serinde

In which I learn that Tetsuya's is like unto the French Laundry, and calling for reservations a mere month in advance is wildly insufficient. (Their next open slot is July 22nd.)

I called off Friday, which meant I didn't have my sports bra all weekend, so my perfect weeks are now skewed, feh. I did the same as last week: 3/1.5/5/2.5/3/1.5/5. Today I found I could do the first three-minute run almost easily, but the subsequent ones were much more like work. (Except when I listen to "Domino."[1]) I haven't made up my mind whether to do that for all of this week, or plunge directly into the next week, which starts getting Funky. The next episode, if I moved forward, would be run 5/walk 3/run 5/walk 3/run 5, and the running starts increasing from there. Hmm.

Point of Self-Aggrandizement: I increased the second three-minute run's speed by .4 mph, and lived. It made the remainder much more difficult, however.

I'm also mournful about spending my lunch hour in the underground, cement-lined, stuffy gym, and wonder if I'm l33t enough to attempt running on the street. There comes the problem of negotiating through the other bodies on the street. If I can make it to the riverside walking path, that's not too populated; but that's nearly a mile away, which is, well, half of what I cover in the running portion of the show at this juncture. Perhaps I should hold off. (Or I could go to Central Park, which is less than half a mile, but...RIVER!) If I do this, I should unquestionably haul in my Camelbak.

Down two pounds. Scarcely eating for three days'll do that.

[1] Mem.: I should turn the Blue Garden cover into an icon.

Due to stupid scheduling, I couldn't run yesterday during lunch (and I'd fixed on doing that, rather than in the morning, because I stayed up WAY too late Tues. night), so did it today instead. It was... Yes, I'll say it was a little easier, though I drove myself to go faster (HA HA HA by which I mean keeping at or above 5mph) during the running bits. The Stupid Obviousness Department reports that it helps my mental state a great deal to concentrate on why the sodding fuck I am doing this instead of "wah so tired and hot and this sucks wah wah wah". I found myself slightly shocked and even vexed when suddenly the treadmill dropped speed for the cooldown phase. NO RUN MORE MAKE ALL THE PUDGE GO AWAY NOW!, etc. But was exceedingly red and overheated, so it was right to stop. (Still am, a bit. I may go sit out in the 17 degree F. windchill until my body temp returns to normal.)

Forgot to weigh myself this morning. Probably would have been high-ish, anyways, since That Time is coming.

At the request of the Beloved Husband, I have been installing Plone. Fine, it is installed. We can haz test instance.

I would like to state that the documentation for this beast is shit.

There are reams upon reams of it, helpfully categorized. But it's all special-cases. There are all sorts of serious, elaborate instructions on how to have it use LDAP, or Active Directory, or specify this, or reject that--but there is NOTHING I HAVE YET FOUND that has the basic. user. creation. process.

This is your future! It's easier! Can't you tell?

Edit: But wait! There's more! By default you can self-register...which I don't want, but I'm willing to poke at in the testing stage...but it does its thing by sending mail. And the mail is bouncing because the sender address is rejected. Is there any documentation about this problem? WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Edit #2: My Mongolian Hordes, let me show you them. I grepped for "postmaster@localhost", which is what it's sending as, in the relevant directories. You know how you change it? BY LOGGING IN AS A USER. WHICH YOU CAN'T CREATE.

I'm guessing that this is some degree of NetBSD pkgsrc Fail. I am guessing that there is some compile time option that lets you change this that I was unaware of (but I don't know because I haven't turned up any documentation talking about compile time options!). Either that, or the developers have their heads so far up their asses, they think that ISPs are accepting mail from external "localhost"s these days.

Edit #3: No, I have done a disservice to NetBSD. The Plone developers really, really think that's a reasonable default. What the fuck?

Edit #4: Okay, so, it automatically sets up an admin user with the same login combo as your Zope admin user. Nice of them to tell you that. The closest reference is "provided during the Plone install", which, thank you, it was not.

Today, I adventured the gym's weight machines, after a 12-minute warm-up on the elliptical. (It is interesting to note that, at least according to the amazing electroscopitron, I move at a much higher speed walking on the elliptical than I do running on a treadmill. To the tune of 3mph, at that. Fallacy somewhere, I fancy.)

My arms are feeble. I knew this. But they are really, really feeble.

Some Press Thing I Forget, Next To The Pull-Down: 2 reps of 10, at 2#
Lat pull-down: 3 reps of 10, at 25# (lats {duh}, biceps, deltoids)
Shoulder ("incline") press: 2 reps of 10, at 2# (deltoids, trapezius, triceps)
Dip Assist: 1 rep of 10, with 100# of counter-weight (triceps, biceps, shoulders). Barely.

That latter device is an interesting one. It can be used for both chin-ups and for -- Well, imagine being a kid on line at the amusement park, and you're in the cattle chute corralling the line, yeah? And you're bored out of your skull so you put one hand on the rail on either side of you, and you lift your feet off the ground so you're held up between the railings just by your arms. Now, instead of fucking around, start doing push-ups. That's a "dip". So, what the assist machine does is, instead of having a dip or a chin-up be strictly Your Arm Strength Vs. Your Body Weight, it provides some counter-weight so you have, well, an assist. (It is backwards of what I expected, 'cos I didn't think it through: I set the weight to the second-lightest thingie, like I did for everything else, and had an amusing episode of Fail.)

What is driving my sudden pumping of iron is the fact that I am too goddamn feeble to do a single, solitary chin-up. (You could say weight is a factor, aheheheh. Except that I could not do this at my thinnest--size 6--in high school, either.) (Did I mention how, even at that thinnest, I was still convinced I was overweight? Not to the crazy anorexic point, but just sorrowfully resigned? Because I always had been, and because my boobs were still huge. But enough about my body image issues.) I don't want to be some scary body-builder, I don't even want to be ripped, but I want to have some basic level of tone and fitness in my arms and upper body.

I was fine at the time, although did less than I thought I was capable of because I know how this works, but now I am full of the ache and the ow.

Please stop wrecking my favorite comics. Your twin +5 weapons, Mischaracterization and Inability To Craft A Plot That Makes Sense, are making Birds of Prey mediocre and Teen Titans a giant, festering pile of horse diarrhea.

Just so you know, if you come anywhere near Booster Gold, you are as dead as disco.

No love whatsoever,

Me.

Edit: Oh fucking wonderful, and Will "Amazon Attacks" Pfeiffer is going on Blue Beetle. THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS

This morning was a giant pile of steaming chaos, so I ran during lunch instead. This week's leitmotif is:

* 3 min. run
* 1.5 min. walk
* 5 min. run <-- DOOM DOOM DOOM
* 2.5 min. walk
* 3 min. run
* 1.5 min. walk
* 5 min. run
* Fall down

I managed the first five-minute run by downscaling speed...a lot...but pushed myself hard on the second one (for values of "hard" which are laughable to actual athletes, even amateur ones). Having drunk insufficient water this morning, I ended up overheated and dehydrated. Hurrah! But I did manage to evict much of the morning's spleen and ire. (Don't worry, it will refill.)

Up two pounds, but did not weigh myself immediately upon rising, and there was rather a lot of chocolate consumption this weekend. Ahem.

Looks like about 2" down so far. So, no running this morning, since I did not heed must_sew_faster and acquire the clever run-on-all-surfaces shoes.

My st00pid lizard brain attempted to short-circuit me, by which I mean there was another exciting episode of Alarm Clock Fail. Woke up at ten past six instead of 5:20, beat head into pillow, froze for a moment, and said GODDAMMIT WILL DO ANYWAYS. So I get the late train, so fucking what.

I curtailed my warm-ups and got the job done. It's ass-cold again; did not cover up my mouth and nose this time, and it seemed okay, but now that I'm sitting down and cooling off I have a little tiny recurring cough. It'll go away.

I don't feel like my endurance is getting better yet--3 minutes "running", ha ha, is still awfully hard. How long does it taaaaaake?

Down 3.5 lbs from yesterday, which had been back up to starting point. o_O

Our long national nightmare is over: at last we have an XBox Elite. With the right sort of motherboard, even. (Yes, and a Wii, all at the same time. Life is like that sometimes.)

We buckled down to some serious song unlocking this evening, and then relaxed for a bit of fnu. I knocked the vocals out of the park on "Don't Fear the Reaper"--well, big fucking duh. Steve, however, muffed the guitar solo and nearly got booed off stage. Buck Dharma he is not. (I did slightly less well on "Suffragette City" because I kept getting distracted by the "oh, is *that* what the words are there? Huh." And by the time we got to "Go With The Flow" I'd had enough wine that my voice was doing wacky things.)

Am much looking forward to trying "Dani California".

The guys from Boston have much to answer for. "Foreplay/Long Time" is one of the maybe ten songs that's unlocked from the get-go, and it's listed under "Impossible Songs", and they do not lie; nevertheless it keeps showing up in the random set lists you have to succeed at to unlock more stuff. DOOM DOOM DOOM

Playing drums is really. fucking. hard. Bass and guitar are about the same as in Guitar Hero (go figure), so with me on bass and Steve on guitar we are a tolerably smooth unlocking machine.