Posts from 06/2012
I previously reviewed the Horizon T202 Treadmill in our basement back in March. We've now owned the beast for five months, and it's played a successful role in my continuing quest to eliminate all outdoor activities from my life.
At the beginning of 2012, I set the attainable goal of walking or running for 2 hours per week, and then met or exceeded expectations every week since. Given that my former level of exercise was 0 hours per year, the 56 hours of walking and running so far this year has been a nice bonus. I have also dropped 9 pounds, and since all weight loss can be extrapolated linearly, I expect to hit my eighth grade coxswain weight in January 2014, and my birth weight about four years after that. The chart below shows my activity for the first five months of 2012:
This experiment has also shown that the motivation to exercise plays a minimal part in a consistent workout schedule. Instead, the key ingredient is a worthwhile set of TV shows to watch. I overachieved on exercise when rewatching the Dollhouse series, but could barely crank out 2 hours during season 2 of 24. In the only two excessively good episodes during that season, I actually stayed on the treadmill for an extra 40 minutes because I wanted to keep watching.
If just watching TV isn't sufficient motivation, I'm sure it would be harmless to have a snack too. Bacon-wrapped scallops are bite-sized and not too messy.
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It recently became apparent that no one was going to take the initiative and be our volunteer travel agent. I was averaging 62 hours of work per week in the first part of the year and Rebecca was making the ten-hour round trip between Sterling and Springfield for school every day, and the window for planning exotic locales like New Zealand gradually slipped away. Since the only alternative for adventure that didn't involve planning would have us flaunt rolls of Benjamins on the street corner until we were kidnapped and held for ransom, we finally got our asses in gear this past weekend and cobbled together our slightly-less epic yet still exotic summer vacation.
Day 1 | Fly into Montreal (cheaper than flying to California!) |
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Day 2-3 | Spend two days in Montreal, most of it at the BU Wine Bar. |
Day 4 | Drive to Quebec City (3 hours). |
Day 5 | Spend a day in Quebec City. |
Day 6 | Day trip out to Baie-Saint-Paul. |
Day 7 | Drive back to Montreal (3 hours). |
Day 8-9 | Hiking and nature in Mont-Tremblant. |
Day 10 | BU flies home from Montreal. Rebecca goes to a week of yoga camp in Val-Morin. |
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travel
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June 6, 1996 was the last full day of the school year at T.C. Williams. Being a senior at a public school where senioritis started manifesting after Advanced Placement tests at the beginning of May, I had been coasting for quite some time. My biggest worry was probably whether the twenty-one students with higher GPAs (measured to the hundredths place) would screw up, forcing me into one of the speech-giving roles at graduation. (This is probably how Ray LaHood feels, anytime the President and Vice President hang out).
My breezer of a schedule included the following highlights:
After school, I got on the dial-up modem with Chris Sharp and played Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Later on that night, my grandfather rolled into town with a $100 graduation gift. He stayed for a week, forcing my college-age sister out of her room and onto a futon in the home office. You would think that the graduate would be the one sleeping on the floor, but my grandfather wholly preferred her bigger bed.
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There are no spoilers in these reviews.
Our Idiot Brother (PG-13):
This is a pleasant, understated Paul Rudd comedy, good for a few laughs. The title is misleading, and suggests the type of movie that Will Ferrell would star in and poop all over, but Rudd and his co-stars manage to give the proceedings a little dignity. The wrap-up is a little too neat and sudden, but again, this is not supposed to be Oscar-worthy material.
Final Grade: B-
Coupling: The Complete Series:
This is the British series that led to Friends in the US, with slightly more intelligence, frank sex talk, and British accents. The first three seasons were very fun, although the last season suffered from the sudden loss of the best actor (handled with the other actors pretending to talk to him on the phone for several episodes) and the heavy-handed replacement of his character with a more annoying version with the exact same hairstyle. Apparently this actor didn't want to get typecast -- a motivation I don't understand since the series is only 28 episodes in total (British shows don't feel the need to pad a season out with the origins of Jack's tattoos). Free on Amazon Prime.
Final Grade: B
Bumpy Ride by the Hoosiers:
This is actually a re-release of the album, Illusion of Safety. Apparently, the group had issues with Sony under-promoting the album, so they left the label, struck out on their own, and added four new songs to the re-release. The package also contains a DVD of live performances which I have yet to watch. The four new songs are definite B-sides, and don't make the album better on their own (one song is annoyingly repetitive), but more Hoosiers songs isn't a bad thing, and it's always nice to have longer albums for car trips.
Final Grade: B+
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The Fairfax County Parkway has officially been given a new route number, 286 rather than 7100, as evidenced by the elephant-sized signs splashed along the median. I supposed that the signs aren't that big when compared to campaign signs, and you might be forgiven if you merely thought that 2867100 was running for office somewhere in Fairfax County and he assumed you were nearly blind.
Although the signs themselves are a huge waste, I'm definitely onboard with the change, for laziness reasons. It is impossible to refer to the road with its current name or old number in less than six syllables in a way that people will recognize appropriately. Calling it "the parkway" might work for people who live nearby, but I live in Sterling, which is adjacent to Ashburn, where every single paved surface is some kind of parkway (supposedly it evokes class). So, you usually have to speaking it very fast, like an auctioneer selling driving directions, or just direct your guests via other roads.
"Toll Road" is nice and succinct, and is the usual alternative, in spite of the fact that all of Rebecca's friends are cheap and insist upon taking Route 7 to visit us.
Pranksters hijack live-stream Republican printer
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Ask me some questions. Whether it's trivia, recommendations, hypotheticals, or higher education, I'll pick the best ones and answer them on Friday. This will enable you to get one step closer to changing the passwords on my accounts and stealing my identity for evil.
If you can't think of any questions, then just take your favorite quote and put a question mark at the end of it.
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you speak
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6:14 AM: Showered and shaved. |
6:26 AM: Apparently there's actually a night shift cop assigned to county registration violations, sneaking through the neighbourhood at 11:30 PM. Sadly for him, I have sixty days to register new cars and the decal in hand. | |
6:41 AM: All of that traffic stimulus money just got us a bunch of milled, unpaved highways and this deluxe recessed crosswalk at an intersection where I've never seen a wheelchair. |
8:00 AM: Working in the office. | |
11:32 AM: Gloomy Popeyes run. |
11:55 PM: Lunch and the news. | |
12:15 PM: This rainstorm wasn't in the forecast last night when I sprayed the entire yard for mosquitoes. |
12:27 PM: Working from the home office. | |
3:45 PM: Rebecca books tickets to yoga camp in Montreal. Booty reserves a spot at Titan's house. |
4:31 PM: Treadmill time. | |
5:52 PM: Diablo time. |
8:20 PM: Dinner is a chicken-bacon-alfredo pizza with a crispy crust. |
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12 of 12
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My first job, paying $5.50 an hour, was an internship at Potomac Electric Power. It was just after high school graduation sixteen years ago, and took place in the aging power plant that looked as if it would tumble into the Potomac River during a mild earthquake. I was too young to legally have a job the summer before, and did nothing during my senior year other than occasional Alexandria Symphony stage crew gigs (and our family was of the "your job is to be in school" mentality).
As I've mentioned in previous posts, the PEPCO internship was billed as a computer-oriented position for an up and coming computer science major. I arrived at work at 7 AM every morning, had 30 minutes for lunch, and then left at 3:30 PM. In general, I just did the leftover work that none of the four secretaries wanted to do (and the fact that it took four secretaries to work a front office totaling ten people should have been an early warning sign that this was not going to be the next Apple). Here are the tasks that comprised my average day:
Entering "Fly Ash" Tickets
Each truck that brought coal to the plant was weighed on its way in and out, to determine the net weight of the coal. My job was to take the handwritten carbon copies and type them into the PEPCO mainframe so someone else could run a report. Generally there were about 30 tickets a day, and the mainframe took 5 minutes to login. Total Time: 20 minutes
Typing up Purchase Orders
When people around the plant needed equipment, they would fill out a triplicate order form (the white-yellow-pink variety). I would then take this information and type it onto a new triplicate order form of the same variety with the office typewriter. I never figured out why they wasted a real form on the handwritten copy, but I was not paid to seek efficiencies. I typed 2 or 3 orders per day. Total Time: 20 minutes
Printing Reports
Once I finally had a computer, I would occasionally be called upon to open up corporate memos or documents on the fileserver and print copies of them for the managers. Total Time: 5 minutes
Delivering Mail
This was a task that the full-time secretaries were glad to offload. The plant received US and inter-office mail for 100 different people, and my job was to sort and deliver the mail into a massive wall of cubbyholes. The problem was that the wall of cubbyholes was not alphabetical -- it was sorted with the lead plant worker in the top row, and his team in the slots below him. Total Time: On the first day, it took me 2 hours. On the second day, I created a mapping grid with the names listed alphabetically followed by their location in the mailbox grid, and hung it on the wall. Subsequently it took 20 minutes.
Lunch
Two baloney and Miracle Whip sandwiches on white bread, a brownie, and an apple (in the days before I became allergic to fruit skins). Total Time: 15 minutes
It is left as an exercise to the reader to figure out what I did with the other 7 hours of the workday. It is an exercise I had to endure daily for the entire summer.
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A whopping 32% of the cost of a ten-day car rental in Quebec is taken up by fees and taxes. Should Ticketmaster ever need a new home, I can think of one country that will welcome them with open arms.
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the retrograde inversion of Questions Day
How are you? - Evil Mike
My mind is a swirling miasma of scintillating thoughts and turgid ideas.
Are you now, or ever in the foreseeable future, willing to babysit for me? If so, how many children at once, and for how long? If the answer is more than "1" and "10 minutes", which ones? - Ex-Roomie
This question would be much more interesting if I could replace the verb, babysit, in the style of Mad Libs. I will do so, since this is my house.
juggle: I could probably juggle two of your children at the same time for about two minutes, providing that each one was duct-taped aerodynamically to prevent wind resistance from flailing arms. I would pick Rosie and Katie's namesake, because they are probably the lightest.
speed stack: I could make a pyramid of all three of your children in less than five seconds, as long as Ella does not fidget. I would probably want to buy one of those specialized mats that cost a hundred dollars and prevent the baby pyramid from slipping (after which I could sell it for profit as yoga equipment). If you are interested in this offer, we need to act now, because you're probably going to have kid #4 within the hour (and millions of lives are at stake). Once there is a 4th, I can't guarantee a symmetrical pyramid again until you reach a total of 6.
What do you do when your current job is paying for expensive training but you have prospects for a new job any day now? - Evil Mike
I paraphrased this question, which wended its way across the comments section like a soccer mom on a cell phone in Costco and established major and minor characters like a George R.R. Martin book. In its original translation, the question reminded me of one of those ten-page novellas sent to Carolyn Hax, where the clueless advice seeker caught her boyfriend humping a barista but has painted an excuse (involving weather patterns and tricks of the light) that will let them stay together in fairy-tale land.
The bottom line is that you should be prepared to reimburse your current job for the cost of training if you voluntarily leave soon afterwards, as free on-the-job training is seen as an investment in an employee. This may even be formalized in your employee handbook. However, there's no reason you shouldn't complete the training as soon as possible, and you should definitely not use a training voucher after you've left the job. The fact that you knew of the new job when you took the training is no one's business but your own. With the training completed, you may find that there is no official mechanism in place to pay them back, so you end up with a free certification and did the best you could to even the balance.
Going to Virginia Beach soon. Any ideas of fun things to do? I will be digging a hole at one point so that's covered. - Evil Mike
If you could have a re-do day of any day in your life, which day would it be and why? You don't need to preface it with the whole "Well, if things hadn't worked out the way they did I wouldn't have Rebecca, and Booty, etc, etc". - Mike (of Mike and Chompy)
There are no single days that utterly shifted the direction of my life in a negative way. With that in mind, I would go back to March 1997, on the day when I had just put the finishing touches on an online birthday card for some girl I liked, complete with original music that was accurately timed to the slideshow of pages (Netscape 3.0 Gold required). After spending hours essentially reinventing Flash before Flash had taken over the browser, I went to work on my C++ programming assignment which had to do with memory pointers and ended up bricking my Pentium P60. This resulted in a day lost to reformatting the computer, having to rewrite the entire assignment, and never getting to show anyone the online card.
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We opened our weekend on Friday afternoon with a trip to the Taste of Reston event, which was merely an excuse to walk up and down a street eating paella, crabcakes, ribs, shortcake, gelato, and sliders, while consuming overpriced Dominion Ale. We didn't hear much from the various local bands, as they had more technical difficulties than play time, but at least one of the DJ booths seemed intent on playing every single choreographed wedding song known to man.
Rebecca spent Saturday working on one of her summer assignments for school while I did nothing of any remote utility. In the evening, we drove out to Purcellville for delicious subs at the lazily-named "My Deli and Cafe", and then took in a performance of the Polka Dots at Franklin Park, a folksy local group introducing Rebecca's cousin, Abby, on second violin.
On Sunday, we finished up the second season of Treme, and then grilled some steaks for Rebecca's parents, in a hybrid anniversary/birthday celebration. I also researched a few improvements I could make to this site while Rebecca is on her summer road trip including, but not promising, a better post search engine, next and previous buttons on pages with individual posts, and the potential return of Name-That-Tune and Newsday Tuesday. I'm also not quite sure where Museday Tuesday scampered off to, but I haven't found them as fun to do this year.
How was your weekend?
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filling needs the world never knew it needed
When it comes to riding in the car, children are always given short shrift. They have no control over the radio, must fight their siblings to avoid the "hump", and have to sit in rear-facing child seats for longer and longer. The latest study from the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children should sit in the rear-facing child seats beyond the age of 2, and platoons of helicopter moms have even been spotted at the Vienna Metro station, forcing their adolescents to employ the rear-facing Metro seats "just in case".
As many parents can attest, kids hate the rear-facing child seat with a passion. In interviews with a noted baby whisperer, a representative sample of 21st century one-year-olds noted that facing the rear was "boring as hell" because you "can't see a damned thing". Installing a special mirror to set up some sort of mommy's-face periscope was also dismissed as "a stupid way to sell unnecessary baby products". (Special thanks to the parents of Dakota, Leighton, Teegan, Creighton, London, and Skyler for allowing their children to be interviewed for this article).
Unfortunately for these kids, safety in the car will always be the primary directive, and rear-facing child seats have consistently protected children from collisions, turn-overs, and errant nudity near strip clubs. However, there is definitely room for improvement, and that's where my new invention comes into the picture.
Introducing the URI! Hood-Baby, or "Hoody" for short. This child seat attaches securely to the hood of your car, so your baby can look at you in the driver's seat for the duration of the trip. It retains all of the safety benefits of a rear-facing car seat, while allowing your child to see more than the stained beige interior of your Volvo.
Direct sunlight provides increased vitamin D intake and an early warning system should your child be bitten by a vampire. In a clinical study, the increased exposure to smog and dirt boosted the immune systems of 84% of test babies, an improvement beaten only by the home remedy of rolling your baby in a gluten-peanut paste twice daily for a year.
The hoody comes with a plastic accessory that can be attached to your child to prevent bugs from splattering on your windshield, and is also Bluetooth-enabled so Junior can meet other babies while idling in downtown traffic. The frame is hooked directly into the car battery while the engine is on, to prevent baby thefts when you're at a stoplight.
When reviewed by Consumer Reports, the URI! Hood-Baby was branded a BEAST BUY!, because "BEST just wasn't good enough". Coming to select Walmart and Target stores in Fall 2012. Preorder now for $89.99!
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Seventeen years ago today was the last day of my junior year in high school. As was customary, I had one of my rockin' parties, complete with a Trezur Hunt. Here are the knocking instructions that adorned the front door for this party:
Here is the final clue from the Trezur Hunt for one of the three teams. There were 15 guests at this party. Are you smarter than a junior?
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There are no major spoilers in these reviews.
Treme, Season Two:
The second season of Treme is more of the same -- if you liked the first season even a little bit, you'll like this one just as much. It's now a year after Hurricane Katrina, and this season follows the lives of the various characters established in the first season, with a minimum of Crash-esque path crossing. It's still a show of character development rather than plots, although there are flashes of inspiration where the writers were obviously trying to channel The Wire. There's still a few too many musical interludes, but I enjoyed the musical styles explored here more than the first season's.
Final Grade: B+
Pushing Daisies, Soundtrack:
It's been a while since I purchased a soundtrack CD -- the last was probably from season two of LOST (after which I made four copies of the CD and put a new season number on each one with a Sharpie). The level of thematic cohesiveness on this soundtrack is impressive, and the show's cute cover of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" sent Rebecca off on a They Might Be Giants nostalgia kick.
Final Grade: B+
Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin:
The HBO adaptation of this novel was an unexpected gem (not unlike any heist movie where the jewel thief offloads the goods in the pocket of an unsuspecting passerby while fleeing from the cops). I read the source novel after watching the show, and was impressed by how faithful the adaptation was. Unfortunately, the show was so exact and fresh in my mind that I couldn't help but to picture its visuals while reading. This was not necessarily a bad thing, but it gave me a better opinion of the book than I might have had, had I read it without any introduction. The novel employs the device of telling each chapter from a different character's perspective. This lends itself well to an HBO-esque show, but puts the damper on your reading speed when you get to the end of a favorite character's chapter and then realize you have to read twenty pages of Sansa garbage. Overall, I found it to be a decent, but not amazing fantasy story, and don't plan to continue with the rest of the series.
Final Grade: B
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What do these images on my Dell toner cartridge warn you about?
To me, they say "Do not use toner to print scary masks, as startled people may have heart attacks." and "Do not allow your baby to become a beekeeper."
Also today is the birthay of a Brian, a Brianne, and a Brian's wife (all different people, I assure you). Happy Birthday to all!
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Rebecca leaves on a 1000 mile road trip tomorrow, burrowing into the Midwest like a prairie dog after farm subsidies. When it comes to driving and vacations, we dwell in two separate camps: I was indoctrinated to think that the drive is a necessary evil keeping you from the fun, so its length should be minimized via 4 AM departures, radar detectors, and traffic avoidance, while to Rebecca, the trip itself is part of the vacation. So for this trip, I will be staying home and making my own fun. Here are some of the fun activities I have planned:
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Composing music is a lot like going to the bathroom: the vast quantity of music you write will immediately be discarded, and you really need to have produced a diamond to make saving it a worthwhile venture. I have dozens of folders of unfinished tunes, from longer works that I simply lost interest in before they were done, to shorter fragments that I edited out of existing works when they didn't quite fit, to two and three bar motives hastily jotted down after a night's dream.
Here is an unfinished work I started in December 2006 -- a jazz chart based upon a simple melody that Anna plunked out on her piano. I don't know why it was never completed, but I can theorize that I was distracted trying to obtain an epic mount in World of Warcraft, or something equally as useless.
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Yesterday morning, I somehow managed to throw out my back while bending over my laptop to check my email saving a small child from the path of an oncoming dump truck. Since then, I have been homebound, slowly shuffling around the house with an excessively curved back, not unlike a D3 Witch Doctor. In yoga terminology, I can cat just fine but seem to have misplaced the muscles needed to cow. It's a weird feeling, because it's not necessarily that painful -- it just feels like a few muscles that I once relied upon have mysteriously vanished.
Since the aging process has apparently accelerated, I expect to get my first gray hair tomorrow, after which I will have dinner at 4:30 PM and watch Wheel of Fortune on TBS. In the meantime though, I am lying on the floor with the miscreant laptop on my stomach, working on a proposal for work.
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Booty hasn't moved in five hours. Apparently back problems are contagious. If you wish to remain a productive member of society that doesn't have to balance a laptop on his or her stomach to do work, please stay away.
On the other hand, if you could use a break from the daily day-to-day and want to catch my malady, come on by and we'll lie on the couch and watch an entire season of Veronica Mars while consuming the remaining supply of chicken fingers, extra buttered popcorn, and cream cheese in my fridge.
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New pictures have been added to the Life, 2012 photo album. As the number of interesting activities we attend declines, the number of cat pictures increases proportionally.
This post means that the month is over, which tells us (by induction, or possibly convection) that 2012 is now halfway through. Is that depressing or amazing?
P.S. If you squint at the picture above, Booty looks like an Ichthyosaurus.
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