Archives March 2013

So I picked up the dogs in Ali’s Volt and brought them back to the house last night.  I only had driven it once before.  The car is just so damn cool.  The cockpit is surrounded with information everywhere with enough buttons and video screens to keep any geek entertained.  Once I get the the SSR paid off I could definitely see something like a Volt being in my automotive future. Techno wizardry aside, it is also awesome to be able to drive 40 miles + without burning an ounce of gasoline.

I decided to try to get the Volt in the garage next to the SSR so it wouldn’t get blasted by dirty sprinkler water.  I no longer have the garage optimized for two vehicles but I was able to squeeze both Chevy’s in there with a few inches to spare.

I was worried that the Volt charging harness might pop the GFCI circuit in the garage, but it gave it’s “I’m happily charging” chirp after plugging it in.

I finally was able to watch this week’s Walking Dead last night although I did so by loading the Xfinity web site on my computer.  It was an aggravating experience.  The streaming performance was awful with constant pausing.  Even after I changed the settings to stream at the lowest resolution, which looks pretty shitty, I would still have some pausing of the stream.  Ironically, when I was forced to sit through the commercial breaks, which were in full resolution, they streamed just fine.

I supposedly have the “Blast” internet service which boasts speeds up to 50 mps.  To have this sort of shitty performance streaming content from their native network is inexcusable.

Well poor streaming aside, this weeks episode was just fantastic.  The show is written, shot and produced in a way precious few shows can match.  I am rarely one to encourage jumping on a bandwagon but if you have not gotten hooked into Walking Dead yet, fire up your Netflix account and get started.  It is that good.

Last night I went out on the lanai and propped open the one screen door to the yard.  Both of the girls looked at me in a slightly confused way.  I told them “go ahead, you can go outside and come back in when you want to”.  Nicki was the first one to head out and proceeded to find a comfy section of grass and take a nap.  Sadie joined her a little later.

The book I am reading, Merle’s Door, is all about a man and his life with his beloved dog, Merle. One of the themes of the book is how interesting it was to see how Merle interacted with the world, a world where he had very few physical barriers since the author lived in a remote area of Colorado.

I have always trusted the dogs to be more autonomous than Alison has as she is always first thinking of the horror if something DID go wrong.  Both of the girls hung out in the yard for quite awhile.  Once the sun went down and it started to cool off, they both returned inside and joined me, content.

This morning I drove into work on pure electric and was able to find a nearby outlet in the parking garage for me to “refuel” while I worked.  With as much as I drive,  at least 1500 miles a month, I am spending $400-$500 a month just on gas.  With a Volt I would probably knock that number down by 75%

This Easter weekend appears to be just another two days off for me.  Mom has absolutely no interest in doing any sort celebration, not that we ever did anything beyond just getting together for a family meal and exchanging cards and stuff.  Instead I will just be stopping by with the dogs to say hi sometime Sunday afternoon.

Mom has created a mental scenario that on the days that she works, the rest of her day gets sucked into a black hole, nothing else can take place.  It’s almost like she has a severe allergic reaction to doing anything outside of her self defined routine, even if that thing is seeing me.

So last night I big part of my plans was to finally catch this weeks Walking Dead episode that I heard so many people raving about.  I fired up the Xfinity app on my Xbox and looked at the episode list.  The most recent episode was last weeks.  Hmm that can’t be right.  I closed the app and relaunched it, hoping it would force some sort of refresh.

Once again, this weeks episode was not there.  WTF??  Every week the episode is normally available by Tuesday evening, why would it not there by Wednesday…  Hopefully it pops up tonight.  I filled the void playing further through the Walking Dead game.

Yesterday the new, bigger and louder megaphone I ordered for the running club showed up.    You can see the size difference as well.  The new unit is HEAVY, heavy enough that if you plan to hold it up at head level to talk you better be doing shoulder presses on a regular basis.

In addition to being louder than the other megaphone it has an auxiliary input and the ability to run off of DC power.

Ali leaves for an Easter trip to PA today meaning I have two black and furry additions to the house for a few days.  Ali is letting me use her Volt while she is gone so I can minimize my gas costs for a few days.  The only catch is she wants me to wash it for her, fair trade.

You may have noticed this image popping up on Facebook yesterday.  If you were like me, at first you were like, “What the F is that?”

With a little legwork I found out it is a simple icon for equality, specifically equal rights for non-heterosexual individuals, including the right to get married.  If you know me either personally or through my brain dumps here you know this is a concept I support.

I considered making my profile picture the image as well as many others have done but I never enjoy being a “me too” kind of participant.  I figured it would be more meaningful for me to express my support here.

Most of my mental energy today is going to be directed to a post on Dufisthenics, jump over there if you feel like it.

Today I had a physical, my first one in over 5 years.  I really have a dislike of going to the doctor and have been lucky that I have a healthy history that hasn’t required me to visit doctors on a regular basis.  Well the harsh reality is at 45 years old you NEED to get checked out now and then as a preventative measure.

The worst part of this for men that are approaching or past their 40th birthday is the adding of a DRE (digital rectal exam) to the physical.  When I was younger I thought a “turn your head and cough” hernia check was bad enough.  A DRE is the ultimate in male humiliation.

This was my second time enduring the procedure.  If there is a small consolation, this time around it was not as painful as my initial foray into ass play.  I just kept reminding myself that this guy does this same thing countless times, it’s like me sending an email.  The probing was done in less than 10 seconds, thankfully.

In a couple weeks I will hear the results of the blood work.  I am hoping I can wait another 5 years until having to submit to the humiliation once again.

Today is the one year anniversary of when I announced my marital separation on the blog.  I can not a believe 365 days have raced by already…

So late last week I received an email from Facebook saying that I had just hit 100 likes on my Dufisthenics FB page. Dufisthenics is a bodyweight fitness oriented blog that I have had going for over a year. Anyway, Facebook said that they were giving me $50 in Facebook ad credits that I could use to promote the site.

I was kind of skeptical of the effectiveness of FB paid ads but if it wasn’t going to cost me anything I figured I might as well try it out.  I set up my ad and budgeted it to use $10 of ad dollars per day for 5 days.   It didn’t take very long till I received an email notification that I had a new Dufisthenics like.  Shortly I received another, and another, the flow of new likes was very steady.  All of a sudden Dufisthenics was getting in front of all of these people I had no connection to whatsoever.

Now 4 days into my ad campaign, I look at the stats for my ad.  The click through rate was a small 1/4 of 1 percent, but it was put in front of close to 7000 people. That tiny percentage has now more than doubled my total likes on the page which now sits around 225.   That is a HUGE response.  I am now a FB ad believer. The trick now is posting content that these new FB followers find interesting.

Saturday morning I had a race to time, the only event on the calendar that is actually held on the beach.  It is my least favorite event because of the clean up involved after the race.  Not only did I have to clean the very sandy timing mat, I also had to wash every timing chip that was used since they all had a a gritty coating.

Other than clean up, the timing of the event went smoothly.  I was off site a little after 9AM.

I made arrangements to go see a movie with Ali Saturday night.  In the back of my mind I thought it might be nice if I got a short nap in beforehand.  Unfortunately my workload had no breaks in it.  By the time I got done doing all of the post race clean up, weeding, mowing and weed whacking the property I had about 25 minutes left to take a shower and head out the door.

The movie we decided to see was Olympus has Fallen, starring Gerard Butler, the man who indirectly got me interested in bodyweight work outs after reading about the “300 workout” many of the actors in the film 300 participated in.  King Leonidas is one of my favorite characters of all time.

So anyway the premise of the movie is North Koreans manage to attack the White House and the only thing between them and success is Gerard Butler.  The movie had all of the ingredients of an action film I normally like, non-stop action, crazy special effects and violence. But in this case a rare thing happened, the film actually went a little too heavy on the graphic violence for my tastes.

There were way too many and unnecessary up close and personal shots.  Ok fine, if you want to show a few head shots to portray the brutality of a scene, fine.  But it seemed the film pigged out on head shots and was over indulgent in gratuitous violence.   Coming from me, someone whom has grown up on violent films, that is saying a lot.  For me it clearly stepped over the line, a line which I didn’t really know existed although the last Rambo movie probably crossed it as well.

The movie certainly didn’t do much to make me feel good about the fighting ability of the secret service.  I find it hard to believe the agents would come marching out of a narrow doorway revolutionary war style as human target practice when a North Korean heavy artillery machine gun is ripping holes into the front of the building.

Gerard Butlers character seemed like he was a mutant combo of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  He killed Koreans like he was tying his shoes.  I love Gerard but damn it was a little silly, even for me.

After the movie I heard the mostly senior crowd making comments about it, some saying they thought the premise of North Korea launching a ground attack on the White House as ludicrous while others said after 9-11 nothing was out of bounds.  I was somewhere in the middle.

So anyway, overall the overuse of violence as a story telling tool took away from my overall enjoyment of the movie but it definitely delivered on excitement, drama and adrenalin. B+  I kind of expected Ali to be more turned off by the violence than she was.  She wrote it off as the way the world is, always turning up the (violence) dial until it hits the final detente.

Sunday morning I originally had ideas of doing a long approximately 25 mile ride followed by a swim at the water park.  However when I woke up the skies looked very stormy and the trees were getting blown around.  I also got a later start than I planned so I modified my plans down to the standard 12.5 mile ride and a 1200 swim.

On the ride out I had the ferocious wind at my back.  I enjoyed being pushed to speeds over 25 mph at times but knew I was going to be paying dearly on the ride back in.  I was right.  The ride back was brutal.

I spent the entire time down on my drops, trying to make my long frame as aerodynamic as possible.  At times gusts knocked my speed all the way down into the 11’s.  There were several moments where I just wanted to stop, my quads and hips were burning.

The lighting fast first half of the ride followed by the pulling a parachute second half averaged out to about 17.5 mph overall for the ride.  I was surely glad I opted for doing the short course, I was exhausted.  The 1200 swim went pretty well.  My speed actually wasn’t as strong as the week before but my endurance felt better.

Late yesterday afternoon I went to the opening game for the Tarpons.  My season ticket seats are in a nice spot although there were plenty of other open seats available.  If I were to guess the place might have been 20% full.  The game was close, something unusual when compared to last season when every regular season game we saw was a huge blowout win.  The Tarpons prevailed in the end, holding on to a narrow 5 point lead by snagging an interception in the final minute.

It’s been very cool watching FGCU, which is only 12 miles up the highway from us, have their historic run in the NCAA tournament.  The school only came into existence in 1997 and only become eligible for the tourney last year.  Their success is really going to put the school on the map and should have a huge positive impact on their future recruiting efforts.  Our entire area has Eagle Fever.

I had to go out to a branch that is on my way home yesterday afternoon to do some work.  I got done a little early so I headed home, it gave me a nice block of time to get some stuff done before I had to head to Ali’s place to help her with some web site issues.

I did the laundry, cleaned the bird cage and got the house cleaned in the span of 90 minutes. Hell I even had time to replace the air box in my Tacoma before heading out.

This weekend I have a race to time, my least favorite race to do so.  It is run on the beach which means dragging the timing and computer equipment down on to the sandy beach.  It is always a big pain in the ass trying to clean stuff up afterward. With a race like this I don’t know that chip timing really matters much at all since it is not official distance and the sand makes survival more important than speed.

This weekend I might try to do another training brick, I’m not sure if it would be a two or three sided variety.  Sunday is the first game for the Tarpons, the local arena football team that I bought season tickets for.  It will be fun to check out the game.  I never had a bad time at a Tarpons game to date.

I have no doubt I won’t have a problem filling in the remaining blanks in the weekend.  There is ALWAYS something to be done.

Today is my brother Patrick’s birthday.  It’s hard to believe he is 27.  It seems like it was only recently that I was down in the basement of the Gouglersville house playing ping pong with the 12 year old version of Pat.  I love that he is living his life the way it should be done.

Last night was the monthly running club board meeting.  It was a long one that got a little more spirited than normal.  A couple parts of the debate revolved around me.

One discussion was about if the running club wanted to pick up ownership of another local race.  Some of the board members pointed out how it would be throwing additional load on the club resources and specifically me since that means I need to make myself available to time it.

Over the past couple years it has been the consensus of the club that we put on enough races, somewhere in the neighborhood of 21 or 22 per year.  Our general response to someone that comes to us to put on a race has been thanks but no thanks, our schedule is full.

Well over these same few years there has been a large increase in the amount of races being held locally.  A new organization started up in our area that started it’s own series of events.  Their activities have negatively affected the attendance in our events.  If there are more and more races available, they become less unique.

Runners only have the time/money to do a finite amount of races.  When that pool of races grows substantially there aren’t enough participants to keep race numbers high. So anyway the end result of this has been a steady decline of entries in almost all of our races the past 2-3 years.

So the club president was pushing hard for us to buck our trend of maintaining our current workload.  Before even asking me to chime in he went on a small rant saying how we can’t make my availability as the driving force behind our decisions on adding races to the schedule.  He said we should have another person available to time races if need be so I would not be the on the hook each and every time.

Finally he gave me a chance to speak.  I told him that I wasn’t necessarily opposed to timing the event.  In the past I expressed that I was content to maintain the current workload however my new financial reality has adjusted my tolerance level for additional race timing.

I said my bigger concerns were the group that puts on this race was the same group that we decided to part ways with several years ago because of multiple issues.  Basically, they were a big pain in the ass to work with.  My other point was putting on additional races is not just asking more of me, it is asking more of all of the people that are involved with a race, including the volunteers and the core club members that show up to help nearly every race.

I also understand the club is a bit nervous having all of their timing eggs in my basket.  Multiple times it has been expressed that if something happened to me or if I just said “f it, I am sick of this”, the club would be in deep shit.  That was pretty much true up until a year or so ago.  There is another local race timer that uses the exact same equipment we do.  He would be able to pick up the ball and run with it if need be, of course it would cost the club much more.

I have had some others involved in helping me time here and there however to have someone be able to run things from floor to ceiling they really need to broil in the fire.  Learning how everything is supposed to work isn’t the tough part if you have solid computer skills.  It’s learning how to handle things when stuff doesn’t work when the pressure is on.  That is not a skill that can be easily taught, it is something that is developed in the heat of the moment.

So the end result of that discussion was that we would more than likely be adding this race to our schedule.

The second bullet item that involved me was the club website.  The president said the website needed to be “refreshed” and he already had talked to a 3rd party about doing the refresh.  Well this had me pretty dumbfounded since last night was the first time this was ever communicated to me.  Especially since I have been the person solely responsible for all updating of the web content for the last 5 or so years.

So after expressing my confusion about why this would not be discussed with me ahead of time, since it directly involves me, I said that the I agreed the site could use some updating.  Based on my extensive work on the Bar-barians website I have a solid grasp of just how interactive and connected a web site can be nowadays using tie ins to various social media and a dynamic back end running it all.

They were talking about paying this person a substantial sum of money to redesign the site, money that would fit just as comfortably in my pocket as well.  It’s a matter of if I want to dedicate the time to do so.  Plus adding ANOTHER WordPress site to my shared hosting account could be pushing the limit since it took me over a month to get the BB site to play nice on my host.

So the end result of that discussion was I will talk to the guy that was interested in redoing the site and see what he is thinking.  Whatever the web site would wind up as, it needs to be easy to keep updated since a running club’s web site content is constantly changing as pages on the calendar turn.

After the meeting, many of the usual suspects headed to South Street for some pizza and beer.  I had fun as usual, laughing out loud at many of the adjectives that were thrown around the table.  The one downside was the live two man band that was playing. They were awful.  Not only were their musical/vocal skills subpar, their amps were turned up way too loud, making the entire bar unsuitable for conversation.  You literally had to scream so the person 3 feet away could hear you.  I left sooner than I would have otherwise just to get away from the noise.

I hadn’t used Stumble Upon in quite awhile, the site aggregator that presents you with content it thinks you will find interesting based on your surfing habits.  Well yesterday I had a number of “damn that’s cool” sites in front of my face in only a few minutes of “stumbling”

First was an awesome site for would be coders, http://codeacademy.com  On this site you get to go through a ton of interactive training on various coding languages, including HTML, CSS, Java, PHP and many more.  It’s totally free and totally awesome.  I am hoping to dig into the site to expand my knowledge base.

Next was http://wetransfer.com  This is a site that allows you to get large files to others, up to 2 GB in size, simply and quickly.  No ftp skills needed.  I have used another site to do similar things, http://justbeamit.com, another StumbleUpon find.

Finally I was shown http://searchtempest.com  If you are a Craigs List junkie, this site is for you.  It will search ALL of CraigsList for you in a few clicks, adhering the search to the distance and keyword parameters you supply.  It is AWESOME.  You can even have the search expand to include Ebay and Amazon if you like.  Try it out.

Since moving to Florida I have been a member of four (technically 6) gyms.  Each gym was unique in some of the annoyances about them.  Gold’s Gym was well equipped but was  a social club as much as it was a gym. There was a lot of people just standing around looking pretty. There also was enough silicone, steroids and saline walking around in there that I felt like I was in a science lab.

Next was Powerhouse which was very close to work.  This was a gym that was the magical combination of a shoe string budget and an owner that didn’t give a fck about anything.  I think you could have dropped your pants and taken a shit in the middle of the gym floor and he wouldn’t have cared.  He would not have cleaned it up either. The place was absolutely cruddy with cob webs as decorations and piles of dust in every nook and cranny.

If there was anywhere the owner he would cut corners he would.  Instead of turning on the AC, many days he would just have the small front and back door open, thinking that was enough to cool off the roughly 2500 square feet of floor space.  If a machine was broken it would not be fixed for months, if at all.

To top it all off, I later found out the owner had a drug/gambling problem.  Towards the end he jettisoned the Powerhouse franchise name (another way to save money) and renamed the gym Pure Fitness.  Less than a year after that he closed up shop without notice and moved all of the equipment out of the place like a thief in the night.

Then there was World Gym, which was very close by.  I liked World Gym.  It was clean, had brand new equipment and was staffed by nice people.  Well the owner then sold to Planet Fitness, the worst gym franchise in the world and home to the infamous “Lunk Alarm”

In a few weeks they transformed the place from a nice gym into the shell of one, removing many of the machines and weights that only a “lunk” would use.  They also implemented a lengthy and ridiculous set of rules, the violation of which could result in the staff ringing the lunk alarm on you.  I HATED Planet Fitness.

That brings me to my current gym, Retro Fitness, where I have been a member for somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 or 4 years.  When it first opened I was really impressed.  Again the place had all new equipment and a huge cardio theater room.  The place (I thought) was owned by a younger guy that seemed to have a real good attitude.

Things have been generally good there although there were a few warts like hot water that basically never worked, the cardio theater not being maintained and some cleanliness issues that were masked by the dark rubber floor.  If you get down to do anything on your hands like push ups you come up with two very dirty hands.  There are definitive islands of dust under the machines and weight racks too.

As time went on I discovered the young guy whom I thought was the owner, actually was not.  He was the son of the owner.  The owner was a dentist that lives in Michigan.

Well the son had some personality issues, mostly anger related.  He was not very good with his staff and not adverse to causing a scene in front of the members if he was off the hook.  He evidently did not run a very tight ship either.  At one point there were people from Retro’s main office that were there for an extended period of time to try to clean things up.

I heard there was something like $5000 in missing product like protein drinks and supplements and a number of other book keeping issues.  Part of the revamp was installing a new, multi-camera security system.  The son was actually banned from coming into the gym for a period of a month or two.

Well eventually things settled down, kind of.  The son was back and the ship seemed to be moving along however there were various tweaks being done.  They smashed all of the cardio equipment in the theater room into half the space so they could offer fitness classes in the evening.

Then they set up a small caged area for some weird dude to try to pitch his fitness supplements.  That lasted all of 6 weeks until the guy and his cage disappeared.  I never saw anyone buy a single thing.

These moves concerned me as it was a pattern I saw repeated at Powerhouse.  The owner was always trying to make side deals to make some extra money.  None of them worked out either.

The other danger sign was the revolving door of staff.  When the gym first opened they had a solid crew of 5 or 6 people you saw consistently.  In the last year I bet no less than 15 different faces have been behind the counter.  Sure, working the counter at the gym can’t be a job many would select as a career path but the high turnover was a clear indication of problems.

So that brings us to this week.  All of a sudden there is a new guy behind the counter.  He is a little nerdy looking guy wearing a sport coat.  He sort of looked like he would have been a character in the old school Leisure Suit Larry games.  I never saw the guy before but he was giving the girl working the counter orders like he was running things.  The son has been nowhere to be found and the trainers seem to have pulled all of their stuff out of their former location as well.

I have heard rumblings that this creepy little guy was the new owner but I have not confirmed it 100% yet with any of the remaining staff. Based on my past history with gyms, a change in ownership is rarely a good thing.  I am already starting to scope out my alternatives if things go south quickly as I expect them to.

There is absolutely no way I would consider going back to Planet Fitness.  Hell if I have no other viable options I may just keep equipment in my truck to do outdoor calisthenic style work outs.

I picked up the dogs on the way home from work.  Nicki has developed this weird behavior when I get them now from dog daycare.  She comes over to the door of the truck but then lays down, like she doesn’t want to get in the truck.  It’s weird.  So I scoop her up and place her on the front seat and she then makes her way into the back behind my seat like she always did.  I don’t know what the reason is for her latest quirk, she has a lot of them.

When I got home I headed outside to try my hand at BB mode of this month’s forum challenge.  The weather was fantastic.  The temperature was in the upper 70’s and the sky was a deep, rich blue with hardly a cloud in the sky.  It was the kind of setting that just made you feel good being outside.

I remember one thing that I always appreciated when I first moved to Florida was just how awesome the blue skies are, much more so than I ever recall living in PA for over 30 years.  It’s also something that I suppose I take for granted most of the time, now that I have lived in Florida for over a dozen years.  For whatever reason, last night I appreciated it.

The girls appreciated the weather as well.  They were quite content to hang out in the yard as long as I was out there.

By the time I ate dinner, caught an episode of Kitchen Nightmares and cleaned up the night was almost over.  I closed down my Tuesday watching this week’s Walking Dead episode.

When you have nothing nice to say, might as well say nothing at all…