Vibram shoes helps speed

I got some vibram fivefingers shoes. It’s near-barefoot running. It might sound painful but it’s not that bad running on pavement and asphalt. You have to learn to run right because the Nike foam platform is gone. Is it hard on the knees? No one knows yet. My knees don’t hurt but that’s just anecdotal.

Anyway. My goal of sub 06:05 mile came suddenly close when I ran a 06:35 after running a 07:00 flat. I think some more time at the gym doing squats and time at the track with the barefoot stuff will let me break 6 minutes. Just once. I just need to do one mile sub 06:00 to break my middle school and all-time fastest pace. Suddenly it seems very possible. In running shoes, I’d kill myself for 07:15 but barefoot forces you do concentrate on fast turnover (versus long stride). Your feet just can’t hurt themselves when you run barefoot, it’s too painful.

I could go on about general fitness stuff but there’s just too many resources and tips on youtube for free. You can get training tips just by watching a bunch of short videos. I found that a fixed routine isn’t that important but proper technique and insight from these videos is valuable.

So that’s the running bit, let me ramble on about the weight training.

The gym

For my own records, 2 weeks ago I was doing around 3 pull ups and yesterday I did 11. 4 days ago I did 10. These pullups are where my thumbs face me (halfway between a pullup and a chinup), it’s just the type of bar the gym has. It’s good to see the weight that I use go up too. Yay progress. My upper body routine goes something like this:

1. Do as many pullups as I can, last was 11
2. Two hand tricep cable pulldown (overhead leaned over, not in front) – 77 x 15 reps
3. Military pulldown – 90lbs x 10-12 reps (my forearms really burn here, I don’t think I’m doing it right)
4. Do as many pullups as I can again, usually 2 or 3, tired
5. Tricep cable again, 77lbs x 15 reps. Then another 15 with 60lbs keeping hands apart (harder)
6. Bicep curl with 30-35lbs (cable or dumbells)

After all this, I’m just doing repeats of all these in random order. I aim for 45min to 1 hour. Usually I do it too long and sometimes throw in a set of 10 squats @ 110lbs if the gym is busy or I’m getting bored. It’s probably bad to be mixing so many things together. If I’m really pumped and worked hard, I’ll have a protein shake at the end (usually have a protein shake 1 hour before working out). Some days I jog to the gym, on those days it’s really hard running home because my arms feel stiff. I don’t jog to the gym on lower body days.

A full-out lower body day goes something like this:

1. 10x squat rack @ 110lbs (I was using 70lbs to get my form right) These are great! So much energy to do these! Form is key here. Find youtube videos. Don’t hurt yourself. At the end I am very out of breath and hamstrings/quads are burning
2. 10-20 Calf raises @ 70lbs – dumbells or squat rack. Just started these because my calves give out first while running. Not sure yet, running form might be wrong and my routine isn’t solid on these.
3. Leg press. Nothing makes you feel stronger than moving a couple of tons. I do 2 or 3 sets of 10 reps @ 270-290+lbs. I try to explode up and lower slow. Then some calf raises with same weight.
4. Hamstring curl with machine. These are really good for running. It seems to give me more ass-kicking (literally) power during a sprint. I do 2 sets of 10x @ 90lbs.

So the other thing I’ve realized is that remembering my workout isn’t important. If it’s too light or too heavy you learn quick after going 7-10 times to the gym. Eventually you figure out what you should be working out with. I try to work with weight that I can do 3 sets with. If I can’t do 3 sets then I’m doing too much weight. Many times I do a subset of the workouts above. Someone told me that going past 1 hour in the gym is too much.

Rest is important. I wait a day in-between these routines to rest. If I went hard I won’t jog on the rest day. If I jogged on a rest day, I won’t go hard at the gym. Starting out, I was really sore. Now I usually am not sore the next day unless I started a new exercise. For example, playing tennis with a friend made me sore because it was new motions. I don’t know if the protein shakes help with the soreness, I’ve recently stopped drinking them to find out.

So if I do hit sub 06:00, I wonder if I’ll stop all of this crap? Hmm …

I don’t own a netbook but if/when I do. I’m putting jolicloud on it. It’s exactly what I imagine when someone says netbook: a netbook is a stateless window into the internet.

Everything in jolicloud runs fullscreen and there’s no browser. You install webapps with a single click and they run as if they are desktop apps. Maybe this sounds backwards but it’s seamless and transparent where or how you are working. You just work on the cloud. People see your install / removes as social events so you can possibly see what’s cool and new with people you trust or know.

I like the netbook as an AUX device. Something off to the side, like a taskbar or dock icon on steroids. Big ass growl event messages would rock too.

Jolicloud isn’t out of alpha yet. Until then, I guess there’s only the ubuntu netbook remix that it’s based on.

Also, zero hits for better than jolicloud on google. I’ll be the only one with a false hit. Sorry. Googling “better than whatever” with quotes on google is something I swear by. Nothing sifts out opinion and uncovers new ideas faster. Nobody start exploiting it with fake “better than [product | brand]” bot sites goddamn it.

Went to the beach and boogyboarded. All of the guys (read: husbands) in our group were 30+ years old. Each of us had a wipe out that screwed up something. For me it was my legs going the wrong way over my head and my lower back was like “eep”. So these stretches really helped. You have to be careful with back pain, but for me the stretches took away the soreness instantly.

Edgar is running every day (slacking is every other day). *sigh* I’m trying to run every other day and slacking for me is two times a week. I do about 2mi and it includes up and downhill in a loop. It’s pretty brutal actually, about 1/3 is uphill slowly and then 2/3 is downhill quick and flat. My nike+ shoes say it’s burning about 300 calories. That’s not a lot. Running doesn’t burn that much but your core gets in shape and your VO2 max starts coming around in 4-8 weeks (watch NOVA’s marathon challenge on Hulu).

I don’t know exactly what my goals are. I guess I want to play soccer or tennis again. In the short term, I wanted to feel better and have more energy. I think that has already happened just in 3 months of running and barbells (I’ll get to the weights in a second). There’s a few pickup leagues around here but I think I’ll really get a reality check when running around with 20 somethings on a soccer field. My longer term goal was posted a while back (beating 6:05 mile time). Right now my easy jog pace is 2.06 miles @ 9:05 per mile. If I rest and book it, I can do about 8:15 per mile. This is far and away from where I need to be but it’s been improving even in 3 months when a 10 minute pace was medium difficulty.

Today I went for a run down to a local high school (1.6mi) and then did a fast 1/2 mi (7min pace) followed by 4 100m sprints. I was dying on the 7min pace, I had to stop. I did the 1st 100m in 12.75sec (but this is with an ipod clock), my fastest since I can remember (because I never timed in college or H.S.). I’d love to get this time way, way down but I was really hurting after all this activity. I jogged back home really slowly and my calf was threatening to ball up on me (I’ve had that happen in soccer … wow ouch). So I think I pushed my muscle limit with the speed burst crap.

So reading on youtube and forums, I need to set a goddamn goal. I can’t do long distance jogging and expect to get better at sprinting (fast vs slow twitch muscle). So I’m going to try eating more carbs during the day and do interval running. It goes like this:

5min warmup run
30sec sprint
2.5min slow jog
30sec sprint
2.5min slow jog
Until about 20minutes.

There’s also a video of resistance training called the “300 routine” (because you do 10 sets of 30 reps), maybe it’s related to the movie .. I dunno. It goes like this:

30x elevated pushups
30x one arm dumbbell swing
30x lat bell
30x jump squat with DB
30x elevated pushup
30x split squat jump no DB
30x band row
30x shoulder press
30x stationary lunges
30x russian twist

So I ordered some bands and weight lifting gloves. I have a set of dumbbells (it’s crazy how much you can do with those). There’s a lot of those sets that absolutely kill your legs but that’s really what I need to increase my speed. At the gym, I’m going to change it up and do some squats once I figure out good form (so I don’t kill my back). They have a rack assist thing.

Ok, weights. I’ve been doing an upper body thing for about a month or two. I don’t know how I feel about this. Sprinters will use upper body but long distance slow twitch is opposite. I don’t know any soccer or tennis players that are huge. So I dunno what I’m going to do about this. In college, I’d barbell fly 65lbs at 10 reps. My chest was pretty far along considering I weighed about 155lbs @ 5′9″. I wasn’t benching max more than 140 but I wasn’t doing benches that often. So I guess I want to get about 65lbs flies just because it never slowed me down in intramural sports in college. Right now, 40-45 is where I’m at. I got this set of bells from Dick’s sports for like $60 and some extra weight was like another $40. They are kinda annoying to change weights on but the Bowflex bells were too expensive and I read they break easy.

So my routine kinda changes. I drink a protein shake 1 hour before I lift. Then I try to work 2-3 muscle groups hard. I go until failure and then back the weight off and go some more. I don’t know if this is right but it seems to work. When I’m done I have another shake. It’s the Cytosport chocolate stuff. It’s like half a glass of water … doesn’t taste too bad. It helps get rid of soreness (or at least it’s hyped too). I don’t have a control group but I bought it after I was really sore and wanted to not wait 3-4 days before going again.

Bell curls have really increase my triceps and biceps. I’m not huge but my shirts are fitting differently. Crew shirt sleeves aren’t hanging anymore (sometimes they get caught) and everything is filling out a bit. It’s pretty cool. The best part is, many things in the world are lighter. Doors, boxes, “honey move this please” and even the push lawn mower are lighter and easier. I still break a sweat but I’m not out of breath or hurting after lifting stuff. Maybe I’m just getting un-wimped. I don’t know.

Most days I work out at home and watch the daily show and colbert report on Hulu. I can watch and do my routine. But I think I’m going too long because I watch 3 episodes total some days and that’s 1.5 hours. I talked to a guy who’s been lifting for a long time and he said I’m going way too long. So I might be over-training. I’ll see if I can get it down to 45min this week.

For sure I overdid my triceps one day. First time using the pully thing at the gym, I did these overhead tricep things. I did 100 reps and my arms were so swollen that my elbow disappeared. I couldn’t scratch my back for 5 days. That was bad. I’m really a noob actually.

Well I guess that’s about all I have to say about this summer fitness thing that I’m doing. I’m learning a lot and it’s been a lot of fun seeing changes happen so quickly (albeit I’m not some ripped dude) and the best part is thinking that a lot of my free time to work out has come from quitting World of Warcraft. Squarism has less meat-head oriented testaments to that fact perhaps.

Game developers and players aren’t organically aligned. What is easy to code isn’t always hard to avoid and what is hard to code isn’t always easy to appreciate. Development difficulty and player experience are not related.

For example, a player may spend 30 minutes trying to avoid Game Over in Tetris when the following lines make Game Over happen:

[game lose]; // fire the game over screen
gameRunning = FALSE; // set our game state variable in case of clean up
return; // return and basically exit loop

Three lines or less is really what fires and controls the player experience. Whereas boundary checking, animation tweening and AI is much more difficult. So really the code work doesn’t align with the game play. This is important because nothing is built-in to align up the experience of developer to player. Of course there’s no solution. Maybe this disparity can be managed by completely ignoring coding effort. Just because physics took a long time to implement, let’s not create a physics playground level. Just because an animation was hard, let’s not reuse animations everywhere.

30 minutes of player effort to avoid 3 seconds of coding effort. Ignore it.

With E3 2009 over, a number of game sites are handing out awards and winner badges for their favorite vendor. I have watched and read their coverage and it has organized bulleted points of merit for each. Sony, with their strong line-up of games, Nintendo for their surprise Metroid announcement and Microsoft for their Project Natal. Project Natal with its image recognition wizardry and flashy “product vision” marketing slick sheet shows well with gamers who voted “who do you think did best at E3?”. This is intriguing. Has some kind of veil of deception been thrown on us? Sony and Nintendo had a strong software sequel showcase that is within their core business and MS promises a device that is no more revolutionary than a Wii Motion controller with more bells and whistles.

I am excited about forward progress and I want to have a minority report TV but this is a major software corporation who is copying Miis and remotes. There is nothing to be had that tech demos and mini games haven’t already given us. If the Wii Motion Plus can give us a light saber game then there is no market left for a light saber game where I hold an even more imaginary light saber. I turn a plastic remote into a sword, this is much more exciting than turning air into a sword.

The end-game is appealing. In a living room full of plastic peripherals; wheels, musical instruments, fishing gear, dance floors, tennis rackets, guns and even skateboards are approximated and interpreted as impressionistic clutter. Natal would lay waste to these contextual inputs where only one is useful at a time and all else lay in a closet. One would get upset if a basketball team had 5,000 players on the bench. Natal would abstract away the physical implementation of these plastics and make me become a sign language yoga traffic cop. This is the future but I don’t Microsoft to take me there.

Vaporware is a steamy cloud of water droplets emitting from a hot mouth (drama!). You can polish it up because the budget is limitless. You don’t have to worry about engineering and effort because you haven’t slaved away on anything yet. Everything is possible because no one can warn us of vaporware’s eventual let down. It is hope and blue sky. Burning off this vaporware fog is as easy as asking for a tech demo.

The video that made me buy Scribblenauts a million times is one where they try to break the illusion. Where I saw promises, I now see delivery. The testers of Scribblenauts write down random words and content appears. Precognitive design has happened. An artist built a Kraken and assigned animation to it. This is delivery, this is the work done and delivered into the hands of users. Natal has to have this test administered by skeptics and be able to interpret “Einstein fights God”.

Freaking PS3 BD disc drive died. No bluray plays. No PS2 game plays. No PS3 game plays. Icon never shows. Sony sent a box (that used to be my job when I worked for them — heh). I’m mailing it off soon.

So when you ship it off, you have to wipe your personal data (or at least they recommend it) but trophies can’t be backed up! Wtf. I don’t have a ton of trophies but I wonder if this is going to be an issue for other people.

So the turn-around time they say is 3 weeks. And it’s out of warranty $150 repair. Take into account that this is the last hardware backwards-compatible 60gb PS3 model that I’m shipping out, I’m really worried that this is a lost game. I can’t repair it forever and I can’t get a new PS3 unless I break out my old PS2 (which is not that reliable). Maybe I should just get a PS2 slim and a new PS3 when they update it.

In other news, a friend of mine got in an accident. He’s fine but he’s selling his bike. Sad to hear that his bike riding is taking a hiatus but I’m glad that he’s ok. His car looked really bent-up in the pic he sent.

Ableton Suite 8 came today. I’m installing it now. It’s like 62gb installed with all the samples. I was super-impressed with the demo. It’s so smooth with the workflow and creative construction with sort of a loop-centered mentality. Hoping to make some really big strides forward from linear things like Logic and Cubase.

Wow. What a game. Finished the DS remake of the SNES classic Chrono Trigger. 92 on metacritic, I don’t know what the SNES original would get these days but it’d be up there.

I have started it many times and either lost the save or lost track of what was going on. Buying and starting the DS version was a good move. They cleaned up a lot of stuff and the DS has a dependable save game function built into the cart itself.

When I worked in Florida at a Sony call center (hey, that’s a good job down there). I worked a 4pm-2am shift. There was a guy there who loved Chrono Trigger. He played it on an emulator while waiting for calls (I’m sure he had beaten it many times). I remember asking him what it was. He was very nerdy and nice at the same time about it. I must have seemed like such an outsider. This was in 1999. 10 years later I finally get around to beating it.

I followed a walkthrough and that made it much easier to find all the secrets etc. But it really wasn’t needed. It was fun seeing “omg massive damage” at the end but it was really a cake walk. I grinded a little bit at the end to get infinite strength capsules while listening to TWiT for 2 hours but it was more radio listening than playing. In the end, I had about 26 hours logged. Not horrible at all.

The game is very symbolic, er maybe not symbolic. I guess I mean they have circular and emotional story elements that very much make the game seem bigger than it is. For a game that is very dated, it still does a lot with sprites and cheap 2D effects. I’m glad to have this one packed away. Maybe 10 years from now I’ll beat it again.

2019. It’s a date.

Running through an iPhone dev class on iTunes U from Stanford. Alan Cannistraro is teaching the second lesson and he’s wearing this jacked with what looks like MUNK FUNK on the sleeve.

I sent him an email (I don’t know if he has time to respond) telling him how weird that is for me:

Kinda a small world moment, saw your jacket. Does it say MUNK FUNK? That was my handle back in the day (think Tripod and Netscape 4.x days). Guy I worked with said it should be Milk Filk because I drink so much milk. It stuck and is unique on the web for about a decade (unique actually means confusing). I have to explain the story every time I give someone a business card etc. It’s always been my email (vs Bob2784@aol.com) etc.

I wish I had this class at my school back in the day. It’s very technology specific but it’s got to be more useful than learning Cobol or whatever. The class/audience in the videos are surprisingly inexperienced. The questions are bad or non-existent and the teachers are just preaching to what appears to be lost souls. I dunno, maybe only the squeaky wheels are talking. I figured everyone at Stanford CS would be smoking me from the get-go.

I should go back and get my goddamn CS master or something. Watching the videos and breezing through the assignments is empowering as fuck.

UPDATE: I was way off. He writes back:

The shirt brand is “Skunk Funk”, a brand out of Spain (http://skunkfunk.com). But I see why it was hard to make out. :)

Very cool that he wrote back for such a random topic. His videos are doing very well. I don’t know the totals but the first episode got 36,000 views in the first week or something. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s reached 200k people total.

Bunch of random shit incoming. Excuse the brain dump.

• Started a new gig at Oracle. Very cool so far.
• Saw Henry V last night. Neat new experience. Hard to follow language. Play group was excellent.
• A bunch of updates on squarism.com. Getting Tetris write-up polished and working on Elevator Simulator. More there.
• Quit WoW (for NoW). In productivity kick.
• Got a Axiom 49 usb controller. Works so great. Perfect for ableton.
• Ableton 8 is out. Waiting to buy it in retail. With job switch, not so ready to spend de dough.
• Running quite a bit. Ran a 100m sprint in 13.5 sec. Not great, but not bad after the winter break. Ran a 1:15 1/4mi. On pace for 6mi mile but I’m not even close to having the stamina to run 4 laps like that.
• Did a youtube video about playing a Beatles tune “She’s So Heavy”.
• Played with Ubuntu 9.0.4 daily ISO and final. Ext4 is amazingly fast.

Went to a car meetup with TL. He brought his Z06. There were good and bad cars there. It was fun, never been to a car meet up before.. I took some casual pictures but there were far finer cars than my pictures let on. Ford GT, different things from shelby. Old guys with old muscle cars.

I didn’t care about the GT-R until I saw it in person. I’ve got a summer crush.

Also, I’m reading this book called Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. It sounds boring as all hell but it reads very easily. It goes beyond the left-brain & right-brain perspective and discusses a wide variety of techniques and strategies to thinking better. One of my favorite bits of the book so far is a part where he explains the wiring of your right hand and leg. Try this:

Sit at a table. Dangle your right leg off the floor slightly. Start moving your right leg clockwise in a circle. Now at the same time draw a number six with your finger on the table. Your leg will reverse directions when you draw the circle part of “6″.

The author explains that this is ok. It’s how you are wired. There are techniques not to solve this particular problem but other wiring problems. It’s a good read.

Beat Grand Theft Auto 4. Goddamn is it good. One of the most compelling characters in anything I’ve ever seen. Niko Belic is a character that sticks with you. Good acting, good design, good game programming. It’s bigger than this blog is so I don’t need to go on about it.

I skipped the pigeon shooting in GTA4. It’s a mini game where you go around the city and shoot the “flying rats”. There are a crap-ton of them so I was marking them off in a digital map with a photoshop clone named Pixelmator. My little system was working great until I counted up how many I had left. My count was 57 and the game’s count was 58. That means I marked one down wrong. I spent some time backtracking but it was too much to deal with. Finding a missing bird is harder than finding a bird (and they are already hard to find). A bird that exists at least has a red glow on it and a missing bird is not as obvious. So I gave up on the whole goddamn thing.

The image above is from Beyond Good & Evil. Hmm, how to describe BG&E. I’ll keep this short. It’s an underrated and undersold adventure game from Ubisoft. It’s not as good as the fans say imo. I enjoyed parts of it (like the parts near the end) but it’s not the underdog that everyone says it is. I found it very frustrating and not that engaging. It had a very european developer feel to it (nothing wrong with that). It was just a little bit off most of the time. The controls were weird, the game engine didn’t keep up and the camera and level design was like playing blind pinball. I nearly sold it but then took it off the sell pile to put a nail in it. I’m just glad it’s done.