Archive for August, 2007
Now I thought I’m quite fit. I work out a bit each day, and although I never get caught in a Gym, I’ll do my strengthening exercises, pushups, chin ups and squats almost daily. But when I found YRG on the internet, I became intrigued and ordered the DVD straight away. Much to my surprise it arrived just 3(!) days after I’ve ordered it, which is phenomenal, considering that normally an order from Amazon takes up to 6 weeks(!) to arrive here in Australia. So I guess there must be some synergistic effect at work here.
Anyway, today was my second day doing the 20 minutes workout, and I’m really impressed. My back muscles ache like as if I’ve never trained before and my quads almost killed me during the lunge touchdown (aka Superstar). I am having as much fun doing the workout as the guys and girls on the set and I’ll post my progress. At this time I couldn’t imagine doing the 60 or 40 minute workout that also came on the DVD.
So what is this YRG? Well, there’s this huge guy, Diamond Dallas Page, a former heavy weight ‘world’ champion in staged wrestling. He started his wrestling career at 35, an old age really when most other wrestlers already retire. When at the crown of his career he ruptured two vertebral discs in his lumbar spine he couldn’t even bend to tie his shoes, his wrestling career seemed to be over. Then his wife got him to do Power Yoga and after a few months doing this consistently he got back his flexibility and core strength and stepped back into the ring to become 3 times ‘world’ champion. Now I’m not into wrestling, as this is very much an american thing, but having a big guy like this preaching Yoga is very interesting indeed. So he developed his own style of Yoga to include more strengthening and cardio elements so that it would appeal to the ‘regular guy’. The moves are all Yoga moves but he’s given them new names that are easier to remember like ‘Road Warrior’, ‘Touchdown’, ‘Superstar’ and of course the ‘Diamond Cutter’ which is his trademark from his wrestling career. Also he really stresses the importance of breathing correctly in and out of the movements and makes you contract all your muscles isokinetically to achieve a strenghtening and cardio effect. I think it rocks. And that is only partly because of his great personality, but mostly because it is a challenging and entertaining workout.
Have a look at www.yrgworkout.com.
August 29 2007 | No Gym and YRG | No Comments »
… the secret is in the add-ons! Below is a short list of plugins that I would sorely miss would I ever switch to another browser:
- Firebug - a complete Javascript IDE in your browser
- Webdeveloper Toolbar - too many good utilities for web development
- FireFTP - a complete FTP client in your browser
- It’s all text! - edit text from textareas in your desktop editor of choice
- abcTaipu - provides an easy way to insert accented characters into entry fields or textareas, great for writing German or Esperanto on an English keyboard
It cannot be said often enough - Get Firefox Now!
August 17 2007 | Geek Stuff | No Comments »
Watch this video to understand how the government (specifically the U.S., but others aren’t much better) promotes bad nutrition.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISONN1LHj7g
Now just because the government is at fault, don’t think that serves as excuse for you to be fat! You still got your own mind, think and eat right, no matter what the supermarkets throw at you.
August 17 2007 | No Gym | No Comments »
So why do you feel tired every day in and every day out? Look at Jack Lalanne over at Ross’ Training blog: Wake Up!
The answer is:
- Lack of Exercise!
- Empty Calories
- nervous Tension
How do you get rid of this tiredness? Easy, you all secretly know this:
- Do a little exercise EVERY DAY!
- Eat more fresh veggies, lean meats and fruits and less of the potatoe chips, chocolade and greasy stuff.
- If you’re doing the above you’ll be better equipped to stand the stress of the day and nervous tension will disappear all by itself.
But you knew this already, didn’t you?
August 17 2007 | No Gym | No Comments »
In his article “We Worship MD5, the GOD of HASH“, Rich Skrenta shows some of the good uses for the old and trusted MD5 hash algorithm. So what if it’s cryptographically broken? As long as you know about the weaknesses, you can still use it for stuff that doesn’t need to be 110% secure.
In a way this article ties into the same line of thought as “The Architecture of Mailinator“, in that it emphasises that the perfectness or security of systems and algorithms must be seen in the context of it’s use. MD5 is great and fast and creates a collision only after hashing 2^64 items, in the same way to provide throw away emails that noone cares about after 1 or 2 hours, storing them all in memory in a LIFO is a great way of solving the problem.
Goodness or fitness or perfectness of a thing is always relative to the domain or context of it’s use.
August 17 2007 | Geek Stuff | No Comments »
In this article Paul Tyma talks how he designed and implemented his great Mailinator system, a service which provides free short-lived throw-away email addresses. This article is a great read in systems design. The Mailinator receives around 2-5 Million emails a day and runs on a very modest machine with an AMD 2Ghz Athlon processor, 1G of ram, and a boring IDE, 80G hard drive. It also shows that Java is good and solves real world problems reliably and fast.
Links:
http://mailinator.com
http://mailinator.blogspot.com/
August 16 2007 | Geek Stuff | No Comments »
Since I was a big fan of Stephen King and am a big fan of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, I read this review with extreme satisfaction. Stephen knows the secret of magic and he acknowledges that Rowling has raised the standard with her Opus Harry.
Just in case you haven’t read the latest book yet and just in case you cared, don’t read the above review just yet, it contains spoilers!
August 13 2007 | Geek Stuff | No Comments »
In this article Peteris Krumins explains how he is learning the finer points of JavaScript programming by watching a couple of video lectures by Yahoo.
Since I work with Alfresco in my job and a lot of scripting in Alfresco is done in JavaScript, I think it would be good idea to just follow his lead. So I tried to watch the videos but find that the links on Peteris’ blog don’t work. But all is well after a simple search on Yahoo all was well
For your convenience, I have collected all these videos on my video pages here:
Javascript Programming, Douglas Crockford
Advanced Javascript Programming, Douglas Crockford
Theory of the DOM, Douglas Crockford
August 11 2007 | Geek Stuff | 1 Comment »
Eine Erinnerung im Spiegel.
“Mir ist wichtiger, dass meine Kinder keine Arschlöcher werden, als
dass sie wissen, wie groß die Fläche unter der Parabel ist” - einer von
Krebs’ Lieblingssätzen.
August 10 2007 | Deutsch | No Comments »
When thinking of Tai Chi Chuan one usually thinks of either old chinese people practicing in the parks of Beijing or healthy looking young models posing for the newest beauty craze. I was always intrigued by Tai Chi, the movements do look beautiful, but I could never decide to actually learn it. There is only so much time, and when training for a martial art I wanted to learn how to fight more than just pretty moves. So I skirted around Tai Chi for years, never really leaving it out of sight, but never pursuing it either.
This may change though after watching this clip on YouTube, in which Joanna Zorya from England shows in such a clear and precise way how each move of Tai Chi is actually related to an attack or defense. Though practiced slow, it feels like these techniques should really work. It also shows great body mechanics.
Joanna is the head teacher of the Martial Tai Chi Association which denounces the concept of Chi and strives to teach this ancient art like it was meant to be: a fighting art.
August 10 2007 | Smart Moves | No Comments »
Next »
