Indestructible Piñatas

The boy turned five recently. The theme of the party (since all kids parties need to be "themed", apparently) was supposed to be a Star Wars sort of thing but Legos got wrapped up in there somehow and also it was at a pool. Oh, yeah, the piñata was a T-Rex, assuming T-Rexes ran around dressed like flamenco dancers.

C'mon folks, get it together here... You're all over the map.

The piñata was a (nearly literally) last minute addition to the festivities. The wife had the idea we could get a soccer ball piñata and paint it like the Death Star or something. Unfortunately, the party store didn't carry what she was looking for so she picked up the T-Rex, which was a decent substitution (like any kid he likes dinosaurs). Since it was the night before the party there was pretty much no way I was going to able to do anything...

With...

It...  

Sigh... Even if the idea for painting it to look like a ton-ton or an AT-RT had occurred to me before right this second...  Damn it, why didn't I think of that earlier...  Doesn't matter, doesn't matter...

Anyway, we didn't even have anything to whack it with.  She suggested we could use the boy’s wooden baseball bat. Sure... What could go wrong?  Let's blindfold a bunch of clumsy, sugar-high, pool-water wet, sunscreen-slathered three-to-six-year-olds, hand them a heavy, polished piece of lumber and tell them to just go nuts. I suggested if we do go with the bat idea, we should probably bring extra Baggies to the party so that the guests could have something to carry each others' shattered teeth home in.

For you see, kids standing around a piñata know the following things:

1. Friends never, ever hit friends.  I am safe around friends.
2. Once that thing breaks, I will get candy.
3. I will get more candy if I get there first, so I need to be one quarter of an inch closer than the person on my left and on my right. This requires vigilance and constant adjustment.
4. Every time an adult yells something along the lines of "GET BACK!!", I need to back up two inches per swear word they just used to make them stop yelling, although its not clear why.  Don't these stupid grown-ups know #1 above?

The following morning (the day of the party) I dove into my wood supply to see what we could use instead of the Louisville Involuntary Manslaughter-er.  I had a six-foot hunk of 1-1/4” oak dowel (um... no) a bunch of one-foot poplar dowels of the same thickness (again, no) and a four-foot poplar 1/2 inch thick piece.

Ahhh... now we’re on to something.  I grabbed a chunk of the one-foot poplar dowel and cut a few inches off of it.  After that, I bored a 1/2 inch hole down the center a bit, cut the 1/2 inch thick piece down a bit, and slotted it into the thicker piece.  After adding some grooves with a Dremmel, a “button” out of some scrap pine, and painting the thing grey and red I had the light saber you see in the pic below.  The paint had dried just in time for the party.

We found a convenient overhead branch to tie it to and let the kids have at it, yanking them back out of the Danger Zone when they needed to be.  We decided not to blindfold them before they swung because, as the saying goes, “Prudence is the better part of not being sued by outraged parents”.

After about twelve hundred whacks, I called for a TO and inspected the still very much intact piñata.  I ripped it a little to get it going and told the kids to go on.  After another four hundred and sixty five whacks I called for another time out and really tore it.  That’s when I noticed that it was constructed primarily of corrugated shipping cardboard.  You know, the stuff they ship other stuff in so it doesn’t get damaged.  Check out the pic on the left.

Before all was said and done, the dowel had broken in two (yikes!) and I was forced to tear the thing in twain and simply dump the candy on the ground.  Weak, right?  Wrong.  The kids couldn’t have cared less - the ends justified the means, in their opinion.  Plus now they could get back to swimming, so, like, whatever.

So, the lesson here seems to be if you are ever in need of a piñata (hey, it could happen) just make it yourself.  If not, you might find yourself wishing for a real light saber just to put a dent in the sucker.

Can't Fault the Logic, I Guess...

(Screen grab from wvec.com earlier today)

Queen?  I had no idea that was an option.  Now that is gonna be a wedding for the record books...

Animal, Vegetable, AND Mineral?

I haven't been Geocaching too much lately... I was disappointed to find out the off-trail forest hikes I normally like to do are much less of an option around this time of year unless I wanted to emerge from the woods "more deer-tick than man".  

My last attempt a couple of days after a big downpour was a miserable failure.  At a local public park I was driven back by a black cloud of mosquitos only yards into the hike and I hadn't yet stepped foot off the path.  I was likewise thwarted from retrieving a cache from near the local library by a one-two punch of cargo-net-thick spider webs and a poison ivy farm.  I have solved a few puzzle-related caches and done some recon to determine their exact location for later, but that's about it for the off-trail stuff.

I guess I will pick it up again in earnest (Autumn?) once the weather, terrain, and wildlife stop being so Jumanji-y.  In the meantime there are always tons of caches more in the open.  The city ones are usually too small to hold cool stuff - usually they contain just the log to sign.  I prefer the larger ones that have say, Dollar Store trinkets or Matchbox Cars or hundreds upon hundreds of... eeeeeeewwwwwwwwww... earwigs...

That one was in a birdhouse on the perimeter of a local cemetery.  After spraying the cache with a generous dose of OFF, I took this pic, braved the still-wriggling horde, signed the log and left a trinket.  I didn't take anything in trade except for a huge case of the willies.

And I thought it was gross running into caches filled with stagnant rainwater...  What a great hobby!

Oh, yeah, before I forget: Not only do cemeteries usually have a good number of easy-to-get caches, did you know that if you are being pestered by certain folks for "a couple of bucks" or "a gas can" you can ditch them by walking confidently onto cemetery grounds?  It's true!  I'm telling you, with this one dude he stopped so suddenly it was like watching a bird smack into a window.  Uncanny.  

Bugs and rainwater notwithstanding, some caches do contain some pretty interesting things.  For example:

Also this:

I left both the dollar and the ultrasound in the cache for others to see.  Not too sure what to make of the dollar, but I sure hope that woman had a good pregnancy...

The pic in the upper left of this post is the current state of the Geo-Junk Clock I made (and, technically, am still making) for my son's room.  Some of the pieces had fallen off and had to be re-attached with epoxy instead of hot glue, so what you see here might have stuff that's been slightly shifted around.  I am running out of space so I am not sure how much more I will attach before I call it "done".  A couple dozen more things, tops, I guess.

But I think I might just have an idea for what to do with any extra stuff beyond that.  We'll see... :)

  

Firing the Trainer

Two weeks ago I finished up my fifth month of routines using Nike+ Kinect Training. I earned 35,000 Nike+ points, burned about 18,000 calories, attended about 100 training sessions and earned most of the achievements that don't require you to create yet another pointless online account somewhere in the holy name of social media.

I did not miss a scheduled session, skip any workouts, or forgo any stretches. The cumulative time spent using this software over the past 20 (or so) weeks was a little shy of 48 hours. I stuck with the "Get Lean" option mainly because it seemed like a good compromise between what was probably pure aerobics and pure muscle work. Plus, keeping with the one option allowed me to have an apples to apples comparison of month to month progress. 

As I progressed through the software and my monthly fit test scores ratcheted slowly upward, the computer-selected aerobics workouts which started at a convenient 25 or so minutes morphed into 45-minute "man, I am totally gonna be late for work" slog-fests.  I had to start getting up even earlier than I had been to compensate. 

I don't remember the exact numbers for my fit score when I first started using this software (the program history only keeps the last 4 for some reason) but I think I was able to increase both the "endurance" and "athleticism" metrics (whatever the heck those terms mean here) each by about 25 to 35%. My score is good enough where I am told I am "above average" regardless of the age group I select to compare myself to. That's a great ego booster and all but, honestly, unless the focus groups involved in determining those averages included the permanently bedridden, people who were severely hungover, and perhaps even the recently deceased, I am thinking those numbers were simply pulled out of thin air. 

The software does well what it does well.  It provides a structured regimen that uses a system of points and achievements to help motivate the user into performing more exercises and with better form.  It is not designed to drag you out of bed or to padlock your pantry or fridge.  It's not your buddy (although it sometimes tries to be and fails) nor is it your enemy (although it does seem intentionally malicious at times). 

It was great for augmenting my gym workouts and eventually I dropped using the treadmill there altogether, saving myself 30 minutes of high-speed trudging in the evening.  I worked up more of a sweat and got a more thorough leg workout with the routines in this software package than I ever did doing my boulder-less, motivation-less, impression of Sisyphus every night.  I still did hiking, biking, swimming (well... wading and keeping an eye on the four-year-old, really) and other jazz on the weekends. 

Like I've said before, there is no such thing as a perfect piece of exercise software.  Make peace with that.  But, good Lord, using this title at least three times a week for 5 months really showcased so many annoyances, quirks, and straight up bugs that  all I wanted to do sometimes was to kick a hole in the TV. Here are some examples:

• It recognized me correctly twice, misidentified me twice, and didn't even try the other 95% of the time I logged in.  I am guessing this has to do with my height. Moving and calibrating the Kinect had no effect.
• The workout time is not logged on the calendar correctly.  Before a workout, it shows you the number of active minutes but post-workout it shows something else... not sure, really.  Whatever it is, though, if it is above 59:59, the end gets partly chopped off.   
• Only the past 4 fit test results are kept for some reason. 
• Literally two seconds into a 15 second "square hop" routine, you are ordered to change direction from clockwise to counterclockwise. 
• If you do not start the exercise the nanosecond your avatar turns white, you get dinged for bad form ( for example, during a High Knees exercise you are told to "Get those knees up!" right out of the gate). Trying to start the exercise a bit early does not help since your avatar will not be in the "correct position", so the routine won't start. On the bright side they do say "Good correction!" about 1 second after they get done berating you. 
• Humans have mass, inertia, and a realistic response to the force of gravity. The trainers do not.
• While it is physically possible to perform jumping jacks at trainer Marie's speed, the Kinect lags to the point where you actually earn less Nike Fuel points than you did by going slower. 
• I doubt trainer Alex could, in real life, "Star Jump" for 60 seconds that fast, that consistently, and, above all, that high, all the time yelling at me that I'm doing it all wrong.  At the end of a minute of that nonsense, I am mostly relying on the weight of my arms tossed in the general direction of "up" to maybe lift my exhausted body a nanometer above the carpet.  
• Sometimes my avatar would simply disappear.  Poof. Gone.  This sucked during Mountain Climbers especially since you face away from the TV and the audio cues that indicate something is wrong are covered up by your own exhausted panting. I might give that one a pass if I thought it was because of the floor position of the exercise, but I have seen it happen while I was standing during "Split Decision" rounds, too. 
• Sometimes an errant hand wave or cough (or both, maybe) screws with the software. I can't be any more specific than that since stuff happens and menus pop up so fast at that point I am not sure what audio-and/or-gesture-based menu options have been automatically triggered. Once I was bent over wheezing "oh my God I'm gonna freakin die" with my hands on my hips and I was somehow rewarded with my 30 second break being immediately skipped. Another time I was 43 seconds into an exhausting 45 second "Star Jump" routine when my wife noisily opened a bag of chips downstairs somehow tacking an additional 90 seconds onto the hated exercise. I know that one sounds like a joke but it's true, and that was the last time I used the software at night with other people awake in the house. 

• It does not recognize me doing some exercises and stretches correctly, regardless of what I try. 
• Lunge Jumps (part of the Leg Matrix) are simply not counted.  "Return to the lunge position" they shout "I am in the freaking lunge position, you [string of near-random, semi-intelligible expletives deleted] I wheeze while watching the fuel meter drop to zero. 
• High Knees, if they are part of the Star Jump Combo, are counted at about 25% what they should be. High knees by themselves are fine.  Star jumps by themselves are likewise fine. 
• During one stretch I forget the name of, I am constantly ordered to "keep my back leg straight" even though it is obvious from the avatar it couldn't be straighter. However, bending the front leg more somehow appeases the software. 
• In preparation for doing Leg Swings you are told to stand there with one hand on your hip in the classic "I'm a little teapot" pose. No matter where I have my right hand ( from my armpit down to my thigh) it's wrong and I have to wait for the body tracking to be disabled. 
• Occasionally I will be told to face the TV, even while standing there facing the TV readying myself for an exercise called "Split Decision"
• During Inchworms it has accused me 100% of the time of not raising my hands above my head at the start. Mind you, it cannot see anything above eye level for me regardless of where I have the Kinect sensor, so I guess when my arms go up and up and up then disappear from my avatar, it assumes they actually did disappear and they could be anywhere in the universe... You know... Quantum mechanics and all. 
• During squats of any kind, my weight is not on my heels like it should be. Ever, apparently. 
• According to the software I cannot successfully make a simple "Y" shape with my arms. I am likewise flummoxed by the acts of running in place, sitting still with my feet straight out in front of me, and holding my arms out to the side. 

The list goes on and on, and I didn't quit the exercise just because it confused my shirt sleeve with a body part or whatever. The point is that I had to hear, about five times a day, that I have struggled with these in the past but today I know you are really going to nail these.   "Oh, really?" I think. "Well, prepare to be disappointed again, there, blind-y... Oh, what now?  Is this better?  MY HAND IS ON MY FRICKIN HIP!!! SEE?!"  Reminds me of this: 

• Sometimes the trainer does an extra set after the counter gets to zero and your score stops accumulating. Should you follow suit or will you get dinged for bad form? Sometimes they quit with six seconds left on the clock, and if you match the trainer's pose like you “should” you get yelled at for quitting early. 
• Literally three seconds into a 60 second routine you are sometimes told "you're coming up on your personal best". Also, your personal best is not displayed until afterwards, and does not correspond to the time you were allotted to do the routine. For example, your personal best could be based on a 60-second routine but you are only doing a 30-second one at the time.  Worse, your personal best could be some score you got doing challenges which in no way compares to what you can get during the actual exercise - it could be different by hundreds of points. 
• The Quick Start sessions are a way to add an aerobics or upper body session whenever you want. That's great and all but the program absolutely sucks at spacing out exercises that work out the same muscle groups.  Doing a set of Side Planks followed immediately by a set of Rotating Side Planks is painful and stupid.  I mentioned before about a 5-set run of Star Jumps, High Knees, and Star Jump Combos, and all I could think was "Not 'Happy Birthday'! Not 'Happy Birthday'!"

• Speaking of the quick start sessions, the randomness of the workout is spoiled somewhat by a bug that accidentally  reveals the next "secret" exercise and its duration before your 30 second break after a routine. After the break, the words and duration of the next round ( which have been visible the whole time) are covered and the trainer says "Ok, let's see what you get..." and does this semi-dramatic reveal of the info you already knew.    
• The trainers mostly use the same script, although there are some differences.  Alex's tone is a little too pumped to take seriously (Today we're gonna push. WE'RE GONNA PUSH!!!) and I don't like when he calls me a "tiger". Marie seems to insist that I find many of the exercises easier than I have in the past because I have built up my thigh muscles.  I don't... especially when she is talking about, say, plank-to-push ups or virtually every other non-thigh-related exercise. 
• The trainers yell at you from the moment they tell you what exercise you are doing next until you are in position. If you are standing and you find out you are doing push-ups next, the only way to get into position fast enough for them not to say "Down on the floor, please!"  is to simply go boneless and collapse.  
• Although I have done 5 sessions in a week, I have not been awarded the congratulatory video associated with that. I can only assume that is a bug based on how the software defines "week". If it means, say, Sunday midnight to Saturday 11:59 pm, or if it means "any 168 consecutive hours" I should have gotten it. If it means Wednesday morning at 6:38 to Wednesday morning at 6:38" it might have counted one extra for one week and one for another week since I don't start or finish precisely at the same time each day. 
• There is no easy way to see your rank for challenges when comparing your score against the rest of the world. It is one long continuous list you have to scroll through. Unless you suspect you are in 50th place or better when compared to the two hundred thousand other folks out there, it's prohibitive to even check. 
• Unless you decide to immediately follow up a session with another identical session, you are forced to do another warmup routine before the second session starts. This wastes time and is boring to boot. 
• There are no extended (two minute) breaks in jump in sessions. During regular aerobics sessions they are at the midway point. This might be intentional but its a pretty unpleasant surprise to discover that fact during an hour long drill. 
• During the fit tests, you are told to run with High Knees for 30 seconds. You have three chances, and they say they will "only" use your best score. That's just idiotic. I can't imagine the second or third round EVER being better than the first. You sprint as fast as you can, get a 30 second break, run again, break again, then run. Those other two runs are probably not just thrown away, though. I base this on my last fit score where I beat my records for everything except the High Knees, which I tied. My score came in one point less than my all time high - the only difference seems to be the number of reps I did during the last two sets of the High Knees. 

• Expansion packs (I think there are two) are constantly advertised at you when you start the software.

There are other issues with the title, but those are the main ones. Although I would give the title an overall thumbs-up, after five months these tiny things get a little (read: a lot) grating, so I quit. 

Well, I quit using that title for now, I mean. Two and a half weeks ago I started using Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012 instead. So far it's been a nice change. By the end of tomorrow morning I will have completed my first "objective" (do 360 minutes of "approved" exercises in 4 weeks).

I have already collected enough info on this title to remind me of why I stopped using it in the first place but I think I will stick with this one for a couple more months just to see if the positives outweigh the negatives like they did for the Nike+ Kinect Training. 

Just Some More Geocache Swag

I finally finished making the rest of the presidential quote cipher disks I started on a while back.  Man, talk about an elephant sandwich of a project.  At the start I was pretty darned pleased with the fact that these were all unique and all hand made.  In the middle of the project, though, I was actually pricing laser engravers because, you know, the “screw this where’s the TV remote” part of the task hit a lot earlier then expected.

In order to break up the monotony a bit I switched gears and gave myself something new to focus on.  Nothing too difficult... something the boy and I could work on together.  

In the interest of time, I am going to depart a bit from my usual style of hyperbole and over-explaining my self-talk to simply relate the facts of recent trip to Lowe’s to get supplies for this project.  You can, using your imagination, fill in the emotional gaps.  You will most likely be right.

Me: Where can I find the wooden biscuits?  I see the biscuit joiners right over there so I am guessing they are nearby... I suppose I am just missing them.

Employee #1: Blank stare.  Pause.  What are you looking for?

Me: Biscuits for use in making biscuit joints.  I am positive I have seen them around before.  Plastic cylindrical container, holds about 100.

Employee #1: Pause.  Biscuits?  Could you describe them?

Me: Wooden, football shaped... things, I guess...

Employee #1: And what are they used for again?

Me: Making biscuit joints.  Look, I don’t think that anything else I say right now is going to help out and I don’t want to waste any more of your time.  Is there someone else I could talk to?

Employee #1: Bobby is the only one here other than me.  Pause.  Uncomfortable silence.  

Me: Could you get him, please?

After a time a Santa-esque man shambles up and I describe to him what I am looking for.  

Employee #2: Hmph... my brother-in-law bought a biscuit joiner about three years ago.  He has never even taken it out of the box.  Pause.

Me: I see.  Do you know where the biscuits are?

Employee #2: No.  Sorry.

Me: Ok.  Thank you.

Employee #2: Is there anything else I can help you with today?

Me: No thanks.  You guys have done enough.  I will ask the manager on my way out.

I left to do some more shopping.  Five minutes later the wife and I were literally chased down by a third employee waving the container of sought-after biscuits with Bobby-Santa in tow.  I thanked them and went on my way.

All I was going to use these for was to make some fish for a mobile for his room, nothing fancy.  As I write this I can’t for the life of me recall why we decided that making a fish mobile would be a fun thing to do... Maybe it had something to do with part of a school project he brought home...   It doesn’t matter, I guess.

I cut the biscuits on the bandsaw and got rid of most of the uneven parts and fuzz with a Dremmel.  SInce this part of the job was super-quick I decided to cut myself an extra fifteen of them to use for my next batch of geocache swag.  

He painted his whatever colors he felt like, and I kept mine all green.  After they dried we glued googly eyes to them, one on each side for his mobile and just one on one side for my stuff.  

I made some little “plaques” for my fish out of a hunk of scrap cedar, sanding the edges to make them a little more interesting to look at.  After the front label was added and a simple cryptogram was glued to the back they were pretty much done.  A coat of gloss sealant on the front and some shellac on the back helped to waterproof the paper.

Oh, yeah, the cryptograms.  All fifteen encode the same message, but all fifteen use a different mono-alphabetic scheme for no other reason than that I like to put coded messages in the stuff I make.  That’s it.

I attached the fish to the actual mobile part of the mobile but I thought the thing looked a little... I don’t know... I guess it looked different in my head than it did in my hand.  I was expecting the boy to be as disappointed as I was but he just said “That.  Looks.  Awesome.  I love the red ones and the orange ones!”  So there it is, hanging above the desk in his room.  I’m glad he likes it.

Breaking up the cipher disk project like that gave me the second wind I needed to push through and make the rest of them. I took the last bite of the elephant sandwich a couple of weeks ago and I even have seven “blanks” I can use for something in the future.  Sweet.

One last thing.  I found my 250th cache a little while back and went online to buy a pin to put on my backpack like I did for my 100th find. The only thing they had for a 250th find was a medallion you could put on your bookshelf or something.  Pfft... Weak.  The boy and I dug through his craft box and we came up with what you see on the left.  After waterproofing it and epoxying a small safety pin to it I was done and it sits next to my metal “100” one right now.

The Final(ly) Countdown

Nearly half a year ago (wow... has it really been that long?) Santa brought our boy an Estes Tandem X Rocket Kit for Christmas.  In January we excitedly assembled the larger of the two rockets that came in the kit and then tucked it away in the garage so it wouldn’t get lost or smashed.

And there it sat, the victim of a string of launch delays. Weekend rain, flooded launch sites, cold, and high winds played a factor in well over half or them.  Birthday parties, travel, playdates, yard work, and family and church functions were responsible for others.  I guess there were a couple of “man, I totally don’t feel like driving to the park” and “holy cow, I forgot this thing was even here” reasons sprinkled in there, too.

Life has a way of getting in the way, you know?

When I was a kid I had rockets sort of like this... just smaller and less plastic-y.  Probably less safe, too, what with me using a twelve-inch bicycle spoke jammed in the grass as a make-shift launch “guidance” rod. Also, instead of the fancy electric launcher this kit came with I used what I now recognize as a waaayyy too short hunk of wick and the OSHA-disapproved “light it, run like hell, pause, wonder what was taking so long, take two-and-a-half steps toward the rocket, get seriously startled” method to get the things to fly.  

“No sirree, no son of mine is going to have to deal with that,” I thought while I was putting the batteries in the yellow plastic... um... make-it-go machine (sorry about that... my thesaurus has no other words for “launcher” and I used that word in the last sentence and I plan on using it again in the next).  It took 4 AA batteries, which was a little weird but not not as weird as the fact that the flashlight bulb on the launcher (see?) didn’t light even with the safety key in place.

It turned out that it was not defective, just badly designed.  Or overly-well-designed.  It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes... Anyway, by mashing down on the safety key with all my might and with a fuse in place I could just make the lightbulb dimly flicker which is supposed to mean the LAUNCH button would then be active.

Pfft.  That’s no good.  How is my kid supposed to use this thing, even if the bulb was somehow visible in bright sunlight?  Let’s do better.

I rifled through my electronics “hoarder” boxes and found a small project box, a large red LED, some wire, a 9V battery connector, a current-limiting resistor, and a normally-open push-button switch.  Sweet.  Almost there.  I went to radio shack and found a really cool-looking switch (the one with the red cover) to act as one-half of the new safety-circuit.

Just half, you ask? See, regardless of how liberal your definition of “safe” is, you have to admit that handing an electric launcher to a four-year-old and saying “Here, hold this while I go hook up the rocket engine.  Don’t touch the big shiny red switch and, no matter what for the love of God, don’t touch the dazzlingly blue, jolly, candy-like button below it until I get back” will end with you returning from the launch pad with way less eyebrow hair than you had when you woke up that morning.

The second half of the safety circuit came from Lowe’s.  I finally found a use for one of the key-shaped items that their automatic key “duplicator” made, other than filling my door locks with a hunk of ill-fitting metal.  I cut a chunk off the end with a Dremmel and sanded the material down a bit to expose the conductive surface.  Sliding the key through a slot in the side of the box bridges the gap between two pieces of copper leaf inside, completing the circuit.  

Now the very bright LED lights when the key is inserted (which I wear around my neck) AND the covered switch is flipped.  Only then will the blue LAUNCH button light the fuse, launching the rocket somewhere... hopefully mostly “up”.  Also, it takes a 9V battery which is way more convenient than scrabbling around junk drawers looking for a handful of AA’s.

The weather last weekend was awesome and the park was dry so we decided to give it a go.  I was a little nervous about getting a ticket since it wasn’t clear what the rules were there.  There was plenty of space, but some of the parks here have some unusually specific rules.  Heck, one near here actually has a written rule against javelin-throwing.  Man... you accidentally kabob one lousy poodle and “the Man” is all up in your grill, like, forever, you know? 

Grumble... those no good punk kids... training for the Olympics at all hours of the night... 

But,  hey, wouldn’t you know it, another family was there launching rockets as we pulled up so that meant it must be ok!  Right?  

Well, actually, they launched only once and then couldn’t get any more to go.  Their launcher died, you see.  After we confirmed ours worked ok we shared the thing and a good time was had by all.  My wife got some awesome pics and we made some new friends. 

Hopefully the weather will hold for this weekend.  We will see.

Nike+ Kinect Training Daily Waaaahhh! #2

I Got Nowhere Else to Go! 

Look, software, I correct my form as needed.  I doubt anyone in the history of humanity can be said to have "struggled" with 20 seconds worth of running in place during a warmup, so maybe your metric should be a little more analog than "flawless execution" and "utter failure". But, if it can't , maybe you can, like, not mention it every single time we get together.  I mean, you didn’t even recognize me when I signed in, yet you have perfect recall of all my failures.  

It’s been just about four months now, and I’m getting a little sick of your whole “6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade.” attitude.  Look, I don’t know if it’s the infrared reflectivity of the clothes I wear, the light level in the room, or some other unknowable effect,  but, dude, you stop scoring me in the middle of a set of burpees again because my avatar has simply vanished, I’ll...

I’ll... well...

Sigh...  I'll just do the exercise, I guess...

Nike+ Kinect Daily Waaaahhh! #1

TL;DR Summary: There is no such thing as a perfect piece of exercise software. They all have shortcomings.  Make peace with that.  Nike+ Kinect Training is the best piece of software I have used so far.  That said, it’s got some issues.  

The treadmills and elliptical machines at the gym just got so boring I was finding it difficult to keep myself motivated. More than once I drove into the gym parking lot, sat there for a minute staring at the front door of the place, said "Yeah... I ain't doin that", and drove off. 

Seriously.

It wouldn't take much. Maybe I could see that it was a little crowded. Maybe it was raining.  Maybe it was a little cold and windy... 

Obviously, I needed a change. Sure, I hiked on the weekends and that helped switch it up somewhat but I wanted something I could do during the week that didn't depend on the weather or the angle of the sun in the sky.  I wasn't about to go running in the freezing darkness. Hell, even if the weather was perfect and the roads were well lit I probably wouldn't have done it.  

I borrowed some P90X DVDs from a friend but they stayed in the box untouched.  I saw this software somewhere and decided to pick it up about the same time a couple other friends of mine did.  I started using it in the morning to augment the aerobic part of my workout routine three months ago. You can find out what I thought of it then here.

Oh, by the way, this is not a review. It is neither a promotion nor is it an indictment.  It’s just one dude’s opinion.  If you want to find out what the software can actually do, go to the official site or go to Amazon and read the reviews there (stick with the 2 to 4 star reviews - they tend to be a little less fake and a lot less ax-grindy than the 1’s and 5’s).  The game might suit you, it might not.  Who knows?  Everyone is a beautifully unique freaking snowflake, after all.

I just started my fourth month this morning.  While I was getting my butt kicked around by the virtual trainer I finally came up with a way to whine about the shortcomings of the software without going all “Stephen King describing the what the leaves sound like during a typical Maine autumn (76 pages)” or “J.R.R. Tolkien writing a short note asking the UPS guy to just leave the box on the porch (143 pages)”.

So here it is, the first installment of Nike+ Kinect Daily Waaaahhhh! Note:  “Daily” here means “occasional and subject to termination with no notice because I get bored easily”. 

Who the Devil Are You?

Over the past three months (52 workout sessions) the software has identified me correctly only once.  Once.  Can you imagine what it would be like if your real-life personal trainer said "Now... Who are you again?  Cuz I am drawing a total blank here." every single time you met to work out? Can you imagine making such a feeble impression on others that they have difficulty remembering you exist from one minute to the next?

Dude, it's me. You have one client, and it's always me. Now, I know it's tough to recognize someone with the top one third of their head missing like my scanned in body image always shows, but at least give a guess or something.  Don’t just give up after, like, one second. Say... maybe in the future you could key on the fact that I seem to be missing a large asymmetrical chunk of my skull or something...

Besides, you don’t seem to have any problem at all remembering that I once did a less than flawless jumping jack eight weeks ago and now you feel compelled to say “You have struggled with these in the past but today I know you are really going to nail these” .  

Every. Single. Time.   

I mean, in what universe could it be said that anyone over four years old has ever “struggled” doing jumping jacks? What I am really “struggling” with, here, is coming up with new swear words to hurl at you... What do I have to do to make things right in your eyes?! WHAT?!  NAME IT!!! 

Wait...  You're trying to make me go berserk, aren't you?

Oh, you're good...

(More Later)

Gandalf & Tom Cullen: Sign Makers

Shall?  Well, la-ti-da... After you go there (with Her Royal Majesty's permission, of course) you can go here:

Get in "O" Shape?  Way ahead of you. I just had the fanciest Whopper imaginable, you see...

Dude, Seriously... Don't Screw With Those Guys.

Not so much a "debate team" as... Well... Have you ever seen Beyond Thunderdome?