has atrophied, stiffened, and constricted in neglect.

Currently, I’ve got about 45° of motion in my knee, at which point it starts to feel pretty sketchy. I’m learning to tell the difference between the kind of pain that tells me my muscles and tendons are unhappy stretching, and the much more severe pain that tells me by kneecap is unhappy.

Today alone though, in a few bouts of directed stretching, after a warm bath, and after walking around town for about an hour, I’ve already gained perhaps 5° or 10° of motion. I know that recovery of full mobility is going to take a long time, and that I shouldn’t rush the process, but today was encouraging.

So happy birthday to my new leg, may it heal and strengthen as as well as nurtured flesh can.

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I registered for my Fall ‘08 classes a few weeks ago and, suffice to say, I’m not going to be taking all the classes I wish I was. It seems as though all the classes I was so looking forward too, classes required by my major, are only offered on alternating semesters, the Fall semester not being one of them. This was only compounded by my relatively late registration appointment (upperclassmen get to register first), and only looking for classes I could schedule into a 30+ hour work week.

Over on the Adventures in Ethics and Science Blog, Dr. Free-Ride gives an academic perspective on ‘Why it’s so hard to get that course you need.’

Maybe the problem is that faculty don’t teach enough classes in a particular semester? On paper it might look that way, but students may not be aware of the other requirements of our job (like scholarly output and committee work). These other requirements eat up time — and they make a difference as far as how we are evaluated for retention, tenure and promotion. Faculty who devoted themselves entirely to teaching to the exclusion of these other activities wouldn’t get to stay in the teaching pool for very long … at which point, it might be a while before their departments hired someone else with the appropriate expertise to take on the courses these altruists taught.

Until we get to a stage in our budgetary thinking where smaller classes are tolerated, there are going to be real constraints on how often required classes can be offered.

Dr. Free-Ride teaches philosophy at San Jose State U., and I can attest that the same budgetary concerns are on the minds of many faculty and students at CSU, Chico as well. The state’s budget for higher education is being renegotiated this summer, and cuts loom high.

That doesn’t explain why the classes I want to take are unavailable though. I’m special.

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I ought to be doing homework right now, but I’m listening to music instead. Here’s a short mix titled “reverse murder”.

1. Objects Of My Affection - Peter Bjorn And John
2. Dead Bodies - Air
3. The Graves of Good Humans - Cicada
4. Bright Red - Science of Self
5. Bloody Knife #1 - The Robot Ate Me
6. Knife - Grizzly Bear
7. Pocketknife - Kickball
8. Handpocket - Best Friends Forever
9. Kept Our Hands Warm - The Robot Ate Me

Uploaded to my muxtape for your education.

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I couldn’t help myself. Despite this being the last weekend before dead-week and finals, I spent far too much of the past few days redesigning my website. What started as an interest in improving the typographic elements and repairing a few minor issues gradually grew into a lesson on .css and Wordpress styling.

I was aiming for something that lent itself a bit more to the typographic elements of a blog, and would be less dependent on big grey rectangles to convey organization. Hopefully the new design works, but if you see anything misbehaving please let me know.

If you’re interested in how I came to soil my hands with the blood of the internet craft my own stylesheet, read on!
Read the rest of this entry »

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Mucking around with the latest revision of the K2 theme for Wordpress, I seemed to have botched my modified version of the fork style-set. Whoopsidaisy. For some reason the whole shabang didn’t restore from backup as kindly as I would have hoped, and it’s become apparent to me how ramshackle some of underlying structure of this site is.

I’ve been planning another redesign for the site for a little while, maybe it’ll come sooner than later. However, seeing as I have to be up for class in less than five hours, I’m going to stop trying to teach myself CSS and get some sleep.

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In the earliest instance I can remember I was maybe thirteen years old. My brother and I were at my dad’s apartment in New Jersey, glued to a computer monitor as per usual, downloading music on Napster. In the years since, I’ve never really considered myself much of a CD collector. I listen to music on my computer, and that’s how I like it.

I’ve been a member of Last.fm for over a year now, having the music I listen to on my computer automatically “scrobbled” and cataloged. Their benign data-mining makes answering the question “what kind of music do you listen to?” a fair bit easier, and allows me to see what my (participating) friends are listening to. Having confidence that we share tastes, this can be good way to find new music to investigate.

As a social network they offer messaging and the ability to post on your friend’s “shoutbox”, but this is pretty redundant and useless to someone who already has a relatively functional friends-list on another social network. Their tagging, loved-it, favorites, playlists, features? Whatever, I don’t even care what these do.

At the other end of the spectrum lies Muxtape, which is a very different kind of service. As described by the developer Justin,

Muxtape is a service for creating mixtapes.

You upload up to 12 .mp3’s which anyone can then stream them from your muxtape.com sub-domain. Look at mine for a simple demonstration, jonodavis.muxtape.com.

Dead simple to use, Muxtape doesn’t suffer from the glut of features found on Last.fm. The few additional features that are present, like customizable header color, favorites, and RSS feeds, don’t get in the way of the uncomplicated design.

Cheers to elegant, inexpensive, and DIY methods for web music distribution.

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