Slice of Chaotic Life

The daily life of a celibate middle-aged man.

New laptop

Posted by Itlandm on May 25, 2012

With the Black Beast rebooting randomly and the reserve being a Windows Vista machine that has a challenge playing Sims 2, it seemed a good time to get a laptop again. The old ones are broken or outdated, although I am sure children in Africa would be thankful for the newest of them. Well, some children in Africa. Not all parts of Africa, I suspect.

Anyway, Asus N56V.  It is pretty good, although it doesn’t have a SSD but an old, slow hard disk. Having 6 GB of RAM helps, though. This is particularly nice for Sims 3, which needs a lot of RAM to run large neighborhoods. It can use the hard disk (or SSD) as “paged memory” or “virtual memory”, and with SSD the speed of this is actually acceptable. But there is a weak link when saving games, where it only uses physical memory. When I have played a neighborhood long enough (longer the smaller it is), the game runs into this limit and crashes with an Error 12 instead of saving. Saving frequently seems to help for a while, but after a couple more days the neighborhood is lost forever. You can still export your favorite families from the game and import them in another neighborhood, and they will keep their stuff, but all their friends and history will be lost. So, more RAM is good. Probably, unless there is something else to mess things up.

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Computer troubles

Posted by Itlandm on May 24, 2012

So the quad-core is in trouble again. It suddenly reboots every few minutes when I play a game, even a browser game. (In fact, browser games in Firefox seem to explode it faster than Sims 3, which lasted a quarter of an hour.) It takes much longer to blow it up with reading and writing in Opera or massive copying of files, and it seems to not restart at all when left with just the Folding@home client (using 25% of the processor, on my machine.)

The symptoms are quite similar to before the power supply melted down last time. This one should be a little stronger, though, and the temperature monitor does not indicate a problem. Still, it seems too much of a coincidence that this problem shows up shortly after the temperatures approach tropical. (It was around 30 degrees C in the room – that’s 8 degrees below a fever, for you anti-metrics. ^_^)

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Sluggish summer

Posted by Itlandm on May 23, 2012

The sudden summer heat has made me slow down. The disturbing part is that I don’t notice this myself. When I am out walking (and jogging short stretches), I feel like I keep my usual speed. But Runkeeper is not fooled. Every 5 minutes it informs me of my distance and speed, and both are a little less than they used to be before the heat wave.

I like to think it is the heat, at least. After my gut flora grew back to somewhere in the 80-90% range of normal, I have gained two pounds in a week and a half, or so. The good news is that I am no longer quite as hungry. At least this answers the question of how athletes can avoid starving to death.

 

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Summer, suddenly

Posted by Itlandm on May 22, 2012

Until yesterday, it seems to me, the temperature was “pretty mild for March”. Today: “Just right for July.” This will take some getting used to.

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On the road again

Posted by Itlandm on May 17, 2012

After three days with minimal exercise – basically only the walking that is part of my commute, about half an hour a day – I was getting rested and restless at the same time. I was aware that my glycogen reserves were almost certainly full and any carbs above the basic needs would just be floating around as blood sugar until it could get converted into fat or burned off. So in the afternoon, I took a rather long walk again. Well, an hour and a half is pretty decent, I think – I burned some 800 calories even though I jogged very little.

As expected, my pulse stayed fairly low. It was not anywhere near record low even when I started, but it held up great. And after an hour and a half, I was less tired than I usually am after one hour. I am pretty sure the glycogen is involved in the low pulse, not sure about the tiredness.

Of course, as soon as I came home, I drank a couple glasses of Pepsi. ^_^ All the sugar you eat right after exercise is stored in your muscles, or that is the impression I get.

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Rainy day

Posted by Itlandm on May 16, 2012

Rain is pretty rare here on the south coast of Norway. So I take it as an opportunity to not actually walk or jog today. This is kind of intentional – although my walking shoes are watertight, I have decided in advance to not walk or jog when it rains, since I anyway should take the occasional day off and these are the best for it. Well, except in the heat of summer I suppose. But that seems pretty far away – except for a couple days after my cardiologist visit, it has been pretty chilly up till now.

It feels kind of strange to sit out two days in a row, but I may well need it. And at least my glycogen reserves should be fully rebuilt after this!

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A day off from exercise

Posted by Itlandm on May 15, 2012

My knees hurt and my legs are stiff from moving too fast without warming up properly. I have reached the age where even my warm-ups require warm-ups. I am sitting out a day.

Conveniently, my digestion is also upset. I seem to react much more strongly to xylitol (the natural sweetener) than I used to. Xylitol is actually a sugar, but is not digestible by humans. I guess my intestinal flora is a bit confused at it too. I used to chew xylitol gum and eat xylitol candy in moderation but pretty much daily during my previous intestinal flora, but after the reset from the broad-spectrum antibiotics I have to be more cautious, it seems. Hopefully it will rebuild soon.

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The tooth is reattached

Posted by Itlandm on May 11, 2012

I went to my regular dentist, which picked out the tooth (this is one of the two wholly synthetic ones, after all), cleaned the spot where it had been sitting (I kind of made this an issue), sterilized the tooth and glued it back on. Cost me barely $200. Between the oral surgery, the various heart tests and artery scans, and now this, there’s a bit of maintenance. But by Norwegian levels, it is not hideously expensive. We don’t have universal insurance for dental works, so that’s the actual price. For other health expenses we get part of them covered by the state-run health insurance. (Technically it is not a tax, but most people think of it as such, since it is mandatory. In any case, I have definitely paid my part so far.)

To be honest, I had the tooth fixed two days ago, on the 9th, but forgot to write about it then. It is much easier to write when there is something to whine about than when something is fixed! A human trait, I still have some of those… ^_^’

My upper jaw still hurts when I wake up from sleep, for some reason. Perhaps I gnash my teeth in my sleep? Let us hope that is not a predictor of my final sleep! In any case, it tends to improve quickly after I get up. And my nose no longer smells like a decaying zombie – that’s bound to be a good thing!

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Blistering

Posted by Itlandm on May 10, 2012

Evidently I made a mistake on Sunday (for a change! ^_^) When I took off my shoes and found blood on my socks, I showered the broken blister for a while, dried it with a clean paper towel, and slapped antiseptic salve, gauze and skin tape on it. This was not ideal, I have found from later reading.

When I grew up, broken blisters were a fact of life, and only sissies whined about them. But these days, it is a quite serious condition, it seems. This is due to more aggressive, multi-resistent bacteria which have spread throughout most of the world over the last decades.

So far, I seem to be doing well enough: There is only a small red patch around the wound in the morning, although walking a lot makes it larger. It is not healing, or at least very slowly: There is still a little red on the gauze each morning and afternoon when I change it, although I think it may be less today.

Perhaps I should go to a doctor, have the wound re-opened and then closed professionally. But 1) there’s probably still a 4 week wait for doctor appointment unless one is at the brink of death, and 2) clinics are where the superbacteria gather. So for now I am just following it warily, dressing it twice a day, and not walking/jogging more than an hour at a time and only in waterproof shoes when it rains.

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Tooth smell

Posted by Itlandm on May 8, 2012

The smell of tooth bacteria, dental plaque, caries, that kind of stuff. Don’t know how it smells? Rub one of your teeth with your finger before you brush in the morning and sniff it. Icky! How do I know? Well, for one thing, I have been shoving the loose tooth back in place when it tried to fall out for two days now. Also, this smell now fills my nose, especially when I swallow, all day since sometime at work. Probably related to the previous problem, but somewhat disturbing in itself.

Probably related to these: A light headache (I would guess the bacteria have crept up in the lower right sinus again) and a feeling of lump or swelling near the top of the throat, also on the right side, probably also courtesy of our bacterial visitors. Luckily it does not seem to impact breathing at all, neither through the nose nor mouth. But quite distracting anyway, especially with my history when it comes to breathing.

On the bright side, it got better after slowly consuming a cup of tea with honey. Mm, honey. Presumably good for your health, recommended by Solomon. Our natural source of fructose. Don’t eat too much of it, says Solomon. I think it was Solomon, it is definitely from one of his books in the Bible. Jonathan, King David’s BFF, also discovered the benefits of honey during protracted battle. Unfortunately he had to die, but for most of us honey is likely to prolong the life.  Besides, it is tasty and filling. And it smells better than teeth.

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