I’ve been trying all day to get logged into Windows Live Messenger, and keep seeing this:
Instant Messaging is kind of like email: you shouldn’t offer it as a service unless you can provide virtually perfect reliability.
New Iron Man Trailer Released
I’m a comic book geek, and few things get my blood pumping faster than seeing characters bought to life that I’ve envisioned in my head for years. Iron Man, being released on May 2nd, looks amazing…I sure hope the movie lives up to the coolness factor that the trailer is generating!
The new trailer looks so cool! It’s under VIDEO > TRAILER. I dig the Chris Cornell tune they use in the trailer – hopefully it’s in the movie as well…
Calgary Weather: A Study in Extremes
People who live in Calgary have a saying: if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes, and it will change. Exaggerations aside, it is rather amusing (in a bi-polar kind of way) how quick the weather will change. On February 27th, the weather was clear, sunny, and quite warm (I think around 10 degrees Celsius). There was no snow on the ground in my back yard. The morning of February 28th, I woke up to this:
The above photo was taken at 10 AM. Eight hours later, at 6 PM, here’s what the same scene looked like:
The snow is nearly gone – the temperature was over 10 degrees Celsius and the day was beautiful. I love this city, but the weather is sure bizarre sometimes…
Digital Home Thoughts Contest Announced Today
It seemed like I was never going to get my contest launching post done, but I did, and the list of $6500 USD in prizes is up at Digital Home Thoughts. Like prizes? Sure you do. Keep an eye on the site, and enter to win…
Made My Commitment to the Gym, Got My Ass Kicked Today
Well, I did it. After going to the gym for a month, three to four times a week, I decided I liked it enough (or, rather, could tolerate it enough) to make it a regular part of my life. I signed up for two years in order to get the more reasonable rate of $38/month – the gym charges $48/month for a one-year sign up. Paying month by month? $99/month, which is insane and what I paid for the first month because I didn’t want to lock in for a two year period unless I was 100% sure I could commit to it. They have a $149 sign-up fee, and thankfully they put the $99 I paid for the first month against that fee, so it worked out OK.
I’ve been slowly but surely improving my fitness level over the past month:
- Treadmill: when I started I could last about five minutes at incline 2.0 and speed of 4.0. Now I can do incline 4.0, speed 4.0, and walk a full mile (15 minutes or so) without needing to stop.
- Stairmaster: also known as the “machine from hell”, I started at difficulty 5 and could only last three minutes – and after three minutes, I thought my heart and lungs were going to explode. Now I can last five minutes and only feel like I’m having a mild heart attack. A ways to go on that machine, but it seems to kick everyone’s ass…and it’s just climbing stairs. Go figure.
- Leg Press: I started out at 225 pounds (this is a two-leg press) and last Friday I was able to do two sets of 10 reps at 315 pounds. This isn’t so much from me building muscle in mylegs as it is me getting more confident about wanting to push myself.
- Lat Pull-Downs: I started out able to do one set of 20 pull-downs at about 60 pounds, and last Friday I was able to do one set of 10 pull-downs at 120 pounds, and one set of 20 at 90 pounds.
None of that is particularly brag-worthy, but shared as an encouragement to other out-of-shape geeks like myself out there, that even in a month if you’re committed to working out regularly you’ll see positive changes. I haven’t lost any weight yet, but I have noticed a marked improvement in my energy level on the days I work out…except for today. What happened today you might ask? I had my initial consultation with my trainer, Kirk.
I had hoped that one month of basic prep would allow me to survive the assessment, but it was brutal – sometimes the simplest things can be the most difficult, like doing push-ups while using nearly every muscle in your body to stabilize yourself because you’re balancing on a Bosu ball (imagine a ball cut in half with a flat plastic top but round and bouncy on the bottom). It’s amazingly difficult for what seems like a simple motion. Or doing squats while standing on said Bosu ball, trying not to fall over. My arms were so exhausted when I got home this morning I could barely wash my hair in the shower – they felt like rubber and were hard to lift. Even now, six hours later, I’m wiped out. One day at a time…
A YouTube Comment I Wish I Could Post
…but I have to be all, ya know, professional and polite. đŸ˜‰
jasondunn.com, Now iPod Touch/iPhone Icon Friendly
Courtesy of Mr. Darius Wey, if you add this site as a shortcut to your iPod Touch or iPhone, you should see a snazzy icon. You know, just in case this blog is just SO critical to your daily existence that you want to add it to your iPod/iPhone home screen. Bwahaha…
A Winter Sunset
Keep Your Priorities Straight
This is an interesting article about the addiction that some people have to World of Warcraft, and what it can do to a marriage:
“Jocelyn had been friends with her ex-husband Peter since the age of 13, but it took only nine months for her marriage to collapse. “I bought the game for him for Christmas 2004, when it first came out. By May we had our first serious discussion about where our marriage was going, and by September I had moved out,” she said. Jocelyn recalled one particular incident that was typical of Peter’s habits. “I had set aside 30 minutes for us to watch a television show together, and he couldn’t. He was stuck on a raid, and completely failed to understand why I was upset,” she said. Peter’s domestic duties also suffered. He stopped paying bills, she says, and refused to do his share of the housework.”
This is clearly an extreme case, but certainly not unheard of. Anyone with an addictive personality would certainly have trouble resisting getting addicted to a game that has no ending. World of Warcraft is probably at the root of more marriage break-ups than any other game in history, yet if it wasn’t the game it might be any other number of things that person would get addicted to. Should the game come with a warning label on the outside? “Caution: May Be Harmful to Marital Harmony.” I believe that people are responsible for their own actions and that blamings games, music, or anything else is a cop-out.
Breathtaking Flame Fractals
Math has never been so beautiful – you can grab 50 flame fractal wallpapers from this site. Unfortunately they want all the pageviews they can get, so there’s no single ZIP file download – you’ll have to grab ’em all manually like I did.