Appcelerator Developer Center – This looks cool…write your app in JavaScript and Appcelerator maps it to native code for multiple mobile platforms. Hmm…..
101 Fast Recipes for Grilling – Grillicious! Can't wait to get back to regular grilling. And by that I mean entertaining the kids in the pool while the real grill master does her thing.
Fannie Mae Cracks Down on Strategic Default – Do you really need someone to tell you that "strategically" defaulting on a mortgage is wrong? Sorry, but I don't feel pity for someone who is behind on their mortgage while they have sea doos and dirt bikes in their garage.
It’s days like today when I reminisce about all the times I visited the Wal-Mart Super Center in Alcoa. Oh the things I saw and heard..
“Upon getting the cell phone to ‘unlock’ and work properly, the Wal-Mart employee saw a picture on the phone of a female subject that was topless and whose breasts were exposed,” the report said.
At that point, the man who brought the cell phone into the store became “furious about anyone seeing his ‘private pictures’ and demanded that the cell phone be destroyed.”
The employee complied with the man’s request by hitting the cell phone repeatedly with a hammer until it was in several pieces.
…
But at 3:11 p.m., video surveillance at the store recorded the man re-entering the store through the Tire-Lube Express entrance while carrying a plastic bottle containing what appeared to be “a brownish colored substance,” which he allegedly poured onto five laptop computers at the store.
…
The brownish substance was believed to be tobacco spit.
…
The suspect was recorded by video surveillance driving away in a green-colored Pontiac sedan with hubcaps missing from both front tires.
If I could make stuff like this up, I’d be independently wealthy.
The next time someone thinks you are crazy for going on a “short” 10 mile run or spending three hours on your bike, let them know about Charlie Wittmack’s World Triathlon.
12,000 miles total, beginning with a 275 mile swim down the River Thames and ending with a climb of Mt. Everest. And sandwiched in between:
The 9,000-mile bike ride might seem relatively easy compared with the swim and the climb up Everest, but even there Wittmack has his work cut out for him.
“I have to get to the border of China and Kyrgystan by the end of October in order to get over the Tibetan plateau to India,” Wittmack said. “I’ll be riding over harsh deserts through areas with political instability.”
So…(talking to myself now)…you probably can squeeze in that workout today you’re not sure you have time for.
If this passes, hopefully someone with some sense will just install a “switch” in the Oval Office and put a label under it that says “Internet”. It won’t do anything, but that’s ok. The people involved clearly have little understanding of what they’re talking about anyway. We could give Al Gore a lifetime position that requires him to flip the switch when he turns in for the night to cut back on the global warming or whatever other crisis the interwebs contribute to.
Even if the president ordered all U.S. Internet companies to block, say, all packets coming from China, or restrict non-military communications, or just shut down access in the greater New York area, it wouldn’t work. You can’t figure out what packets do just by looking at them; if you could, defending against worms and viruses would be much easier.
“Shutting down” the internet isn’t anything like closing the freeway. It’s like shutting down radio, television, and newspapers all at once. We don’t even have a radio, cable, or a TV antenna at our house, so how would we know the webs had been shut down (for our protection)? You know what that means…get ready for the phone systems to get wrecked as part of the collateral damage with people calling up their internet providers because they can’t do the Googles or log on to the Facebooks.
The SIL sent me a link to this site which lets you sign up to have your name included on a microchip that will be sent to Mars on a rover.
I sort of assumed that lots of my information and various encrypted passwords were being sent into deep space when the Space Bigfoot is playing jokes by moving the satellites I’m trying to bounce data off of.
Mars Schmars. I’m not giving up on hope that I can aspire to have my name sent to an asteroid. I’m not 100% sure this isn’t a trick by the gov’ment to give our personal information to the Martian overlords.
I’ve been substituting my regular run scheduled for Thursday evenings with 7s rugby practice for the summer. Thursdays aren’t really long runs, so I figure I can go out and burn more calories playing rugby while having fun and getting a good run in. It’s good cross training because it works every muscle, especially core muscles. I end up spiking and recovering my heart rate instead of keeping it steady like a would in a normal training run too. It’s just fun to mix it up, and I love playing rugby.
Plus there is beer afterward.
I’ve discovered Coach Brett over at ZenTriathlon recently, and I’ve really been enjoying his podcasts. There’s some really good stuff in there about triathlon in general, and his style totally vibes with the way I like to train. One of the things he talks about are “Push/Pull Workouts” where he’ll do a 6 mile run, stopping at each mile to do pushups, squats, pullups, etc. I realized that’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve been doing at rugby practice, although the intervals of running are much shorter intervals and at a much higher intensity.
I wore my heart rate monitor for the first hour of practice last night and kept splits just to get an idea of the intensity of the non-contact drills we were doing. I averaged right at 135 bpm for the first hour of practice (that included water breaks and the dynamic stretching warmup), but I spiked it close to 180 during the two most intense periods. I know it got at least that high later in the practice when we were scrimmaging and I had long sprints.
A bonus in disguise was that I forgot my rugby boots at home, so I trained barefoot. I haven’t been doing much barefoot running at all, and it was probably good for me to get a good two hours of action without shoes. The only part of practice I skipped was the repetitive tackling drill, but I made good use of the time, doing “Jacos” around the field during that period.
Jacos is a fitness drill we used to do in college. Many rugby teams do variations, but we called the drill “Jacos” in honor of the coach who brought it to our club. It’s a not-so-fun way to run laps.
You start in one corner at the goal line, sprint to the halfway, jog to the opposite corner, stop for exercises–pushups/situps/burpees/squats/jackknives/mountain climbers–jog across the field to the opposite corner for a different exercise, and so on. So it’s sprint, jog, exercise, jog, exercise, sprint, jog, exercise, jog, exercise….
You get the idea, right? This is a great rugby fitness drill because it simulates a lot of stuff that’s going on in a game–high intensity bursts with lower intensity recovery runs and “lifting” sprinkled in. Lots of moving your own body weight around and getting up off the ground.
Keeping my triathlon goals of getting a core workout and staying in a training zone in mind, I like to add two exercise stations at the halfway line on either side of the field and substitute the jogs and sprints with a steadier, more intense pace. I got in four laps of that (about a mile) barefoot while the tackling drill was going on. Sounds a lot like a modified Push/Pull Run, huh? That’s what fitness end of rugby training is like for the most part, and why I think it’s a good substitute for at least one of my workouts each week. It also does me a lot of good mentally because it throws a curve into my training and involves something I really love doing.
Check out this guy…95 years old and still working out with weights, doing cardio, and starting out his day with 1,500 crunches. Most people 1/3 of this guys age start their day out with 1,500 calories of Cap’n Crunch.
“All the doctors that have treated me can’t believe what they’re seeing,” Matzinger said. “That’s encouraging, to go to the doctor and have compliments rather than prescriptions.”
I remember doing a 10 mile race a few years ago and a guy in his 80s finished in under 2 hours. People like that are amazing. I hope I live long enough to have an opportunity to be like that, and I hope I don’t blow it.
Greener Than You — Entrepreneurial Foraging – This is nothing new. Broke college students have been foraging in bars for half drunk bottles and in the student ghettos for morning-after "yard beers" for decades.
Banksimple – Long overdue, and supposed to be launching in 2010. You can sign up for an invite right now. Loooooong overdue.
The Breaking Point for Children in Sports – The middle ground between letting kids live a sedentary lifestyle and pushing them to the point of injury and psychological distress is pretty wide. I can see where parents at both extremes would point to the opposite extreme for justification, but it's only a justification.
Soluto – This looks like a promising solution to help you diagnose and end PC problems. I'm signed up for the beta, hope to get my account soon, and will let you know!
Don’t be surprised if you see more stuff like this as school administrators realize that rugby is not only a very affordable sport to promote in comparison with other sports, but it’s also relatively safe and full of positive life lessons:
“There’s a new attitude in the house,” Del Valle said. “The girls are taking ownership. Rugby promotes character, trust, loyalty and honor. You represent your program on and off the pitch.
Check out the beta of Soluto. It’s a pretty cool idea–it monitors your PC at startup to find out what’s being loaded. After your computer starts, Soluto gives you a report of what was loaded, how long it took to load each program, and give you suggestions on which programs could be removed from your startup routine to not only speed up boot time, but also keep your machine running faster. All suggestions are based on the actions other users have taken with the same programs.
If you are running WordPress, version 3 is out. Some good stuff here like custom post types, which make it pretty much a full fledged CMS, and bulk updates of plugins. Nice.
The middle ground between letting kids live a sedentary lifestyle and pushing them to the point of injury and psychological distress is pretty wide. I can see where parents at both extremes would point to the opposite extreme for justification, but it’s probably only justification.
When Walmart carries organic frozen dinners and even your neighbor with the Hummer is touting the environmental efficacy and bonus deliciousness of peaches grown within a 50-mile radius of the neighborhood co-op, foraging represents the next link on the food chain of greener-than-thou eating.
This is sort of like charging panhandlers $2 the morning after a kegger to scavenge for yard beers and empty cans for recycling. In my day, we were just happy they were willing to come by and clean up after us. It was a voluntary symbiotic relationship before the Wall Street Fat Cats got involved.
RecipeChimp is a great idea–give it the ingredients you have available and it will give you back a recipe you can make with those ingrediets. But there’s a catch…
If you were too lazy to go to the store and buy food, you are probably too lazy to type in a bunch of ingredients into your laptop.
It’d be even better if there were an iPhone Android app that let you stand right there in the pantry/fridge and scan the barcodes of the stuff you have.
I will give a shiny quarter to the first person who can point out what is so misleading about the title of this post.
I’m not exactly sure what people expected the POTUS to do to stop this leaking well. For all I know, he’s not even SCUBA certified–he’s yet to produce that certificate to the public–much less an expert on deep sea drilling. And as far as I know, there’s no government agency with deep sea drilling expertise. But wait for it…I’m sure there will be innumerable people proposing one.
And let’s be fair, I don’t see how Katrina was Bush’s Katrina either.
I’m not sure why so many otherwise reasonable people expect the POTUS to have super-human powers to achieve feats like putting on their cape and airlifting people from a flood or plugging gushing holes at the bottom of the sea with their fingers.
I’m not exactly a fan, but of all the ridiculous promises Obama made and expectations he set, being able to summon the powers of the sea a la Aquaman wasn’t among them. And if he spends the whole weekend going to baseball games and playing golf, that’s three days he won’t be signing legislation that puts future generations on the hook for deficit spending. I’m cool with that.
