Uncategorized – Page 29

Workin’ out

has been doing a great job of dutifully documenting his workouts to inspire the rest of us. So has

. I have been falling rather flat on the same charge – on the reporting bit, I mean, I’ve actually been quite good on the exercising end.

I’ve been doing 30 minutes a day for several weeks now. I have probably missed 2 or 3 days in all of last month, and at least one of those days I made up for it with an extra workout later that week. Generally I meet with my trainer twice a week for 30 minutes of strengthening and toning stuff – he focusses a lot on core muscles, which I think is good. The rest of the week I do minimum 30 minutes cardio, usually on my home treadmill. I alternate between three programs: walking steadily fast, walking up a steady incline at a more moderate pace, and alternating between moderate pace walking and running.

I have improved since I started doing this, although the metrics suggest I’ve gone to utterly pathetic to just kind of pathetic. I’ve never been good at running, so that’s my usual self-test. At the outset, be utterly shot within 2 minutes. So I was alternating 2 minutes run, 3 or 4 recovery, another minute or two running, and so on. By now, though, I can steadily run 5 minutes (a half-mile) – still kind of sad, but at least it’s getting better. So far, no obvious change in my weight or clothing size, but that’s fine… not really my goal anyway, I just want to be stronger and more fit. I’m in no danger of looking anorexic if I do lose a few pounds – in fact there’s a few outfits I’d love to be able to wear again – but not unhealthy now either so can’t make myself get that worked up about it. Not when it’s December so Blue Bell is marketing peppermint ice cream, anyway.

That’s all!

Huh?

Got reviews back on an article I’d submitted along with a friend/colleague to an asthma journal.

The reviews shredded the article. They questioned the value of the work in the first place, the methods we’d used to approach the work, and the conclusions we drew from our results.

The editor sent it back with a “revise and resubmit”.

Huh?

Usually revise and resubmit means “we want to publish it but have to give lip service to our reviewers.” I conclude that either the editor didn’t agree with the reviewers, or they’re really hard up for material these days.

As you can tell, I didn’t have a lot emotionally invested in this article – I sent it in expecting a reject. So even a shredding followed by an invitation to resubmit has exceeded my expectations.

More relieving, when I screwed up the courage to look at my advisors comments for the paper I actually DO care about, they’re… manageable. I was terrified he’d say he really didn’t think the underlying idea had value, but in fact he seems to have enthusiasm for the basic precept and simply made (generally worthwhile) comments about wording and presentation. Whew.

You know, this academic stuff is a pain, but it sure beats working for a living.

They just can’t win…

I’m not passionate enough about my shopping to have a strong opinion, but it sort of seems like Wal-Mart just can’t win. The mass media seems to be full of people grasping for any possible reason to criticize them, and every move they make is grounds for new criticism.

The latest example on my radar is their new line of organic stuff. Apparently they’ve made a committment to increase their inventory of organic products (both food and things like clothing from organically grown cotton).

My reaction was “Cool! A huge market player is going to be shopping for organic foodstuffs on the global market – that’ll increase the pressure for more farmers to adopt healthy, sustainable practices! And their tradition of competitive pricing will make organic food available to shoppers who simply can’t afford places like Whole Foods Market!”

But what do I see written about this move? Well, the US organic farmers are pissed because Walmart might buy some of their organic produce from somewhere other than the US. And the general WalMart bashers are certain WalMart is doing this as part of an insidious plan to lower the standards for what is “organic”. Oh, and the monopoly alarmists are concerned that once WalMart supplies organic food, well, there’ll be no further reason for any other stores to exist so they’ll all go belly-up – at which point I suppose WalMart will cackle gleefully, jack their prices through the roof, and start sacrificing virgin babies? (or is that Microsoft?)

To me, this just seems like people who can’t stand to admit that their favorite enemy has done something right. Or am I missing something here?

On other fronts…

At work we all got set back by a major system crash – long story involving a major software vendor who pushed an upgrade on us without bothering to mention the upgrade was known to be unstable for groups with more than 200 users. In all, about 3 days of information (about 4000 patient encounters) were lost and will have to be manually reloaded; there was also a lot of lost productivity because people were fighting with the system instead of seeing patients most of those three days.

At home we proceed forward with our off-beat wedding planning; it turns out that the makers of tungsten carbide rings generally assume that females won’t want their product. At least, I assume that’s why all the designs have names like “Thor” and only come in size 7 or above. But we found some pretty rings that seem to be available in smaller sizes, and so that’s another problem solved. I’ve let the house get messy again; need to get back on top of the clutter race even though NaDeCluMo seems to be over now.

School… well, my advisor just returned my paper draft with an email explaining that there’s no fewer than 30 comments on it and “you might find that some of them are rather contradictory depending on when I added them”… OK, guess I can try to sort it out if he doesn’t want to go back and clear up his contradictions. I’m trying to screw up the courage to look at the actual document – probably after a good night’s sleep. I tend to get really depressed and discouraged at perfectly reasonable feedback, then have to crawl into my cave, lick my wounds, remind myself that concrit is good for me, and whimper a while before regaining my self-confidence. Committed to meet with him to review on Tuesday, so that keeps me from going into total shut-down avoidance mode (I hope).

Social – enjoyed the Lights in the Heights on Saturday night. For those who are not from here, this is a local event based in a part of town where most of the homes are classically Victorian in style – big porches, gingerbread detailing, peaked roofs… the neighborhood residents block off their streets for the evening that they first turn on all their Christmas lights. People walk the streets checking out all the lights; local musical groups perform from the big old porches, residents invite all their friends for parties… it becomes a big spontaneous street festival in true Houston style. It’s one of my favorite events of the year – I hang out at the house of a good friend who’s a very talented hostess; I get to go watch

greeneyes_rpi

and

drangelo

entertain the crowd with their singing, I get to drink spiked eggnog…

Health – was worried I was getting sick Fri/Sat because was exhausted and coughing, but slept 11 hours last night and have been more productive today. Also remembered that I tend to really need to seek out sunlight this time of year. When it gets grey and cloudy and the days are so short anyway, I fall into the doldrums and don’t get anything done. Give me some sunlight and I can get back on my feet again.

Life is good.

To-do list

Things I intend to do this weekend:

Go through enormous mail pile and clear it all out (partly done)
Work out tomorrow (just did today’s –
la_directora

can take note if it pleases her)
Scrub cat box (yeah, you all wanted to know that)
Work more on thesis paper.
Book club with K’s family
rake leaves, throw onto beds that need mulch (if I leave it for the lawn guys they’ll end up in the trash)
finish edging maple bed (what else do I need from home depot? …muses…)
prune more on the vine that ate the world
music list for DJ at wedding
email mothers of future neices-in-law – did they not receive the flower girl fabric, or did they just not bother to acknowledge receipt?
balance checkbook
bring load of books to my clinic to be put out in the rooms as bookcrossing (bookcrossing.com) releases

Also hoping to spend some time with friends tomorrow afternoon.. should keep me busy!

Viruses are getting me down…

I lost a bunch of productivity a few weeks back with a bad cold.

Now my laptop isn’t working right and I’m suspecting a virus. Though my virus scanner doesn’t seem to be finding anything.

Those who are smarter about this stuff than me: I have an XP computer, which starts up OK but doesn’t seem willing to connect to my wireless even though it apparently sees it just fine. Asked to repair the connection, it hangs up on the “disabling wireless adaptor” phase forever, or until I stop the process using task manager. Asked to shut down, it hangs up on the “Windows is shutting down” message forever. If I cut power it will restart normally.

Ordinary programs (word processor, etc) seem to be working correctly but a few days back (before any of this started happening) I noticed that the license manager was being wonky.

Tried restoring the system to an earlier date; it didn’t fix the problem. Although, given that it’s not shutting down properly, maybe the restore isn’t actually working.

Have run a couple of malware programs without finding anything more lethal than a tracking cookie.

Any thoughts?

Oh! And…

Had promised

la_directora

that I’d keep posting when I work out, in the hopes that it would help inspire others to do the same…

Last workout post was Monday. Since then…

Tuesday I attended a conference in the med center and did a lot of walking from site to site – probably walked a couple miles during the day. Wed AM had a session with the trainer. I did 30 min cardio (treadmill, incline) Thursday night; Friday I did brisk walking around campus at homecoming activities but no formal workout. Sat I ran up and down stairs at the stadium over the course of the game (not purposeful exercise, just being hyper social person) and then Sat PM I did another 30 min on the treadmill (no incline, speed-walking). Sun AM had a session with my trainer.

Hope that’s inspiring enough!

NaDeCluMo and the “Oh-Hell-Box”

This episode of NaDeCluMo is brought to you by Old House Syndrome and the “Oh-Hell-Box”.

When I go to the hardware store, I tend to overbuy in order to avoid having to run back for more parts midway through. These spare parts tend to accumulate in disorganized piles in my garage. I don’t throw them away because I might need them someday; I never actually use them because I can’t locate the right part at the right time.

So as I was decluttering the garage, I designated collecting places for various categories. If it’s “plumbing stuff”, it goes in this box. “Electrical stuff” goes over there. You get the idea. My Dad calls these Oh-Hell-Boxes … for reasons that will become obvious shortly.

Which leads me to old house syndrome. When you go to fix something in an old house, the repair is simply an opportunity for something else to break. Often everything in a particular system will be ready to collapse at once, and so when the first element goes, the others follow right away. In plumbing, that’s usually because things like rubber washers tend to degrade over time, and so if one washer is bad, all of the others probably are as well.

In this case, the toilet flow valve had ceased to function. You had to physically manipulate the valve to get it to start refilling the tank after a flush, then again it took human intervention to get it to stop the water flow once the tank was full.

So I trundled down to Home Depot and picked up a replacement valve. Grabbed a new flapper as well, since those tend to die on the same schedule as the valves. That repair seemed to go fine, but of course manipulating the shutoff valve on the toilet made its washers break down and I ended up with a nice leak in the valve.

Enter the Oh-Hell-Box. When you’re doing a repair and something else breaks, giving you that “Oh, Hell!” moment, the Oh-Hell-Box has the bits you need to do a quick repair without having to go back to the hardware store. In this case, I had a spare shutoff valve of the correct size, and so the repair was accomplished in just a few minutes.

Of course, manipulating the water supply line to repair the valve seems to have led to a leak in the water supply line… on the bright side, I have a spare water supply line in my OHB (though it may be too short)!

On other fronts, I also bought a wedding dress this weekend. Went to a place with many, many dresses and tried on a bunch; picked the one I liked the best and discovered it cost the least as well. So I must’ve done something good recently to get such karma. It’s a relief to have that task out of the way.

Just took Mom and Dad to the airport, after a restful weekend, and now need to get back to work. Let’s see if I can find the initiative to do so!

Stuff

Spent the day at Homecoming, where Rice actually managed to pull out the game with a successful field goal in the last 10 seconds of the game – giving them a lead of 1 point. This made the crowd Very Happy.

My parents are in town (for the afore-mentioned homecoming) so I have not been decluttering much. And not much positive feedback on the decluttering, because it’s just not the sort of thing my parents notice. Which is a good thing, I think – I like having family who will not criticise my home when they visit.

Saw a couple people I hadn’t seen in years – that’s sort of the point of going to homecoming, right?

For this month’s family bookclub, K’s brother chose a movie. The Gods Must Be Crazy, in particular. It’ll be easier to get a movie finished on time and I’m curious what the discussion will be like. And looking forward to watching the movie, which I remember as very entertaining when it came out and I haven’t seen it since.

At the game, they were passing out these inflatable tubes designed to make a lot of noise when they’re wacked together. Handy at the game, where you can make enthusiastic noise without wearing out hands or voice (and all those waving tubes make a good visual image). After the game, Mom volunteered to take the three sets of tubes we’d been issued (one each for Mom, Dad, me) and take them to my nephews. Which led me to wonder if she’s mad at my brother about something? Giving noisemakers to three hyperactive boys doesn’t seem like a kind and generous thing to do…

Not much else going on. I’m desperately behind on Important Stuff but I also desperately needed a break. Maybe these days off will renew my sense of energy and initiative….

Supposedly will take tomorrow to go buy a wedding dress. Wish me luck.

Chain reaction

la_directora

read someone’s post about exercise, which inspired her to work out.

Then she posted about it, which the ~~guilt trip~~ impetus I needed to get myself to work out today.

So she’s suggested I should post about working out, to inspire someone else on the path to good health and buff bodies.

I did my time on the treadmill, while watching the last half of Buckaroo Bonzai – I’d forgotten how silly that movie is. Particularly silly are the costumes, which can’t possibly have been entirely serious even back in the 80’s when that movie was made – could they? It’s hard to really laugh while trotting along on a treadmill so I settled for sort of smirking at it all.

Not making great progress on the “to-do” list for the week, in part because I got a call this AM about a meeting where my attendence was apparently essential but somehow notifying me of the meeting got forgotten… to be fair, someone sent me an email sometime Friday but it didn’t seem to go through until nearly too late. Good thing they called. Though I’m not at all sure my attendance was all that critical anyway… and it kept me from working on my planned projects for the day. Sigh.

I was in a much grumpier mood before the workout, though.

A banner moment for NaDeCluMo

I can now park my car in the garage. Woo-hoo! Never mind that I blew off a major work deadline and spent four hours puttering in my garage instead… Suppose it’ll now be a long night at the computer, catching up.

Free stuff for a good home:

Metal bike rack (for a car) – fits standard sedan-style cars. Old – probably purchased in the 60’s or 70’s, but bikes are pretty much the same shape still, right? Since I now drive a hatchback, seems pointless to own it.
Small desk with wheels. Made of some sort of particleboard with veneer, but not horribly cheap-looking. Currently dusty from living in my garage.
A pair of speaker stands – about 2 feet high, sturdy black metal base with a flat top on which a speaker can sit. Not really needed here since I installed surround sound and mounted all the speakers on the walls.

I will also be selling a mongo chipper-shredder but not willing to just give that away – paid too much money for it. Will advertise it in the local Craig’s list, I guess.

Getting rid of those things will make space to work so I can transfer the router table stand over to a different table, then trash the old dresser (cheap, throw-away particleboard veneer thing that already had substantial water damage). That’ll leave enough space to put in a sink and a drill press. At that point, it’ll also be quite a bit easier to park both cars in the garage.

Also this weekend I took a pile of old pictures that had been scattered around the house – some on walls that no ended up covered by shelves, some sitting on shelves – and hung them all on one wall (after hours of rearranging them to make them fit most pleasingly together). Have decided it needs some rearrangement – needs an additional row of pics on the right side to look more centered over the piano – but overall am fairly pleased. And cleared a bunch of shelf space by putting things up on the walls.

Threw away a bunch of stuff. Trash bin is now full, must remember to take it out tomorrow night so I don’t miss trash day.

At some point, I want to deal with all the loose pics by scanning them and storing them in some sort of digital scrapbook. But I haven’t figured out the right software to do this. I want to be able to store data about each picture (including, say, a paragraph of description about the pic and keywords for things like the people in the pics and the places the pics were taken and the year(s) the pics were taken) – and ideally the data is stored as part of the actual picture file, so can move the pic around and change its file name without losing the connection to the notes, I want to be able to work with pics stored on a bunch of backup media (CDs or DVDs, probably), rather than having them all on one big hard-drive, and I want it to be a format that many systems can easily deal with. And I want to be able to do the majority of this work on the Mac, since I have a big-screened Mac desktop and the only PC in the house is a small-screened laptop.

I don’t want much, right? If anyone has suggestions, let me know. Unless a super solution is just handed to me, this endeavor will have to wait, at least until after the wedding. I have too much else to tackle between now and then, no time to do any research.

My to-do list for things that have to be done before Wed lunchtime (when I pick up my parents from the airport and have SWORN I will really take time off to spend with them, because I’ve been too darn busy to pay proper attention to them lately):

Finish generating and analyzing the simulated data for my paper (requires learning a bit more R coding to make this happen smoothly)
Write up results as well as polishing methods section and then write up discussion section – and revise intro to incorporate some more subtleties that I was pondering while cleaning the garage
Finish the design of the Diabetes report card form I’ve been programming
Meet with colleague about family history project
Present poster at all-day conference Tuesday (maybe I can bring a laptop and get a bit more work done in the background)
Fix the toilet in the guest bathroom
Finish the last details on the picture-sorting and picture-hanging project
Clear up all the mess from the picture-sorting project off the guest bed so my parents can sleep there
Grocery shop and plan meals for guests
Take load of stuff to Goodwill – have another carload ready, currently stored in guestroom closet, so need to clear that out for family to use closet.

Not too much to do, right? Sigh. I better find some food and get some work done.