John’s Ramblings

Among the things we are divesting ourselves of (like kerosene heaters, scroll saws, and clothes that no longer fit because we’ve lost a gajillion pounds), is what formerly was our 55 gallon fishtank.

The tank WAS a gorgeous centerpiece to our living room.  It was a saltwater setup, with uber filtration, protein skimming, compact florescent lit goodness with a ton of live rock, etc.  I didn’t love having to top off the water every couple of days, but it was pretty cool and when we got the environment dialed-in just right (after a year to two), it was pretty much on autopilot, maintenance-wise.

Unfortunately, the entire environment got wiped out a few years back when we had that big windstorm and resulting 6 day power outage.  Tropical salt water environments don’t survive at 42 degrees, unfortunately.  It was sad, and once we came to the realization that we’d be starting over from scratch, we put the tank and equipment into the furnace room for future consideration.  Now that we’re contemplating a long-distance move, setting it back up makes even less sense than before.  Thus, we decided to sell the whole setup on Craigslist, and a bargain price of $150 (likely what we paid for the dang light).

I got a few “nibbles” on the ad last week, but everyone wanted to bargain with me. One fellow wanted me to trade the aquarium for a paintball gun.  Not being motivated to become a paint-baller, nor to acquire more crap that I am not going to use, I refused.  The ad expired on Friday, so I re-posted it yesterday.

Today, instead of the usual email inquiries or even phone calls, I received a text message about the tank.  Conversation went JUST like this:

Craigslist Messaging Guy (CMG): Do you still have your fish tank for sale?

Me (Me): Yes

CMG: How low are you willing to go if I pick it up today?

Me: It’s still $150.

CMG: Would you take $100 if I pick it up right now?

Me: No, I’m in no hurry to sell.

CMG: Would you be interested in selling  jst (sic) the filter or the lights?

Me: Sure, how about $150, and I’ll throw in the tank and stand for free?

CMG: lol. I would, but I only have $100, so thats my offer.

Me: Give me a call if you find $50 in the couch, and I’ll contact you if the price drops.

All you west-coasters are waking up, getting your morning cuppa joe, and sitting down at the computer to see which of your friends stayed up too late posting on Facebook.  Unfortunately the site is down this morning, variously giving you either an incorrect password message, or telling you that they are performing maintenance.  “Try again later”.

OMG WTF! How will I know if Sally finished her term paper, Steve made it to Albuquerque, or see the latest baby pictures from Mary and Bill?  Quick, to Twitter!  Ah… it’s not just me, the whole system is down…

Facebook and Twitter both were victims of a Denial of Service (DOS) attack a month or so ago, so it could very well be that Facebook is under attack again.  They could also be a victim of their own success, having grown to the point that they seriously need an upgrade in their server/software department.

My suggestion is that you use your usual morning Facebook time catching up on some really important stuff.

• Go to Google News or your news service of choice, and see what’s happening with the two wars we’re fighting.
• Read the content of the proposed Health Care Reform legislation, so you know what’s actually being proposed.
• Go for a walk, run, bike ride, or some other physical activity.
• Go back to bed, and snuggle your S.O.  First, go brush your teeth though.

In our personal effort to stay informed on upcoming calamities (of particular interest now are the potential flooding of the Green River Valley and the H1N1 flu pandemic), we have registered with the Regional Public Information Network in order to receive emergency updates wherever we are.  The basic premise is that you register an email address at their website, and you will receive notices of Emergency or Transportation alerts for the geograpic areas you specify.  It seemed to us that getting an advanced notice of a catastrophic failure of the Howard Hansen Dam would be preferred to just carrying a snorkel in our car at all times.

My preference is that I receive the notifications by text message to my cell phone, rather than via email.  This is primarily because my email to cell phone link isn’t always the most reliable.  The RPIN system has a cell-phone notification option but the online form does not allow phone numbers to be entered, just email addresses.  The work-around to this is as follows:

1. Point your web-browser thingee at the Regional Public Information Network website (yes, click that now).

2. Click the link to Subscribe to RPIN “Sign Up Today”. You will see the form to enter email addresses and Notification Type:

3. In the email address box you need to enter the email address that can be used to send text messages to your phone via email.  This varies by carrier, but here’s a quick list I just pulled off the internets.  If your carrier isn’t listed, call them and ask them for the email format:

Verizon: 10digitphonenumber@vtext.com
AT&T: 10digitphonenumber@txt.att.net
Sprint: 10digitphonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile: 10digitphonenumber@tmomail.net
Nextel: 10digitphonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
Cingular: 10digitphonenumber@cingularme.com
Virgin Mobile: 10digitphonenumber@vmobl.com
Alltel: 10digitphonenumber@message.alltel.com
CellularOne: 10digitphonenumber@mobile.celloneusa.com
Omnipoint: 10digitphonenumber@omnipointpcs.com
Qwest: 10digitphonenumber@qwestmp.com

So, if my cell number was 253-555-1212 and my carrier was Verizon, I would enter

2535551212@vtext.com

4. Select “Cell Phone” under notification type.

5. Enter more cell phones, if you want your spouse or 12 year old to know about the imminent disaster.

6. Enter the types of emergencies you want to be notified of, and the geographic areas you are interested in.

7. Click “Subscribe”.

8. You will need to agree to terms and conditions on the following page.  You’ll then receive an text message to confirm your registration.

I think I've done some beer drinking in this same outfit...

So, like Twitter and Facebook before me, I guess I became a victim of an internet attack by Kim Jong Il.  My site was hacked a few days ago and even I could not get to it for a time because it had been flagged as “distributing malware”.  I think maybe the North Korean dictator was jealous of my well developed musculature, so he had his minions shut me down.

I noticed the shutdown when I tried to post a boring workout summary on Sunday, at noon.  I’m not sure when the actual hack occurred, nor exactly what the malware “payload” was on the site.  I do apologize for the inconvenience, and if you have had any repercussions from the attack.  If you have visited my site since June (which, I’m gathering from the internets, is when many WordPress sites were hacked) I’d urge you to scan your computers for any malicious code.  If you don’t have a good antivirus/malware detecting software, you really do need to buy some in this day-and-age.  You can also get a free online scan by TrendMicro’s HouseCall utility.

The warnings about my website generated by Google didn’t give a whole lot of detail.  Rather than hunt-and-peck through 100′s of files on the site I just ordered a backup restore from a week or so ago.  I also removed several old web pages from my original “static” website.  Once the restore was complete, I was unable to find any of the typical signs of malware, or re-directs to bad sites.  I asked Google for a re-review of my site, and as of this morning I was in the clear.  I’ve put new & improved passwords on all my stuff, so I think I may have thwarted ol’ shorty for now.

Thanks.  Boring posts about workouts coming soon…

I’ve been struggling to get in my home workouts for the past couple of weeks.  Emphasis on cycling, lots of work to do around the house, school, and to be perfectly frank, a bit of a lack of motivation has kept me from doing anything but the bare minimum to assuage my guilt.  Well, it wasn’t working as either a quality workout routine nor a guilt-assuager.

Part of my problem has been that I never quite got my head around the Wednesday night training vs. Saturday morning sessions that I had been doing at Hocevar Performance Gym.  Wednesday nights actually work better for me in a lot of ways, I just never quite got into the rhythm of what I was going to be doing workout-wise for the rest of the week.

Given that my spare time is a pretty precious commodity right now (and for the foreseeable future) I am going to concentrate my hard training time on the kettlebell/bodyweight training, and taper back on the road cycling.  Practically speaking I can accomplish a helluvalot of conditioning in 4 hours a week with the kb’s, but I’d need 2 to 3 times that amount of bike time to just maintain.  I asked Luka to provide me with some workouts that I can schedule during the week, and he obliged with a series of 4 workouts that utilize my inventory of kettlebells, exercise equipment, and (gulp) the hill that my house sits at the bottom of.

Much of the training I’m doing with Luka is Escalating Density Training, or EDT.  The principal of EDT is to do a set of alternating exercises that use opposing (or different) muscle groups, and do as many sets as you can in a given period of time (known as PR, or Personal Record).  Monday was Luka’s “Workout A”:

4 sets of:

• Kettlebell front squats, (2 x 20kg), 8 reps
• Negative Chin Ups (3 second descent from chin-over-bar), 5 reps

EDT-PR Zone 1: 10 minutes, as many rounds as possible (I did 9)

• 10 x 24kg kettlebell swings
• 10 pushups

EDT-PR Zone 2: 10 minutes, as many rounds as possible (I did 5)

• Kettlebell reverse lunges, 6 reps R & L, 16 kg kettlebell
• Kettlebell 1 arm rows, 24 kg, 8 reps R & L

3 sets of:

• 10 x v-ups
• 30 second plank

The principal here is that I will be able to do more work with less rest as I progress… so future sessions of “Workout A” should mean more rounds completed (by virtue of having to rest less), and eventually more weight being used.  I’ll try to keep up with my posting here, so you can keep score at home.

Oh, and then I went for a bike ride.  Recovery pace, about 13 miles, lovely weather for it.

When you’ve got one of these website/blog things, you can see what postings/pages are getting viewed, and in some cases how the viewer made it to your page (such as a Google search phrase).  By far my most popular post has been “Bicycle Porn“, which was purposely mistitled in order to gain hits.  That posting was actually a call for folks to get out and vote in the last national election.  A day does not go by, however, that some kinkster doesn’t enter “bicycle porn” into their search engine, and end up on my blog.

I saw a strange referring link this morning in my stats, and when I clicked it, I got this result:

It’s an auto-tranlsated rendering of my Bicycle Porn posting.  It’s springtime, after all, and I’m sure that as the weather warms in Russia, the boys there turn their thoughts to sex and bicycles just as much as their American counterparts.

I saw this tidbit come across my Snopes.com rss feed, and had to check it out. It is an interesting concept, to say the least.

FreeRice.com is a website that went “live” on the 7th of October, 2007. The concept is that you play a word game that helps you to expand your vocabulary. When you guess a word’s meaning correctly, you “donate” 10 grains of rice to feed starving people. The rice is paid for by the sponsors whose advertisements appear in the banner underneath the word game. The rice is to be distributed through the United Nations World Food Programme.

OK, so what? What is 10 grains of rice going to do against the millions of people without adequate nutrition in the world? That would be my question. Well, since the website’s inception, the “grains” that have been donated are growing at a fantastic rate:

Total Donations by Day

A quick search on the internet reveals that there are approximately 29,000 grains of long-grain rice per pound. 2,840,667,010 grains divided by 29,000 = almost 98,000 pounds of rice. Not bad.

So, go expand your vocabulary!