The Beatles. Their charisma is undisputed, and their talent for rock confirmed by half a century of phenomenal notoriety. Love by millions, generation after generation of adoring fans all over the world.
Maybe I just missed something.
I’ve become ever more disgusted with my lack of fitness, and I am jumping feet-first into my work out plan from last summer, augmenting it with some more plans.
I have begun to implement the following plans into my work-out program:
Couch to 5k
100 Pushups
200 Crunches
200 Squats
These plans take up my Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings before work. Tuesdays and Thursdays, I am putting in a full stretching session and going 20-30 on the elliptical trainer.
My stretching routine harkens back to my martial arts days, when I was quite the bendy little bastard. I am still more flexible than most guys my age, but I want my super-high kicks back, dammit!
Also, for Christmas Beth got me a gift certificate for a climbing gym in New Haven. I’ve only ever been climbing once in California, but I loved every minute of it, and I am looking forward to trying again.
In a few short days, the pool will be open in out apartment complex, a few laps in which will supplement my exercise quite well.
Here’s hoping I can keep up with all this!
Ever since I was but a young seedling human, I have loved animated film. My heart often longs for the days of Don Bluth and Warner Brothers in their cartoon-making hayday, when classics such as The Secret of Nimh and The Iron Giant (made all the way back in 1999) were as anticipated and popular as the best live-action movies.
The undisputed king of American animated cinema, Walt Disney Studios, closed the doors of their traditional 2-D animation department in 2003, making room for the ever-growing popularity of CGI features. Their last 2-D animated feature was Home on the Range, which I never actually saw, but it seemed to lack the great epic story telling that made the old Disney favorites so compelling. While I do enjoy Disney’s conjoined efforts with Pixar on great films like Wall-E and The Incredibles, I can’t help but feel a little disenchanted by the direction the studio has taken over the past few years.
It seems now, they have realized their mistake, and look to make amends.
Enter Disney’s new 2-D animated venture, The Princess and the Frog. Yet another retelling of a classic children’s fable, this one appears to take place on the muddy banks of the Mississippi, sometime around the turn of the century (I guess, to be accurate, we must now say the turn of the last century), giving the story a sort of Creole flavor.
The animation quality looks amazing, as one must expect with the technology available, and I must admit I had a hard time containing my childish glee while watching the trailer.
The last photo set from our trip to California was taken at the Castello di Amorosa, a winery in Calistoga.
The Castella was built by a 3rd generation Italian-American by the name of Daryl Sattui. It took $30 million and 14 years to build, and has been producing fine wines since 2006. I won’t go to deep into the history and details of the place, as its story is so vast, so please feel free to browse their own website and the Wikipedia article for more information.
My good friend Tye, a California native, joined our group for the tour that Sunday. We spent an hour or so touring the areas open to the public, then took the guided tour of the rest. Of particular note was the dungeon and the torture chamber, AKA the “Guest Room.”
Before we could head to Patterson to surprise Kevin, we had to wait for Chris to show up in San Francisco, a full day after Kenn, Shayne and I had arrived. We spent a good portion of the day at Pier 39, seeing the shops and sights of Fisherman’s Wharf.
The image you see above needs a bit of explaining.
Yes, the posts have been nonexistent as of late. For this, I have reasons. Nevertheless, the pictures have come!
At the beginning of April, four members of Pagan Productions traveled to the small town of Patterson, California to visit the fifth, Kevin. Kevin was unaware that any more but me would be arriving, thinking I was coming to California for business. (My work does include much travel, but I have not as of yet been required a cross-country trip.) Read the rest of this entry »
Twitter - that monumental time-waster and social phenomenon - can honestly make your assimilation into the hive-mind much easier. Here, I’ll be highlighting some tools that I use to integrate Twitter into my online experiences and persona.
But, undoubtedly, there are those of you out there that have no idea what I’m talking about! *gasp*
Twitter is a service that offers users the ability to send out small, 140-character blurbs - or tweets - stating what that person is doing at any given time. This is also known as “micro-blogging”. When it started, most people used Twitter just to spout out mundane details about their mundane lives. As time has progressed, because of its ease in updating from the web, mobile phones and other devices and software, people have turned to Twitter for news on world events, celebrity gossip, and as broad of a social network as can be found on the tubes.
What a pain in the ass it is to have to navigate to the Twitter home page every time you want to send out a quick 140 word post! Luckily, Twhirl helps with that. There are several desktop applications out there that allow you to send tweets out in an IM-like interface, but Twhirl is my drug of choice. It runs in the Adobe Air environment, which means it is platform independent. It has a nice, customizable interface, and can also connect to other social media services, such as Friend Feed and Seesmic.
Being an avid RSS reader, I am frequently finding blog posts and news articles on the web that I’d like to share with my friends. Granted, Google Reader does an awesome job of facilitating the sharing of feeds, but I found myself copying and pasting URLs into Twitter just as often, so that my followers could be part of the fun.
Twitterfeed takes any existing RSS feed and pipes it to your Twitter account, as though you were typing out the headline and URL yourself. You can edit a custom 20-character prefix, to help explain what your tweeting (For example, on mine, every tweet is prefixed with “Found this:”) Simply sign into the service at the above URL using your OpenID, give it your RSS feed (again, in my case, I use the “Shared Items” feed from my own Google Reader), edit the prefix if you like, and set it a-tweeting!
Many people use Facebook’s status update tool just like Twitter, sending out updates on “what you’re doing” directly from their Facebook page. There is an application available within Facebook that will sync the two statuses (stati?) together, allowing one to update the other. As it stands, my own Twitter account sends my latest tweet to my Facebook status, so they read the same. Just search for Twitter in the app section of Facebook, and I’m sure you’ll find it.
One of the huge benefits of Twitter is being able to update it from anywhere using your mobile phone. While you can update by sending an SMS (text message) to 40404 - after allowing SMS updates in you Twitter preferences, of course - this can start costing you cash if you update frequently and do no have unlimited texting from you mobile provider. However, if you have an unlimited data plan, like I do, you can download a Twitter application for your phone that will use the data connection, not you finite SMS messages.
Most phone platforms have some sort of app, an Blackberry has one of the best. Twitterberry offers a splendid Twitter-like interface, and allows you to send tweets, look up your friends’ updates, and all the other functionality of Twitter you can’t live without.
Simply visit http://orangatame.com/ota/twitterberry/ from your Blackberry’s browser to download it.
Twitter Tools for Wordpress
Twitter is also a great medium for posting notifications of blog updates. Rather than manually tweeting every time I update this blog, however, I installed a plugin that will send out a tweet automatically. Twitter Tools can be completely customized to send out any notification you want about your new blog post, including a custom message and a link to the post.
Also, you can set it to create a blog post from your tweets. It can create a new post for every tweet you post, or even send out a daily or weekly digest of you posts for easier reading.
I hope you all get as much use out of these tools as I have. What Twitter tools do you use regularly? Let’s see some comments!
UPDATE!: I may try implementing this as well: TwitterCounter