Rugged's Blog

The next big thing(s)

2006-12-15T10:13:00.000-05:00

Intersting article over at Popular Mechanics: 10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2007. Here's my take on them.

1. Bendable Concrete: Not that revolutionary. In the same arena, I'd be more inclined to expect that "Composite Bridge Decks" (see this company website for an example) will have more impact. With the surge of bridges built 50-80 years ago, many of them are due for upgrades. Bendable concrete is cool, but unless you're building a sky-scraper on the Rim-of-Fire, it's not pertinent.

2. PRAM: I'd never heard of this before, but from what the article says about it, this could be a big leap for portable electronics. PRAM=Phase-Change Random Access Memory, and is set to replace Flash memory as the standard of choice for electronic data storage (ie. iPODs, USB drives, etc.). I'm curious to see what the gains in access time will lead to in new technologies.

3. Printed Solar Cells: It's funny... solar power has been around for decades. It's one of the cleanest alternative fuels (if not the cleanest). There's no shortage of sun-light. There's next to no impact on the environment. Yet, so much of the time the "alternative energy" sector seems to be striving to find options besides solar power. Two of the main motivations for finding other alternative energies are: i) The poor efficiency of solar cells and ii) slow production. The efficiency barrier was recently cracked, making solar cells comparable to other energy conversion processes. Now a company in California has tackled issue number ii) by designing an efficient production process.

4. Passport Hacking: I think this will be just one part of a bigger issue RFID HACKING. The primary concern with passports are that foreign agencies can harvest information from you. If you want to learn more about the dangers of RFID chips containing identifiable information, check out Bruce Schneir's blog and scan through his posts.

5. Vehicle Infrastructure Integration: Sounds interesting, but I've heard so many promises of "smarter vehicles" over the years that I don't see it happening quickly. The idea of providing information to drivers to let them make choices is a good one. But we'll see how fast this technology rolls out... most cars currently on the road don't even have an "On-star" type system.

6. Body Area Network: Never heard about this kind of stuff, so I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

7. Plasma Arc Gasification: This has been around for awhile, and a plant has been operating in Japan for several years. Essentially it is a technology that allows waste (or any material for that matter) to be used for fuel. Fundamentally, nearly all material that we use in our everyday lives contains atoms/molecules that can be used for fuel (think of all the Hydrogens present in polymers/plastics). The hard part is getting them in a form where they can be used to produce energy. That's what Plasma Arc Gasification does. Let's hope the plant in Florida can overcome the problems plaguing the one in Japan. We certainly aren't going to run out of garbage for awhile.

8. VoN: Video on the Net. Never mind u-tube, or Google video. Keep your eyes on Bittorrent's recent moves to bring High-Definition video over the net. It wouldn't surprise me to see Google try something along the same lines. Until you can get High-Def video over the net, this won't be big news. But it is poised to start becoming reality in 2007.

9. Smart Pills: Little sensors that you swallow and report what's going on in your body. No probes required. Why has this taken so long to appear?

10. Data Cloud: This technology could be big step towards liberating ourselves of the personal computer. Imagine computers being replaced by terminals. You go to a cafe and log into a virtual operating system. All of your personal files, music, videos are automatically downloaded from the internet. You make a new play-list, work a bit on a report, post on your blog, and update your personal calendar. You save your files, log off, and then head home. No need to worry about emailing yourself the updated files. They're all stored online. Glorious!

New micro power source

2006-10-03T13:13:00.000-05:00

No, it's not fuel cells. Nor is it cold fusion.

It's a tiny combustion engine built on a silicon chip (story here). My oh my... to see the look on Henry Ford's face had he been told that one day his combustion engine could power an iPod for 10 times longer than a lithium-ion battery.

I wonder where you would re-fill them? I think the pumps at the local Esso may not work well.

worthwhile

2006-10-03T13:11:00.000-05:00

Reviewing my last few posts I see that I've gone awry. Ever since that u-haul post I've been bitching on my blog, whereas my original intentions were to put up something worth reading.

I shall attempt to get back on course.

counting

2006-09-11T17:43:00.000-05:00

-12 years of public education.
-4 years post-secondary education.
-2 years post-graduate education.

And what do I do now? I count things. Granted abstract objects in high-dimensions. But I count things.

If you had of told me this at my high-school graduation I might have re-thought my choices :-)

Awesome trip story

2006-07-27T16:34:00.000-05:00

Last summer my friend Riley came to town to visit some other friends. It was a short visit, but f**kin awesome to see the guy again. He did a cross-continent trip to check out some bands down in Maryland.

His vacation summary is kick-ass. If you've got a few minutes to kill and want to see some serious pose-downs, check it out:

http://www.severetiredamage.net/features/86/page1.shtml

Also, for those of you who now know the infamous Jimmi Jammz... this is the story of his beginning.

rugged

pics are online

2006-07-27T10:50:00.000-05:00

I've finally set up an online photo gallery.

Flickr has a bandwidth limitation per month, so it may take a little while to upload all of the photos I want. For now, you can check out a camping trip to NY state, Marathon running in Ottawa with Kenny, and Val's swim banquet.

There's a link to the gallery from my website: firstlastname.ca or you can search Flickr for me.

rugged.

The Toshiba A60 Satellite

2006-07-19T14:18:00.000-05:00

My laptop bit the dust this week. 9 months after the 1yr warranty expired. Bloody hell.

It had been acting very peculiar as of recently, so I naturally assumed it was something to do with Windows (I run XP SP2). I had been toying with the idea of switching permanently to Linux (I work on desktop PC that runs Fedora Core 3), so I decided to take the plunge and throw Ubuntu on my laptop. After testing the Live CD to ensure all my devices worked (which they did) I tried to install Ubuntu.

I had an extremely hard time getting it installed... the disk partioning portion of the install kept freezing on me. After finally getting it installed, the OS then kept freezing on me. At this point my suspicions of a hardware problem with the laptop seemed to be confirmed. After googling for the symptoms I was seeing (it was also refusing to turn on sometimes) it seemed that the problem was a faulty memory module. I grabbed memtest off the web, and sure enough, the laptop failed one of the tests designed to stress test your RAM.

Sweet! I thought. RAM would be easy to replace (I had worried it was the hard-drive or system board). After opening the memory access compartment on the laptop I found a single empty slot. Puzzled, I consulted my owner's manual and discovered that the base 512MB of RAM that comes with the laptop is mounted directly on the system board.

Not panicking yet, I phoned up Toshiba and asked them if I managed to dis-assemble the laptop, would I be able to remove the memory? NO. The tech person did not offer specifics, but the memory is somehow inherently part of the system board and you can not remove it. SH#T !

So, instead of paying $100 for a new piece of RAM, I need to buy a whole new system board for $500+. Absolutely ridiculous! Who thought it would be a good idea to make the RAM non-removeable?!

I've attempted to find a way to somehow disable the faulty memory module (via the BIOS) so that I could just put a new piece in the available slot but I haven't had any luck. When our tech person gets back from holidays I'm going to see if he/she can somehow remove the faulty module. Otherwise I may have an expensive paper weight on my desk.

u-haul experience (subtitle: The most frustrating 48hrs of my life)

2006-07-11T10:55:00.000-05:00

I moved from Ottawa to Montreal over the Canada day weekend. After doing some price comparisons, u-haul emerged as the leader for a 1-way move. I sure do wish I had of spent some time using google to see what kind of reviews u-haul got. Here's mine, and hopefully it will save someone from going through what I did.

On the 1st of June I arranged to have a 14ft truck for a one-way move from Ottawa to Montreal at the end of the month. I phoned a local rental center directly, and found the person very pleasant and helpful. I was informed that someone from the regional office would contact me the day before my rental with the details of my pickup location and time, which I had requested would be 6pm (approximately) on the 30th of June.

At 3:45pm on the 29th, I was contacted by a representative of U-haul, and informed that do to some unforseen cirumstances, I would need to pick-up my truck that same day by 5pm. I was not familiar with the location, and after asking the representative if it was near my current location (I specified that I had no vehicle) I was informed that it was. I got the contact information for the location I would be going to, said thank you and hung up. Proceeding to look up online where the location was, I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that it was 30km from where I currently was, necessitating an expensive taxi ride to get there. Realizing that I would need to leave almost immediately to get there by 5pm, I phoned the location. Their answering machine informed me that they were closed today, and would be closed until July 3. Frustrated, I phoned the U-haul 1-800 number and choosing the only option to speak with someone about my rental, proceeded to wait on hold for 40 MINUTES before giving up. After arriving at home, I phoned U-haul again, and after 30 MINUTES on hold I spoke with an actual person. After explaining my distress at being told to go to an office that was closed, it turned out that there was someone at that location, but that they were not answering their phone. The initial representative I spoke to had failed to mention that I would not be able to contact anyone at the office. I was then informed that arrangements would be made later that evening, and they would contact me tomorrow with a solution.

At 7am on the morning of June 30, I woke up and found in my email box a message stating that I was to pick up my truck by 8am that same day at the same location as the day before. This was not near the 6pm pick-up time I had specified in my original booking, so I phoned the 1-800 number at 7am, and despite the automatic message indicating that their business hours were 7am to 7pm on Friday, it was not until 7:20am that my call was put through, at which point I was put on hold for 20 MINUTES before I spoke with someone. After explaining that I worked from 8-5, the representative assured me that arrangements would be made, and that I would be contacted by 9am with a pickup location.

At 9am I received an email indicating that I was to travel to a location that was 25km away from my place of work, to pick up the truck. I was also told to call the location directly to arrange a time for pick-up of the truck. Upon calling the location I spoke with someone (without being on hold) and they kindly informed me that the regional office had made a mistake. There were no trucks available for a one-way move. I was told that I would have to phone the 1-800 number again to speak with someone in order to correct the problem. After 45 MINUTES on hold I informed the representative that the location had no vehicles. They assured me that they did indeed have a vehicle for me, and that the location must have made a mistake. It was at this point that they informed me that the location closed at 5pm. I informed them that I would be unable to travel that far to be there by 5pm. The person I spoke with then put me on hold while they tried to find a solution. After a mercifully short 5 minutes on hold, I was told I could pick up a 26ft truck at a location near my work at 6:30pm. I then asked them to phone the location and confirm that the truck would be there while I waited, so I would not have to endure another hour of wasted time on hold. The representative put me on hold for 5 minutes, and then informed me that everything was arranged.

I proceeded to phone the location and to my horror was told that no truck was available for me. Furthermore, no-one had been contacted by someone from the regional office. At this point I almost lost it. The person at the pick-up location was very helpful, but could find no record of my reservation, nor anyone that had spoken with someone from the regional office. I phoned the 1-800 number and after 65 MINUTES on hold spoke with the same person that had "helped" me previously. He assured me that it must be some mistake, and phoned the location again. According to him, they were just super busy and there must have been a mis-communication. After hanging up (and praying that it would be the last time I had to phone that damn 1-800 number) I called the pick-up location and YES! they had a truck there for me. It took 2hrs for me to actually get the truck (the location was very busy) but the people there were quite pleasant.

In my mind, the U-haul people need to seriously improve how they handle customers over the phone. Every person (pick-up and drop-off) that I actually spoke with was very pleasant and professional. The regional office people were not very helpful, did not take my requests seriously, and in all honesty seemed to just want to get me off the phone as quickly as possible. I can understand that they likely had very irrate people to deal with... who wouldn't be irrate after an hour on hold?

In the future, I'd only deal with U-haul if I can by-pass the regional office and deal with a specific location.

soon...

2006-05-05T08:39:00.000-05:00

First part of my Part A comprehensive complete. Did alright. The second 4hr exam is this Monday, after which I am free to begin blogging again.

soon...

hiatus

2006-02-13T10:46:00.000-05:00

My new year's resolution of not blogging has failed, as do most of my new year's resolutions.

I attempted to replace my blogging with a different procrastination tool: FreeCell. However, I'm having trouble expressing my creative side by interacting with some sh**y microsoft app, so I'm back.

HA! Creative... yeah right. However, I will try to make an effort to at least keep these entries from replacing your night-time sedative.

Catch you on the next wave.

crash and burn

2005-10-31T08:30:00.000-05:00

Laptop just crashed this weekend.

Had it running a decent size Matlab program over Friday night, Came in Saturday morning and it was constantly restarting, attempting to find a boot CD or a network boot command. Attempted to reboot into Windows. Failed. Attempted to run Windows in Safe mode. Failed.

Thank goodness for Knoppix. Managed to access all my files on the hard drive and ship them off on a USB key.

Finally managed to boot into Windows safe mode. Ran chkdsk to see if there were problems with the disk. Everything was fine... until it froze on me. Rebooted. Got the blue screen of death! with error code 0xF4 (which means "Critical Object Termination"). Google searched on that and found out it's a very BAD thing. Also wasn't pleased to find that many other Toshiba owners have experienced it too, and were less than happy with the support offered from the company.

Two days later I finally managed to re=install the original image of the software that came with the machine, after 6 tries (kept freezing). Now I have to try and diagnose if there's anything still wrong with the machine. I'm hopeful it is not a hardware issue.

r.

social contact

2005-10-25T09:55:00.000-05:00

Came across an article in Wired News talking about future trends in technology. This one blows my mind:

"What's in store? How about mapping programs that show us whether anyone we'd like to see is nearby."

It's like a mobile version of the online chat feature that shows if you are logged on. Instead, your cell phone can say where you are, and anyone you permit to can then check where you are. This is crazy. Never mind being constantly in touch with a cell phone, but soon your friends can also come surprise you. I'm all for being in contact with people. But I also like being able to remove myself from contact with people. Whereas before that meant NOT MAKING a concious effort to contact people, it may soon mean MAKING a concious effort to not be in contact with people. A subtle difference, but something I'm not used to yet.

I'd really like to know more about socialogical studies of how technology is changing the way we interact. The article has a good quote on that, in which they point out that cell phones allow us to meet with friends more often, but then people end up talking on their cell phones while out with their friends. And with Seinfeld no longer on, how are we supposed to know what the proper etiquette is?

Are these new technologies bringing us all closer? or just pissing us all off? Thoughts?

fists o' fury

2005-10-24T14:35:00.000-05:00

... my wonderfully inaccurate Karatedo nickname from my training partner. My fight record of 1-1-3 (W-L-T) doesn't seem to agree with that designation.

Everyone should take a martial arts class at some point in their lives (preferably during University). My rational is: 1) You're old enough to know that you won't be learning how to break bricks and smash boards with your hands... that's what sledge-hammers are for. 2) You're young enough that this stuff may come in handy.

I've been fortunate enough in my life to have not been in too many situations where my personal safety has been at risk. For those times that I have been, Matt and Chris have been around (thankfully). Reality though, is that at some point you may need to fight or run. It's hard to predict what I would have done a year ago, but I think it's safe to say that my odds of getting out of a bad situation are a lot better now. Simple things like being able to identify when a situation is going bad are a lot clearer since I've actually been in a situation where someone wants to kick--my--ass. Forget the referee... when someone comes at you with fists cocked, it doesn't matter that you are wearing a helmet, and that there are people around to keep things under control.

This guy wants to hurt me.

After the first few fights you stop panicking. My sensei says that once you advance beyond the basics, 80% of fighting becomes a mental challenge. It's like playing chess while someone's throwing punches at you. Bobby Fisher... you ain't gonna make it in this ring. And talk about instant feedback! You make a dumb-ass mental mistake while playing Risk, then boohoo. You get cracked in the head, you learn a lot faster.

back from the brink

2005-10-21T08:59:00.000-05:00

Wow. Two months since the last time I posted. Judging from the lack of comments on my absence, then likely I'm the only one reading this thing anyways ;-)

Anyways, I'm actually not goint to write anything with substance right now. Instead, I wanted to get things going by talking about what I will be writing about in the forthcoming days.

1. I just passed my green belt test in Karatedo last week. It's surprising to me how much my perspective on personal safety has changed since I began my training.

2. Ethics within research. As some of you may or may not know, my PhD research is on evolution in genetic networks. In somewhat misleading terms, I'm trying to understand how humans and monkeys can share 99% of the same genes, yet be quite different.

3. Changing perspective. I realize that I pay more attention to world events now than I have in the past, but still... it seems there's a lot of terrible struggles taking place in the world right now. Tsunami, earthquake, hurricanes devastating the souther US, Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti and don't forget the atrocities occuring in Iraq and Sudan.

The stage has been set. Catch you on the next wave

Mark it on your calendar

2005-07-28T09:23:00.000-05:00

We're back in business baby on October 5!

http://www.cbc.ca/story/sports/national/2005/07/27/Sports/nhl_sked050727.html

In the immortal words of Wayne and Garth
Wanye> Game on.
Garth> Game on.

and so it begins.

I think I see land

2005-07-24T15:03:00.000-05:00

If I was born 200 years ago, I would like to have been an explorer. Relying on your instincts and brains. Knowing you are going somewhere that few (if any) have tred before. Damn.

Alas, I had the misfortune of being born in the 20th century. No new lands to discover. No new places to go.

But being born in the 20th century has its perks. Running water. Plenty of washroom facilities. And let's not forget a rather large amount of scientific knowledge.

So, instead of exploring the vast expanses of the globe, I trek into the unknown nether-regions of differential equations. Where few have gone, and even fewer understand what is going on (including me). But then, after 2 years of searching... having made right turns and wrong ones... I can see the horizon appearing. It looks like land. But maybe it's one of those ocean mirages. I've been in front of the keyboard for so long that my eyes have become irradiated. If I can keep the computer programs from mutinying for a little longer we might just make it.

to be continued...

scientific programming

2005-07-11T08:35:00.000-05:00

It's interesting.

I spend probably more than 50% of my day programming or running programs. Yet I have next to no actual programming training. I took a couple C++ courses in my first year of college, where the most advanced concepts we touched on were stacks and function handle passing. Object Oriented Programming (OOP) was flashed in front of us the whole time we were there... but when your code is (maybe) 1000 lines, you don't actually put in the effort, nor learn the lessons, that would really help you become a better programmer.

After that first year of programming, I picked up Fortran (F77, F90, F95) and C, which was so different from the C++ I had been using, it might as well have been a new language. Then, along came Perl which scared the hell out of me... but fortunately a sound programmer who knows more than I, pointed me towards the wonder of Python.

Now I spend most days working with Matlab, which is pretty much C for those who don't want to take the time to write good programs AND those who like to have nice graphing utilities built in.

Through the course of my Master's (coming up on 2 years) I've probably written 10000+ lines of code. A respectable amount, but aside from some clever alogrithms and neat Math present in it, it sucks from a programming perspective.

Anything unexpected happens, it exits... no graceful exception handling here. If x is supposed to be positive, and it ain't, it goes running to mommy.
I use integers to represent everything. EVERYTHING! 0==Use algorithm 1, unless you are in function foo() in which case it means switch the sign of variable A. YUCK!

And the worst part? Matlab has all the tools I need to do proper programming in it. There's exception handling. There are structures (not as nice as classes, but better than integers) for handling parameter sets and the like.

So, I've decided to do two things. 1) Clean up my code so that I don't cringe 3 years from now when someone emails me to ask what x==0 means in one of my files. 2) For my PhD I will not sacrifice good code for speed. During development, that's fine. But when I actually consider how many times I've re-written everything from scratch because I didn't code things up smarter in the first place... well, let's just say I have a few more gray hairs now than I did.

Wish me luck. Hopefully I emerge with some sanity and my wrists still functioning.

surfs up

r.

Time travel

2005-06-22T11:27:00.000-05:00

In my endless pursuit of perfecting procrastination, I came across these two sites.

First: A blast from the past I was reading about the Internet Archive... cool stuff. I decided to look up the history of Google. Check out the OLD (Oct 2000) versus the NEW (June 2005) . Note the number of pages indexed... Google sure has come a long way.

Second: A view of the future It's been a long time since I browsed the Onion. This site is great for a couple of laughs. I especially like the headlines: "Butt-Fuck Sluts Go Wild wins daytime Emmy", "Fat Brittany chosen for holo-stamp",...
And for an interesting poke at the current US administration, read this. Kind of puts some things in perspective.

surfs up

cash cow or ...?

2005-06-21T16:50:00.000-05:00

So, I read something like this
"Compared to current technology, Nanomech storage devices offer 200 times better write performance while consuming 50 to 100 times less power." article
and I think to myself "Wow! Wouldn't it kick-ass to get in on this action early and make a fortune!"

Problem is, I'm sure there's more to smart investing than picking companies that have cool ideas/technologies. Anyways, cool technology bit.

In other news, Deep Impact is coming up on July 4. No... I'm not talking about all those crazy southerners blowing up part of their lawn with Independence day fireworks! At approximately 2am EST on July 4, the Deep Impact mission will attain it's primary objective, which is to smash a payload into comet Tempel 1 at a speed of 23,000 miles/hr and record the resulting explosion. Below is a picture of the comet taken a few days ago.

The scale on the picture is approximately 100,000 miles across. Pretty huge!

21km completed

2005-05-30T15:16:00.000-05:00

Ran in the Ottawa 1/2 marathon on Sunday. It was an awesome experience. Aside from being packed in with (guessing) 3000+ other runners the crowd was teriffic.

After running 21 km, the prospect of going 21 more to do a full marathon is not that appealing. I think I'll stick with this reasonable distance for a while.

For those interested, my time was 2:00:25 (just barely missed sneeking under the 2hr time). Something to strive for next year!

Go Canada!

2005-04-23T14:12:00.000-05:00

Went to the Canada vs USA IIHF hockey exhibition game last night in Quebec City. Great game, although losing it with 4.5 seconds left hurt. But the night was a guaranteed success after the start.

The girl singing the National anthems forgot the words to the US's, tried again, still couldn't remember. Ran to get the words. Got back on the ice, slipped and fell flat on her ass.

You gotta feel bad for her.

Check out the story here or here

Still too bad losing... but I have not laughed so hard in a long time.

Super refrigerators!

2005-04-21T14:18:00.000-05:00

Damn those people down at NIST are cool (no pun intended). They've come up with an amazingly simple way to cool larger than nano-scale objects to less than 1 degree above 0. Why is this amazing? because the fridge's themselves are nano-scale devices. Quoting from the article at PhysOrg

This is roughly equivalent to having a refrigerator the size of a person cool an object the size of the Statue of Liberty

Apparently there's lots of applications too for sensors that are very small, but need to be cooled down alot. It would be cool if they could embed these things in CPU chips and then we'd see some serious over-clocking!
Or better yet, somehow merge them into beer bottles and you'd have one frosty cold one!

Black holes do not exist?

2005-04-15T12:06:00.000-05:00

So first off, I'm going to start writing about cool science stuff more often. LB has the political stuff covered, MacBitch has the cool stuff covered, so I'm left with geeky science. Read on at your own risk!

Interesting article (click here for Nature's report on it) I came across. Black holes have been studied, theorized, and written about for so long, I kinda figured that they were irrefutably known to be real. Not so according to Dr. Chapline. He actually has a pretty cool argument for why they don't exist. I don't follow all of the details, but essentially it spawns from the fact that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are in contradiction with each other in some cases. One such case occurs at the edge of black holes where gravity and quantum effects are both prominent.

Sidenote: Usually they don't conflict with each other because at small scales Quantum Mech is important, and gravity is negligible, while at astronomical scales gravity matters, but QM doesn't. (gravity==General Relativity)

He argues that Quantum mechanics should prevail, and hence there is no singularity in space-time (aka blackhole). He develops an alternative explanation for what happens, and has some evidence to back it up. Basically his alternative is that where a blackhole would be, there is instead a dark energy star. It still possesses a large graviational field (like any normal type of star), but something crazy happens near the event horizon (boundary of the blackhole/dark energy star) where there's a quantum critical shift (no idea what that means!).

Anyways, the attraction of the new explanation is that you don't have places where all of our usual laws of physics break down, such as the problem of information being destroyed in a black hole; things work out okay for a dark energy star.

r.

Quebec is the place to be

2005-04-14T09:39:00.000-05:00

... if you are a student.

Tax season is upon us, and am I ever happy that I get to file in Quebec! I figure it's saving me close to 2K compared to if I had to file in BC. Unfortunately federal tax is still quite high, but can't do nothing about that.
Unless quebec separates... hmmm. Maybe the Bloc should make the tax code part of their platform. It might sway voters like me who are very self-absorbed.

AND

In other news... guess who's going to watch Team Canada take on the US in pre- World Championship action next week? That's right baby! F**kin eh! (that's for you MB)

survived

2005-03-25T15:11:00.000-05:00

Survived fight night. Finally tally was: 0-wins, 2-ties, 1-loss. All-in-all, pretty happy with that. The last match (which I lost) I was so bloody exhausted it was unreal. The fights only last 90 seconds, but they are draining.

The first fight was kind of funny. It was against a green-belt (2 levels up on me) and he kept coming in fast with his kicks. I resigned myself to having to block them with my shins, and MY GOD, they were bruised the next day. I think it must have hurt his legs too, cuz he stopped trying it pretty quick.

Couldn't get my hands on a digital cam to take pics of the damage, but I'm sure there'll be further opportunities.

surfs up

r.