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Clio and I went to the Wachovia Center and caught the Nine Inch Nails concert on Friday night.  We really enjoyed the show, they played a wide range of material (although I admit I am biased towards the earlier releases) and sounded great.   The lighting was absolutely phenomenal.  When NIN started playing I initially thought they had a ‘bare bones’ lighting setup, which surprised me.  A few songs into the concert, 3 cool screens came down that displayed some amazing visual effects.

I found a You Tube video that shows some of the cool effects starting about 25 seconds in.

  I think the last big concert I’ve been to previously was David Bowie and NIN in Hershey around late 1995.  I also saw a few smaller concerts in Philly at the Trocadero in the the late 90s, but seeing the concert last night made me remember what I have been missing.  I am definitely going to make an effort to see more shows.

 Pic from my cell phone

I was at a customer site and saw a java app that was chewing CPU.  Using prstat -L  we saw the busy threads were 2 through 9.  Running pstack $pid/$thread showed that the spinning threads were all running garbage collection.  Luckily verbose GC logging was turned on so we were able to look at the log to see how long the previous full GC cycles lasted:

20493.297: [Full GC [PSYoungGen: 2040K->0K(240064K)] [ParOldGen: 697548K->397070K(1077248K)] 699589K->397070K(1317312K) [PSPermGen: 243883K->243054K(262144K)], 9.3868202 secs]
23490.529: [Full GC [PSYoungGen: 6063K->0K(663616K)] [ParOldGen: 1004912K->588931K(1400832K)] 1010975K->588931K(2064448K) [PSPermGen: 247384K->245927K(262144K)], 613.1687549 secs]
25069.416: [Full GC [PSYoungGen: 660290K->0K(664704K)] [ParOldGen: 961941K->1287172K(1400832K)] 1622231K->1287172K(2065536K) [PSPermGen: 246538K->246128K(262144K)], 14492.5636839 secs]

14492 seconds =  just over 4 hours! Yikes!

When I was back at the PT on Wednesday, I was given a calf massage and the PT could definitely feel a knot deep in the muscle.  He worked on it for a while. I was pretty sore after the intense massage but feel somewhat better today.  My next PT visit is Monday and hopefully further massages will help.  They also had me perform additional stretching/balance/agility drills to help correct my walking/running form.  I really like the PT team I am seeing now (the Lingelstown branch), but their facility is extremely crowded.  I’ll definitely take a good set of people over a nicer facility anyday.  They will be moving into a new larger office in the next month or two, but I hope by that point I will be finished.

My doctor also prescribed a muscle relaxer that I will take for the next two weeks to see if that helps as well.

I’m hoping the stars align and I’ll be able to start doing some aerobic exercise again on a regular basis soon.

Some other good news is that I found my iPod Touch last weekend!  It was underneath the front passenger seat wedged back behind a small case that holds the seat supports and movement mechanisms.

I had my first visit today with Mark, a physical therapist.   When deciding which PT to see, I knew Mark’s office was a bit of a hike for me, but since he was well regarded by a bunch of runners I thought it would be worth the trip, instead of just picking a closer but random PT. (The PT I had visited previously was probably fine for most situations, but I wanted to go to one that specialized in runners this time).

We started out with Mark taking a training/injury history from me.  Then he had me perform a bunch of movement and balance exercises (I felt incredible clumsy trying to do some of the exercises).  Next he took measurements of my feet/ankles and checked flexibility.  I apparently have a small leg-length discrepancy.  He also had me put pressure pads in my shoes to see how my feet distributed stress when walking.  Just as the PT I visited about 5 months ago saw, I was doing almost no toe-off. I had focused on proper toe-off sometimes during running and thought I had improved on it , but the pressure sensors showed that wasn’t the case.  I also was showing much higher pressures on my right foot, which indicates I am favoring it.  Mark also had me run outside for a few short bursts of varying speeds under his watchful eye to check my running form.

After he was finished with his observations and measurements, he said my form wasn’t (completely) horrible, but that there definitely were some areas I could  improve.  Unfortunately there wasn’t any clear clues as to what might be causing the lower leg sensations, but he recommended that I take a break for two weeks and see if the rest helps.   He thought I could try doing PT exercises without adding additional (much) stress to my calves, so I’ll try working with his team and see how it goes.

I’ve been traveling quite a lot during the last four weeks (a week in Philly, a 2 day trip to Cambridge Mass to speak at a small presentation at Harvard, 4 days in Rochester NY, and then a week back in Philly).    While in Philly I’ve been working at the Comcast Center.  The building has some neat features.  There is a huge and amazing high-definition screen in the lobby that is a tourist attraction all in itself and shows  a rotation of short clips that range from merely cool to eye-popping.  On the 43rd and 44th floors is a cafeteria that gives an incredible view of the city and surrounding area (I’m not sure if you can access the cafeteria unless you have a badge).  If you are in downtown Philadelphia, it is worth heading over to the corner of 17th street and JFK Boulevard to check it out.

Earlier in the week  I was eating lunch at that cafeteria and looked up and saw the Direct TV blimp was circling the Comcast Center, which I thought was pretty funny (since they are direct competitors).  I think it would have been ever cooler if they skinned the blimp to make it look like a pirate ship.

On nights I have been bored I’ve started walking down to the Ritz at the Bourse theater, which has a nice selection of independent and foreign films.

If you have any interest in medical books (my interest in sports medicine has certainly increase recently), there is a wide selection of medical books at the Thomas Jefferson University Bookstore at 1099 Chestnut Street.   I picked up a copy of The 5 minute Sports Medicine Consult which has been neat to look through.

I’ve been using the Akismet wordpress plugin to block comment spam and it has been fantastic.   It is free for personal use and out of over 4000 spam comments that have been posted to my blog, Akismet has only let about 20 slip through to the comment moderator panel.  Even more importantly, I’ve never seen a non-spam comment get flagged.  Without Akismet (or something similar) I probably wouldn’t have comments enabled since the administrative burden would be too much. I highly recommend Akismet to anyone looking for a comment spam blocker.

I looked into using Akismet for my company’s blog, but for very small commercial sites, the price seems a little excessive ($600/year for 5 or less blogs).

After not hearing anything back on the MRI by early Thursday afternoon I called my doctor’s office.  They had not heard anything from the hospital that did the MRI yet.  I called the outpatient imaging center at the hospital a bunch of times, but it always went to voice mail, so I left a message.  I called back this morning and reached a person who transferred me to the transcription department.  The woman I talked to there said the reason my report had not been passed back to my doctor yet was that the radiologist had not signed off on the report yet, but that she could fax over a prelimary version if I wanted it.  You bet.

My doctor called me about an hour later.  The good news is there doesn’t appear to be any significant structural damage.  The bad news is we aren’t any closer to knowing what the real problem is.  Next step is to start seeing a physical therapist.