Musings of a Wandering Mind

Standardizing

2010-07-10T07:57:00.000-04:00

In my continuing quest to simplify my life, I've started standardizing some things in my life. Part of that has been about developing routines to simplify my day-to-day life, although that's not really different than how I normally operate. Everyone will develop daily routines to efficiently get through mundane tasks and move on to dealing with the rest of the day. Mostly though, I've been moving towards standardizing my possessions and things I need to use. Simplifying the products I use has made my daily life less of a hassle. The things I've changed include:

Tupperware. When I'm cleaning up the kitchen at night and putting food away, nothing annoys me more than seeing a pile of mismatched tupperware and lids. I'm already doing the odious task of kitchen cleanup (usually sometime around 10 o'clock at night); the last thing I want to deal with is searching through a wretched pile of containers and lids to find a match. Consequently, I settled on only three styles of containers: round takeout plastic tubs, cylinder soup takeout containers, and rectangular Gladware. Everything else, I gave away or put away somewhere.
Phones. Since I handle all things electronic or tech-related in my household, I finally decided having my wife on Virgin Mobile and me on Page Plus was a royal P.I.T.A. I told my wife to burn up her minutes and then switched her to Page Plus. I then switched us all to Motorola phones so we'd only be using chargers with mini-usb connectors. Having to deal with finding the right charger for our phones is now not a problem since all our phones use the same type of charger. There's no confusion of plugging the power connector into the headphone port as I've witnessed some of my family members do with Nokia phones. And when I need to hack the phones (to customize a ringtone or something), there's plenty of online resources for reference.
Electronics. A myriad of different charger and connectivity options works ok for me. It doesn't seem to work so well for many members of my household and family, so I heavily favor devices which use common plugs. If a device uses a proprietary connector (instead of mini-usb), it loses massive points. This applies to cameras, gps, mp3 players, etc. Some devices idiotically have proprietary audio connectors so you can't use standard 3.5mm or 2.5mm headphones. I don't care how cool the device is. That's a sign of a company trying to screw you over. There's no good reason to re-invent the connector wheel other than to charge extra money, lock you into a product, and royally piss you off when you can't find the special connector. I unfortunately do still have a Sandisk mp3 player which uses a proprietary connector, but it was cheap. When it gets replaced, I'll pick a player which uses a mini-usb connector so I don't have to keep extra proprietary cables around.
Batteries. Other than stuff like the smoke alarm, alarm clocks, and wrist watches, everything else I have that requires semi-regular battery changing uses either AAA or AA batteries. Flashlights, mp3 player, remote controls, noise cancelling headphones, etc. are all using AA or AAA batteries. No more AAAA, C, D, CR123, or crappy button cell batteries are allowed.

There are some other things I'm working my way to standardizing:

Socks. I wear mostly white athletic socks, but I have white socks from different sock packs that my parents gave me. The problem is that all of those socks are either different brands or styles. It's not a huge deal, but it is mildly irritating matching up socks when I'm doing my laundry. While I'm folding my laundry, I think I have a matching pair of socks only to find that one sock as a red line and the other one doesn't. Next round, I'm getting all the same socks (other than my dress socks anyhow).
Operating systems. My wife uses Mac OS X. I unfortunately use Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows 7, Linux, and whatever operating systems and variants my work requires. It's good to be familiar with them all, but heterogeneous computing environments not so great when the rest of the family isn't as technically inclined as I am. I should probably migrate every computer that's not work-related to Mac for the sake of my tech support sanity.
Filing System. My wife and I aren't fully merged in terms of paperwork. This is ok for things that are work-related, but inconvenient for stuff like referencing our apartment lease, renewing the car registration, or looking up any household related documents. I should probably suck it up and buy a scanner so all our documents are in an electronic archive. The only thing holding me back is that being the one in charge of things tech-related, I'll end up doing all the scanning, and that's just a hell of a lot of paperwork.
Cookware. I would never buy a cookware set since you always get pieces that are useless to you and just take up valuable kitchen storage space. I am however consciously choosing my cookware replacements so that lids are interchangeable. Having a lid that works on only one pot or pan is a nuisance. Then there's the fact that I'm hooked on induction cooktops, which requires ferromagnetic cookware. The days of having cookware that's non-magnetic in my kitchen are numbered. I'm slowly switching everything to ferromagnetic stainless steel.

And of course, there are things over which I have no control that I wish were more standardized:

Screws. One thing that I hate is something that uses multiple screw types, whether it be furniture or a gadget. The engineer who decides that simultaneously using flathead, Phillips, hex head, and tri-wing screws is a good idea deserves to taken out back and beaten.
Mattresses. Shopping for a mattress follows closely behind shopping for a car in things I don't like to do. How hard can it be to buy a bed? Theoretically not very hard. But the thing is you can't easily comparison shop. The product lines are intentionally stratified and obfuscated so you can never make direct comparisons. Each store may carry the same manufacturers, but they all carry different named brands/product lines with the specs just different enough that apples to apples comparisons aren't possible.
Clothing sizes. I know it's worse for women's clothing, but it's still irritating in the men's clothing department. Depending on the manufacturer and the country of origin, a shirt that is small, medium, large, or x-large may be the correct size for me. Even with something that's measurable like waist measurements, things are maddeningly inconsistent. Some pants with a 32" waist fit me just right, and others with a 30" waist fall off me. That just shouldn't happen.

Lessons from Fist of the North Star, part II

2010-05-31T22:53:00.002-04:00

I am now nearly 60 episodes into Fist of the North Star. That comes out to about 40 episodes watched in the past 3 weeks, only two of which I've actively watched the series. Hey, what can I say? When your wife is off traveling to foreign lands, you have a lot more free time living a bachelor life. Anyhow, I've picked up some new lessons hidden in the plot of FOTNS. I'm still really enjoying watching Kenshiro kick ass, but these little points stuck out for me:

Yuda wears lipstick and looks like a fugly woman. He also happens to be under the "star of deception." Rei pulled a similar stunt earlier in the series. He dressed as a woman to lure unwitting bandits into his trap. Lessons learned: (a) South Star fist martial artists are well versed in the cross-dressing arts, and (b) Never trust a transvestite.
Kenshiro gets his arm bone "shattered" by Raoh in their battle, yet continues using his arm to fight in the subsequent episodes. Apparently, with muscles big enough, you can move your arm freely without any skeletal structure in place.
When Rei is defeated by Raoh and only has three days left to live, he decides to avenge Mamiya. That involves traveling to 2 different cities... on foot... while occasionally spitting up blood... being overall weakened... and walking through the desert with no water. Yet, he and Kenshiro manage to walk between two cities easily within that three day window. And this is after we have seen that Bat has repaired his dune buggy in an earlier episode. I was mistaken to think the characters were Japanese. They must be crazy Europeans since they prefer walking to driving, even when it makes more sense to drive.
If you suspect a cross-dressing, flaming martial artist is gay, then your suspicions are probably grounded in truth. Yuda started wearing lipstick after his bromance obsession with Rei.
How can you identify bad guy martial artists? Because they all practice martial arts from foreign lands or need weapons other than their hands. You practice the ultimate Chinese kempo style XYZ? You're probably a bad guy about to be killed by Kenshiro. Invincible Persian spinning blades? Ditto. Also, if they look a lot bigger than the villagers, then they are probably bad guys.
Of course, midgets are also evil. All short characters who aren't children are evil.
Kenshiro is color-blind. He mistakes Mamiya for Yuria, despite their hair colors being quite different. Or maybe even in post-apocalyptic Japan, it's still fashionable to constantly change your hair color.
The radiation from the nuclear war has changed biology and laws of energy (or mass) conservation. Characters often grow and shrink in size quite dramatically (particularly the bad guys, and especially around battle scenes). Must be all the radioactive energy in the environment.
All of Yuda's henchmen are branded with "UD." I'm all for school pride, but that's no reason to make all of your underlings show off your school. And how the heck did Yuda get into the University of Delaware? He strikes me as more the type to go to Brown.
After deciding to devote his remaining three days of life to saving his beloved Mamiya, Rei suffers exponentially greater pain from Toki extending his life and has his hair turn completely white. He manages to kill Yuda for Mamiya, but still dies in the end. What does this illustrate? "Women: can't live with them, and if you try you'll suffer, have your hair turn gray, and you still won't be able to live with them."

What motivates you?

2010-05-30T17:42:00.004-04:00

In the capitalistic model, it's money. But we all know (hopefully we all know) that money isn't everything. So, then what does motivate us? I thought this video had an interesting answer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

I thought the results of higher financial incentives leading to worse performance in cognitive and creative jobs was telling. It mirrors my own experience. Don't get me wrong. I DO like getting paid and would have absolutely no complaints about earning more money. But that's never been the drive behind my choices. I was groomed for and pushed to medical school most of my youth, primarily because the medical professions pay well. That didn't sit well with me since I'm pretty sure I couldn't stand doing a job I hated merely for money. So, I became a black sheep in the family by going to engineering school. There are a ton of jobs out there that I could have done that would be paying a heck of a lot more than I earn now, but I decided that job misery simply wasn't worth it.

As a side note: if monetary incentives are mostly ineffective at boosting job performance, you have to wonder why it's so commonly used in the financial sector. That would seem to select for greedy, self-interested people who get dumbed down by the financial incentives. Maybe that's not the greatest combination for an industry which drives a large portion of the country's economy.

Lessons from Fist of the North Star

2010-05-10T23:26:00.002-04:00

I've recently started watching Fist of the North Star since I've discovered the Hulu has the complete series. I had watched the animated movie in college, but I never saw the t.v. series. I'm around 17 episodes into the 152 episode series, and I must say I am enjoying it (1980's graphics and all). But I am glad that I didn't watch the series as a kid. While it is technically a cartoon, I'm not entirely sure my 7-year old self would have been quite ready for all the animated gore. I also think that the cartoon quirks may have taught me some erroneous lessons. So far, I've noted several themes/messages/patterns in Fist of the North Star:

To be a bad-ass protagonist in a manga series, you apparently need to have black hair, a triangular head, and really bushy eyebrows. That way, you can be readily distinguished from the evil European-looking arch-nemesis who has blond hair and well trimmed eyebrows. In fact, you can identify the rightful inheritor of the North Star Fist by the black hair, triangular head, and bushy eyebrows since everyone else appears to have different colored hair, round heads, and thinner eyebrows.
You can identify the powerful characters by the ginormous pecs, thick arms, and thin waists. The bodybuilder "V" shape is the ideal martial artist shape because it allows maximal punching power. Kenshiro beats all of his enormous opponents because they have thick midsections and legs in comparisons to their chest and arms. Apparently, Kenshiro's ability to tap 100% of his body's potential has to do with his bodybuilder's physique.
There's no need to worry about running out of oil. Even in post-apocalyptic Earth, there's plenty of gasoline for the multitudes of vehicles.
There are 708 pressure points which Kenshiro can strike to brutally maim and explode his enemies. There are about 208 bones in the human body, and 640 skeletal muscles. Assuming those pressure points are evenly distributed, Kenshiro can pretty much hit anywhere to kill his opponents.
You can easily identify the grunt bad guys. They have mohawks, tattoos, and ride motorcycles. They pretty much look like the bad guys from Mad Max.
It looks like even in post-apocalyptic Earth, we still haven't gotten rid of cheap muscle shirts manufactured in sweatshops. All Kenshiro has to do is flex and the shirt disintegrates. He must be single-handedly keeping the Chinese t-shirt industry afloat by constantly destroying his shirts in every battle.
Nothing says "endearing" and "lovable" character like a pre-pubescent orphan girl who constantly whines and longs for Ken (in a weird Freudian way) whenever he goes off into battle. That said pre-pubescent girl then proceeds to get hit on by a pre-pubescent boy around episode 14. Apparently, post-apocalyptic earth has fostered dysfunctional romances.
Tapping 100% of your potential power depends on shouting the right syllables in a high-pitched voice. Something like "a-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-tah" followed by an emphatic "watah!" while hitting your opponent is sure to put the massive hurt on.
To follow the previous point, announcing the poetic name of your deadly moves makes them more effective. For example, hitting 20 opponents and then saying "North Star 1000 crack fist" is sure to explode all opponents standing in your way.
Yuria must be an extraordinary harp player because that harp she plays is enormous. Most regular humans wouldn't even be able to reach all the strings. Kenshiro must love her because of her supernormal powers to play strings out of reach. It sure isn't for her musical talent. She apparently can't hide her mood since she plays melodies in a minor key when she's sad and a major key when she's feeling more hopeful.
Shin apparently suffers from the same problem as the James Bond bad guys. You'd think that after the first few times of Ken destroying his minions, he'd send the full forces to crush him, but that's not the case. Rather, he likes having his minions fall to Ken one-by-one and then angrily swear that next time Ken will certainly be stopped.

Despite all these points, I'm still thoroughly enjoying the series. There's something gratifying about the cheesiness and animated bad-guy head explosions. And hearing the predictable "you don't know that you are already dead" hasn't gotten old even after 17 episodes. I'm sure I'll find more quirks (and plot problems) with the cartoon, but I plan on finishing all 152 episodes anyway.

Weight bearing exercise

2010-03-12T09:56:00.002-05:00

Conventional wisdom tells us that weight training increases bone density (ex. here and here). The force of your muscles moving a load stresses the bones slightly and causes them to grow back stronger. That's a decidedly good thing, at least assuming that you don't do anything really (excuse the pun) bone-headed like lift weights you're not ready for or do exercises with terrible technique. Imagine my surprise when I catch this bit of news: "Weight-bearing exercise does not prevent increased bone turnover."

My response to that headline was a bafflement. I thought there was going to be some crap study on how weight bearing exercise didn't do anything for your bone health. Turns out that it's a study about how jogging and walking don't mitigate the increased bone turnover that occurs during weight loss. Apparently, you have increased bone remodeling when you lose a lot of body weight. This makes inherent sense: less weight = less load on the bones = less stimulation for bone growth. The thing that bothers me with the study is how "load-bearing" exercises are defined. I guess getting my ass up and walking around is technically putting a load on my bones. But it's as much of a load bearing exercise for a healthy person as is picking up a remote to change the channel on the idiot box. I'm not sure when "walking" and "light jogging" became considered "load-bearing" exercises. Have we became that sedentary that everyday activities have become tough exercise?

New Years Resolutions 2010

2010-01-01T13:58:00.005-05:00

I read some interesting statistics on New Year's resolutions of which I wasn't aware. Apparently, something like 40-45% of American adults make resolutions. Of those who make resolutions, the numbers sticking to their resolutions continually dwindle over the course of the year. Eventually, less than 50% of people who make resolutions actually keep them. That comes out to 20-2% of Americans who make and keep their resolutions. It's not a great success rate, but the upside is that people who set resolutions make more progress than if those who never set them at all.

Looking back on 2009

Anyhow, it's another year down, and another year of New Year's resolutions for me. How did I fare with last year's goals? Not great, but not too bad. I didn't do great with my goal of having more "me" time. I did end up having more time for myself by virtue of quitting my job with my last tyrannical boss and taking up a new job with a new company run by sane people. On the other hand, my time just filled up with other things. Some of those things were out of my control, like my wife being in her tenure review year and thus shifting a lot of responsibilities to me. Other factors were under my control, like my habit of try to do too much.

My goal of getting into a consistent I-Liq Chuan training was also a mixed success. My personal practice habits were pretty hit or miss all year. I did manage to get myself into consistent daily meditation practice though, and I did manage to get my class started. I've been told that my spinning hands has improved despite my poor practice habits, so I've managed to accomplish something with regards to my ILC training (if not as much as I'd hope to accomplish).

As far as my fitness goals went, I think I was also only half successful. I finally got the handstand, though it's a little wobbly and I can't hold it for more than 4-5 seconds. The iron cross goal was too ambitious, but I can actually get my arms out to maybe 60ish degrees, which is far better than it would be if I had never made that goal. I can do a dragon flag and almost do a full front lever, but both of those strength skills aren't rock solid yet. I got up to a 70 lb weighted pull up and dip (just another 80 lbs to go for the 2X bodyweight goal). Deadlifts maxed out at 225lbs for me, so I'm still about 75 lbs shy of the 2X bodyweight pull there. I didn't meet any of my fitness goals, but I knew they were too ambitious. I just made really good progress towards them.

Looking forward to 2010

So, what are my resolutions for this year? Well, I'm going to try being less ambitious this year. I'm intentionally not going to make any fitness goals. I'm just going to continue having fun working out with my buddies and continue making steady progress to the goals I set out previously. I'm also going to purposefully not make any specific goals of improving my Mandarin, picking up my guitars again, dropping my body fat, etc. My only two goals this year are to:

Simplify - There was just too much going on last year. It was too easy to get overwhelmed. I had no chance of pursuing anything when my plate was so full that I didn't even know where to begin. So, this year, I'm going to try to cut out more unnecessary items from my life, in terms of material things, pointless tasks, and mental clutter. If I can simplify my life, then I'll be better able to get back to other goals I want to pursue.
Improve my I-Liq Chuan - I know, it's a goal every year, but I've been told I'm supposed to test soon for my student level 5 and instructor lever 2. That means I can't be so lackadaisical about my personal training. So, I have to get my own training in on a more consistent basis in addition to teaching classes. On the flip side, I also want to raise my students' level of understanding and get them ready to start testing and to do more partner oriented training.

So, that's it. Here's to another year of improvement.

The next big thing

2009-11-01T12:36:00.001-05:00

Flipping through Shape magazine (it's my wife's, honestly), I came across the page with the latest fitness fads which included some yoga hybrid workouts. I'm usually pretty leery of fads. By the time an idea is mainstream popular, they're usually more marketing than substance. The resurgence of yoga is a good example. Sure, yoga is great for you, but its sheer popularity means that a lot of people are trying to milk the popularity cow. You get a lot of unqualified people with serious misunderstandings teaching classes just to meet the demand. You also get crossover ideas which are questionable and quite possibly silly.

For example, the latest crossover trends I've read about include:

Doga - Yoga with your dog. Bond with your dog while holding yoga poses.
Slackasana - Yoga on a slackline. Ok, I admit, that does sound fun to me. But it's mostly because I want to try slacklining, not because I feel an inherent urge to combine yoga with slacklining.
Koga - Combining the best of kickboxing and yoga. Two great tastes that taste great together? Not so sure about this combination myself.
Goga - Yoga for golf. I'm not sure it's actually all that popular or trendy, but I thought I'd include it for the sheer absurdity of its name.

Given all the yoga crossovers I'm seeing, I'm predicting that we will see more yoga crossover classes. Personally, I'd like to see two crossovers in particular. We could combine the gentle arts of tai chi and yoga into the great new hybrid Toga. Of course, wearing a white sheet to class would be optional. The other combination I want to see happen would combine the surging popularity of MMA with yoga. Keep healthy and fit, both body and mind, with the ultimate art Moga. Moga would be the ideal class for martial arts posers everywhere (pun intended).

What do you think? What crossover class do you want to see?

The Cornucopia

2009-08-30T10:00:00.003-04:00

My apartment complex actually forbids growing vegetables on the premises. It's actually explicitly specified in the rent contract. It makes me a little sad to not be able to garden here, but I did bend the rules a bit by growing basil (ha, take that evil apartment management! it's an herb, not a vegetable.). But who needs a vegetable garden anyhow? Especially when you've got friends willing to share their bounty.

One of my students brought this cornucopia of garden fresh, heirloom produce to me. My jaw nearly dropped when I saw the quantity of tomatoes, eggplant, squash, peppers, etc. And all of the samples are unique heirloom varieties, making it doubly awesome. Everything tastes just as scrumptious as it looks.

Whale Watching

2009-08-08T20:28:00.002-04:00

We went whale watching in Boston today. Apparently, off the coast of MA is prime whale feeding grounds. There are lots of whales off the coast feeding off the rich schools of fish. We were really blessed today with two humpback whales the revisited our boat several times during the whale watching tour. Unfortunately I was too slow with the camera to get the really cool footage of the juvenile whale flipping its tail right next to the boat. I did still manage to get some cool footage:

Colt 45, shaken not stirred

2009-07-22T10:02:00.001-04:00

Reading through the recent news in one of my surfing sessions, I discovered that numerous states have laws allowing people to carry guns into bars. Tennessee just passed a law allowing handgun permit holders to carry their handguns into playgrounds, school parking lots, civic centers, and establishments selling alcohol. Arizona is considering passing similar legislation. Shockingly, laws allowing handguns in establishments serving alcohol already exist in 37 states (though to be fair, not all of those states allow guns in bars).

I'm no expert in social phenomena, but my spidey senses tell me that mixing alcohol and firearms isn't the world's smartest combination. It ranks up there with smoking at a gas station, and watching t.v. while driving. Bad things don't happen every time, but mishaps are certain to occur. Unsurprisingly, bar owners and other voices of sanity note that people do stupid things around alcohol, and bringing guns to the equation is a recipe for disaster. Sure, the passed laws still make it illegal to consume alcohol at these establishments while packing heat; perhaps I have too little faith in not believing that that particular provision will be vigorously enforced and scrupulously followed by every citizen. Dumb and unenforceable laws are passed in alarming regularity. My own home state of Florida (which at least had the sense to expressly prohibit guns in bars and nightclubs) has laws prohibiting cohabitation and lewd acts by unmarried couples, farting in a public place after 6 p.m., and showering naked. I'd be shocked if any of those laws were actually enforced or followed, just as I'd be surprised to see Tennessee or Arizona spending the resources to make sure that gun-toting citizens weren't imbibing alcohol in their bars.

Latest DIY experiments

2009-07-14T07:28:00.004-04:00

Being an engineer, I often tend to opt for the DIY solution for many situations. I perhaps chose a suboptimal major and university combo since I seem to enjoy tinkering a lot; a cellular molecular bio degree from a university known for its theoretical work was in hindsight probably not the best fit for an eventual engineer. I'm also frugal, which also tends to contribute to my DIY nature. Why spend hard earned cash on something that I can build myself for a lot cheaper?

My latest DIY experiment has been finding a cheaper alternative to the Stick and Tiger Tail. Both are massage tools for loosening up those muscles you've got scrunched up from your crazy workouts. I'm not unopposed to spending money on truly useful tools, but $30 for what is essentially a glorified stick (in both name and function) didn't sit well with me. My alternatives to these products was a really cheap wood dowel that I had left over and a rolling pin from the store. The wood dowel works great, with its biggest downside being that it doesn't rotate freely about an axis. The best you can do is let it roll in your hands as you massage your tight hamstrings, quads, and iliotibial bands. It's not exactly the most convenient tool for the task, but it's perfectly functional. For the price (free since it was scrap material I had left over), I'm not complaining. The rolling pin actually rotates on an axis, which makes it easier to use. You can exert more pressure without having it induce friction burns on your calloused hands, as might be the case with going heavy with the dowel. I may still try out the commercial variants of these tools at some point. For the time being, I'm going to stick with my current solutions, since they are perfectly functional and a heck of a lot cheaper (<$5 vs $30+).

My other recent DIY experiment was making an agility ladder. These things can be had for around $30 on ebay. Of course, $7 worth of hardware store parts also gets you an agility ladder. I used some PVC pipe and some pink nylon rope to build mine. And it works just as well as the commercial product. Though, in this case, it would have probably been smarter to just buy the manufactured solution. The webbing and adjustable rungs are more flexible and easier to pack/unpack than my messy contraption. Nonetheless, I don't regret making my own ladder. Sure, I spent more in time and labor than I saved from the cheaper materials. But I had fun making that ladder, and I'm pretty sure no one is going to mistakenly walk off with my holy mess of pink rope and pvc.

Traffic Court: The Shakedown

2009-07-09T19:53:00.001-04:00

In my second [recent] experience with the legal system, I had to go to traffic court for a red light ticket. Overall, it was a pretty easy procedure, but it's still a hassle to have to take time out of my day to drive downtown, find parking, and then talk to the judge and traffic cop. In my last trip to court, I observed numerous people talking with the cops to arrange a fine payment without points. With every case, there was a deal made for a point-free offense as long as the person was willing to pay a fine. It was no different in my case.

My parents seemed to think I could have fought the ticket, but that really isn't worth my time and it just annoys all parties involved. Why do I want a pissed off judge and cop? It would probably mean a higher fine if I lose or a cop that's out to get me later with another ticket. My whole experience does lead me to think that the whole ticketing thing is a fundraising scheme though. There are a helluva lot fees (EMS fee, fire department fee, administrative padding fee, cost recovery fee, civic salary fund fee, alien invasion fee, etc.) tacked on to the basic fine; when everything is said and done, the original fee for the traffic violation has increased five fold. The ticket seems to be less about public safety than the Benjamins.

Dinner, the breakfast of champions

2009-07-03T09:45:00.001-04:00

Breakfast foods usually don't do much for me. They're mostly too sweet, too carbolicious, and often too light. Cereal, pancakes, waffles, fruit, oatmeal, bagels, muffins, and the ilk just don't rank very highly on my "I want to eat that first thing in the morning" list. I'm not a huge fan of eating lots of sweets, especially first thing in the morning. I'm much more a savory food eater. Eggs, cheese grits, and other savory items are acceptable. But the thing I usually want most first thing in the morning is leftovers from dinner.

Some people think I'm weird for wanting "real" food first thing in the morning. I say people who need lighter fare to ease them into the day are the abnormal ones. If I've just gone over 8 hours without eating anything, I'm going to be starving hungry. In fact, it's not unusual for me to wake up at 4-5 in the morning starving hungry if I had a particularly hard workout and too light a dinner the day before. When I wake up, I want real calories from a real meal. The other stuff (the typical sweet breakfast foods) are good in addition to my first real meal of the day; they just don't work for me as the complete breakfast.

As far as weird dietary habits go, I think my breakfast preference is pretty innocuous. Breakfast (not dinner) is supposed to be your most substantial meal of the day, so I figure I should get just as much food at breakfast as any other meal. Plus, I think it's terrible to start off the day with the typical carb heavy, processed food breakfast (I'm thinking of crap like pop tarts and sugary cereals here). Even worse and weirder to me are the people who start off their mornings with a Coca-Cola. An acidic, completely artificial drink with nothing but empty calories is not what I want first thing in the morning. I just prefer French bread pizza to French toast for breakfast. It's weird to some, but it's the way I like to start off my day.

To Crossfit, or not to Crossfit?

2009-06-28T13:55:00.001-04:00

Whether 'tis nobler to push the body to extremes of performance
or to listen to the voice of sanity and care about good form?

Crossfit is still popular for workouts. I've never personally done a Crossfit workout, though I do like the idea of Crossfit in principle. It's well-rounded, high intensity training, and the workouts never get stale since they're always changing. It's a breath of fresh air to see people doing a Crossfit workout after observing the legions of people going to the gym to zone out on the ellipticals or treadmills every day. How people can do the same ineffective workout day after day is beyond me.

That being said, there are a few aspects of Crossfit with which I have serious philosophical disagreement. The cultural emphasis on training hard, while admirable, should be tempered a bit. Training hard without training smart is just a recipe for injury. For example, compound, multi-joint exercises (deadlifts, push presses, squats, snatches, etc) are neurologically demanding exercises and really should be done with correct form to keep your joints healthy. Simultaneously training these exercises with heavy weight, high reps, and high speed just isn't a good idea. Unless you're training with a weight that's way too light, your form will break down over high-rep multi-joint exercises. That's just going to put unnecessary stress on the joints involved in the movement. It's even worse if you're dealing with a beginner or someone unfamiliar with the exercises. There's absolutely no reason for someone unfamiliar with a deadlift to do max effort deadlifts in a workout... well, not unless that person doesn't care about their spinal health anyhow.

I both love and dislike the randomness of the daily workouts. On one hand, workouts never get stale if they're constantly changing. On the other hand, if you're training for a specific goal (like increasing strength or speed), the complete randomness of the workouts means you'll always have mediocre progress towards your fitness goal. Also, there's seems to be no thought behind the exercise selection. Doing a ton of push presses a day after doing a ton of dips (or some other equally thoughtless combination) is a great way of causing long term shoulder problems.

Finally, there's the "Uncle Rhabdo" mascot. There's the fine line between funny and tasteless. IMO, Uncle Rhabdo crossed that line. Rhabdomyolysis just should never happen in a workout. I realize that it's rare, but the fact that it has and can happen during a Crossfit workout is disturbing. I only ever train to mild nausea and then start easing up. Exactly what do you gain by training any harder? It gets counterproductive at that point for the vast majority of people. And the "no pain, no gain" attitude which pervades Crossfit may go just a little too far. Having tired and sore muscles after a workout is ok. Being proud of training hard enough to get injured or training through an injury is stupid, not a badge of honor.

I probably will dabble with Crossfit at some point. I do like parts of its philosophy. But at the end of the day, I'll probably modify the workout to focus more on the training smarter instead of just training harder.

I cuss, you cuss...

2009-06-23T18:04:00.002-04:00

We all cuss for asparagus!

I've always thought that Far Side comic was funny. Gary Larson was pure genius. So, imagine my amusement this morning when I'm reading through the sports news and I see that William and Mary is considering making their mascot an asparagus stalk. I'm amused by silly mascots, being that my own alma mater was represented by a color (the "Maroons"). I had thought that Stanford choosing a tree was already pretty low on the sporting mascot scale, but a college giving serious consideration to a vegetable (which a lot of people don't like) as a mascot... well, that's a recipe for ridicule.

A stalk of asparagus blown up to a life size mascot is going to look like a large green phallus. I can already see the references to limp vegetables making it into rival school sports commentaries. And if I thought of Gary Larson when I heard this news, I know it's probably not a very original brainchild. Someone out there is going to paste the school into a rendition of the comic. Finally, does anyone really want to have their team be known as the "Fighting Asparaguses"? It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue or instill much fear into the hearts of the opposing teams.

Progress?

2009-06-15T19:48:00.001-04:00

Technology is supposed to advance civilization and bring us closer to a utopian, carefree existence. But advances in science and tech usually bring unforeseen consequences in addition to the improvements. While I was wasting valuable brain energy pondering this, I came up with a list of "advancements" that have also had negative impacts:

Cell phones - Both a godsend and a curse. I can keep in touch with everyone all the time, which is great... and absolutely horrific at the same time. Sometimes I just don't want to keep in touch with everyone. Then there's having to deal with the people talking in obnoxiously loud voices in every public space, people who can barely drive with no distractions but who insist on talking on the cell, and the worse yet, people texting while driving. And for goodness sake, how can people talk on the phone so much they give themselves "cell phone elbow"?
Gaming Tech - I'm a fan of gaming technology not because I play a lot of games, but because the gaming industry has driven technology development to the point that I can do serious research on off-the-shelf hardware that used to require really expensive, specialized gear. On the other hand, people get so into their games, we have issues like Wiitis and World of Warcraft addictions.
Athletic Shoes - I admit, that I do find sneakers pretty comfortable most of the time. But overall, the ultra cushiony, super supportive shoes of today are making our feet weaker and leaving us more prone to injury. Athletic shoes that are two stiff around the ankles (supposedly to protect against sprains) just force our bodies to compensate at the knees, hips, and back, increasing injury likelihood somewhere else in the body. It's ironic that shoes meant to protect us from injury make it easier for us to get injured.
Television - A marvel of instantaneous moving picture entertainment. Just add surround sound, HD resolution, and a comfortable couch, and you'll have home theater nirvana. Of course, there's the problem of television keeping people indoors on the couch instead of doing things like interacting with their community outside the home, in this thing called the real world.
Internet - Same problem as with television. It's just the newest tech trend that's made our lives so much more wonderful while at the same time isolating us and making us dumber. I can now keep in touch instantly with everyone I know, surf instantly for information and entertainment, etc. But the flip side is that it's easy to get sucked in and forget to live in the real world interacting with people face to face instead of over a virtual connection.
Modern Agriculture - Food production is the last few decades has been nothing short of astounding. Synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and industrial scale efficiencies means we have a huge quantity of really cheap food. The downside is that it's mostly subsidized corn that accounts for the vast quantities of calories that we can so easily and cheaply consume. The intensive farming techniques reliant on petroleum and natural gas chemistry aren't sustainable in the long run (both in terms of resources and environmental cost). Plus, there's a growing body of evidence that industrial agriculture results in less nutritious food. There's more to growing food than nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, and we certainly didn't evolve to subsist on corn and all its artificial derivative ingredients.

I'm sure I could come up with many more examples. But thinking about modern agriculture and food actually made me hungry. I'm off to scrounge around my pantry for some [no corn-derived ingredient] food.

More workout vids

2009-06-11T08:00:00.000-04:00

Just posting some video proof that I've managed to accomplish a few things before injuring myself from overtraining. When my wrist feels better, I'll make Gen film my other strength skills.

Dragon flag. Ignore the wobble towards the end. :)

Leaping push ups. Always fun.

Swiss ball-med ball plank. Getting the initial balance on this exercise is always a challenge.

A you might be list

2009-06-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

In light of the closure of a recent bad employment experience, I thought I'd write a humorous account of my misadventures in the form of a "You might be..." Jeff Foxworthy type list. So, here it is. You might be working for an idiot if:

Your boss can't spell your name on official documents, despite having multiple printed copies of your name on other documents and your name being only three letters long. (How you get "Qua" from "Kuo" is still beyond me)
Your boss claims that you should work through dinner because we're dealing with Eastern European programmers on a different time schedule than us. I may not be a math genius, but adding 5-7 hours on to 7ish p.m. Eastern Standard Time seems to put the Europeans in the midnight and beyond range. Perhaps they really are all vampires over there.
Your boss wants you to write code testing for a number greater than 10 to subsequently execute code testing whether that same number is less than 10. Logic may have been my weakest standardized test score, but I have trouble seeing how it's mathematically possible for a number to be simultaneously greater than and less than 10. (I was going to insert a statistician joke here, but thought better of it)
Your boss gives you the above logic-confounding instruction on three separate occasions in a 2 week time frame.
Your boss has been known to call technical support for a company and demand that the outsourced low level support employee log on to his system and tell him why his code isn't working with their software.
Your boss thinks it's a good idea to do Flash animation over the network work by remotely logging into his system, even though you can only see the animations at a 1-2 frame per second refresh rate.
He thinks its a good idea to do the above over a trans-Atlantic internet connection.
Your boss doesn't understand why people can't move around the screen as quickly as he can on his local PC when they're remotely logged into his computer over the internet and he's running a higher resolution than everyone else.
Your boss (the multitasking guru) thinks it's a good idea to tell you to actively train another developer while simultaneously working on another section of code. Apparently, doing two incongruous tasks which both require active participation must double your effectiveness when done together. I'll remember that next time I'm texting, watching t.v. and driving.
Your boss tells you that you can't eat lunch because work needs to get done... a mere hour after he eats his lunch in front of you.
Your boss tells you there's something medically wrong with you for needing to eat so often... after he eats his lunch in front of you. (this was the final straw in my quitting decision)
Your boss constantly spouts off how he's been doing software engineering for over 25 years... yet he doesn't know anything about programming.
Your boss, the esteemed software expert, refuses to use version control software on a huge, convoluted code base. Apparently, using industry standard computer software to manage rote, bookkeeping, time-consuming code tasks "develops bad habits." It's a task better handled old school: by error prone humans who don't always remember every little record-keeping step.
Your boss continually refers to his software as being written in .NET, when none of his code is written in .NET.
Your boss develops software for the education market... and claims that no one in the education market uses a Mac.
Your boss, who is developing on a strictly Microsoft platform, thinks it's a better idea to use his own development tools to write and manage code rather than using the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE. Apparently, his tools developed in the early 90s work better than highly integrated GUI tools of today. Code folding, code highlighting, pop up function prototypes, easy code navigation and searching, etc. are all features which pale in comparison to deprecated, crash prone, PC Junior-like development software.
Your boss can't even do problems in the children's math tutorial lessons he himself designed. It took superhuman effort not to bust a gut when he was doing the problems with some young children and got flummoxed by his own tutorial.

Trials and Triumphs

2009-06-09T09:46:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, I had the thoroughly unpleasant experience of going to court. I had to sue my former employer for backpay. The period leading up to the hearing was a nerve-wracking experience, but in the end, it felt like a huge relief to air my grievances in a court of law. I won't know the judge's decision for a few days, and even if my suit is successful, I may not be able to collect anything. But that really doesn't matter to me. The court hearing feels like a moment of closure. After many months, I feel like I can put the whole unpleasant experience with my former employer behind me.

In every bad situation, there's still a positive spin. You might argue that people that put those positive spins on bad situations are annoying overly perky people, but after talking to friends and family, I feel that there were at least a few good things that came out of the trials of my last employer's douche-baggery. If I hadn't taken that horrid job:

Gen and I probably wouldn't have gotten married as soon as we did, and we probably would have splurged an inordinate amount of cash on a large, fancy wedding instead of going to much cheaper and less stressful route of eloping.
I wouldn't have seen first hand the various lessons of mismanagement. I got hands on experience with exactly how a company should not be run. Call it learning by examples of what not to do.
I wouldn't have built up my patience and breathing meditation practice from having to deal with an incompetent moron every day.
I wouldn't have been so immensely successful at dropping my weight because I wasn't actually given any time to eat regularly (meals, snacks, or otherwise).
I may not have learned interesting Chinese phrases (like "Win or lose, no heavy heart") from my mom and thus not made any progress on expanding my vocabulary beyond "I had stir fry for dinner." As a bonus, my dad stopped spouting useless, completely imaginary phrases at me like "the early spring chicken gets his groove on."
I wouldn't have gained as much proficiency in assimilating information for spotting inconsistencies and untruths.
I wouldn't have seen the fascinating aspects of the legal system. Believe it or not, not everything about the legal system is dry, boring, and unpleasant. As sick and twisted as it is, talking to a lawyer friend was really interesting in seeing just how lawyers have to think.

I still haven't completely gotten over the trials of the past few months, but I've managed to mostly let go of it. I'm only human, so I imagine it'll be a little more time before the ill will completely dissipates.

Shaken, Not Stirred

2009-06-07T20:00:00.003-04:00

As most of my friends know (and which they sometimes give me grief), I don't drink. I haven't partaken of an alcoholic beverage since I was 5, when my dad gave me a sip of his beer. I was horribly traumatized by the incredibly bitter taste, and I've been turned off of alcohol ever since.

That doesn't mean I don't consume products made with alcoholic products, presuming there's no significant alcohol in the end product. For example, a tomato sauce cooked with a wine is perfectly acceptable. In fact, a tomato sauce cooked with wine is probably a good idea, since the alcohol extracts extra flavor and nutrition which aren't as readily available otherwise.

In my perusing of the interwebs today, I came across a story of the amazing properties of an alcoholic beverage. It turns out that shaking a martini instead of stirring it improves its antioxidant abilities, and both types of martinis are more effective than gin or vermouth alone. Amazingly, this was a supposedly carefully controlled studied published in a peer reviewed journal. I'm not exactly sure how they received funding for the study, but I'm going to guess that they had no trouble finding people to perform the studies. I will also give them props for writing fabulous lines in the paper:

"As Mr Bond is not afflicted by cataracts orcardiovascular disease, an investigation was conducted to determinewhether the mode of preparing martinis has an influence on theirantioxidantcapacity."

and the fabulous conclusion:

"007's profound state of health may be due,at least in part, to compliantbartenders."

So, with this fascinating research showing the potential health benefits of martinis, will I start my Dionysian plunge? Probably not. But at least I have a sense of why 007 was so badass.

Trickle Down

2009-06-01T23:59:00.001-04:00

Trickle down economics. The theory of making the rich richer as the means to bettering society as a whole was always a bit flimsy idea to me. Why exactly do the wealthiest and most powerful people need any more special treatment than they already get? The pictures in this post sum up my feelings on the subject.

Rich and powerful people are in a position of power, and who doesn't want to be in a better position than everyone else? It's only natural. It does become problematic when the already rich and powerful want to become yet more rich and powerful just for the sake of having more. They might generate wealth that does "trickle down," but at what cost? Overall wealth goes up, but proportionally more goes to the people upstream while the people downstream get the trickles. According to one statistic, 40% of growth in GDP ends up in the hands of the richest 1% of the people. That's just absurd.

The funny thing is that people are amazingly adaptable, especially when it comes to matters of material wealth. We can adjust to our level of financial riches. Once we get past our basic needs, what makes us most happier is not our absolute level of wealth. Rather, it's how well we're doing relative to our peers. Most people would rather be making a moderate salary that's better than their peers than a fortune that's smaller than their peers. It's petty, but the proverbial "keeping up with the Joneses" is firmly ingrained in our psyches.

Which brings me back to trickle down. If the rich get a whole lot richer, while the poor do just a little bit better, then are we really better off? The people getting a smaller slice of the pie aren't completely clueless. They can see they're getting shafted. Even dogs have a sense of fairness. Humans live longer and, with supposedly more brain power, can devote more neurons to resentment against getting the table scraps with the feast in plain view. Trickle down economics is merely a way the haves to make themselves feel good about being greedy and taking advantage of the have-nots.

Camel Jumping

2009-05-28T23:07:00.001-04:00

Heh, when I first read about camel jumping (via RossTraining), I thought to myself "I didn't know camels could jump." Of course, it's not the camels doing the jumping in this case.

I'm sure I could come up with some smart ass comment about the sport, but at the moment, I'm too impressed that the guy had enough hang time to clear six camels. Ok, maybe I can think of just a couple of humorous (dumb) comments: I just don't have enough in me to make it over the hump. That sort of physical exertion might make me yak.

All right, I'm going to leave my comments at that. I'm seriously impressed at this somewhat unconventional display of athleticism.

The quick fix

2009-05-23T22:09:00.001-04:00

Recently, I read a post on T-nation on training myths. This mythbuster post made the claim that steroids are overrated and that they don't do nearly as much as most people thinks. That's an interesting claim, especially coming from a site with a heavy body building slant. Turns out that I actually agreed with the assessment after I read through the explanation.

Steroids are useful (for the bodybuilder/athlete/etc) for building muscle mass, but there's a big caveat for maximizing the positive effects. If you're not already working out hard and eating smart, the 'roids probably won't do that much. It would be akin to putting racing tires on a car with a 4-cylinder engine; the tires may be great, but they don't make up for the fact that the core (engine) of the car sucks.

That got me to thinking about how people are always looking for the quick fix. There's no substitute for effort. Even geniuses need to work hard to attain greatness (though it may come easier for them than the average person). Similar to steroids would be sports supplements IMHO. They don't do much except fill the coffers of supplement companies unless you're actually training hard enough to need them.

I was talking to one guy in the gym who was asking about which protein shake was the best to take to gain muscle mass. Fair question (even though not one I'm well equipped to answer being that I don't actually buy those things). Turns out upon further questioning that he doesn't eat breakfast, eats irregular meals, doesn't even do strength training on a regular schedule, and only does exercises which hit small muscles. You're just not going to gain any appreciable muscle with poor eating habits, an irregular training schedule, and poor exercise choices. He shouldn't have even bothered with protein shakes until he took care of the basics. He totally fell for the quick fix marketing of the protein shake.

My parents shared a Chinese adage with me (which I've heard again from a third party, so I'm confident they weren't making this one up): an idiot who works hard will surpass the lazy genius. In their own Asian work ethic way were trying to teach me that there's just no substitute for effort. You can work smarter and find ways to facilitate a process, but in the end there's no quick fix for achieving anything you truly value.

Maintaining Literacy

2009-05-11T20:53:00.002-04:00

I've never been a big book reader, except for maybe a brief stint during my middle school years. Being educated and all, I seem to be the exception rather than norm in this regard amongst my peers. Almost everyone I know seems to be more well read than me. Sure, I read plenty of stuff, but it just doesn't tend to be in book format. I'm more likely to be reading articles (online and dead tree), blogs, forums, etc. Maybe it's because I tend to read more of the "how to do stuff" and "how stuff works" sort of things that my fascination with books never quite took off. I find other sources tend to get me the information faster and are usually a little more up to date.

On the other hand, I did marry an English professor. I'm not entirely sure why she agreed to marry me since I must appear nearly illiterate with the dearth of literature in my collection. But I am working on upping my reading rate. My normal book reading average over the past few years was 1-2 books a year. In the past six months, I've managed to read 3: The Four Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss), The Subtle Knife (Phillip Pullman), and The Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan). I'm not counting the strength training anatomy book I read since it was mostly pictures, and I'm currently working on The Amber Spyglass (also by Pullman). If I keep up this pace, I'm probably going double or triple my usual reading average.

I'm ambivalent about my new reading habits. I'm usually too busy tackling more projects than I can feasibly handle. I'm enjoying the ability to read at the moment, so I'm hoping that this reading uptick isn't an outlier.

I will call him... Mini Me!

2009-04-23T09:21:00.006-04:00

Well, I don't exactly have a mini genetic clone of myself. Even if that were technically feasible, I'm not sure it's a wise idea to have a mini-me wandering the world. I think full size me is all the world is ready to handle right now.

What I do have now is a Dell Mini 9 netbook with Mac OS X installed on it. Yep, I've fully caught the Mac fanboy syndrome. I was hooked after my first hackintosh, so I wasn't satisfied with the default Ubuntu install on my netbook. I was intent on making myself a mini-mac. After an initial hurdle of not having a recognized usb boot dvd drive, I got Mac OS X installed in under an hour. Then there was the task of shrinking the install so I could install the 10.5.6 combo update and MS Office (believe it or not, I do actually do work on my computers). Then I had to get two finger scrolling working on the touchpad. All in all, probably about 2-2.5 hours of install time, most of which I was surfing on another computer.

My mini-mac works surprisingly well. Ok, maybe not it wasn't so surprising since I extensively researched the Mac compatibility of the Mini 9 and people's general experience with hackintoshed Minis. I won't say that I can do serious work on my Mac mini. The non-standard keyboard and mini keyboard really slow me down. I did manage to create a short two page technical document on it; I won't say that was an efficient process. But for surfing the web, typing out short blog posts, checking my mail, etc. on the couch or on the road, my mini-mac really shines. And chicks dig the mini notebook. So far, the typical response has been "Oh, it's soooooo CUTE." It's not the typical compliment I like having thrown at my manly ego, but I'll take it.

Fitness inspirations

2009-04-09T18:23:00.003-04:00

I know it's not being modest when I say that I'm more fit than the average person. But the thing is, while I like knowing that I'm in the upper percentiles, I don't think I should be in the upper ranks of fit people! The only reason I'm more fit than the average is because, well let's face it, the average ain't that fit. Properly taken care of, the human body is amazing and can easily maintain high levels of physical fitness. Don't believe me, well, these guys are genuine senior citizens can put most people to shame. I find that really inspiring that at their ages, they're still so physically fit:

68 y.o. banging out some pull ups

71 y.o. doing a 450lb deadlift. I'm not even at half that weight with my own deadlifts!

524lb deadlift at age 75!

Here's a 67 y.o. doing a workout that most people probably can't do.

Might as well jump (a.k.a. why I don't run)

2009-04-08T19:12:00.004-04:00

I'm not a big fan of running. I know it's great exercise, but I'm short and I have flat feet. That's not a great combination for excelling at running. If I run for distance, my shins kill me. Add that to the fact that I always ran with people taller than me and with longer legs than me (i.e. longer strides), and it's no surprise that I'm usually the last one in the pack. Things have gotten better recently, but it's not because I run regularly. I sometimes do some sprint or stride work on the track just for a change of routine, but most of my cardio conditioning comes from something that I can actually do somewhat well: skip rope.

When done with proper technique, jumping rope is easier on the joints than running. It's also inherently plyometric and pretty much becomes an interval workout by default. Plus, you can do cool steps and tricks with the rope. Of course, you do whack yourself a few times with the rope learning the tricks, but it beats tricks with running for overall safety. While I think free running (parkour) is awesome, the potential for injury there is whole lot higher.

Anyhow, I managed to play around with my camera's video features. You can see what a typical rope workout looks like for me.

Round 1: Warmup

Round 2: Speed things up a little.

Round 3: Double unders

Round 4: One more speed round

Taking a month off from goal setting

2009-04-06T22:03:00.002-04:00

Last month wasn't great for my attempts at 30 day challenges. I didn't come anywhere close to getting in bed by 10:30 p.m. every night. I just got too busy. Eating dinner at 9, then cleaning up around 10 pretty much guranteed that I wouldn't even be winding down until 11. Combining daylight savings, traveling, and periods of being busy was not a good combination for that goal. And I still can't do a handstand, though I am getting closer. I also never quite got to 10 straight muscle ups (8 ain't bad though...).

I think I'll be taking a break from setting 30 day challenges for myself this month. Now that my schedule is returning to something more resembling "normal", I'll try re-pursuing the goals from last month. We'll see how that goes.

The Basketball Dilemma

2009-04-01T08:54:00.002-04:00

I haven't had a television for nearly 3 years now. I can't say that I've missed it much, though I do occasionally miss being able to vegetate with FoodTV, TLC, Discover, and HGTV. More recently, I've missed being able to watch sports. College basketball is nearly over for the season, and how many games have I watched? Zip, zero, zilch. That's how many.

Perhaps that's not such a bad thing this year since my beloved Duke Blue Devils got beat (well, stomped more technically) by Villanova. Despite living close to 'Nova, I can't actually bring myself to root for them. But UNC is still in the running, which is both a good and bad thing. It's good because I'm happy to see a North Carolina and ACC team still in the tourney. On the other hand, it's UNC.

So, I'm just a little torn about where my loyalties lie for the Final Four. UNC winning is great for NC and the ACC. Equally appealing is the idea of UNC suffering a heartbreaking loss. It's a tough call. I'll have to ponder this dilemma of sporting proportions while I consider my game viewing options.

Teaching in a Gym

2009-03-26T23:32:00.002-04:00

I've been teaching my tai chi class at the gym for just about two months now, and I think I've finally got the hang of the hang of the hour long class in a gym environment. It's been an adjustment going from a 1.5-2h long class structure with people specifically seeking out an internal martial art class to an environment where people come and go constantly and may just be looking for a short exercise class diversion. The hardest part about teaching an art in any sort of detail is that there's not always continuity week to week. People can't make every week, new people drop in randomly, and then there's the loud top 40 music blaring in the background.

Despite the less than ideal circumstances, I think I've figured out a formula that keeps the door open for newcomers while still keeping the regulars learning new stuff. The first thing I do is warmups (stretching, qigong, etc). I then do a combination of basic exercises, mobility drills, muscle activation exercises, etc. Usually, I start with a few of the 15 basic I-Liq Chuan exercises and note what movement dysfunctions people seem to have. Lately, that has included lack of hip control, tense lower backs, and knees going out of alignment with the toes. The movement dysfunctions give me feedback I use to choose exercises to improve body mechanics; after that, I then revisit the basic ILC exercises with attention to the corrected body movements.

The particular one or two exercises and body mechanics principles emphasized are then used a focal point for practicing the form. I lead the class into the form as far as most people have learned. To deal with the fact that there are sometimes newcomers, I focus on the last couple of learned movements rather than repeating a longer form sequence. Those movements get repeated many times and tied into the basic exercises/body mechanics corrections done earlier.

My approach seems to work relatively well. At some point in the future, it'll get tougher since I'll have to delve into greater detail. I've spent some time discussing hip control, knee alignment, opening the back (expanding the mingmen), center of gravity, and keeping the shoulders over the hips. Those topics were treated separately so as not to overwhelm the class with too much info and overly challenge their neuromuscular control. But I'm going to have to inter-relate all those body movement principles in the future. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to pull that off. Hopefully, my classes will continue surprising me in how fast they pick up and integrate what I'm teaching them. It'll make my task of tying together concepts easier when I get to that nebulous point in the future.

Daylight Savings. Really. Sucks.

2009-03-13T22:39:00.002-04:00

I've managed to quickly adjust my sleep cycle in response to daylight savings. I'm not sure how, but I'm actually managing to get up earlier despite having lost the hour. But it's seriously screwing with my schedule. I had made it a goal to be winding down by 10:30 every day for this month, but that seems highly unlikely for the next few days since I managed to get busy with work and lost the hour at the same time. I've been winding down around 11 p.m. a lot of nights, and not until midnight one day. Sigh.

States like Arizona were smart about daylight savings. They just don't do it. Of course, it is wretched hot in AZ, but maybe that's a fair trade off for not dealing with the retardedness of DST.

Half a goal down

2009-03-03T22:25:00.002-05:00

Oops. I apparently set the bar too low for my March fitness challenge. I did 27 total muscle ups and still had some extra left in the tank (probably could have made 30). That breaks the 25 goal I had set. I still have to make 10 straight muscle ups though.

March[ing] Forward

2009-03-02T22:26:00.003-05:00

February has come and gone, and my 30 day (or more accurately, 28 day) challenges were mostly met. I'll give myself a break because I was traveling for 4 of the days. My I-Liq Chuan practice habits have definitely gotten better because of the month long challenge. I wasn't particularly good about keeping up my handstand practice, though I did discover something about my hand positioning which should improve my future practice. And I didn't do my daily anatomy studies. But I made good progress overall despite the missed days.

So, on to my next set of goals. I'm going to tone down my goals for this month since I set too many last month (even though they were in different spheres of my life). This month my fitness goal is to get 10 straight muscle ups and 25+ total muscle ups. My personal goal is to get back in the habit of going to bed at a sane time. I'm going to shoot for winding down my evening by 10:30-11:00 p.m. It might be tough, but I think it's definitely something I should be shooting for so I can start getting up earlier and not suffer through the spring time change. I'll keep trying to get those handstands and the anatomy studying, but those will be secondary goals this month.

Silly Mascots

2009-02-23T22:58:00.002-05:00

Gen and I had a conversation about silly sports mascots, and I'm always amused when I remember some of the weird mascots out there. My own alma mater, University of Chicago, has a phoenix as a mascot, which isn't very related to the sports teams being the "Maroons." Nothing strikes fear into the heart of your opponents like a fierce abstract visual concept.

Then there's the Stanford tree mascot. How you get a tree to represent "cardinals" is beyond me. How someone chooses a tree as a mascot also baffles me. What sort of message is a tree mascot supposed to send to the opposing team? Fear the leafy terror! Witness the awe of our wooden movements! Only you can prevent forest fires?!?

While looking into other silly mascots, I came across some other gems. The University of Hawaii has the "Rainbows." To be fair, only of the teams is actually the "Rainbows." The others chose Rainbow Warriors or just Warriors. Still, willingly choosing to call your team the Rainbows doesn't instill confidence in the competitiveness of the team. Closer to home, Franklin and Marshall is the "Diplomats." I haven't been to any games yet, but I chuckle imagining the cheers: "Ne-go-tiate!" or "Talk it over" (clap, clap - clap, clap, clap). Then I picture signs in the crowd reading "I beg to differ", "we can compromise", or even "let's split the difference."

If you ask me, part of the fun of sports is the competition. Lame mascots don't exactly project an image of sporting competitiveness, while providing a wealth of comedic fodder for opposing teams.

She-man

2009-02-23T15:27:00.002-05:00

I came across this image while looking for diagrams/illustrations of the back muscles. Now, I like strong, athletic women, but there does come a line that maybe shouldn't be crossed. I can't define that line precisely, but I think this is a case of "I know it when I see it." I can accept that there are women out there with bigger arms than me, but having arms twice as big as mine and more ripped than most serious gym going, weight lifting males... well, that's just (IMO) plain unnatural.

Those arms are more buff than even the bearded lady I saw in the gym while I was at school in Chicago. Again, I thought it was a little weird seeing a woman with that much facial hair and stronger than all but 2 men in the gym. But I chalked that up to it being the University of Chicago since it's not a campus known for its physically strong student population. Anyhow, kudos to the women driven enough to get this strong, even though the physique looks disturbingly wrong to me.

Away for V-day

2009-02-18T00:20:00.004-05:00

I spent my second consecutive year in NY training martial arts during Valentine's Day weekend. I suppose that would be a big no-no in a lot of relationships, since it's supposed to be such a romantic day. But Gen was a good sport about the situation.

It may sound like a rationalization on my part, but I posit that Valentine's Day is just one huge capitalistic ploy to part consumers with their money. The sheer number of jewelry, chocolate, and flower advertisements that show up as February nears is disgusting. Buying commodity material goods is being pushed as a substitute for truly thoughtful gifts and actual expressions of affection. If we need to be reminded to show affection for our loved ones on a pre-anointed day by rushing out and buying gifts, then we seriously need to re-evaluate our relationships. It's the little things we do everyday that grow a relationship, not an expensive gift purchased once a year. Save the chocolate and flowers for another occasion that has more personal significance and when there's less pre-holiday price inflation.

Meatheads on vegetarianism?

2009-02-03T11:06:00.001-05:00

I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw this article show up on T-nation. A meat-eating body builder going mostly vegan for two months? That's unheard of. Props to John Berardi for trying to gain muscle mass on a plant based diet.

I'll say that I think it's entirely possible to be strong and vegetarian. Heck, I'm even living proof of that. There's no meat in my diet, and I can still strap on 70 lbs and bang out some weighted pull ups and dips. On the flip side, I'll never have a body builder look since I'll never consume enough protein to put on that much muscle mass. But I'm ok with that. I'd rather focus on being able to hold an iron cross than looking like Arnold.

February goals

2009-02-02T15:20:00.000-05:00

Last months goals went pretty well. I was pretty religious about doing my I-Liq Chuan training everyday, working in a daily meditation, and spending at least 10 minutes of quality time with Gen. I actually starting getting my daily training up to the 15 minute range and my meditations are getting up to 20-30 minutes daily practice. I still have to work on not letting my mind wander so much during my meditation. Overall, I'm pleased with January.

This month, I'm going to try upping my ILC form practice. I'm going to shoot for at least 10 minutes of daily form practice on top of the minimum 5 minutes of basic exercise practice. My fitness goal for this month is to cleanly kick up into a handstand and hold a solid 10s handstand. I think I'm pretty close to that. I just need some more practice. My personal improvement goal is to read up on anatomy. I'll start with 1 page a day out of the anatomy book (or 1 joint a day). I may not memorize all the details, but I figure I may as well start familiarizing myself with the skeletal and muscular anatomy since I have such a personal interest in body mechanics.

Food kick

2009-02-02T09:24:00.003-05:00

I seem to be on a bit of a food theme in my latest blog posts. It was bound to happen at some point since I spend so much time preparing and eating food. I'll try to use this post to get my food and eating thoughts out of my head, so I can move on to other subjects.

Weighing in
So, I unashamedly admit that I'm a bit of a lightweight for a guy. With my genetics and build I'm just not going to put on much more mass without putting on some flab. At my heaviest, I was 183lbs at some point in college. Then I managed to drop my weight to 132lbs by the time I started graduate school. I went back up to 165lbs (knee injury, no cardio, lots of lifting and eating). Now I'm back to slim 140ish pounds. Problem is that I think my peak athletic weight is closer to 145lbs. At the moment I've got the reverse problem from most people: I need to gain weight. And no, I don't plan on eating twinkies and cheesecake to up my weight. I'm still far too vain to let my body fat percentage creep up.

While I'm thinking of it, what the heck is up with the 100 calorie twinkies? Honestly, dropping the serving size to be 100 calories doesn't make the snack any healthier. You could probably save some cash and cut down on packaging by just cutting a regular twinkie in half (or thirds, whatever) and save the other portion for later (hopefully for later in the century and not later in the day). They're so artificial; it's not like that other half will go bad.

Bread
I've been baking quite a lot of bread recently. For the first time in my life I've gone through two entire bags of flour in under a month, and it actually makes sense for me to now buy bulk active yeast instead of packets of the instant yeast. I won't say that it saves me time, but it sure is a heck of a lot healthier, cheaper, and far better tasting than store bought.

So, my latest baking creations were cinnamon raisin oatmeal bread (with flax for extra fiber and omega-3 goodness) and cornbread from Alton Brown's "I'm just here for more food" book. The cornbread is a little decadent. I don't remember using that much oil in past recipes, but hey, I figured you might as well trust the Southern boy for a Southern food. That cornbread was super tasty, and was a surprisingly big hit at the Super Bowl party we went to last night. That being said, I'll probably go back to the lighter version of the recipe next time.

Eating Habits
Gen and I have pretty healthy eating habits. That's probably a big part of why I've been able to keep my body fat low. We prepare the vast majority of our own food, which is in line with my thoughts of having a connection to our food. Yet for all of my talk of avoiding processed foods, I just can't shake one item of junk food from my diet: tortilla chips. I really like the crunchy texture and salty taste. Add in some guacamole and salsa, and I may very well pig out on chips.

My diet isn't perfect, but that's ok with me. Borrowing a line from The Happiness Project blog, I "don't let perfect be the enemy of good." My diet is close enough to where I want it to be, so I don't sweat the chips too much. It's a work in progress. Even though I'll never quite reach it, I can still strive for the ideal and reap all the benefits. Though given my love of corn chips, maybe I should consider giving them up for a while; in the abstainer vs moderator spectrum, I'm not always a good moderator of chip consumption.

Dominoes and Papa Johns ain't got nothing on me

2009-01-26T23:05:00.003-05:00

We had pizza for dinner a couple of nights ago. I decided to use some of my leftover no-knead dough to just make a pie. That pizza was divine. The crust was crisped on the outside, but soft and chewy on the inside. The herbed, whole wheat dough had a really nice complex flavor, and mushrooms are always a winner on a pizza if you ask me. The only thing that could have possibly been better is if I had sprinkled some garlic powder on the crust (but alas, we ran out last week). There was a downside (or potentially an upside, depending on how you view it) to the pizza dinner though. The apartment smelled like mushroom pizza for hours. Midnight snack temptations were lingering the air that night.

Cookathon

2009-01-23T10:36:00.011-05:00

Sometimes it really sucks being a vegetarian and having an active lifestyle. I have to eat constantly, which unfortunately means either I (or Gen) have to cook constantly. So, we ran out of prepared food by mid-week as usual, forcing me to cook again. My 2.5h cook-a-thon yesterday yielded these fabulous dishes, which will hopefully get us at least through the weekend (when we'll be cooking yet more absurd quantities of food).

Fresh home-baked bread:

I'm really getting the hang of the no-knead bread. These are actually my 3rd and 4th loafs for the week from the original batch of no-knead dough. I was going to buy some clay tiles to put in the oven to simulate a baking stone, but I find that a perforated pizza pan works pretty well too. I get the oven heat baking the bottom crust and a neat dot pattern on the bottom of my bread.

Braised tofu:

Tofu and eggs in a delightful mushroom, black bean sauce with a hint of scallion. Yum, yum, do I sound like a restaurant menu or what? I like this dish because it's tasty, easy to make, rich in protein, and highly calorific (which I really need after a rough workout at the gym).

Spiced tofu stir fry
I found spiced tofu "threads" at the Asian market in town. I don't often cook with this ingredient, but I decided to give it a whirl this week. This dish has spiced tofu noodles with peppers and string beans in a positively delectable bean sauce. We've already put quite a dent into this dish. I don't think it'll make it past today.

Chickpea, red lentil dahl
Gen's usually better with the Indian curries, but this is one of the few dishes that I can make which scales up to large quantities. I also used dried chickpeas this time around (pressure cooked so that I didn't have to cook the dish for ages). I did accidentally use too much water, so the dahl is a little on the thin side; it's more of a chickpea, lentil soup with potatoes and other assorted veggies. Still tasty if not quite as hearty as I originally intended.

Lemon string beans
I had some ingredients to use up, so this is more of an afterthought dish. String beans, carrots and peanuts in a pseudo-Chinese lemon sauce. Very inauthentic (lemon sauce is something invented for the American palate). I think my version of lemon sauce tastes better than the restaurant version. Some fresh squeezed lemon juice and hoisin sauce combined with some fresh ginger and fresh ground black pepper makes for a citrusy, tangy, mildly spicy, and subtly sweet sauce which complements the crisp string beans and fresh carrots.

I also made a red bean (azuki bean) soup for dessert, but I forgot to snap a picture of that. My cooking (unsurprisingly) tends to be very Asian food biased. I find it a bit challenging scaling up the dishes to larger quantities, both because I don't have cookware or cooking appliances big enough to stir fry large quantities and because I just simply can't do that much chopping and food prep. Oh well. It looks like I'm going to have to get used to more casserole style dishes and learning to make the oven my new favorite cooking appliance.

Now that I've documented my cooking, I'm actually starting to get pretty hungry. It's time to eat!

January habit forming challenges

2009-01-21T12:34:00.003-05:00

I've actually been pursuing multiple challenges this month, which is generally not a good idea. Splitting your attention too many ways and trying to institute too many lifestyle changes at once dramatically lowers your chances of successfully implementing lasting change. I've justified the multi-goal approach by keeping my goals in separates spheres of my life (and also because some of my goals are inter-related so I necessarily have to pursue more than one at a time). So, my habit forming goals for this month are/were:

1. Spend more quality time with Gen, and making sure to spend at least 10 minutes of mindful together time at the end of the day. (goal for my personal/home life)

2. Getting in at least 5 minutes of daily martial arts practice. (training goal)

3. Improving my handstand form and static hold time. (strength/conditioning goal)

So far, I've only been lagging on the handstand goal. My handstand has definitely improved, but I'm not up to a 10s static hold yet or stable kick up into position. My other goals (and other strength training) has cut into my handstand practice time.

Accidently, I added in a daily 5+ minute meditation goal for this month, but that seems to tie directly into my first two goals. Gen and I have started a habit of a daily 10 minute meditation together at the end of the day as part of our time spent together. And then mindfulness practice is a core part of my I-Liq Chuan training. It was natural to just add that goal in, even if it wasn't initially on the list for this month.

Also, I appear to have already started on my goal of getting to bed earlier. Gen needs to go to bed earlier these days now that she's teaching again. If I want to keep up my habit of spending quality time with her at the end of the day, that means I also have to wind down my day earlier. This earlier bedtime is (I believe) helping my training. I wake up earlier and can thus get in some extra training time, and I'm getting more rest which is helping my body recover from my workouts faster. I'm making faster progress on my weighted dips, dragon flags, and front levers than I expected.

It's funny how some of my goals are affecting each other. It's complicating my 30-day challenge goal setting plans, but it's also fun seeing my goals approach completion faster.

Under Pressure

2009-01-18T18:21:00.003-05:00

We've had our pressure cooker for a little over a month now, and so far it's been fabulous. Beans cook super fast (relatively speaking), which makes preparing red (azuki) bean soup or Cuban black beans much less time-consuming. Though lentil soup doesn't take that long to prepare normally, I can obliterate those lentils in the pressure cooker and have a red lentil dahl prepared in no time. If only the pressure cooker magically took care of all the vegetable chopping, I'd be able to free myself of a lot of my cooking duties. I have to say, the one downside to being both a vegetarian and living an active lifestyle is that I have to constantly eat (and consequently, constantly prepare food).

Anyhoo, Gen pointed out a funny misprint in our pressure cooker manual. According to the fine folks at Fagor, we can cook blueberries in our pressure cooker in a mere 10 minutes:

Thanks, Fagor. I never knew that blueberries were a vegetable, and that cooking them in my pressure cooker was even an option. You learn something new everyday. :)

FrankenComputer

2009-01-13T22:43:00.004-05:00

Ok, the unthinkable has happened. I've been a PC person for ages, and I probably will continue to use Windows in some capacity for the foreseeable future. But I've taken a plunge. Some might even argue that I've taken a plunge off the deep end. I've switched to a Mac.

However, I didn't actually buy myself a Mac. I bought the operating system and some carefully researched hardware and built myself a "hackintosh." The system isn't quite as slick looking as a real Mac, but it did cost me a lot less money and runs pretty smoothly.

I used to make fun of Macs for being just a little too user friendly. In some instances, they are still a little too user friendly. Sometimes I really do want low level control of all the details. But I'm finding myself enjoying the computer tinkering less and less these days. Time is not a commodity of which I have large quantities. While I like to tinker (it's the nerd engineer in me), more often I just want things to work so I can get stuff done. Macs in their current incarnation (built on top of a Unix core) give me the famous user friendly Mac experience while still exposing tools that still allow me to poke around and experiment.

What's the experience been like so far in cheery, happy Mac land? Surprisingly pleasant. My biggest complaints at the moment are having to re-learn keyboard shortcuts. The home and end keys behave differently (jump to beginning and end of documents, not just lines). I have to re-map a lot of CTRL+key combinations to OPTION+key. But the OS itself is gorgeous, hibernating the OS works a heck of a lot better than Windows, and things (so far) seem to just work. I'm sure I'll find stupid little things that irk me as I get more familiar with Mac OS X, but so far I like having this fresh start on a new computer.

Shift reality to suit your needs

2009-01-07T18:28:00.005-05:00

Picture of George Rousse "Bending Space"

No, I'm not endorsing a delusional denial of reality or questionable interpretations of facts to suit an agenda. Re-interpreting reality is often used as a propaganda tool by those espousing very strong viewpoints. It's quite a nifty trick actually, but ultimately, I'm not referring to anything quite so nefarious.

I was just reminded today of a positive thinking trick: "fake it 'til you make it." It's too easy for us to get frozen into inaction because of fear of failure or misguided belief that we aren't good enough to do something. The simple act of imagining and acting like we're confident and know exactly what we're doing often brings about the desired result. Inertia is the single biggest stumbling block to accomplishing something. To borrow a cliche from a Greek demi-god themed company, to effect change, we need to "just do it."

I wrote a post on my strategies to accomplishing New Year's goals (on one of my other web projects, TheInternalArts.com), and the listed tips are all ones I use to help me achieve my goals. I forgot to add the fake it til you make it tip though. It's one I've been implicitly using but never thought of in those terms before.

30 Day Challenges

2009-01-05T12:00:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, I posted my 2009 New Year's resolutions. Today, I thought I'd share some more of my goals for the year. These goals are secondary and goals which I'll be approaching more as 30 day challenges. Why 30 day challenges? Well, I got the idea from Zen Habits. Thirty days is long enough to develop a habit, but short enough that you don't get discouraged from even starting. I've managed to develop a few habits using 30 day challenges: drinking a glass or two of water every morning after I wake up, eating more frequent smaller meals, and doing warmup stretching and qigong exercises first thing in the morning.

So, my 30-day challenge goals for this year are:

1. Go to bed earlier so I can get enough sleep and wake up earlier.
2. Get back into regular Chinese learning (like listening to ChinesePod, learning characters, etc)
3. Read up on anatomy and kinesiology
4. Spend at least 10 minutes a day of mindful quality time with Genevieve
5. Solid 10+ second handstand
6. Front lever static hold

Some of these goals I might pursue simultaneously; I tend to do a fitness goal and regular life goal at the same time since I consider them to be in different spheres of my life. At any rate, I'm sure the list will change (probably get longer) as the year progresses.

Resolutions for 2009

2009-01-04T20:39:00.004-05:00

The New Year has past, and it's time again for some resolutions. I was actually pretty successful with my resolutions last year. I smoked the goals of jumping rope for 10 continuous minutes and dropping 1% body fat. I can now jump easily jump rope for over 20 straight minutes at a reasonable 120 turns per minute pace, though I'm usually skipping the rope at a much faster pace. I'm also pretty sure I dropped more than just 1% body fat since I dropped 10+ pounds and my abs started showing up. My bodyfat has been slightly creeping up again since I took a job that seriously ate into my free time, thus making regular exercise and a carefully planned diet much more difficult. However, I'm dropping that job since the job was sucking my will to live out of me, and that's never a good sign. I'll be starting this year with a really clean slate.

So what are my goals for 2009? I have quite a few goals for the new year, but the primary ones are:

1. Having more free time and me time
First and foremost, this year I want more time. My latest job required so many hours that I almost never interacted with my dear wife, my family, and essentially had no opportunities to develop a community of friends after moving to Lancaster. I also had almost no time to take care of myself (eating properly, exercising regularly, and just having down time to recuperate). It's no surprise I was miserable. Research shows that your happiness is closely tied to the quality of your interpersonal relationships and your health. My job was not providing me either of those things, gave me no fulfillment, and actively denied me the things I cared about. I quickly determined that the job simply wasn't worth pursuing any longer.

With more free time, I intend to re-incorporate all the little things that bring me fulfillment: checking in with my family and friends, spending quality time with Gen, my martial arts and fitness training, and stimulating my mind with things like learning Chinese. I know it can sometimes be hard to juggle the personal and working life, but I think I'll have a better handle on it this year. First off, the toxic job is gone. Next, I'm planning on instituting some new lifestyle design elements into my daily life. I've been motivated by reading The Four Hour Work Week, which has gotten me thinking about how I can rearrange my life to have both a successful working life and full personal life.

It'll be an ongoing experiment throughout the year redesigning my daily habits to fit my desired lifestyle. I've already tried a few things that I think will become permanent. I've dropped my random surfing. I now try to use the internet with more purpose and save the online leisurely pondering to for a select few blogs/sites/forums. That also means I'm viciously deleting feeds from my RSS feeder, because that is also a non-trivial time suck which gives me limited information given the amount of time I spend reading. I'll need to restrict the feeds I read to ones that give a lot of interesting/relevant information per post or friends' blogs. The other noise has to be filtered out. I've also decided to try restricting how often I check my e-mail. So far, I haven't really gone through any internet deprivation symptoms, and I've found that I can focus better on tasks I'm trying to accomplish.

2. Get back to consistent training
Having both moved and taken a new job at the same time, my martial arts and minfulness training has taken a big hit. I feel that my progress has seriously stagnated as a result. I really want to get back into daily personal training. Eventually, I'd like to up to at least 30 minutes each of martial arts and meditation training a day. I'm starting off with 5 minutes each daily and gradually working my way up.

3. Fitness Goals
I have a new set of fitness goals this year: 1. Iron Cross on the rings; 2. Weighted pull ups and dips at bodyweight; and 3. Double bodyweight deadlift. I still have to complete a few more goals from last year's goals, most notably my goals of holding a solid front lever and dragon flag. I'm not too far off from those goals, and I'm guessing that the time suck and energy suck from my last job prevented me from completing those goals. This year's goals should be more challenging than last year's, but I think they're completely do-able. I think the iron cross will probably be the most challenging of this year's fitness goals since it requires both a lot of upper body strength as well as elbow conditioning. I'm nearly halfway to my weighted pull up and dip goal (I can do 70lbs on each pretty consistently), and I think deadlifts should come quickly if I train smart (low rep 5x5 type strength workouts) and eat right.

FTD = royal scam?

2008-12-30T16:49:00.002-05:00

So, I blew some of my e-rewards dollars on an FTD gift certificate since there's almost nothing worth my spending my e-rewards on. I thought I'd be able to just buy a cheap gift basket or flowers for the holidays, but I soon discovered that wasn't the case. As any frugal shopper would do, I clicked through fatwallet to get cashback at FTD. Something didn't look quite right when I did that though. Comparing prices using two different browsers (one clicked through fatwallet and one visiting the site directly), you could clearly see that the prices were vastly different. Not just a little different. We're talking a lot bigger than 20% and closer to 75-100% more.

Ok, so that's a little scammy, but I figured I'd just go directly to the site and use up my gift card that way. I scan for the on sale items and find something somewhat reasonably priced with reasonable shipping costs. When I go to place my order, I find something quite shocking. The calculated shipping price on the product information page is quite different from the shipping price on the checkout page. In fact, it's 30% higher. I repeated the process several times to make sure there wasn't a mistake, and found the exact same bait and switch every time.

Turns out (after a little Google research) that FTD has a terrible customer service track record and numerous complaints about dead flowers, questionable product substitutions, and general screwing over of the consumer. Oh well, looks like I'll have to give away the gift certificate to someone else willing to risk FTD. Next time I'll do a little more research. Live and learn.

'Twas the night before Xmas...

2008-12-24T21:13:00.003-05:00

and all through the house,

everything a-stirring,

including a mouse.

Ok, maybe it's not quite the hustling and bustling household, but it's not a silent night either. We managed to go out to do some grocery shopping today and hit up REI before my member dividend expires. Traffic today was wretched. Apparently people are still shopping. Dear Lord people, you should have your shopping done by now. What sort of thoughtful gift can you possibly get at the last minute?

Ack! The Holidaze are upon us!

2008-12-20T01:12:00.002-05:00

Where did my time go? It seemed like just yesterday that I was posting about Thanksgiving. Now, Christmahanukwanzikah is right around the corner. I had more grand plans for my holidays (particularly in the shopping department), but time flew right by (i.e. I had to work so many hours that I didn't have time to do a lot of my holiday shopping, and also my boss seems to think that being "too busy" to write a paycheck is an acceptable excuse for not paying me on time). I'm not one to give into to rampant consumerism, but there are a few things that I did want to pick up. I'm pretty set on the idea of building myself a hackintosh, so I've been trying to gradually pick up parts on sale. Unfortunately, that plan doesn't always pan out since I'm usually working/exercising/eating during the hours that the good stuff is (a) on sale and (b) not sold out. Oh well, here's to hoping that good deals will abound in January.

My martial arts training has taken a big plunge lately. The job killed off any ideas I had of regular training, but the holiday season basically completely nuked my training schedule. I'm hoping to get back into it soon, maybe even during my break. Of course, I'll probably have a really long to-do list over my break which may eat into my limited training time and also my "recover my sanity" time. I'm sorely tempted at this point to make a to-do list that literally says "nothing" on it. Vegetating for a few days sounds really good to me now.

The holidays also seems to bring with it a fresh beginning with the New Year. I'm hoping my New Year brings me more free time and more quality time with my wife, family, and friends. In case you don't already know, I resigned from my current job. The number of hours required made it impossible for me to do the things important to me: interact with my loved ones and friends, continue my I-Liq Chuan practice, and maintain my physical and mental health. I finally decided that the job was taking all the joy out of my life and just wasn't worth it. So, I'm especially looking forward to a fresh beginning in January when I'm free from the bonds of a life-depriving job.

Thanksgiving musings: SPAM,Tofurducken, and melamines

2008-11-24T23:57:00.004-05:00

I haven't touched my Zenfulness blog in ages, but boy am I ever suffering from a deluge of comment spam. I'm sure I don't get nearly as much as some more popular blogs, yet the 20 spam comments I get a day do feel like quite a bit. If I could get my hands on the punks who keep spamming my blog... well, I probably wouldn't do anything since I'm not really the violent sort. It's nice to picture a nice punch to the gut or a knuckle strike to the temple though. At the very least, I'd really enjoy giving them an atomic wedgie in public.

With Thanksgiving right around the corner, my thoughts return to reveries of the mythical tofurducken. I don't really know if it exists or if it is merely a fantastic creation of my crazed mind. In case you're wondering what the heck a tofurducken is, just look up turducken. The turducken is a ~~foul~~ fowl Frankenstein creation. I imagine the vegetarian equivalent of it around this time of year. The closest thing I could find on the internet was some person's reference to a "tofucken" which my juvenille sense of humor found funny. I did come up with my own recipe involving wheat gluten, mushroms, tofu skins, and pressed/frozen tofu. I never tried out my recipe though, and given my huge amount of free time, I probably won't be doing so in the near future.

And while I'm on the subject of foul foods, I read a disturbing article on Treehugger today. We hear the scary stories about melamine in Chinese food products, but apparently, melamine is pretty common in U.S. food products, too. And even being a vegetarian doesn't spare me the exposure since it can be used as a crop fertilizer which not only gets into the food supply, but also taints the soil and environment. I already think that the U.S. as a country eats crap for food, but this only re-inforces that perception. Industrial agriculture and food production is more concerned with making money than providing real food. And the fact that the food production is so far separated from the everyday consumer means that most people have no idea how potentially bad their food is.

So, to sign off on a more positive note, appreciate the good food you eat this Thanksgiving. Hopefully, the meal will be blessed with lots of whole, nutritious foods.

Have I become a fitness snob?

2008-11-19T12:00:00.001-05:00

I think I have. I actually analyze people's workouts when I go to the gym and give a thumbs up and thumbs down approval rating. Mostly, it's a thumbs down rating since what I see people doing doesn't (in my opinion) do much for their fitness. People spend way too much time on cardio machines doing long, even paced workouts. I don't know about you, but that would bore me senseless. I need to vary my pace and rhythm and get done quickly. I don't have an hour free to burn on an elliptical machine, or God forbid, a treadmill. I'd rather do rope or run sprints for 15 minutes and be done. Fifteen minutes of high intensity interval training (HIIT) will beat an hour of slow, even-paced cardio every time.

Today, I just came across an ad for the "Ab Rocket Abdominal Trainer." Devices like these don't rank high on my list of worthwhile purchases. It's a marketing gimmick, and I think it's more than likely total crap. I guess I can see how it'll give some people an ab workout, but if you honestly expect to get strong abs from this thing, you're delusional. People put far too much effort into training their rectus abdominus (the muscles that you see in six-pack abs). Ironically, those muscles aren't really the most important ab muscles for core strength. The obliques (internal, external, and transverse) are probably more important for core stability and strength. Overemphasizing the rectus abdominus serves no purpose other than causing "poochy belly" because the other abs aren't proportionally strong enough to hold the over-developed rectus abdominus flat. To add insult to injury, working the rectus abdominus more with tons of crunches won't actually give you a six pack unless you drop your body fat with smart exercising and a healthy diet.

Anyhow, I digress. If you really want to develop strong abs, do exercises that challenge your entire core. Stabilizing yourself on the rings, throwing and catching a medicine ball, yoga, pilates, etc. all develop your core. Heck, you can drop the ab exercises all together and just do proper full range of motion squats. You'll develop strong abs with weighted squats a lot faster that you will with overpriced, gimmicky devices that you see on infomercials. And you'll get toned legs at the same time. The more I think about it, the more squats sound like a cheaper and more efficient exercise than ab-rocketing the money from my wallet to the black hole of questionable exercise gadgets.

Weekend cook-a-thon

2008-11-18T23:52:00.003-05:00

I actually had some time to cook this past weekend, which is a rare thing. Of course, I also got some new kitchen toys which provided me extra motivation to do some cooking. I just got a pressure cooker and a new stir fry pan, both of which I'm really digging. I managed to make red bean soup in 20 minutes (usually takes me 8 hours or more in the slow cooker). Then, I blasted some dried chickpeas in about 20 minutes, and then made a yummy chickpea/lentil curry in about 30 minutes. I've discovered though that the advertised cook times on the pressure cooker are a little deceiving; they don't include the time it takes to bring the water up to a boil and pressurize the pot. That time is not insignificant when you've got a 8 quart pot. Nevertheless, the pressure cooker was still a heck of a lot faster than cooking in a normal pot.

I also managed to bake some acorn squash and roast the seeds. The seeds do take a while since you have to separate them out from the pulpy mass in the middle of the squash. Yet, there's something deeply satisfying about working with your hands, even if you're running your fingers through squishy, slimy pulp. Despite the time drain of roasting the seeds, I still enjoyed the process as it was a time I could just reflect in peace. And we get a small container of yummy roasted seeds, which is always a plus.

New old tech

2008-11-13T22:52:00.005-05:00

In my last blog post, I mentioned how my computers are getting a little long in the tooth. I'm still perfectly happy with them, though I will admit to having weak moments of tech-lust during those rare instances when I feel my computer is really dragging. It's also appalling that I'm actually wanting to get a Mac when I've been a PC guy all my life. I nearly broke down and bought a Macbook, but discipline (a.k.a. my cheapskate instincts) prevailed.

I did break down and upgrade my desktop though. I'm now up to a whopping 2 gigs of ram, and I'm now sporting a 22" lcd monitor. I spent an embarassing amount of time researching lcd monitors; I now know what the performance difference is between different types of LCD panels, backlight technology, and more than I ever cared to know about color fidelity. And I still ended up just purchasing a cheap TN panel (which to be fair did get good reviews). I just couldn't bring myself to fork out a few hundred (possibly thousand) dollars more for the uber high color fidelity and massive view angle of an S-IPS panel. I just don't do serious enough artistic work on my monitor to need it, though I will admit, a high end S-IPS lcd monitor still is on my tech-lust wish list.

So, I haven't done much with my computer, but the new monitor and upgraded ram makes my computer feel newer. My computer is still technologically ancient, but it's been given a second wind. We'll see how long I can hold out before I join the dark side (a.k.a. the Mac world).

The latest and greatest

2008-10-17T22:38:00.002-04:00

I've actually got two computers on which I regularly work. One is a big Compaq laptop running an Athlon XP-M at a whopping 1.6 GHz, and the other is a desktop running an Athlon XP at 1.8 GHz. Both computers at this point are probably over 5 years old. For someone who spends so much time working on computers, you'd think that I'd get some new systems. But the funny thing is that both computers suit my needs just fine... ok, at least when I'm not doing serious programming work. Overall though, my computing needs are fairly modest.

Several years ago, I'd be itching to upgrade my systems. Nowadays, I do a little research to price out a new system only to decide a day later that it's not worth the money to upgrade when my computers suit my needs just fine. The only new thing that I want is a new, bigger lcd monitor. Other than that, there's not much else I actually need. I find the same goes for all the gadgets I see on the market. I don't want a fancy-schmancy smart phone. That would mean an expensive phone plan, expensive phone, and being tethered to work more. That seems like a horrible idea to me. My mp3 player needs are also modest. I only really listen to my workout mix at the gym or Mandarin lesson podcasts. The only feature I really need there is a user friendly navigation menu to get to the mp3 I want to play.

I think once I hit my 30s, had to move several times, and got more into mindfulness training, the message of uncluttering has taken a bigger role in my life. I really don't want more stuff in my life unless it serves a well-defined purpose and doesn't just waste time and space. I find I have more peace of mind having fewer material possessions and not wanting stuff. What I want in life isn't more possessions; I rather prefer having more time. Material possessions are a poor substitute for time spent with Gen, with family and friends, and for myself.

Truth in advertising

2008-10-09T11:43:00.001-04:00

One thing that annoys me is advertising that is technically correct, but in a stupid sort of way. I guess the marketing must work. It sure feels like the people being targeted are real morons though, which is why I must find the advertising so aggravating. Even though I rag on the general public not being that bright, I do like to think people have some shred of intelligence. Call me an optimist.

So, what type of marketing am I thinking about? Well, I'll start with some food examples. We recently bought a jar of honey. The label on the front says it's fat free. Once when I was grocery shopping, I saw a sign in front of a display of grapes with the message: "Did you know that grapes are a naturally fat and cholesterol free?" You don't say? And don't get me started on "light" ice cream. The only reason it's light is because it's whipped up with air. You get less ice cream per serving because the servings are defined by volume (which is now half air instead of ice cream). As a non-food example, I was once shopping with my former housemates when we came across the household cleaners section. One of the cleaners was advertising its improved vinegar containing formula and boosted sanitation power. Good grief! Vinegar has been used as an economical cleaning solution for decades, and it's dirt cheap. I couldn't believe this cleaner was more expensive because they added some measly vinegar.

Marketing isn't inherently evil (ok, maybe that point is a little debatable), but does it really have to assume we're stupid?

Wealth perspective

2008-10-07T11:14:00.000-04:00

While reading MillionaireMommyNextDoor, I came across a quote that I really liked:

"...if you and your family are going to be truly happy in having lived a rich and rewarding life, it is essential that they and you develop friendships and relationships outside the home. If home ownership has become too all-consuming for you, then maybe it is time you really consider downsizing your home investment. Our lives have meaning only in so much as we interact productively, emotionally, and spiritually with our community. Let us hope that, regardless of what happens to home prices in the future, we never lose sight of this important truth." - John Talbot, The Coming Crash in the Housing Market

While the topic of the book isn't particularly pleasant (unless you're into schadenfreude), the quoted passage resonates with my own values. I enjoy financial well-being as much as anyone, but I enjoy that financial well-being a whole lot less if I have to make a lot of sacrifices in my relationships to my wife, family, friends, etc. Like most good Asian boys, I was conditioned pretty early to want to earn a lot of money. Fortunately, lessons of coveting material wealth didn't sink in too deeply.

Ironically, the older I get, the more I worry about money, but the less I value it. I'm getting old enough now to care more about how I'm going to fund my children's college tuition, build up my retirement account, and deal with the inevitable bumps in life. At the same time, just earning money doesn't bring me any fulfillment in life and thus has limited personal value. Like everything else, it's a balancing act. Material wealth allows me to live my life, but attaining material wealth tends to hinder the act of living. The true key is realizing that wealth is the means to an end. What seems (to me) to have brought our current economic meltdown is that wealth itself became the destination instead of the vehicle. Greed--which I define here as the desire for more wealth for the sake of wealth--brought about the financially stupid decisions which lead our economy to the crapper.

But troubled times are also good times for reflection. Losing money, while never pleasant, is not the end of the world. Keeping the important things in life in perspective is more valuable than any of our worldly possessions.

Secrets (aka how my Sifu hides his secret techniques)

2008-10-05T10:50:00.000-04:00

My Sifu has said a funny statement to us several times, and I thought I should share it. The saying goes something like: "I don't need to keep secrets from you. The secrets protect themselves." Of course, I didn't have a recorder handy, so I have to recreate the quote from memory. Anyhow, it's a pretty fitting [and funny] quote. It is true that my Sifu has never kept any martial arts secrets from us. And even if he did, we wouldn't have a deep enough understanding to realize it (ironic, isn't it?).

Most people training martial arts nowadays train it as a fun pasttime or form of exercise rather than as a serious pursuit. There's nothing wrong with that. People should do what makes them happy. But the lack of serious pursuit does have the consequence of producing few people with deep understanding or real proficiency. That leaves a lot of martial artists out there with limited understanding of their arts and less than real-life effectiveness. It's the limitations in understanding that keep the secrets safe. Not like the secrets are all that complicated; in fact, all of them that I've learned so far fall under the K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. My Sifu has told me the same things time and again, with only more refinements as my understanding improves.

Everything has been out in the open from the beginning. It's just up to me to train and reflect enough to grasp the lessons so that I can physically manifest the theoretical concepts. Of course, during the process of training and learning, I feel like I've missed an obvious point every time. I slowly realize that what I've just learned has been presented to me several times before. So, I plod along with my training gradually realizing that the "secrets" are pretty simple. Considering the skill differential between me and my teacher, I can safely say that some secrets will remain safely in the open for the forseeable future.

Great minds think alike?

2008-10-03T22:56:00.002-04:00

Do you ever ponder something completely meaningless but yet still infinitely fascinating? Last night, the phrase "great minds think alike" popped into my head, and I got to thinking: why in the world do we use that phrase? Great minds often think differently than everyone else. The collective mind of the masses willingly bends to pop culture, religious idols, and political ranters. Homogenous thinking is a trait of those who don't wish to spend the mental energy for critical thinking. The phrase is nonsensical.

So, where does the phrase actually come from? Well, as best as Google can tell me:

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE -- "Often quoted in jest today, this saying originated in the seventeenth century as the comic-sounding 'Great wits jump.' Daubridgecourt Belchier first recorded the saying in 'Hans Beer-Pot' (1618) as 'Good wits doe iumpe (agree).'...The expression 'Great minds jump' appeared in the late 1800s..." From "Wise Words and Wives' Tales: The Origins, Meanings and Time-Honored Wisdom of Proverbs and Folk Sayings Olde and New" by Stuart Flexner and Doris Flexner (Avon Books, New York, 1993).

and also:

Used ironically. Both verb and noun have changed in the course of this proverb's history, the earliest instance of the present form thus far discovered being quot. 1898. Jump used absolutely in the sense of ‘agree completely’ or ‘coincide’ is now archaic.
Though he made that verse, Those words were made before. ‥Good wits doe iumpe.
[1618 D. Belchier Hans Beer-Pot D1]

Great wits jump: for the moment Dr. Slop cast his eyes upon his bag‥the very same thought occurred.
[1761 Sterne Tristram Shandy III. ix.]

As great minds jump this proves‥that my Mind is Great!
[1889 A. James Journal 1 Dec. (1964) 61]

Curious how great minds think alike. My pupil wrote me the same explanation about his non-appearance. ‥
[1898 C. G. Robertson Voces Academicae 24]

‘Great minds think alike—that's why we're never in agreement.’
[2002 Washington Times 28 May C9 (Bottomliners cartoon)]

I probably wasted too much time thinking about the phrase and looking up its origins. But then again, I rarely have the time to just pursue such idles. I'm still glad I wasted some time satisfying an academic curiosity.

Ultrasonic Buzz

2008-10-02T21:10:00.002-04:00

I'm a bit of an ultrasound imaging geek considering that I spent many years of my life doing ultrasound research. Ultrasound stories in the news invariably pique my interest. I was pleasantly surprised to see this bit of news in the headlines this morning. Apparently, you can create a pretty good facsimile of a fine aged wine using ultrasound. How cool is that? Of course, it doesn't do me an iota of good since I don't actually drink any alcohol.

In a way, this is sort of related to my previous research life. I used to work on improving cardiovascular medicine by applying 3D ultrasound to heart imaging. You could say that making better wines with ultrasound are sort of cardiovascular related, given the studies showing that red wine has some heart protective qualities. Ok, it is a bit of a stretch. Still, I at least found the idea of using ultrasound to age wine to be pretty nifty. It's definitely a bit of technology more likely to quickly make it to the marketplace than my graduate research.

The side job

2008-09-21T22:55:00.002-04:00

It's a little over a month into the new job, and boy am I tired. I'm not so sure I like this working 10-11 hour days. With Gen also having to work long hours now that school has started again, it's a little rough keeping the household in order. It's particularly rough on the food side of things. If neither of us has much time to shop and cook, we often run into "what the hell are we gonna eat?" moments by midweek.

Despite the long hours, I have actually managed to do a freelance job. My creative juices don't flow as freely when my brain is tired, but I'm still happy with my latest mini-project: TheInternalArts.com. My freelance work seems to be very martial arts biased. Why "TheInternalArts" and not just "InternalArts"? Well, can you believe that a PC repair company took the other domain? Really, the nerve. Don't they know that "internal arts" refers to esoteric martial arts and not computer repair?! ;-b

One of these days I'll get back around to working on my own website.

Nearly unpacked, and other small miracles

2008-09-13T00:25:00.003-04:00

It's a minor miracle. We almost have our apartment unpacked. The living room only has 3 boxes left, and two of those are earmarked for storing things we want to either give away or sell. My office looks spiffy, especially now that I have enough space to set up my parallelettes. If I can get myself away from the computer long enough during the day, I should be able to practice my tucked planches during my stretching breaks. Now all I have to do is unpack the rest of my clothes and figure out where to put my guitars.

Another small feat was our cooking this week. I was out of town last weekend, Gen was sick, and our jobs don't seem to give us enough time to make it to the market during the week. That means we hadn't been grocery shopping for over a week and a half by the time I got back into town. We quite nearly ran out of food and had to get a little creative with our cooking. You really learn to appreciate fresh food when you're forced to eat dried and frozen foods for an extended period of time.

Love and Marriage

2008-09-03T10:50:00.001-04:00

I've been married for a little over two weeks now, and I have to say I've been enjoying married life even more than I initially thought I would. It's weird. Even though Genevieve and I have been together for quite a while, being married still brings an elation I didn't quite expect. Everyone tells us we look so happy together. I never really thought of it before, but after pondering it, I realized that we are pretty blessed. We actually are really happy together.

There are still some things I'm still adjusting to though. The first is this wearing a ring thing. It's a weird feeling to be wearing a piece of jewelry now, especially considering that I never usually wore any adornments in the past. Heck, I dislike even wearing a watch. Assuming I remember to wear my ring, getting it on and off is also sometimes a challenge. My finger diameter seems to change with the weather, time of day, and how recently I've done any exercise. Sometimes it's a real bear to get off, and other times it slides right off. The other weird thing is that sometimes when I'm not wearing it, it feels like I'm wearing a phantom ring or that something is missing from my finger. I guess I'm now in a strange transitional period where it feels awkward both when I'm wearing and not wearing my ring.

A new experience that I am enjoying is referring to each other as husband and wife. Before, it was just "fiance/fiancee" or "girlfriend/boyfriend." Now, it brings a smile to my face to check the "married" box on questionnaires and introduce ourselves as a married couple. When I wrap up work for the day, I enjoy thinking that my wife is waiting for me to go to the gym and have dinner. It's a little surprising to me that I feel this way. I guess I've been a closet romantic all this time. The stereotype is for the romance to fade as a couple grows older, which I guess is natural as passions mellow out and become more even keeled over time. But I like to view our elopement as a harbinger. If we're already this happy about being married after 7 years together, we'll still be happy together many years down the road.

The Insanity

2008-09-01T21:55:00.003-04:00

Well, it appears my blogging has taken a major plunge over the past month. There has actually been good reason for my extended absence. I've been crazy busy with the convergence of several events, creating a perfect time suck storm. But fear not, it takes more than a mere lack of free time to totally stop me from making my miniscule presence felt in the blogosphere.

So, what has been keeping me busy? Well, first I switched jobs. For a good month, I was wrapping up at my old job while simultaneously putting in hours for my new job. That in itself was really racking up the hours of preoccupation. If you count the fact that I was still teaching my class at the YMCA, I technically had three jobs at the time.

To make life even more interesting, Gen and I were also preparing to move during my job transition period. Packing up and moving when you're working long hours is not a fun task. We decided that we've had enough of moving ourselves around, so we did smartly hire movers this time around. Still, we had to get everything packed for them, deal with apartment hunting, and worry about unpacking at the new apartment, and clean up the old place. Minus the apartment hunting and booking the movers, which took place a few weeks earlier, the whole move process
took place over something like 5 days. There were long hours of packing, unpacking, cleaning, and driving back and forth. All the while my new boss seemed to think that I should be working 12 hour days.

The last contributing factor to my recent lack of time insanity was getting married. Genevieve and I decided to elope. As sad as it is to think that we were never able to find enough time to plan a regular wedding, we were almost too preoccupied to even throw together an elopement. I know there's something very wrong (but also amusing) with that picture. At any rate, we are now happily married and trying to enjoy as much time together before our schedules get busier with work (Gen starts teaching, and I don't imagine my job at the startup getting shorter hours).

Hell must be freezing over

2008-08-08T09:40:00.004-04:00

There are lots of celebrities infamous for (to put it nicely) having a high monetary wealth to intelligence ratio. What little celebrity news I tolerate listening to usually doesn't do much to improve my opinion of the lifestyles of the rich and [unfortunately] famous. Imagine my surprise when I saw Paris Hilton in a funny and--dare I say it?--even somewhat clever video while I was surfing Treehugger.

Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Adfunny videosFunnyOrDie.com

Hell must be getting a cold spell if Paris Hilton has managed to publicly do something that doesn't further lower my opinion of her. What next? I'm going to be totally flabbergasted if I read in the news that Brittany Spears starts making herself respectable or Miss Teen South Carolina suddenly starts synchronizing her gray matter with her mouth.

Tales of a gym rat, part 2

2008-08-01T23:17:00.005-04:00

This post is a continuation of another blog post, which you can read here.

My exposure to the martial arts started when I was a wee little middle schooler punching and kicking my way through karate class. My sensei, I can proudly say, was actually someone not to be trifled with. He may have been a very nice man teaching a bunch of sub-optimally conditioned recreational martial artists, but I do remember him just looking tough. How do I know? Well, I'm judging based on how fit I remember him being. It was an old school sort of fitness. Nothing like the McDojo level of fitness you often see nowadays. The man had bowling pin forearms, which in my mind is a good sign that he took his training seriously. I distinctly remember him inflicting random ab torture days on us where we did ab work until we had trouble holding ourselves upright (and then doing some more). I had the misfortune of one of those ab torture days coming the day before my presidential fitness test in PE. I was really sore the day of the test. Boy, did I ever flunk the situp portion of that test.

I never did become good at Karate, but that's because like most people, I just didn't put in the effort to truly excel. Kids in particular tend to have short attention spans, and I was no exception. I did like it, but I soon moved on to other things. It wouldn't be until graduate school that I would take up another martial art. I got hooked on the idea of tai chi after watching a martial arts documentary. Luckily for me, a few weeks later, a tai chi club formed at Duke. I managed to train Chen style tai chi for something like 6 years and loved every minute of it. I'm not entirely sure why I was drawn to tai chi, but I was definitely hooked on training internal martial arts after a few months.

Since there was a lot of emphasis on correct body mechanics and the internal training, my approach to other physical activities began to change. Slowly, I began making little connections between tai chi training principles and sports. When I got in the weight room, I tried to pay the same sort of attention to body mechanics while lifting weights as I would when training form. It made lifting much more of a meditative activity.

Training an internal martial art, I've often heard that it's not a good idea to do weight lifting. Through my own research and experience, I've come to mostly agree with that sentiment. I don't totally agree though. Weight lifting done incorrectly will certainly tighten you up and promote bad motion patterns. However, like any other activity, if done correctly, it's just another tool for improving your strength conditioning. Unfortunately, way too many people weight train incorrectly. Anyhow, from training martial arts and spending too much time reading about training, I eventually came across the idea of bodyweight strength training. I hadn't given much thought before to bodyweight training since I had a common misconception that lifting weights was the only way to get strong. It had never dawned on me that leverage combined with one's own bodyweight could make bodyweight strength conditioning just as challenging as (and sometimes even harder than) regular weight lifting. Also, most of the wild and crazy bodyweight exercises I saw people doing involved a lot more functional strength than the typical jaunt through the weight room. My weight training routine had gotten a little stale at that point anyhow, so I switched to an all bodyweight regimen as an experiment.

That switch to bodyweight exercises was originally intended to be a 3 month experiment. I think it's been well over a year now, and it doesn't look like weight lifting will be anything more than a training supplement for me for the foreseeable future. A lot of those bodyweight exercises (the rings in particular) are a helluva lot harder than the exercises I had been doing before. They require a good deal of body awareness, total body control, and core strength to execute correctly, and they seem to more readily tie in with my martial arts training. Most importantly, they're just a lot more fun for me; it's like mind candy for me to explore how I can use my body to improve my functional strength. Another added bonus is that the exercises usually look really cool. I know it's pure vanity on my part, but I do enjoy flaunting a little when I'm jumping rope, doing the rings, or trying to hold a dragon flag.

Even the most ardent fan of lifting big iron would be hard pressed to say these two bodyweight exercises are for pansies.

It's been a meandering road recounting how I wound up becoming a gym rat. I think my parents (especially my dad) are sometime baffled at why I'm so into martial arts and physical fitness. Though I've retold what I think is the path that brought me to this point, it may just be that it was predestined. According to the Chinese zodiac, I'm a snake, and if you believe those cheesy placemat descriptions, I'm "vain and intense." Oddly enough, that's a pretty fair description of me. I'm both vain and intense about my training and other aspects of my life. Then there's the fact that my parents named me Qiang (強), which translates to "strong and forceful." If you ask me, blame for this aspect of my life falls squarely on my parents for their predictive naming. It's just a good thing that they didn't choose to name me something like "smelly tofu."

Tales of a gym rat, part 1

2008-07-31T22:27:00.004-04:00

I got to thinking today that I spend an inordinate amount of time working out in the gym or training martial arts. I suppose these are probably healthy passions to have. Time that a lot of people would spend going out to bars drinking, watching TV, or whatnot, I spend training physical conditioning, coordination skills, and martial arts. Overall, I believe this has saved me quite a bit of money and generally kept me out of trouble. One downside to this lifestyle that I end up having to eat a lot to fuel my physical endeavors, which is a small price to pay I think. Another consequence is that my circle of friends becomes highly biased towards people I either train with or see in my training environment. Again, this isn't really all that terrible since I end up around people with similar interests to me and training an internal martial arts usually means that I meet a wide spectrum of people anyhow.

Still, it is sort of funny how I ended up being so interested in physically demanding pastimes. I think part of it simply stems from the fact that I was actually discouraged from physical activities as a child so I could study more. That was an unfortunate, misguided action from my father, and it certainly backfired on him in the long run. The most surefire way to make a rebellious kid do something is to try restricting him from doing it. Combining that with the fact that I lived in the middle of a sleepy retired neighborhood in Florida with no car meant that I had a lot of pent up energy and nothing to do with it except play lots and lots of basketball at the playground. When I finally started going to the gym (via parent chauffeur), I burned off that energy playing more ball and lifting weights.

Then there's the fact that I wasn't exactly the model of fitness for most of my childhood. Embarassingly, I was once 183 lbs, and that wasn't all muscle. Halfway through college, I went vegetarian, started eating 5 meals a day, and exercised like a madman. I was in the gym like 3 hours a day in the gym (over the summer anyhow, I don't think I could swing that gym schedule during the regular academic year). Needless to say, I dropped a lot of weight fast. Basically, I dropped about 50 lbs in a year. I was probably a little too thin at 132 lbs, but I was in really good shape and feeling pretty good.

Throughout college and graduate school, I forged a lot of my friendships in the gym. There's nothing quite like shooting the breeze while grunting under a heavy bar. Even better is the trash talk and attempts to make your workout buddies lose their concentration with off color remarks about other gym goers. I still have fond memories of spotters forgetting to spot me because they were checking out a blondie on the other side of the gym and the subsequent grief they got for the lapse in attention. The pain of sore muscles from a hard workout was a commonality amongst us all. We comforted each other with comments like "you pansy, you only did 3 sets with 45lb plates!" and "alright buttercup, you gonna lift like a man today?" The gym scene was definitely a little strange, but beneath the macho facade, there was genuine camaraderie. It may have been built by bonding over a painful activity, but it was friendship nonetheless.

Read part 2 of this blog post here.

Stirring up the diet wars

2008-07-25T23:38:00.003-04:00

Tom Palazzolo, Vegetarian and Carnivore CoupleI came across this post on TreeHugger about vegetarians living longer than the general [carnivorous] population. Of course, this isn't particularly shocking news in my opinion. Vegetarian diets just tend to be healthier (not quite as calorific, richer in fresh foods packed with nutrients and antioxidants, and not nearly as much saturated fat). Of course, this doesn't mean that meat eaters can't also have just as healthy diets. In my opinion though, most of the hardcore carnivores I run into need to have meat all the time and usually buy large quantities of industrially farmed (and consequently subpar) meat.

It's funny that there are two extremes across the diet divide: the adamant veg heads (which I will admit, I'm more likely to associate myself with) and the religious carnivores. Just read through the comments on the TreeHugger blog post. There are some strong opinions on both sides of the issue. While I won't say that no one should eat meat, I do still firmly believe that eating more on the vegetarian end of the diet spectrum is good for the body and soul.

Blog pimping and [the lack of] creativity

2008-07-21T23:06:00.004-04:00

I came across a fabulous post on Big Contrarian (via 43Folders) recently. Basically, it's an essay ripping into the state of "pro blogging." This is the quote that spoke to me:

Write top ten lists and whore yourself on many other sites as you possibly can. Don’t be thoughtful, long-winded or interesting. Don’t write about you love, unless what you love is popular on Digg. And for god’s sake don’t even think about writing about more than one topic.Whether their strategies work or not is slightly beside the point. It’s cheap. It’s marketing driven, instead of content driven.

Sadly, that expresses my opinion about a lot of popular culture in general even though the original post is about blogging in particular. There's just not a whole lot of original, creative content out there. So many things are just market driven, and large segments of the market for some strange reason likes craptastic drivel.

While there's nothing inherently wrong with making money, I do think that money as the primary driving factor often kills originality and promotes homogenization. Know how there's a ton of stuff on t.v. but almost nothing to watch? Well, that's a good example of profit drive killing originality. Few networks are going to risk airing a new groundbreaking (and potentially money-losing) show when the formulaic banal shows will likely earn more money. In people's personal lives, few people will take a chance on pursuing a dream because of the risk of failure--particularly of the risk of monetary failure.

So, is mediocrity for the sake of money wrong? No, not necessarily. But maybe our priorities aren't quite in the right place if we allow profit drive to become the sole reason for pursuing something.

Mad busy

2008-07-21T22:56:00.002-04:00

Wow, I have been slacking on my blog lately. I have to chalk it up to extreme busy-ness. I've taken a new job with a start up company and am already doing some part time work for the new company. At the same time, I'm wrapping up loose ends at my old job. Effectively, I'm working two jobs now, which doesn't leave me with a lot of free time. To top it off, we're also moving soon. That means apartment searching, packing, finding movers, setting up in a new place, etc. It's both a little exciting and totally energy sapping at the same time. I'm quite frankly exhausted a lot of days.

While I'm looking forward to the excitement and novelty of moving, I'm also pretty bummed about moving. You know how they say you need to live somewhere for at least a year to build a circle of friends and and find your community. Well, it's totally true. Just when I feel like I'm getting to know people around Philly and establish friendships, I'm moving away. I've already done this moving thing 2 times in the past 2 years. Quite frankly, it's starting to get a little old.

Randomness

2008-07-10T16:14:00.003-04:00

I came across this gem on Treehugger, and I thought it was awesome in that silly and utterly ridiculous sort of way. Someone even dubbed it "Vicious Cycle," which I think is a rather apt name. Oddly enough, this bicycle reminds me of how I feel about running on a track. No matter how fast you go, you're still going nowhere.

In other off the wall news, I came across news blurb about chess boxing. What could be a better combination? It involves brawn and brains. They're two interesting competitions that become so much more when they're combined together. So, it's not exactly my cup of tea, but I thought the idea was fascinating. It's an idea born from a comic strip and brought to life by crazy people who thought it would be fun. I'd probably never do it since I'm (a) pretty mediocre at chess and (b) borderline mediocre at boxing. But maybe that's the right combo. The typical chess genius is probably too wimpy and gets knocked out in the boxing rounds, whereas the great boxer might not have the brilliant strategic mind to survive the chess game. I say this is almost as brilliant as the Krispy Kreme challenge I recently learned about. Run a long distance, eat a dozen donuts, and then run back. Combine your athletic prowess with flaunt your gastrointestinal fortitude at the same time (or in many cases, show your lack of an iron stomach on the return run). But as entertaining as these past times sound to me, I'm perhaps just too square to do them. I like to partake of my activities one at a time.

back in blogging action... sort of

2008-07-05T22:06:00.005-04:00

It's been a while since I've blogged, mostly because I've been super busy and traveling. I went to Florida three weeks ago and was in NC last week. I need a vacation at home just to recover from the traveling. Since I'm currently swamped in work (both new and backlogged), I'll have to keep this post and posts in the near future somewhat on the shorter and less thought out side. So, on to the update in Johnny-land.

First off, the somewhat big news (nope, not getting married yet, though that would be big news that all my friends and family keep pestering me about). I started eating eggs again. I finally decided that it's just far too inconvenient not to eat eggs. The Buddhist in me still feels that it's not compassionate to eat meat, so I still won't partake in meat eating. Eggs fall into a gray area. Eggs themselves aren't necessarily cruel foods, but factory farmed eggs is vicious, cruel practice (in my opinion). I still have strong objections to factory farmed eggs, so I'll do my best to buy organic, free range eggs. I know true free range eggs are really difficult to find, but I'll try my best to support local and ethical egg farmers. I still haven't fully gotten used to the taste of eating eggs again, but at least my return to eating eggs hasn't completely grossed me out. I guess it's better this way since I usually cook the eggs for Gen, but haven't been able to taste them until recently. Now I can tweak my cooking methods and recipes for better flavor instead of relying on past experience and guesswork.

My experiment with minimal shoes has been a success so far. For the past 3ish weeks, I've substituted my Speedo water shoes over my sneakers for everyday wear. My feet and ankles feel stronger, and I'm definitely more aware of my steps now since the thin sole gives me a lot of feedback from the ground. At first, it was a little tough; my Achilles tendon felt a little tight from the extra use , and my feet were a little more tired in general. I still switch back to my sneakers from time to time, especially if I'm jumping rope. A somewhat unexpected consequence of switching to the minimal water shoes is that my martial arts practice has improved. All of a sudden, it's much easier for me to sink my weight into my hips, open my back, and wrap my toes into the ground. I feel more rooted without feeling immobile. Another weird effect, which I might be imagining, is that my feet look like they have more of an arch. I was born with flat feet, and for a long time I could actually tell how flat a surface was by just stepping on it (no joke!). In fact, I can still create minor suction on certain surfaces with my feet. I know, it's very weird, and I can't always reproduce it. Anyhow, in recent years, my feet developed a noticeable, if very slight, arch. I think my strengthened feet have made the arch go from like 1 degree curve to a 2 degree curve. I'll never have a regular arch, but my experiences with the minimal shoes to date further convinces me that modern shoes are over-supportive and weakening people's feet.

That's it for now. I'll try to get back to more regular posting when I'm not so swamped with work and not so tired from working so much.

Shocking News: One Size Fits All Doesn't Work

2008-06-21T16:57:00.005-04:00

This week's news brings up a study which has results that fall squarely in the "no duh!" territory: a study from the Thomas Fordham Institute shows that concentrating efforts on bringing the lowest achieving students up to par drags down the highest achievers. Not terribly surprising. Public education has never been about fostering excellence. It's always been about getting people to a minimum standard with no incentive to push beyond that.

Because there's not much incentive for going beyond what's required, public education largely becomes a system forcing homogeneity and universal mediocrity onto students who are naturally stratified in their talents. With the obsession with tracking everything with standardized tests and the arguably senseless "No Child Left Behind" measures implemented under G-Dub, public education has become a wasteland for student development. Not to say there aren't good schools, teachers, and students out there. Educational excellence still exists in the morass of the public school system, but I fear that it only exists as mini ecosystems where learning thrives. The ocean of mediocrity (and the ever increasing cesspools of incompetence) loom large and threaten to make all our students equally subpar.

The end is near

2008-06-20T06:30:00.000-04:00

Ok, maybe not that end about which we hear various cults prophesizing. This is a case of an end which I'd welcome seeing. What I'm talking about is mostly about an end to the ridiculously inefficient suburban model that has been so prevalent in the U.S. post-WWII. Unless you've been living under a rock (not that there's anything inherently wrong with living under a rock if cheap rent is your thing), you're sure to have noticed that gas prices have made quite a jump gas price over the past few years. For the most part, suburbs are designed as sprawling, serpentine expanses of houses and roads which are meant to be navigated via car (and often large, status symbol SUVs at that). This model of having one's own [distant, faraway] castle was only viable so long as fuel was cheap.

The decision to become a nation dependent on cars to get everywhere and having homes distant from places of work was a short sighted decision in many ways. While we probably won't be switching to widespread New Urban development that quickly, I think we are seeing the initial winds of change. Long commutes are one thing, but also paying mega moolah for the privilege of that long commute from BFE is getting unbearable for more and more people. People are actually moving back to the cities in something of a suburban exodus. Moreover, the combination subprime fallout and changing attitudes about mixed use urban living are adding to the suburban decline.

While I'm glad to see that trends are probably shifting towards more smarter development and less suburban crapmansion development, things will change slowly. I just hope demand doesn't send housing prices for mixed use areas sky high so that I'll be forced to live in the suburbs.

Notes on Traveling

2008-06-18T21:52:00.002-04:00

So, I'm back in Philly after a 5 day sojourn to the land of sun, palm trees, beaches, and old people dressed in tacky outfits (i.e. Florida). It was a pretty uneventful trip, but that suits me just fine. I like not having stuff to do constantly. I did still do stuff in FL because I can't completely vegetate, but I was working on a much more open ended time table.

I did notice two mildly funny things during my travels. First, it always seems to be that the people least able to lift big heavy luggage are the most likely to have it. It could be that they're not any more common than the people capable of actually lifting and moving their heavy luggage. Certainly, they're the most visible though since they slow everyone else down while they're struggling with their luggage.

The other thing I noted was about my flight. My flight actually arrived in Philly roughly 20 minutes early, but we had to circle the airport for 20 or so minutes until we could land. The airlines seriously pad their schedules to allow for weather and other random delays. Why the heck is one of the delays just for landing the airplane? I understand how it could happen, but there's not reason a plane should be circling for 20 minutes before landing. It's a fault of the outdated air traffic control systems that we had to circle for so long.

Anyhow, now that I'm back in town, I need another 5 days to get myself back into a regular daily schedule. Just in time for me to leave for another trip.

Chillin' in FL, and thoughts on sun worshipping

2008-06-16T21:55:00.003-04:00

Well, I'm back in Florida for a few days visiting my parents. I do have to say that I've forgotten how hot and humid it is here. It wasn't so bad acclimating this time since we had that heat wave in Philly right before I left. Still, even with my powers of temperature resistance, I still feel somewhat uncomfortable when it's [slightly over] 80 degrees inside the house. If I didn't have a fan blowing on me, I'd probably be too lethargic to do anything.

It's been nice going to Spruce Creek park every morning. I can see why my parents go so often. It is a pleasantly peaceful view on the water for some morning stretching, qigong, and light exercise. If there is a breeze, it's even pleasant. Of course, there wasn't much breeze the first two days, so I had to re-adapt to the feeling of constantly sweating in the sticky warm Florida air.

On another note, I recently read an article about a dermatologist who didn't believe tanning and sun exposure were linked to melanoma. Of course, this is interesting news for someone from a land of tanned people. It's an opinion that's definitely not in line with the mainstream thinking. Just do a Google search for sun exposure and melanoma, and you'll get a ton of hits to sites saying that excessive sun exposure leads to melanoma. Unfortunately, I can't find the original article, but I'll summarize the arguments I've heard so far in my brief research:

Mainstream Thinking: Sun is Bad

High incidence of sunburn, particularly during adolescent years and for fair skinned folk, is linked to higher incidence of melanoma
UV rays cause skin aging and DNA damage
Use of tanning booths is also linked to melanoma

The Contrarian View: Sun Avoiders are Loonies

UV is necessary for vitamin D production
Some studies show that people from sunnier climes actually have lower incidence of melanoma
Melanoma more likely develops on the parts of the body that don't receive as much sun exposure (palms, soles of feet, and other parts where the sun don't shine)
The parts of the body with a lot of sun exposure typically develop benign basal and squamous cell skin cancers.

This is certainly not a complete or thoroughly researched comparison, but it's good enough this blog post's purposes.

So, what's the word on sunning and skin cancer? My guess is that the truth probably lies somewhere in between the two extremes. There are interested parties on both sides (cosmetic industry sellers of sunscreen vs. tanning salon operators for instance) skewing evidence and making one-sided arguments. Moderate sun exposure probably isn't as bad as the mainstream thinking goes. The UV from sun exposure does help you produce vitamin D, and there is some evidence that tanning helps prevent melanoma. On the other hand, fair skinned people (notably blondes and red heads) might need to worry more about getting less sun exposure than people that tan easily or have darker skin pigmentation. In addition, just because getting some sun is probably good for you, going overboard has the big disadvantage of aging your skin and running the risk of getting really uncomfortable sunburn.

I'm sure I get plenty of sun exposure just walking around outside during my everyday life. I think I'll just enjoy the shade as much as possible to stay cool and comfortable in the hot summer months.

Tonight's Title Bout: Environment vs Jesus

2008-06-10T22:32:00.004-04:00

I consider myself a rather eco-conscious person and moderately spiritual. I won't make any claims to being a great religious scholar (and not particularly Christian), but one thing that persistently baffles me is how a good number of Christian folk use their faith as their basis for not caring about (or worse, willfully despoiling) the environment. I don't mean to Christian bash since I do know many kind hearted, good Christians. But I unfortunately seem to have run into a few that apparently haven't truly examined the teachings of their faith.

I'll use a recent No Impact Man blog post as my launching point for discussion. The argument made by the religious Christian doubter of global climate change was:

"He [meaning God] promised never to send another flood--that polar ice will never melt and flood us again. His sovereignty will prevail--whether people believe in Him or not."

Ok, fair enough. If you believe that a divine flood will not be inflicted again, that's fine. But the Bible also states that "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" (Galatians VI). Maybe God won't be flooding us anytime soon, but that sure as heck isn't going to stop us from inflicting environmental catastrophe on ourselves. If we decide to pollute the Earth, we have to accept any potential consequences of our actions.

One thing that bothered me for a long time was that there was so much news about Christian doubters of global warming, and even a lot of fundamentalists outright denying any validity to the science. There are two issues going on here. One of them, the disconnect and lack of communication between science and religion, is a topic for another day. The other is what I think is a misguided skewing of Christian teaching to defend an unsustainable lifestyle. I've heard arguments using the Bible to defend driving SUVs and pillaging the Earth. I'm not entirely sure how Christian ideas got twisted into a defense of ecologically and socially unconscionable actions. I think the argument for SUVs was something along the lines of it being a Christian duty to protect one's family. All I have to say to that is "what would Jesus drive"? I'm sure He wouldn't be driving around gas guzzling, environment polluting, overly large status symbol vehicles that endanger other drivers.

The most egregious thing I ever heard was the use of the passage from Genesis about the Lord giving man dominion over the plants and animals of the world as a justification for being able to despoil the environment at will. That seems terribly un-Christian to me since my [admittedly limited] understanding was that passage was meant to be more of a statement of being stewards of Earth rather than pillagers. It baffled me for the longest time how there could be devout Christians who were so incredibly anti-environment. Fortunately, there seems to be some pushback to sanity since environmental Christian groups have been arising.

As a final note, I'll bring up the Christian ideal of loving one's neighbor. Protecting the environment is just another way of loving one's neighbor. Polluting the environment has multitudes of interconnected and downstream effects which affect people. Air pollution results in acid rain (often distant from the site of pollution) and respiratory problems. Dumping waste into the waterways just isn't a good idea as it makes an essential resource less usable for large numbers of people. The sheer amount of electronic junk we carelessly dispose of often contains toxic substances which either leach into the environment or get shipped overseas where they poison people scavenging the waste. The list of environmental and social ills is pretty long. Being good stewards of the land comes with the added benefit of caring for your fellow men (and women). If you ask me, Jesus would have embraced the environmental cause with open arms.

Recovery Myth(busting)?

2008-06-06T09:45:00.003-04:00

So, I read this article in the NY Times about the myth of consuming recovery nutrition products post-workout to speed up muscle recovery and boost physical performance. Could it be that I've been downing calories immediately post-workout for no good reason? Well, I guess yes and no.

The primary tidbits of new information that I got out of the article was that there's no magical 4:1 carb to protein ratio for post-workout calories and there's no magical time window to get those carbs ingested for maximal effect. Honestly, I never even knew that "magical" ratio existed. I just know that I'm friggin' famished after a hard workout. I just want to get down any calories after an intense exercise session. If I wait too long to eat, I get grumpy, tired, and often get a mild headache. Maybe getting those post-workout carbs don't improve my glycogen replenishment, but they sure as heck affect how I feel. Being low blood sugar for too long post-workout tends to really suck for me.

The article does make some statements about protein intake, which more or less fall in line with what I've read elsewhere. But the tone of article makes it seem like getting amino acids into the bloodstream soon after a workout doesn't have much effect:

"Although studies by Dr. Jeukendrup and several others have shown that consuming protein after exercise speeds up muscle protein synthesis, no one has shown that that translates into improved performance. The reason, Dr. Jeukendrup said, is that effects on performance, if they occur, won’t happen immediately. They can take 6 to 10 weeks of training. That makes it very hard to design and carry out studies to see if athletes really do improve if they consume protein after they exercise."

Well, all I have to say is: no duh! Most people aren't going to see noticeable improvements in the short term. It'll take several weeks (even months) for anyone to improve performance, unless they're a complete beginner having never done any exercise whatsoever before.

Then there's also the fact that the article seemed to very skewed towards running, which I guess is fair since it was discussing recovery nutrition in terms of athletic performance. Most athletes are after all required to run fast. I think I'll be sticking to the strength and body building nuggets of wisdom from T-Nation though. I'm more concerned with my total body strength than my running speed. I figure guys obsessed with physique and strength know a thing or two about protein consumption and building muscle. So, unless I read a more convincing article saying otherwise, I'm going to assume that getting my post-workout protein shake is still helping me more efficiently pack some more muscle on to my (admittedly lean) frame.

Speedos

2008-05-26T23:21:00.003-04:00

I know what you're thinking. I'm not talking about those speedos! I'm talking about the water shoes. I went shopping today and managed to pick myself up a pair of Speedo Surfwalker water shoes. My latest project is to clad my feet with more minimal shoes to strengthen my feet and improve my awareness of the ground. Why bother? Well, I've fully detailed that in my latest Zenfulness blog post. Basically, recent news combined with my own personal experience has convinced me that constant wearing of supportive and protective athletic shoes leads to foot and ankle weakening. I'm trying to transition closer to doing things barefoot to strengthen my feet and ankles. Don't worry though. I'm not planning on completely giving up shoes (or even my current tennis shoes).

I'm not completely willing to be one of those alternative folks who walks barefoot everywhere, so I'm taking an intermediate step by getting some thinner soled, more minimalistic shoes to emulate the barefoot experience. The first trial run (or actually walk) was fun. I could definitely feel the ground better, and I did feel my feet and lower legs working harder during my stroll. I also got the impression that the thinner sole allowed my toes to be more interactive with the ground. I may start switching solely (pun intended) to minimal shoes for my martial arts training. I feel that they'll give me extra sensitivity to the ground and allow me to stabilize my structure better.

My tennis shoes I'll be keeping around for rope jumping and any other activity where I feel I need the extra cushioning (like when I need to do a lot of walking on pavement). I still think regular athletic shoes have a place on my foot. But minimal shoes will most likely get more foot time in my shoe rotation.

Simplicity

2008-05-22T21:38:00.002-04:00

One of my goals this year is to simplify my life. I've managed to get a lot of clutter out of my life simply because I live in a small apartment and I constantly have this thought of having to move again (and not wanting to pack a bunch of extra stuff). But in other ways I haven't managed to simplify my life. I live closer to work this year, yet I've ended up being busier than I was when I lived further away. I managed to fill my time. Just like a gas expands to fill a vacuum, my activities expand to fill my free time.

Since I've moved closer to Philly, I've managed to ramp up my martial arts training and teaching, intensify my physical conditioning training, start blogging, build websites, make my Chinese learning more consistent, participate in surveys for fun and profit, become more vigilant about trying to be more environmentally conscious, etc. All of those things take time. A Bruce Lee quote would be fitting for how I feel now: "It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."

Exactly what I'm going to hack away still baffles me though. I'll probably cut back on the survey thing. They don't actually earn me much cash anyhow, and some of them are an utter waste of time. At some point, I'm going to stop tracking so many things on my training logs. I think I can safely say I've transformed my eating habits already, so I can probably safely stop tracking my food intake. I'll still need to track my strength and martial arts training to keep myself on track though. I'm torn about cutting back my teaching though. Though it really eats into my free time, I really enjoy seeing students make progress and it's good training for me to teach.

What to else to hack away? If I were insane, I'd say sleep and my refusal to drink caffeine. But I'm [arguably] not insane. Too bad there's no pithy quote about what the unessential is.

New websites now live

2008-05-16T15:58:00.002-04:00

Ok, it's official. My websites are now online and actually have something on them. Granted, there's not a lot on the sites now, but I'm working on it.

JohnnyKuo.net

Zenfulness.com

I plan on keeping this blog running, but I think I want to migrate my official online identity to something associated with my name. Zenfulness is my next blogging experiment. It'll be fun to see how it turns out.

Flying punch of power and puny bells

2008-05-12T22:13:00.004-04:00

So, our YMCA has got some new toys. For some reason, they got some kettlebells and a punching bag. Of course, this being the Y, they made some poor choices. First, the punching bag is free standing and they keep forgetting to fill the base of it with sand or water. I hit the thing expecting something pretty solid. I nearly sent the stupid thing flying. Good thing I didn't kick it. And then there's the fact that they decided to put the bag right next to a huge pane of glass. Now, they've made the wonderful decision of putting a rowing machine like 2 feet away from the bag. There are also two punch mitts and a set of gloves next to the punching bag. I think a whopping 3 people in the gym actually know how to use the mitts. The gloves and mitts are in the weight room next to a rowing machine and punching bag. There's like 4 square feet of working space unless you take the gloves and mitts somewhere else. The pure lack of planning astounds me.

Oh, and the kettlebells are amusing. I will first say that my Sifu doesn't speak highly of kettlebell training, so I'll probably just play around with them and not spend too much time incorporating them into my workout. It's probably better that I not have my teacher annoyed that I'm training kettlebells. Not that I could incorporate them much into my workout anyhow. They only went up to 25lb kettlebells. Could they go any lighter? I never do the bells, and already the weight is too light for me. I guess they're aiming them at the middle aged moms who come into the gym, because the bells are brightly colored.

Festival of blurbs: Cinco de Mayo post

2008-05-05T11:03:00.004-04:00

Let me start off by saying ¡Feliz Cinco de Mayo! I don't really celebrate the Cinco de Mayo, but there should always be some good excuse to celebrate something. Today is as good a day as any to have a fiesta. I'm still stuck at work, but when I get home, watch out. I'm going to be a loco hombre. Ok, so I probably won't do my wild man routine today, but it's a fun thought. I think the biggest celebration we'll be having is enjoying a hearty dinner of quesadillas with salsa and guacamole.

We do have a small cause to celebrate. This past weekend was the Ardmore Blossoms. It was basically a small community event with some live music, some vendor and charity group stands, and some freebie stuff. I actually had two soft pretzels (which is a huge increase in my usual refined flour consumption). I just couldn't help myself when presented with a free salty, doughy product with mustard. Anyhow, the most important part of the event (to me) was the electronics recycling drop off. Finally, I rid myself of some extra electronics crap that probably would have been hard to unload otherwise. That combined with our recent donation to the Sisters of the Holy Rosary thrift store means that we have a lot less stuff cluttering up our precious floor space. I estimate that we freed up between 5-10 square feet of floor space when we unloaded our donate and recycle boxes. That's a pretty significant increase in useable floor space when you live in a tiny space like we do.

Another cause for celebration is the return of our hot water. We had to resort to taking one shower at the YMCA (which was actually no where near as bad as we had originally pictured). Boy, do I ever appreciate the convenience of having hot water at home, especially now that I've been deprived of it 4 times in the past few months.

I've recently signed up and been approved for a membership with PhillyCarShare. I sold my car not too long ago. Not owning a car is reason enough for me to be happy. I'm much happier not having to maintain a car, a fact which I'm sure baffles my dad. I suppose I'm just not the typical car-loving American. I think of a vehicle as a means to get me from point A to point B, preferably with an acceptable level of comfort and safety. That being said, I am looking forward to driving a Prius and Mini Cooper for a future driving errand.

I guess the final reason for celebration would be friends and family. I've managed to keep up my enjoyable habit of calling my mom nearly everyday and slowly increase my Chinese vocabulary through daily conversation. And I think I've finally gotten to a point in my life where I actually know enough people that it's difficult keeping up with everyone. It can take a lot of effort to keep in touch with all the friends you've encountered in life. But, all things considered, that's not such a terrible chore.

Mysterious dissapearing creature comforts and slowing posts

2008-05-03T23:12:00.006-04:00

Well, it's happened yet again. We have no hot water. This is like the 4th time it's happened to us. Nothing sucks quite like waking up in the morning trying to start your day with a nice ~~hot~~ cold shower. Then it comes back for a little while, so we go to the gym, only to come back to another hot water outage. I'm sure I don't smell too pleasant now since I definitely poured sweat from my jump rope session at the. But I've been loathe to take a cold shower. I can't bring myself to shiver under the cold water quite yet.

Also, my blog posts have been slowing down lately. That's probably a relief for the whopping 3 readers of my blog since I can type up a storm when I get on a roll. Anyhow, life has been catching up to me. Trying to keep my martial arts and conditioning training up while preparing food for my 5ish daily meals, trying to be environmentally conscious in an environment more conducive to just tossing everything into the trash, and trying to shorten my to do list is really time consuming. Then I had to decide to try to build my web presence. So, building my mini web empire has been sucking my time, both in learning the software tools and working on implementing them. Anyhow, I've added sidebar links to my work-in-progress web sites. Feel free to visit them and offer any suggestions.

Rolling in dough

2008-04-26T22:53:00.002-04:00

Today, I decided to bake some more of the crusty, no knead bread again. It was a big hit last time. At Gen's request I made a sweet batch and a savory batch. Rather than do the rational thing and split the original recipe into two halves, I decided to make two whole batches. One batch was herb bread, and the other batch was honey wheat raisin bread. The original recipe makes approximately 4 medium sized loaves.

You might guess that I made 8 loaves, but that guess would actually be wrong. This time around, I made the mistake of not reading the recipe closely enough. Just because the ingredient list says 4 cups of water doesn't mean I should immediately add 4 cups of water to the dough. One of those cups is actually for generating steam in the oven. Oops. Needless to say, I had a very wet and loose dough.

Again, I defied rationality and succumbed to my laziness. I could have just added more flour after realizing my mistake (2 hours later after my dough had poofed really big). I instead decided to throw the wet dough in the oven as is and see what happened. Lo and behold, I did actually get really nice bread. Only this time, the crust wasn't quite as nicely formed on half the loaves, and the bread itself was a lot moister and lighter. Also, since the dough was a lot looser, I had a heck of a time dividing the dough into quarters. So, instead of having 8 loaves, I ended up with 11 loaves.

Near disaster was averted by smart thinking on my part. Ok, so there wasn't a whole lot of thought involved. Kitchen disaster was actually fortuitously avoided by a lazy decision on my part. But I'm apparently not the only cook redeemed by careless accidents. Brownies are commonly thought to have been discovered by a cook who accidentally left out the baking powder from a chocolate cake batter. Necessity may be the mother of all inventions, but I say laziness ranks up there for sowing the oats of accidental discoveries.

New toy

2008-04-23T22:57:00.005-04:00

Ok, it's not a very exciting toy. There are no blinking lights or music playing abilities. It's just a simple 18'' long, 6'' wide cylinder of foam. Hey, what can I say? I'm easily amused.

What does it do? Well, for those of you who haven't experienced the wonders of self myofascial release (SMR) therapy, foam rollers are basically wonderful tools for giving yourself a massage. It won't ever be as good as having a live person massaging you, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper. I usually use tennis balls for my SMR treatment, but the foam roller actually hits my muscles in a slightly different way. The roller also more easily works things like my hamstrings, which always seem to be a challenge with tennis balls.

I know it may not sound like it does much, but rolling on the roller and/or tennis ball makes my muscles feel a lot looser and relaxed. If I start getting tight from a few days of hard workouts, a little rolling SMR treatment always loosens me up. I may not have been feeling bad before, but I'm always pleasantly surprised by how much better I feel after rolling. It's funny how you can sometimes forget what relaxed and loose is supposed to feel like. Good thing I've got tools around to keep reminding myself.

Soy, it's what's for dinner

2008-04-20T20:02:00.006-04:00

Ok, that statement probably isn't true for the vast majority of people. Being vegetarians, it's often true for Gen and me. Of course, contrary to popular belief, vegetarians do actually get protein from other sources other than soy: quinoa, nuts, whole grains, hemp, beans, corn, and many other foods do contain protein. Anyhow, let's get to the primary topic of today's random musing: soy, the simultaneous wonder food and nutritional pariah.

Soy is a surprisingly controversial food. Some people tout its incredible culinary versatility, health benefits, and environmental friendliness vs animal proteins. On the other hand, other people bash it for containing phytoestrogens and being an inferior protein source to meat. Of course, I really like soy, and I'm surprised that I get some grief for deriving a lot of my protein intake from soy. I've been told by several people (including my own father who is amazingly uninformed about nutrition for a biochemistry Ph.D.) that I'm going to grow breasts, become sickly, and waste away because I eat soy.

For the moment, we'll ignore the fact that I eat a fairly varied diet with other plant derived protein sources. Asian cultures have eaten soy for centuries with no noticeable ill effects. I've been vegetarian for well over 10 years now, and I'll have to say that I've actually become stronger and healthier. So, I think that the theory of soy being bad for me is total bunk. Now, what about the phytoestrogens in soy feminizing me? Well, if that's true, maybe it's not so bad being a new age, sensitive guy. But then again, I don't think that statement holds any water either.

Not a result of soy.I'm an avid reader of Testosterone Nation, and I often have to read many comments poking fun at puny soy-consuming girly men. Ok, I admit, those comments are often pretty funny in the context of the articles, but they only thinly mask the contemptuous scorn that some carnivorous types have for soy. But wouldn't you know it, this article appeared on T-Nation recently. Finally! T-Nation itself posted an article defending soy! I'll let you read the article for yourself if you care to read it, but the overall message is that soy is just another source of protein that can be readily incorporated into a healthy, varied diet. You'd have to eat a hell of a lot of soy (almost more than is physically possible) to be feminized by the phytoestrogens.

The article did reinforce the thinking that processed soy is probably not terribly great for you. Gen's been slowly convincing me to get more protein from alternative sources, and we've been cutting back on the highly processed soy products (i.e. minimizing eating soy protein powder). I can live with that. I've been trying to cut out highly processed foods from my diet anyhow. But at the end of the day, I'm still one of the soy boys, even if I'm not quite a metrosexual girly man.

Juicing up... your brain?

2008-04-15T10:19:00.003-04:00

According to a recent study, nearly 20% of polled Nature readers (who are by and large scientists) use brain-boosting drugs like Ritalin, Provigil, and Inderal. It's already bad enough that we have to suffer with steroid enhanced athletes. Could it possibly be so bad that scientists are doping up to gain that mental performance edge? I know competition for grant money is fierce, but some things (like one's health) aren't worth the cost of success.

Personally, I have a hard enough time with just caffeine, which is an almost universal drug of choice among all the researchers I know. I avoid caffeine since I know it makes me jittery and gives me noticeable tachycardia. The unpleasant side effects of some of the other drugs don't sound worth it to me. I once had a friend in college who used some sort of herb product so he could sleep less and work longer. The big downside to that was dizziness, mild hallucinations, and the host of problems that occur with sleep deprivation. Then of course, we all have some knowledge about the experimentation with mind expanding and mind altering drugs that happened in the '60s and '70s. While most folks from that era turned out normal, there are plenty of high profile examples of people who either had close calls or just didn't survive long enough to become aging hippies.

You'd think that scientists would be smart enough to just look at what happens to athletes who tried tweaking with their bodies to gain an edge. Messing too much with the body comes with serious risks. There's no reason to believe that doing the same thing with the mind doesn't also have significant physical and mental consequences. Hopefully, this won't become a more common trend.

Awesome no knead bread

2008-04-14T23:06:00.002-04:00

Well, I didn't take a picture of it this time, but you'll have to take my word for it. I made a simple crusty bread based on a recipe I saw in the Week (reprinted from the NY Times?). No kneading necessary. The dough was a little wetter than I'm used to with a traditional bread which requires kneading. The tradeoff is that you have to let the dough rest a lot longer, but I'll take that passive waiting tradeoff over 20 minutes of active kneading. More water in the dough apparently allows the gluten formation to happen without the need to knead.

So, how did it turn out? One word: awesome. Most home ovens don't have a steam injection feature like the pro bakery ovens. The wetter dough and the pan of hot water placed in the oven simulates a similar effect to the steam injection. I've never gotten such a nice crust on my bread before. I'm definitely going to have to add this gem to my regular baking repertoire.

It's not small, it's cozy

2008-04-09T12:10:00.005-04:00

We've now officially lived in our small apartment for about 8 months. Initially, 550 square feet sounded like it would be rough, but it hasn't been all that bad. Granted, I do miss some things like having two bathrooms and a dishwasher. Having a bigger kitchen would be nice considering how much cooking we do, but our current small kitchen is workable. Also, there's not a whole lot of private, quiet space in the apartment. Talking on the phone on one side of the apartment is clearly audible on the other side of the apartment.

So, if there are those downsides about the apartment, what are the upsides? Well, location for starters. We can walk basically everywhere we need to go. Trader Joe's: 10 minute walk, even while laden with groceries. Train station: less than 10 minutes, 6 minutes at a brisk pace. Gym: roughly 10 minutes. Hardware store: 4 minutes. Barber shop: 4 minutes. Several parks: less than 10 minutes away. A bevy of restaurants are all minutes away by foot, even though we actually almost never eat out. Whole Foods is also technically a walkable distance, but it's just far enough that driving a car there makes sense.

Cheaper rent and utilities is also a big plus. Rent is about 30% cheaper than the larger apartment alternative we were considering, and we also get free heat and water. We have had to be creative with organizing stuff, but the flip side to that is that I've been forced to get rid of stuff. When you don't have space to store crap, you start focusing on the stuff that you actually need or has real importance. Oh, and cleanup (when we manage to get around to doing it) doesn't take nearly as long as it would with a bigger space. It takes longer to setup the vacuum cleaner than it does to actually vacuum the floor (ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's not far from the truth).

I know a lot of people (many of my friends included) think we're a bit nuts for intentionally choosing to live in such a small apartment. I don't think it's so bad. People do actually live in even smaller spaces than we do. Personally, I hope things start trending towards smaller houses, better built houses, and smarter community layouts. I think it would go a long way to helping people prioritize the important things in life rather than the focusing on the material side of things and keeping up with the Joneses.

Wretched taxes. No more wheels.

2008-04-05T23:23:00.004-04:00

Today has been busy. I'm dead tired. I went to the bank, filed my taxes, went grocery shopping, cooked, and had most of my time today sucked away by selling my car. Yup, I am now no longer a car owner. I posted the ad at 9 a.m. and had the car sold by 4:30 p.m. Most people would be happy being the new owner of a car, but I've gone the other way. I'm actually happy to be newly rid of a car. Of course, I can get away with it since I live in a city with good public transportation and a non-profit car sharing organization. I suspect there will be some hassles with only having Gen's car around, but considering how little I actually drive, I doubt the hassles will be that significant.

As I noted yesterday, recycling is probably going to be an issue. I used to store the recycling in the van and drive it to the recycling center in bulk. Considering how many recyclables we generate, those trips are going to have to be more frequent than in the past. There's no way to store the stuff in the apartment since we live in a roughly 550 square foot space. It's just another annoying problem to solve. I'll add it to my super long to-do list.

Oh, and taxes suck. I can't believe I pay so much in taxes. Federal tax, state tax, and city tax. I know we don't have it as bad as other countries, but it still hurts to see that much of my income being taken away. I find it particularly annoying that I have to pay state tax on my investments, and that Philadelphia city tax is significantly higher than my state taxes. What's up with that?

Challenge of recycling

2008-04-04T12:10:00.002-04:00

I'm a firm believer in recycling. I'm also a firm believer in not buying extra stuff that takes up space and wastes my time, both commodities of which I have precious little. But I do have to buy some stuff, and that stuff inevitably generates waste in the form of packaging or from becoming useless end of life junk. That's where recycling should come into play. The responsible thing to do would be to recycle everything possible.

However, we seem to have a culture set up to make recycling a royal hassle. It's probably a result of our short attention span, consumeristic, throwaway mentality. Not many people take the time to consider how much trash they generate as part of their daily lives. If it's not convenient, recycling probably just isn't going to happen. Just take plastic bottles for example. They are mostly recyclable, but something like 80% of them get thrown out in the regular trash and landfilled.

Right now, I actually have to drive my recyclables to a recycling center. My apartment doesn't have recycling, and recycling at work involves walking down 2 flights of stairs and out into the courtyard to find a recycling bin. This doesn't even include harder to recycle items like a pair of power supplies and some dead batteries. I have no idea how to get rid of those without chucking them in the trash can. If my plan of selling my van (which is getting to point where maintenance is a real time and money drain) goes through, I'll have limited options for hauling my recyclables and will probably just have to toss everything in the garbage.

I guess Kermit was right. It's not easy being green.

Freelancing for fun and profit

2008-04-03T14:05:00.002-04:00

It's been a long time since I've actually did something web related for money. The last time was in graduate school when I wrote a little php cardiovascular disease risk assessment calculator complete with a nifty bar graph generator. That was fun, and gave me a little extra pocket money. Recently, I agreed to help with setting up another website. It's a small job, but I honestly only have time for small freelance projects. It at least earned me enough cash to pay off the extra taxes I owe to the state and federal governments.

So, here are the fruits of my labor: www.automatedaccess.org

After I recover my sanity from juggling my regular job, home responsibilities, freelancing and training for my I-Liq Chuan test, I may finally get around to actually building my own personal website after years of putting it off.

Adventures on the road

2008-03-31T14:45:00.002-04:00

Well, I just got back from a trip to NC for another I-Liq Chuan (ILC) workshop. I successfully tested up to instructor level 1. I sort of expected to pass, though I was a little worried when I had to demonstrate applications for a few moves which I normally don't contemplate much. Fittingly enough, the mindfulness training inherent to ILC helped me stay calm and adapt to the circumstances. I managed to eke out a believable understanding of the 21-form. I also nearly slipped when doing the butterfly form (note to self: in future, don't wear socks on a slick wooden floor when performing fast, force issuing moves). That probably wouldn't have looked great to be in the middle of a throwing move and having my feet fly up in the air.

This time I drove down to NC, and I have to say that I remember why I started flying there. Seven hours in a car (each way) is dreadfully tiring for a weekend trip drive. To make matters worse, the windshield wipers on my car don't work right. I have to push the wash windshield button to get the wipers to turn on and wipe once. Conveniently, the instant I find out my wipers don't work is when it rains. I probably drained my windshield wiper fluid reservoir by the time I got to Richmond.

Anti-dieting: The American Pasttime?

2008-03-24T12:36:00.003-04:00

While I'm on the topic of food, I came across this in the news today:

"A growing trend in all-you-can-eat seating at sports venues is making baseball's summer chorus sound more like "Take Me Out to the Buffet.''
Dozens of arenas, stadiums and tracks are offering tickets that come with unlimited snacks. The seats have been a hit with fans, a money-maker for the venues and a worry for obesity-conscious health officials."

Links to the news are on USAToday and Toronto Star. I personally found the news to be pretty appalling.

I understand that all you can eat can be enticing, especially since the human body is programmed for an environment of scarcity rather than the environment of plenty that we actually live in. But it seems to me that this all you can eat gimmick is a sign of how screwed up the U.S. relationship to food and consumerism is. The sports venues are obviously trying to entice more fans to the game and increase the bottom line, while disregarding the health and well-being of their customers. The consumers on the other hand are falling into the trap of getting a "deal" on cheap food, even though the "food" isn't that great and has a negative health impact.

Now, if there was unlimited whole grain pita chips, hummus, and fresh organic seasonal fruits and veggies, you might see me heading out to the ball park. Alas, that will probably never happen. No one would pay the price for real food, and sadly, a lot of people probably wouldn't even eat healthy, wholesome offerings.

They're corny looking

2008-03-23T23:56:00.002-04:00

This past Sunday was yet another cooking marathon for Gen and me. Sometimes I wished that we could buy more prepared food, but our food standards are too healthy (and we're too frugal) to go that route. So, we're stuck cooking essentially all of our meals.

The last batch of cornbread I made actually went bad after a few days, despite my cookbook's claim that cornbread keeps for a week when tightly covered in plastic wrap. This week, I decided to try to the cornbread muffin route so that the cornbread would be in convenient single serving sizes and could be easily stuffed in a tupperware for freezing. I'm quite pleased with this week's baking experiment, though I have come to realize that our muffin tins totally suck. Apparently, these tins are from the spray-on teflon generation where the teflon doesn't really stay bonded to the tin very well. Gen scraped off the teflon flakes while I proceeded to admire my baking handiwork.

I also baked some more whole wheat flatbread. I think I'm getting the hang of controlling whether I get crackers or flatbread. If I crank the oven up to 450F and roll the dough a little thinner, I get something more cracker-like. If I roll slightly thicker and bake at 400F or lower, I usually get a flatbread type bread. Pretty intuitive, huh? It only took 3 attempts for my engineering skills to figure that one out. Some pieces formed pockets, which leads Gen and I to believe that we can attempt pita bread in the future.

I think I'll probably keep up the flatbread and cracker baking on a regular basis. I might as well be eating my own processed carbs rather than the even more highly refined store bought stuff. My cooking idol Alton Brown says, "I love crackers, and I'm not about to trust their production to anyone (especially elves in hollow trees)." I concur.

Beer and science

2008-03-20T22:24:00.005-04:00

A recent New York Times article discussed a study from the Czech Republic showing an inverse correlation between the amount of beer scientists drink and their research publication success. At first I thought the article was going to show a one to one beer and science success correlation and was worried that my being completely dry was the cause of my short CV publication list. Then I got deeper into the article and saw that there's still hope for me yet to have an absurdly long publication record. So, thanks Dad. Giving me a sip of your beer when I was 5 so effectively turned me off to the idea of alcohol that I'm bound to have a huge upsurge in my publications... yes, it should start happening any day now...

Of course, the article does go on to state that correlation does not mean causation (and anyone that thinks otherwise is ripe for mental manipulation). It could very well be publication success that's driving the beer drinking habit: the poor sots who can't publish a thing might be drowning their sorrows with their good ole friend Al Key Hall.

The study reminded me of other amusing correlations I've read about in the past. I remember way back in the day, when I was a young whipper snapper in college, I heard about a study showing a correlation between coffee drinking and women's feeling of success in their lives. Granted, I never read the original paper, but the first thing that came to my mind was how in the world they published such a ridiculous paper. It seems quite clear that women who need to wake up in the morning (i.e. having work or other stuff to do) would likely be drinking coffee and working their way to success in life.

Another fun example is the correlation between cow populations and global warming. While there is some truth in cow farts being a source of greenhouse gas methane, cows are definitely not the underlying cause. The last funny example I came across is from the Pastafarians of Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) fame. They've noted a strong inverse correlation between the global average temperature and the number of pirates in the world. Who knew? Yargh... apparently, the old Pastafarian salts received some noodly strands of knowledge from the FSM.

Creature comforts & the green infestation

2008-03-16T22:49:00.002-04:00

Some things in life you just like to have and really notice when they're not around. Nowadays, sleep seems to be one of those luxuries, though that may be my own fault for having too many things to do and developing bad sleeping habits as a result. This weekend, the boiler in our apartment shut down for some unknown reason. Normally, I'd tinker to try fixing it, but it's not actually my property, and I wouldn't say that I'm the world's best home repair guy when it comes to hot water heating. We were only without hot water (and consequently also heat) for a little less than a day, but those hours without hot water were a real drag. I really do crave a steamy hot shower at least once a day. It's a creature comfort that makes my life a lot more pleasant. Maybe it's not so bad that we went without it for a few hours though. The temporary scarcity serves as a reminder to truly appreciate what is taken for granted as an everyday comfort.

On another note, this weekend was the St. Patrick's Day weekend. Of course, I was completely oblivious to the holiday since I'm not Irish, don't drink, and live in a strange bubble cut off from these bits of information. Anyhow, I was quickly made aware of the holiday by the throngs of green-clothed people all over Philadelphia over the weekend. There were even small crowds of green people around University City at 8:45 a.m. on Saturday morning. And they were all apparently going bar hopping. I can appreciate people wanting to celebrate, but starting a quest for alcohol at 8:45 a.m. seems just a bit excessive. By the late afternoon, there were already drunk people riding the trains. I don't know about you, but I find the idea of being intoxicated by 3:30 p.m. is IMO just a tiny bit disturbing, especially considering that I'm sure these revelers were probably going to be drinking into the night. Maybe I just value my mental faculties and liver health too much.

Resolutions, schmesolutions

2008-03-12T00:14:00.003-04:00

Well, it didn't take me very long to meet my New Year's resolutions (just under 12 weeks). I think I can now safely assume I've met them. A few days ago, I managed to jump rope for 15 continuous minutes, upped from my original resolution for 10 minutes. I'd increase it again, but I start getting bored after 10 minutes. I've been keeping my routine fresh by upping my speed to 180 turns/min and mixing up my footwork. So, in summary: jump rope fitness goal definitely achieved.

Though my worthless body fat analyzer doesn't tell me anything useful, I'm pretty sure I've dropped 1% body fat. Since last Thanksgiving, I've dropped over 10lbs in weight without any perceived loss in strength. And since my abs are starting to show, I'm think my body fat percentage is probably approaching single digits. I'm not quite at a 6-pack yet, so according to the muscle nuts at Testosterone Nation, my body fat percentage is still double digit. Maybe in another couple of months, I'll have both my resolution and my vain ego fulfilled.

Super Sunday (aka the Iron Chef is a pansy)

2008-03-10T13:17:00.006-04:00

This weekend was crazy packed. No, it wasn't from all wild partying, which is definitely not my usual weekend fare anyhow. I spent a most of the weekend cooking up a storm. Now that we're eating 5-6 times a day (smaller meals), cooking lots of food is a necessity. I spent almost all Sunday (and part of Saturday) making all our food for the week:

tofu veggie soup
sticky rice with tofu, black mushroom, and mixed veggies
stir-fried Chinese broccoli with black beans
stir-fried tofu with broccoli and mushrooms in bean sauce
one pot of mung bean soup
two crocks of red bean soup
3 loaves (really 1 regular, and two mini) of honey whole wheat bread
cornbread
lavash (actually my attempt at crackers which inadvertently turned into flatbread)
baked marinated tofu

I also made extra mirepoix for a tomato sauce which Gen actually finished because I was too tired/lazy after my cooking marathon to finish. Gen also made the vegannaise for our salad and sandwich dinner.

Believe it or not, I had actually contemplated three more food items (quesadillas, Thai curry, and pesto), but I was lacking in either ingredients or energy. As much food as that is, I actually anticipate needing to cook more by Friday. *Sigh*, cooking is a never-ending task. At least all this homemade food is tasty.

Oh, and yes, the Iron Chef is a pansy. He has several helpers and a spacious, well-equipped kitchen. He also doesn't have to do the dishes.