Morning – Spinning Class

This was the regular 05:15 AM class at Lifetime Fitness. I had to bug out a bit early. Was trying to get home before Mikie had to leave for Pasadena.

Lunch – Strength Training Coach said just to do upper-body today. I’ve got the 25K Rocky Raccoon Trail run up in Huntsville State Park. Details Duration: 00:35 Sets: 1. DB bench press - 25x10; 45x10,12 2. seated lat pulldown - 105x10; 120x10,11 3. ab with twist, decline - BWx20,20,30 4. DB shoulder press - 25x10; 30x10; 35x5 5. BB bent-over row - 115x5; 95x8, 10

Parallels 5 Rocks!

I purchased and installed the Parallels 5 upgrade for my Mac a couple of days ago. Those of you who know me are aware that I am no fan of any Windows operating system (although 7 is looking interesting), but that I occasionally have to run it because there are a couple of niche programs that I have whose developer’s have yet to provide a Mac version.

One in particular is the Polar desktop application that is needed to upload data from my Polar heart rate monitor to the computer.

Well I’ve been using Parallels to run my Windows XP partition on the Mac for some time now. It works, but it’s been kind of slow and also there have been issues with certain peripherals. Give you an example of the second point. Sometimes when I plug in the USB infra-red data transfer device that interfaces with the Polar HRM, XP wouldn’t recognize it. My work-around was to just start-up the Add/Remove hardware control panel. Just had to get it to the second screen and then I could quit it.

Well after installing Parallels version 5 I have noticed that (1) it’s MUCH faster and (2) it seems to recognize the IR interface reliably. Good job Parallels!!!

• Install/Build Apache2 and mod_python
• Configure and test mod_python / psp / SQLite

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

I’ve used it a couple of times only so far but am impressed at how quickly one is able to get very relaxed, very quickly.

As an experiment this morning, I decided to see if a short (10 minute) session would alter blood pressure. I measured my blood pressure and pulse before starting the session. It was 120/80 at 79 bpm. I measured it again after 10 minutes with the application. It was 128/75 at 67 bpm.

Interesting. The systolic measurement increased by 8 mm Hg and the diastolic measurement decreased by 5 mm Hg. Pulse decreased by 12 bpm.

Well I decided to go ahead and give SOHO Notes a try. I have been using it for the last month or two.

Today I have uninstalled SOHO Notes and will not be using it again. In spite of following all of the technical bulletins and other suggestions in the support forums, in spite of running the latest version with the bug fixes, etc., I still kept having repeated problems trying to keep information synchronized between just two computers.

I give up! No more SOHO Notes. Viva Yojimbo and the good folks at Bare Bones software!

Yojimbo is an information organizer. You can use it to store all kinds of information. Anything from the very small, like the URL of a web site, to the very large, like a big PDF document, is fair game. I have used many other applications in the past for this task, including:

• Discrete files. This is actually pretty doable now, since Apple has provided the wonderful Spotlight capabilities. But the three biggest problems with this route are:
  1. It wastes space on your hard drive. The minimum amount of space that a single file takes up is based upon the way your hard drive is formatted, but for small chunks of information, you definitely waste space.
  2. It’s a hassle to have to create a file, decide where to put it and what to name it, for small chunks of information.
  3. There is not a hassle-free way to synchronize this information, safely and securely, among an arbitrary number of computers. For me, I like to keep information on my laptop, my big Mac at home, and my big Mac at work, all synchronized.
• StickyBrain, version 4. I have used several version of StickyBrain. Don’t get me wrong. It is good software. It’s a bit sluggish, but basically sound enough. It does not allow you to synch information between multiple computers. Yes you can backup notes to your .Mac storage and restore from the same. But the discipline required to make sure you don’t accidentally lose information is far more trouble than it is worth.. Chronos does have an upgraded version of this software, called SOHO Notes, that supports synching between multiple computers and I did some research before deciding which product to go with. But information that I read in the user forums has led me to conclude that the sync capabilities are buggy and slow.
• I have used various Wiki applications. But you have to either keep the information stored online, which requires Internet access to read or update it, or hand-roll some kind of sync solution. Plus the mechanisms for entering information, as well as the ability to easily enter or store styled text with graphics, is limited.

There are other applications that I have tried as well, but I’m getting tired of typing. Suffice it to say that Yojimbo is some bad-ass software and I like it very much.

Click here to read it.

First, I use a program called Amadeus II to combine all of the MP3 tracks into one. You can get Amadeus II from http://www.hairersoft.com/. Then save as an .m4a file. I use a bit rate of 32 kbps.

Bring that into iTunes and then use the Make Bookmarkable script on it. You can download that script from here.