GordyBlog

Well this has been a very hectic 11 days, as you can probably surmise from my lack of daily updates. One of the biggest shows for our company to attend is TCEA (Texas Computer Education Association). We needed to have the new version of our flagship product ready to show, so I spent most of my waking moments (extending far into the night) getting it ready for the show. And I actually went to Austin and worked in the booth during the show. That is something I’ve not had the opportunity to do for many years.

Anyway I missed a bunch of scheduled workouts and my diet was not as strict as it should of been, but all in all things held up pretty well and today (2/16) I’m back on track.

Strength Training

This morning I started a new routine, taken from Men’s Health Big Book of Exercises, by Adam Campbell:

I just picked up this book recently and it has the best exercise illustrations I’ve ever seen. It’s packed full of information and includes easy to follow dietary advice on top of all of the great workouts. The routine I started this morning (which really kicked my ass by the way) is the Spartacus routine, designed by the personal trainer for the gladiators on the Startz program by the same name.

This is a circuit routine with 10 stations, or exercises. You do as many reps of each exercise as you can in 1 minute. Then you take 15 seconds to transition to the next station and so on until you finish all 10 stations. Then you rest for 2 minutes and start over. Do a total of 3 sets per exercise.

Details

Note that the sets reported are only for 1 side (or arm or leg). So if I record 10 reps for a T push up, that means 10 per side. Any weights recorded for dumbbells are for 1 of the dumbbells only.

Warm Up x 00:11
Work Out x 00:51
Sets:
1. goblet squat: 15/30, 18/30, 16/30
2. mountain climber: 16, 19, 18
3. single arm DB swing: 15/30, 12/30, 14/30
4. T push up: 15/15, 6/10, 5/5
5. split jump: 8/15, 11/10, 20/10
6. DB row: 20/30, 29/20, 20/20
7. DB side lunge & touch: 8/20, 7/20, 6/15
8. pushup position row: 8/20, 9/20, 9/15
9. DB lunge & rotation: 11/20, 8/20, 8/20
10. DB push press: 16/25, 14/25, 18/20

• Leave a comment... (0)

Triathlon Training, day 121

This was a fairly light day. The only thing on my schedule was a Masters Swim class at Lifetime Fitness.
Details

Duration: 01:30
Distance: 3300 m

• Leave a comment... (0)

Triathlon Training, day 120

Cycling Field Test
Instructions

Bike Field Test….warm up well then 3 miles steady full out to get max hr and avg hr. take 10 minutes endurance break and then repeat.

I ended up doing this indoors using my Tacx Flow ergotrainer because it was cold and raining outside. Here are the splits:

Ted Nugent on Gun Control

A friend of mine sent me a copy of this video and I subsequently found it also posted on YouTube. It’s not real long and I encourage you to watch the entire video. I do not disagree with anything Ted says in this video.

• Leave a comment... (2)

Triathlon Training, day 119

NROL Strength 1/A (#6)
Did this workout very early over at Lifetime Fitness.
Details

WU x 00:10 Elliptical
WT x 00:48
ST x 00:13
Sets:
1. squat: 8/255, 2/275, 8/255, 3/275, 12/225, 20/225
2. SS1-Bulgarian split squat: 15/40, 15/40, 15/25
3. SS1-step up: 15/70, 15/70, 15/70
4. AS1-back extension: 10/10, 10/15
5. AS1-Swiss ball crunch: 10/10, 10/15

Masters Swim Class
Did this in the evening at LTF.
Details

Duration: 01:32
Distance: 3700 m

• Leave a comment... (0)

Triathlon Training, day 118

3 mile recovery run
Did this easy run in the evening, after work. It was dark. I just took it easy and didn’t even bother to wear the HRM. I ran to Humble Park and back. It’s exactly 1.5 miles from the house to the park.
Details

Duration: 00:27
Distance:  3 mi

Wore my Feelmax Niesa minimalist running shoes. Very nice!

• Leave a comment... (0)

I got a new Bank of America Visa card for my GnM Services account in the mail today. There was a sticker on the front of the card that said to call 1-888-624-23232 to activate the card.

I did that. The first thing that pissed me off was that I had to:

Press 1 for English

Screw that noise. This is the USA … I think.. I shouldn’t have to press extra buttons for the “privilege” of continuing this “conversation” in what should be the language of this country!

OK, fine… we continue…

I have to enter the credit card number. No problem. I’m holding the credit card in my hand.

I have to enter the expiration date. No problem. Again, I’m holding the credit card in my hand.

Next though, I have to enter the last four digits of the checking account that this credit card is associated with.

There is no way I can open up my laptop and look up that information quick enough to satisfy the merciless automated voice at Bank of America.

So… I have to start the whole process over again. If these turkeys had told me ahead of time that I would need this information before activating the card, I would have been happy. But no, that is not the case.

Bank of America – You piss me off, again!

• Leave a comment... (0)

I’ve started using the very cool MoinMoin wiki as a personal information management tool and so far it’s working quite well. As mentioned, I have a utility that will sync attachments as a complement to the native ability to sync pages.

I did run across what could be a serious problem, especially as the size of your wiki grows. There are currently some bugs (as of version 1.6.1) in the way MoinMoin handles page names.

First of all, say you have a page name with lower-case letters and a digit; e.g., “ww1″, and then you create some sub-pages, say “ww1/Hardware”, “ww1/Packages”, “ww1/RAID”, “ww1/SSL”, etc.

Then in the “ww1″ page you have this macro:

<<PageList(ww1/)>>

What you should get is a list of all of the sub-pages that you have created. I have found that, depending upon some factors that I have yet to figure out, you may get some or none of the sub-pages listed.

Furthemore, doing a title search for “ww1″ won’t necessarily show the “ww1″ page in the search results.

Also, if you copy the page “ww1″, you get the option to copy all sub-pages as well. And in-fact the new top-level page does get created and the sub-pages, properly named do get created. This can be verified by examination of the directories in the data/pages directory of your wiki.

However none of the sub-pages can be accessed via the wiki interface. I suspect it is a cacheing problem.

Anyway, my new practice: Until this problem has been fixed, All pages start with an upper-case letter, no exceptions.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Please see this page for information and a script that can be used to sync attachments between two MoinMoin wikis.

• Leave a comment... (0)

MediaFork is the successor to HandBrake. I downloaded version 0.8.0, public beta 1, today.

I’m experimenting converting a DVD using the following settings:

Preferences

• Use iPod/iTunes friendly (.m4v) file extension for MP4 output files
• Reset picture width to 640 when x264 (iPod) encoder is selected

Output Settings

File format

MP4 File

Codecs

AVC/H.264 Video / AAC Audio

Video Tab

Framerate (fps)

Same as source

Encoder

x264 (h.264 iPod)

Average bitrate (kbps)

1000

Picture Settings

Width

624

Height

272

Crop

Automatic

Audio Tab

Language 1

English (AC3) (5 ch)

Subtitles

None

Sample rate (Hz)

44.1

Bitrate (kbps)

128

• (0)

You can read Drag’s Guide to Debian Variations here.

• (0)