04.30.06
Posted in General
at 2:28 pm
Have you ever been googling for something somewhat hard to find? Maybe, say, lyrics from a song in the credits of the movie you just watched to find out which song in the credits it actually is. You know, before you think to try Amazon for “-moviename- soundtrack”.
Anyway, you have a number of tabs open from the search results page. You found what you wanted (after you get your head out of your ass and check Amazon). You’ve decided to close down all the tabs and you find something that makes you say “How the fuck did I end up here?”
Case in point, I found this while searching for the lyrics to the song in the credits of Dark Kingdom:
Helga’s Mail Room:
“Writings by LiquidGeneration’s Beloved Uncircumcised Pre-Operative Transsexual”
(Via How the fuck should I know?.)
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04.24.06
Posted in General
at 10:24 pm
Now I remember why I used to want to work at Omni. 
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04.20.06
Posted in General
at 11:31 pm
I probably should have done this a long time ago, but I finally googled and found a Wordpress plugin to make a contact form. It’s in the Pages list on the right. If you’d like to get a hold of me via email, use that.
There are more clever ways to figure out how to email me, but I know lots of non-clever people so this is just easier. (Hint, I have a page for my PGP key…)
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Posted in Fitness
at 10:51 pm
Since a number of people have come here having searched for workout logs, I figure I’d share what I have… rather than subject them to my nearly year old workouts that are of no use to anyone.
I should note, this is what I use to track weight lifting workouts. I track similar information for my cardio workouts, but I just put it in the notes of the calendar entry on my workout calendar.
These logs are based on the D*I*Y Planner OpenOffice.org templates. The OpenOffice.org 2.0 ones, to be exact. OOo Draw is a pretty darn slick program, by the way. They’re the “classic” size, basically a half sheet of 8.5″x11″ paper. I got the office supply store to cut a ream of paper in half for $2 and bought a 3 ring binder to store them in. All very slick, if you’re into office supply pr0n.
I’ve made blank versions of these, but I actually “hard-code” my workout into a new template when I mix things up. I do that about every five weeks so it’s not that much work. I’d love to figure out how to programmatically make OOo Draw make that happen. I imagine it’s not too terribly difficult to munge the base XML, but I haven’t taken the time to do it.
Now to the details…
The top section has all the information that I record about a workout, plus the warmup I plan on doing beforehand. I wear a heart rate monitor so I have lots of numbers my nerdy mind can play with.
- Elapsed Time
- Total time I was working out. Duh.
- Calories
- The number of calories the heart rate monitor says I’ve burned. I use this more of a scale of how much I worked out, not as a “what I’m allowed to eat” measurement. It’s also a handy number to use to push just that little bit extra to get a nice round (neurotic) number.
- HR (Avg/Max/Min)
- Heart rate, average, maximum and minimum. The heart rate monitor I’m using right now actually only tracks average, but that’s good enough for me.
- Warmup
- As I mentioned above, this is the warmup I have planned. Usually something like 3 minutes on the elliptical, or 5 minutes on the rower.
- Overall Exertion
- A 1-10 scale of how hard I thought the workout was, a totally subjective number but still useful for deciding whether I need to change things up again.
- Energy Level
- How I feel before the workout. I also record aches and pains here.
And then there’s the bulk of the form. There’s a column for the exercise name, of course. This particular version has room for 3 sets of each exercise. I haven’t had a need to make a 4 set version, but I probably will eventually. Above the diagonal line goes the number of reps, below the line is the weight I used. I usually scribble in the weight I plan to use (based on the previous workout) next to the exercise name.
The strange plus sign is to signify a superset. I fill in the box with a 20% grey (or just a pen) to show that the adjacent exercises should be done in a superset. Naturally you could continue down and group more than two if you were doing trisets or giantsets, or whatever they’re called.
Oh, and of course the standard checkbox to show I’m done with the exercise. It’s not strictly needed, but it was in the template and it’s handy for seeing at a distance how far along I am.
And finally, there’s a section for notes at the bottom.
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Posted in General
at 10:07 pm
I was pretty dumbfounded by my blog stats. I had never gotten around to setting anything like this up at the previous host. Dreamhost has the analog log file analyzer turned on by default.
As it turns out, people actually use this blog for information. I actually had someone at work ping me about my blog and how it answered his question. Very strange.
In particular my post about the weird subversion error message when two people have created a directory and the second one doesn’t remember to svn up before svn commit. Apparently that post gets a good amount of search engine love. Aside from the front page and the RSS feed, it’s the most popular page. Not bad for something that’s six months old.
Having this information has a strange side effect of making me want to write more. I’m going to have to get around to running analog on the old log files I have from the previous host.
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Posted in General
at 10:00 pm
Why does this happen sometimes? I get what looks like a selection box that stays on my desktop. It comes and goes with equal mystery.
The only way I can guarantee it to go away is reboot (or probably log out, haven’t tried that). It seems like I made this particular one disappear last night by moving a QuickTime movie window over it. I can’t even get it to go away by changing the desktop picture, which is very strange.
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Posted in General
at 9:52 pm
I think it’s funny that every pundit out there is attributing all sorts of complex reasons to Apple releasing Boot Camp. They’re going to eat Microsoft’s lunch, they’re going to switch to Windows, blah, blah, blah.
What seems amazingly obvious to me is that the reason for Boot Camp is no different than the reason they have the iTunes Music Store. This is the business model:
- Find something illegal people do on the Internets.
- Make a product or service that makes said illegal thing, a) legal and b) way easier than doing it yourself.
- Set the pricing such that the majority of said criminals will decide that it’s worth trading the money for their time for new legal product and/or service.
- Profit.
Boot Camp just makes it easier to get Windows and MacOS X on the same computer. It also just happens to require a Mac to do it. You win, Apple wins. It doesn’t hurt that it makes it somewhat easier to convince your boss to buy you a Mac.
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Posted in General
at 9:02 pm
It may be quite possibly the worst name ever, but it’s a good machine and I’m getting one. I even managed to get the company to pay for it. Now that takes effort. In theory I’ll order it tomorrow. Who knows how long it’ll take. With any luck it’ll be here sometime next week.
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04.18.06
Posted in General
at 12:21 pm
I’m pretty sure this “Add event info” button wasn’t there in Gmail Friday. I wonder what it does. Time to play with it.
I have found out that Google Calendar doesn’t do anything with emailed accept/decline/tentative responses out of iCal, which is unfortunate. Maybe this button means they’re making changes quickly.
Update: from Google Calendar Help,
Why doesn’t my Gmail have Google Calendar related features?
It may take a few days before your Gmail account displays Google Calendar related features. We’re working hard to roll out these features to all Gmail users, and we appreciate your patience.
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04.16.06
Posted in General
at 10:10 pm
After moving to Dreamhost and having the chance to look at the built-in web server log analyzer I’ve discovered that I have way more traffic than I thought. The stats seem to indicate that I actually get more traffic than Aoife’s blog, which I would have never expected. Especially since I hardly get any comments.
The current theory is that no one comments because they have to create an account. Truthfully, that’s probably a damn good reason. I know I wouldn’t bother creating an account on random other blog just to say hi.
So, I’m just about to uncheck the box that requires an account to comment here. If I get too much comment spam, back on it goes. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
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