Category: Personal

Joe’s Sunday Boot Camp week 1

58 and sunny in Silver Spring today.  I had to take advantage of a lazy Sunday and put it to good use. After some quick research on the net (@ Runner’s World reading up on how to get a little faster and stronger in the newest Men’s Health (nice article about Howard Schultz at the end) I decided to put my Sunday (and legs/arms/body) into use. Here’s the routine I tried out:
  • ~1.5 mile warm up, slow pace (this was the job to the track)
  • 16X 1/8 mile alternating fast pace/slow pace
  • 5X the following circuit with 60 second rest between circuits
    1. 60 seconds jumping jacks
    2. Spidey-ups (to exhaustion)
    3. 15 reps reverse lunges ea. side
    4. 10X squat thrusts
  • ~1.5 mile cool down (the run home)

I ran to the local high school which had a 1/4 mile(?) track which I split in half and ran alternating fast/slow 1/2s for a little more than 15 minutes.  The fastest “lap” was about 41 seconds and the slowest “fast” about 50 seconds (definitely room for improvement and I’m glad I had my Garmin to keep track of the lap times for me).

After the run I slipped right into the circuit/strength training.  I did about 10 each set of Spidey-ups which were pretty tough after the jumping jacks.  All in all though it was fun and flew by.  The jog home through downtown Silver Spring was a nice cool down.

Grand total: 1:15:00 and I was dripping with sweat.

Note: there is also a soccer goal (sans net) setup in the midfield of the track, works great for pull-ups and chin-ups (maybe next time).

@p2pu WordPress Development Course: Assignment 1

I signed up for the P2PU WordPress Development course to challenge myself in design and getting a little handle on php, WordPress development and other stuff like theming (thought it might help with my work at Moodlenews.com and beyond).  Assignment 1 was to create a blog for a potential photographer client (in short order).

So after changing a spare domain’s name servers to my Bluehost account and installing a fresh WP via cPanel I was ready to go.  It took about an hour’s time, which really is a testiment to the quality of themes available freely on the web and how great WP just is out of the box.

  1. Change nameservers
  2. Install WP
  3. Cleanup the default info
  4. Create the requisite pages (contact, about, gallery, services)
  5. Upload some media for use in the galleries and in posts (I just used the images that come default with Windows 7, they look nice and professional so it’s a good proxy for a professional photographer’s style/quality)
  6. Find a good theme: I settled on AutoFocus 1.0.1 by Allan Cole which I’m really digging.  It creates a really snazzy landing page for more recent posts.  Something I’d be stoked to see landing on a photographer’s website.  After adding a few (10) posts to fill out the landing page it was on to the next step
  7. Creating/installing a nice “gallery/slideshow” type app for the Gallery page wasn’t necessarily required, but many of the peers in the course seemed to be adding some nice slideshow features so I figured I should take a crack at it too.  I chose the Portfolio Slideshow which didn’t require any additional installation of code and could be configured right in posts/pages.  It was simple to setup, though I’m not a fan of the way it requires each image to be listed if you don’t want to display all of them (time-consuming…) “[portfolio_slideshow include=”sample19,sample18,sample17,sample16,sample15,…lastimagename”]” in face I couldn’t get that to work correctly so I just deleted the images I didn’t want in the show and voila.  Mission accomplished: http://www.woople.org/gallery/
  8. That’s it!  Check out the sample site I created at www.woople.org.

If one thing is obvious, I like really simple/spartan site design:

Sir Ricky Gervais

Last night I dreamt that I was interviewing/hanging out with Ricky Gervais. Run down of the conversation:

  • Why isn’t he “Sir Ricky Gervais” yet? (he said he was in queue but that these things take lots of time)
  • What are his favorite Netflix Streaming Movies? (Cash Back, Juno, and “Egg Fried Country”…I haven’t checked to see if that last one is a real movie yet)

Those are the only questions I remember…then we went and drank a PBR with my friend and went to a party.

I have to say that my interview questions were a lot better than Jon Stewart’s (from his most recent show where they just giggled the whole time).

1/14/11 Top Five

So busy lately, but here goes:

  1. Fitz and the Tantrums – Winds of Change
  2. Daft Punk – End of Line (from Tron Legacy)
  3. The Black Keys – Lengths
  4. The Decemberists – Don’t Carry it All
  5. Atomic Tom – Maybe I’m Wrong

I’m not sure what to think seeing as #1 is from an NPR show.  If you don’t listen to Marketplace you should (just for the awesome music).  Tron Legacy was great, especially since The Dude was in it.  Black Keys are the underrated band of last decade, Decemberists can thank Kenny for their appearance here and I just like the mellowness of the Atomic Tom song.

FOR YOU, O DEMOCRACY (Walt Whitman)

FOR YOU, O DEMOCRACY

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,
and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (read it free at Dailylit.com).  I’m not sure how accurate this poem is anymore…

“Trilling” by the way is “flowing in a small stream or in drops/to trickle”