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Paris Day 3

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LiveJournal 11/29/2003

Paris Day 3

St. Chapelle – Sunday 10am Paris

The bottom chapel of St. Chapelle is plain enough for the worshipers it was designed to satisfy. Scott and I both got our souvenir coins for 2 euros. We then walked around the lower chapel, taking in it’s staid and plain order. We then ascended a tight spiral staircase into the upper chapel. The first thing I laid eyes on was the fabulously wonderful stained glass windows! It’s absolutely the most awesome display of stained glass that I have ever laid my eyes on. This is the same work that was taken down for World War 2 to prevent damage. Even thought today is overcast and rainy in Paris there is enough beauty in this chapel to take my breath away each time I look up. This sight has about the same awesome presence that the Mona Lisa had in Le Louvre.

Le Cathedral de Notre Dame –

I just lit a candle for my paternal grandmother and added it to the rest of the candles. This cathedral defies easy description in that it steals the breath and leaves you in awe.

Le Tour Eiffel – 1:30pm

I am writing this entry from the first stage of the tower. I have scaled it, taken my pictures, bought my trinkets, and fed the resident pigeons that live in this tower. Being an acrophobe I can’t believe I actually did it!

Le Catacombs –

Hundreds of thousands of dead Frenchmen staring up at me from their bones, neatly stacked in a macabre manner. It made my skin prickle and it felt as if I was being smothered with a dullness on my thoughts and an overwhelming sense of depression from the sight of so much mortality.

Sacre Coeur – 6pm

The song on the Moulin Rouge soundtrack goes “The view from the Butte will make the wretched sigh…” and boy, did it ever! The view from the roof of Paris is absolutely fabulous!

On the dawn of the third day we decided to take on Ile de Cite, which was the place to find the bird exhibit, St. Chapelle, and Notre Dame.

Later on that day I stood beneath the Eiffel Tower and debated with Scott about whether I would be brave enough to scale it. When I was back in the states, before our trip to Paris I made a pact with myself that I would scale the Tour Eiffel just because I didn’t want any regrets on this trip – to let my fears override what could be a wonderful experience. Standing beneath the Eiffel I initially wanted to touch it, to make a physical contact with such a historical object. When I had walked down the promenade and under the tower I decided that my fears be damned and headed for the West Leg. I walked up, ordered my tickets to ride the elevator, and stood in the vestibule with Scott waiting for the Eiffel towers elevators to arrive on the ground level. During this time I cracked a joke that after this I should write “An Acrophobes Guide to Paris”. I was terrified in the elevator but once we were underway I was amazed at how quick and relatively painless the first escalation was. When we reached the first stage of the tower Scott walked along the outer edge and I made do with walking around the inner core area and we eventually stopped in the shops on the first level and bought our trinkets and had a snack, and took our pictures.

After the Eiffel came the Catacombs, where Paris interred it’s bursting graveyards in an underground Ossuary titled “The Empire of the Dead”. The entire journey required going down about 100 feet or so, traversing 1.7km of twisting tunnels under Paris, then up 100 feet and out to street level. The experience was very disquieting – seeing reminders of mortality in such profusion brought my usually airy thinking right to the ground. I felt as if my thinking was getting stuck in the mud, being shackled. The area is very well treated and it felt sacred and sanctified. There was a distinct lack of vermin in the tunnels which surprised me immensely, I suppose not even rats want to hang around this much assembled mortality. Both sides of the tunnel were edged with a wall of bones, femur bones mostly laid lengthwise along the ground with the knob where the knee is facing the people walking down the tunnels. Throughout the entirety of the Catacombs human skulls line the floor, half-way up, and the top of the pile of femur bones, making a three-lined wall. Behind all the legs were tossed odd shaped bones and broken bones, so hands, feet, ribcages, vertebrae and shattered assorted bits were tossed between the leg-wall and the rock-wall. Every 5 feet there was a bright incandescent light mounted on the wall, giving the entire area a very pale and dim illumination. There were several sections where the people who assembled the ossuary approached mortality with a sense of art and Christian grace – there were several sections where short squat crosses were cut from the stone of the walls and made into little altars and nearby the bone-wall had a series of skulls arranged in a similar cross pattern. It was both awesome in it’s sheer immensity and awesome in it’s depressiveness to be one of the most memorable things about my entire Paris trip.

Sacre Coeur –

The second time we went to Montmartre we decided to run up to the Butte of Montmartre and enter Sacre Coeur, a Catholic basilica. This church was more restrictive in it’s forbidding the use of photography and talking so we weren’t able to do much tourist appreciation while inside the church. Sacre Coeur shares an awesome ceiling with Notre Dame, only in Sacre Coeur, the ceiling is a huge frieze of Christ’s passion. We eventually left Sacre Coeur after being set upon by aggressive parishioners and a very particular building manager who instead of simply pointing to the exit we should have used pushed us instead. We left Sacre Coeur feeling that it was best left to the Christians inside and that while it was pretty inside it wasn’t really a great place to go. Next time we go to Paris I would feel dandy in forgetting Sacre Coeur – let the horde have it’s pleasure dome.

An example of the birds on sale at the Sunday Bird Exhibit on Ile de Cite in the heart of Paris. These little friends were moving so fast and I didn’t use a flash because it would have given them heart attacks, each picture came out a little blurry – especially for the more nervous birds in their cages. On the whole tho many of these birds, heck, even the surrounding wild pigeons were rather tamed and used to people so walking up and looking close didn’t cause a blur of feathers and a chattering of squawks and peeps.

This stained glass window was the upper part of a two-part picture. St. Chapelle has these windows, 12 on a side depicting the books and stories of the bible. The day was overcast so the windows were simply stunning, not as they are during a clear day – when they are notably mind-blowing.

Notre Dame. It was so vast and high that I had a seriously hard time getting the right frame for the pictures I wanted to take. Much like a lot of Paris, in order not to disturb the people in mass, flash photography was forbidden, but non-flash photography was allowed. I was musing to myself that Notre Dame is grand enough to restore anyones faith, be they Christian or Pagan – it was just that beautiful.

Here is a perfect example of the bone-wall in the Catacombs. Here you see all the legs and skulls, behind this wall were all the assorted bones that couldn’t be stacked properly. The best I can say is that this experience was stunning.

The Eiffel Tower. I got to the first stage and I’m glad I did, because I don’t think I could have lived with the regret if I chickened out on such a wonderful experience.

Proof positive that I was in the Eiffel Tower. 🙂 Here I was terrified of what was behind me and how high up I was but at least I was calmed by the fact (which they proudly display) that in gale-force (180km/h) winds, the Eiffel’s top only displaces 18cm. If we go back we hope to do it when there isn’t so many clouds and maybe with a better camera so we can catch the panorama of Paris that you can just make out behind me in this picture as I try to hold up the display case with my hand. 🙂

Paris Day 2

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LiveJournal 11/23/2003

Paris Day 2
Nov 15th 7:50 AM

Yesterday was a challenge due to the 6 hour difference in time zones but we were able to get to Le Louvre in time to really explore and get lost several times. We got a chance to see the most famous pieces of artwork on Earth, The Mona Lisa, The Winged Victory, and Aphrodite. The thing I wasn’t prepared for was how surprisingly small The Mona Lisa really is. For some reason I always thought it was larger. Yesterday we enjoyed our lunch at Le Louvre, Scott and I both enjoyed a chicken & mayo baguette and a bottle of water. For dinner we stopped at this wonderful little shop in the heart of the Latin Quarter, where we had a wonderful meal and got a chance to exercise our spoken french. Everyone here is either not-bothersome or very friendly. Our waiter was wonderful and definitely re-affirmed that if you scrabble at the french language that they will honor you and let you converse later in English for speed and accuracy. It just turned 8am and I think I just heard a giant set of bells ring announcing the new day. Paris functions like every other immense city, after midnight only the most awake Parisians are out and about, and the city gets wonderfully quiet at night.

Nov 15th 10:36 AM – Musee Picasso & The Marais

In The Marais, water runs in the streets constantly. I’m noticing that my ability to understand simple french is increasing. At the Musee Picasso I saw a picture of the artist himself and I’ve noticed that his art appears to be more playful than meant to be clear to the subject. In one piece “L’Arbre” I don’t see a tree, I see fish. I think how funny it is that this entire place was constructed because of Picasso’s unpaid tax lien to France. Pablo worked in wood, boxwood, pencil, oils, and photography. I can’t help but wonder what he could have accomplished with modern implements of art-making.

Walking through the downstairs sections of the museum, I couldn’t help but notice how dark Picasso’s work became right after the war. Everything he did got blacker, more gaunt, and more desolate – as if the war was shining through his art.

Nov 15th 12:25 PM – Musee Carnavale

Touring through the relics of old Parisian artwork and associated objects I’m moved by just how over-the-top the gaud is that surrounds nearly every object. While browsing the 16th and 17 century artifacts there really isn’t any surprise why the french fermented their revolution.

Nov 15 2:40 PM – Le Benjamin Cafe

Stopped for a bite to eat and were wondering what the rest of the day holds for us. Scott is busy searching out restaurants after we do the Pompidou Center.

Nov 15th – Centre Pompidou

Some of the weakest hand driers in existence are here. The center itself is physically vast however the 1st floor is composed primarily of functional components, the second and third level are off limits while the fourth level is open to the browsing public. The fourth level provides quite a stunning quantity of modern artwork and I was very pleased with what I saw. I have to admit that my suspicions that modern artists are merely collected and prized because they are insane, dead, and wholly inexplicable. Their artwork must have some deeper meaning, but since they are dead we can only assume that they were all plugged into some higher muse and that their works should be collected, displayed, and valued.

Nov 15th – Montmartre

Shortly after the Pompidou Center, Scott and I made a quick trip around the Hotel de Ville. Then we went to Montmartre to snap a picture of the Moulin Rouge. I actually prefer the reality of the Moulin Rouge as portrayed in the past to the reality of the 21st centuries shell. Scott and I couldn’t agree on where to eat so we left Montmartre and headed back to the left bank. We had dinner in this little Italian place across the street from our hotel and while we were eating Scott told me that “Le Chat Noir” was the famous restaurant and I made the mistake of thinking it was a cover for a nookie palace because it was between a peep show and a dildo shop. While in Montmartre several guys tried to convince us to check out their all-female sex revue. HA! Anyhow, we are sitting here refusing to let our Saturday night just evaporate in Paris.

– LATER –

Well, we certainly didn’t let the night evaporate! Instead we did the gay bar jaunt and ended up walking all over Paris. We ended up at Le Pied de Cochon where we had the best French Onion Soup either one of us has ever had. At about 5:30AM we decided to walk back to the hotel since the metro was closed. The hotel opened at 6:30AM so we toured our local neighborhood. We got in finally, showered, I rested my aching feet and then planned the upcoming day. On our late night return trip back to the left bank we noticed a solitary green balloon floating down the road with us, as we were approaching Pont Neuf. Later on it appeared to cross our path on purpose so we grabbed it and took it home with us. It suddenly started to take on great meaning so we left it in the hotel room as a symbol of good luck while traveling Paris. Scott was successful later on in properly untying the balloon and safely deflating it for travel, it came with us back to the United States.

Saturday marked the first time Montmartre “kicked our ass” as it were. It took us three visits before we could discover some of the hidden beauty in that part of town. The whole time we toured Paris I realized that my sneakers weren’t quite up to the task of all that walking and I was damn lucky to have packed an extra set of gel insoles to avoid the sheer agony of all that walking about with nothing more between my feet and the hard pavement (or sometimes cobblestones). As always, we captured pictures of our journeys through Paris…

statuary

This statuary was across the street from our hotel, on Rue des Ecoles. Neither Scott nor I could determine what it meant or what its purpose was for however I did notice that this particular statue never seemed to exist without flowers being constantly stuffed in crevices and cornices surrounding the statue itself.

jardin

After walking across the river to the right bank we started our walking tour of The Marais. The streets in The Marais are very windey and narrow, harking back to an older Paris, before the grand boulevards. As the street progressed all of a sudden we discovered this little garden stuffed in a courtyard between a host of buildings. While it looked open for public use we had a determination to get to the Musee Picasso, so all we did was snap these pictures of the natural scenes deep in the heart of Paris.

street

This is a perfect example of the narrow streets we were walking while in The Marais section. It was during the taking of this photograph that I realized that I can’t hold a candle to the awesome skill that is Parisian parallel parking.

arbre

This is “L’Arbre”. One of the first pieces of art in the Musee Picasso that we saw after walking in the front door. All art is subjective by design, the person who sees it brings their own set of perceptions to the work and can sometimes radically alter the entire design of what was intended. In this piece I see fish, Picasso, by the title, saw a tree. It was a tie between this one and “The Guitar” that caught my attention and became my favorite pieces of artwork in Musee Picasso.

guitar

This work, “The Guitar” really caught my attention. While browsing Picasso’s work I was actively engaged with thoughts about what the art might mean and trying to hack away at a little bit of art appreciation. I instantly started creating deeper meaning to this work the minute I laid eyes on it. I saw the whole of the guitar in the wooden rod behind the canvas, the canvas itself the physical representation of the anticipation of the sound the string will make and the string in perpetual displacement as the note that can be, but will never be. I also considered that maybe the canvas was a surface between the guitarist who hides behind his instrument and the music that the string makes when the pluck is allowed to release, painting sound on a canvas and linking the visual art here with the art of the music of a played guitar. Damn Picasso for dying on us all without explaining his work! 🙂

carnevalet

This is the Musee Carnevale, an exterior view. This is where Paris keeps many of it’s own pieces of antiquity and artwork. What gripped me most of all here was all the gaudy gilt antiques and opulence which clearly defined the surface between the 18th and 19th centuries in Paris and why France went through a revolution.

hedge

Near the end of the tour inside Musee Carnevale is it’s beautiful courtyard garden. The sculpted hedge is visually stunning and the buildings are covered in a wonderful creeping vine. If it was possible to sneak food into the Musee, this would make for a fabulous picnic spot.

staircase-scott

The Musee is like a lot of other Parisian art attractions, completely filled with art. This staircase is a perfect example of the art that surrounds you all the time while in Paris. Again, with many other Musee’s in the area, flash was verboten so many of my pictures had to be adjusted or amplified, which really trashes lots of the colors but brings out the finer details, such as Scott standing on the staircase.

Nook vs. Kindle vs. iPad

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I’ve been watching a lot of the press surrounding the brewing three-party war between Apple, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, and Amazon over the tablet space for the past few months. I was one of the first people to be in line two Aprils ago when the first generation iPad was released by Apple. I bought it without hesitation, knowing that it was exactly what I had wanted and dreamed of all this time – a much larger version of my beloved iPod Touch. As I’ve had some opportunity to use different devices I’ve discovered that at least for me, each device that I own serves a particular purpose. Here’s a handy list of the device and what I use it for:

  • 24” iMac – General computing, work and writing.
  • 13” MacBook Laptop – General computing, work and writing.
  • First-Generation iPad – Convenience browsing, game playing, reading comic books, cookbooks
  • iPhone 4 carried by Verizon – Telephone and 3G data access with the HotSpot feature. I use it for mobile data access, taking pictures, scanning prices and comparing retailers and writing down notes and ideas for my writing. Sometimes inspiration strikes when you least expect it. Also enables me to play Foursquare, as well as many other location-aware games and activities that my family has come to enjoy.
  • iPod Nano 6th Generation – Contains my entire music library and is the device I use when I want to play music. Also has a very useful pedometer that I use to track my steps and calories burned while I work.
  • Nook SImple Touch – Contains a giant book library and is the device I use when I want to read.

I have to be very clear here, I am an Apple fanboy. If Apple makes it, I’ll use it. Over the years all the Apple devices have worked exceptionally well and over time they have gotten better. I still love using my iPad and my iPhone. There are four devices that I simply cannot go without whenever I travel, my iPad, my iPhone, my iPod, and my Nook. The iMac is a work-only machine and I leave it at work all the time. My MacBook I use from time to time, but I actually prefer to work on my iPad to my MacBook unless I’m writing something very long. The iPod Nano fits in my pocket so easily, or clips to my shirt so well that carrying it everywhere I go is a non-issue. My phone keeps me in touch, mostly over SMS and iMessage, and secondarily by the voice service itself. The majority of this post isn’t about these other items that I find indispensable, but rather about the tablets.

I can speak for the iPad and the Nook Simple Touch. I was absolutely sold over the iPad, especially when it comes to reading comic books. As for reading “regular” books, the glossy display and backlit nature of the iPad does start to wear down the eyes plus the native book app in the iPad, which is iBooks, doesn’t support the font I like the most, which is Helvetica Neue. I was a little dubious about the Nook Simple Touch at first, but the device won me over with it’s eInk display and it’s expandability via a microSD card port on the upper right corner of the device. The Nook Simple Touch has a lot of really compelling features going for it which made it’s purchase a sure thing. Here’s a list of what I like about my Nook Simple Touch:

  • Size – It’s perfectly sized. It feels a lot like a paperback book, this size really is a sweet-spot for me because this device can fit in my front and rear pants pockets when I want to carry it without having it in my hands and it can be easily stowed anyplace a book can go.
  • Weight – It’s surprisingly lightweight. Even with the microSD card, which only adds maybe a gram or two to it’s total weight, the whole package is very light.
  • Textured and Contoured Back – The rear of the Nook Simple Touch is contoured to fit my hands and rubberized so that I can keep a nice grip on it without having to strain.
  • Interface – Ever since the 1.1.0 Nook Firmware upgrade the device has been surprisingly quick on display updates and the touch sensitivity has also been tuned and I notice it. You can either use the side navigation buttons or a tap or swipe on the display to advance pages. It has a built in dictionary and wifi, with some social features but so far I haven’t explored those enough to report on them.
  • Compatibility – The Nook Simple Touch (as well as the iPad) both can open and display ePub format books. There is a special place in my heart for the ePub format. it’s open, it’s well understood, and there are tools like Calibre which I can use to convert PDF or DOC or MOBI format (actually there are a huge number of formats that Calibre understands) and convert them all to ePub. I bought a 4GB microSD card and was able to store thousands of free eBooks on my Nook without even a second glance. I know the books will work, I know they are configurable, it’s perfect for me.

So now I’m witnessing this war brewing between Apple, B&N and Amazon. I’ve never really used a Kindle, but I assume it’s most like the Nook devices. The latest device to be released, and is shipping now is the Amazon Fire. I’ve heard a lot of people going on about how the Fire may be Amazon’s answer to Barnes & Nobles Nook Tablet and may compete with the iPad. Out of curiosity I went to Amazon’s site where they describe the new Kindle Fire and as I was reading along several alarm bells went off in my head all at the same time. Here’s a list of issues I have with the Kindle Fire, even before laying my hands on it:

  • Eight hours of battery life – Even my iPad can beat this rating. I will hand it to the Kindle Fire that they were able to squeeze such a battery lifetime out of a device that was smaller than the iPad, but when you are watching video I will bet real money that end users never see these eight hours of battery life, let alone their hedged-bet of seven and a half for video playback.
  • Incompatible with ePub format! – This one took my breath away! Any device should at least be compatible with the ePub format, but Amazon has elected to support their own format called AZW instead. There are other formats supported, but ePub is not on that list and my library is configured to support ePub and I prefer it that way.
  • Prime Membership – If you want the most bang for your Kindle Fire buck, you’ll have to spring for an $80 a year Prime Membership. This could be useful if you do a lot of Amazon.com purchases but I don’t. It’s a little creepy that Amazon sells you a device and then charges you over and over again to use it fully. Feels more like a cash-grab and/or a gyp to me.

I don’t really believe the Kindle Fire will pose much of a risk to the iPad and iPad 2 class devices. I haven’t gotten a chance to hold either of the more relevant competitors devices in my hands to give it a right and thorough review. Based on just the description from the manufacturers alone, and even considering the Nook Tablet costs $50 more than the Amazon offering I can say just from the start that the B&N device is the one to get. Better battery life, better storage, better hardware, ePub format, that’s the one that I would get if I didn’t already have an iPad.

Keep your eyes peeled on this blog. I doubt I’ll ever get my hands on a Kindle Fire, but I’m pretty sure I’ll eventually be able to review the Nook Tablet.

Working Out

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My workout regimen is a nightly two hour long cardiovascular adventure.

I start the first hour on the treadmill and over time I have increased the angle on the treadmill deck progressively all the way up to where I now use it, at five degrees of inclination. I set the speed at 3.8 miles per hour, which is enough to get my heart pumping but not enough to take my breath away. I read once that if you were going to use walking as an exercise that if you are short of breath or breathing so that you cannot maintain a conversation well, that you are exercising beyond your capacity for maximum cardiovascular benefit. At some point walking has to drop away and give up to running. I was doing some running on a Nike+ program but when I started to run into joint aching that was a pretty clear signal to me that perhaps I need to stretch out my expectations of running, at least in the short-term. This time on the treadmill, at least by the computer in the treadmill declares that I burn around 745 calories for the entire hour.

The second hour I spend on the Elliptical Trainer. This machine replicates the general motion of cross-country skiing mixed with stair-climbing and walking. I set the time to be an hour and the “difficulty” to 14 out of 20. I don’t really know what the units are for the Elliptical trainer when it comes to its “difficulty” and I think that each machine manufacturer has it’s own concept of this. When I finish with this exercise I’ve burned about 845 calories.

I do this every single night, except on Sunday. That’s the day I select to rest and recover. So far it’s working very well for me. I do have some mildly entertaining problems, first of which is that I sweat a LOT. Even when I wear UnderArmour, which is supposed to wick sweat away. I find myself soaking my entire kit to saturation and then the sweat starts to rain off of me. It’s not just a little either, not a pitterpat, but more along the lines of a light rainstorm. I try to keep from swinging my hands too much so I don’t accidentally splatter nearby people who really would rather not take a shower from me. The sweat gets going on the treadmill but goes out of control on the Elliptical machine. It runs down my face and into my eyes and stings. So I’ve altered my kit and now I have a towel with me. I mop myself up every two or three minutes and by the end I’m wringing what I imagine to be about 300 to 500 milliliters of water out of myself. They say Cancer is a water sign, of this I have no doubt. Along with my issues with water, it’s getting colder outside. No longer can I work out, then dash outside to hop in my car. I did that once, and when the 40 degree air hit me it took my breath away. Evaporation consumes a lot of energy, in moments I was shivering. Now I take my time, change, wear more seasonally appropriate coverings so the short jaunt outside to my car isn’t so breathtaking.

What has it done for me personally? Well, I’ve lost a lot of weight. I started this adventure at 280 pounds, and I was wobbling around there and 278, back and forth. Mostly that was my sedentary lifestyle expressed in my weight. At this point I was hypertensive and really on the road to later disaster and I knew it. Now I weigh in at 242.6. I have lost 37.4 pounds. It’s interesting to see where it loses first. The first zones that showed immediate and surprising (almost shocking) improvement were in my legs. I used to have what I affectionately described as thunder-thighs, because I keep a lot of my weight there. That has since started to drop away. The next place was my ass, which as pretty much disappeared. Then I started to notice the drop in my face and neck, and oddly enough, my wrists and arms. The most resistant area for weight loss is the obvious regions, right along my trunk and back. So I still have a belly and love-handles, although the further I go the more I am noticing that I’m starting to develop an actual body-shape that is in line with my overall goals. I’m never ever going to look like the other gym bunnies, and I’m okay with that, but I am tired of being fat, and that fat made me tired. In a way I’m tired of being tired. That leads into the next expected-but-still-a-surprise personal result for me, my energy level has shot way up. All this exercise has also done wonders for my mood. When I carried all the weight I was always tired and irritable and generally a moody bitch. Now that I’ve shed a lot of that, I find myself not so quick in the grouchiness arena. Exercise physiologists say that regular exercise has benefits for mental health in addition to what it does for the body and of that I believe them. Body image is very important to me and it struck me square between the eyes a few days ago. I was about to head into the gym and I was wearing too much bulk, so it wasn’t terribly cold and so I stripped down to my UnderArmour Heat Gear Tee. Almost always I want to put something else on over that because I’m self-conscious about how I look with such form-fitting clothing on but that day I tossed off the layers and didn’t give it a single thought. When I got half-way to the changing rooms at my gym and noticed that I just had on my heatgear tee, and that I was okay with that, that feeling was like a blossoming reward for all the hard work I had been doing. It’s only going to get better, and I have another 42.6 pounds to lose. When I get to 200, then I’ll be just right where I want to be.

Working out this way is exceptionally dull work. I get out of work at 5, get to the gym around 5:30, and I really don’t get started on the machines until 6pm. Two hours of working out push my days to 8pm before I can even think of going home. While I’m working out I found that mental diversions really help. Listening to Podcasts works okay, but often times I get transfixed by the timer on the machine and then it just drags on and on. Reading on my Nook Simple Touch is better, especially when I can make the text very large. I sweat too much, and so the Nook has fallen out of favor in this use because I don’t want to drown it in sweat and short it out and kill it. What works best to keep my mind occupied while my body chugs away is my iPad. I’ve found that Flipboard, DC Comics app, Uno, Bejeweled 2, and Qrank really work well to keep me entertained so the time just flies on by. When I’m working out at the Anytime Fitness in Kalamazoo, they offer free Wifi so it’s great and very easy. When I’m at the Anytime Fitness in Portage, they don’t offer free Wifi, so I have to create my own Wifi through my iPhone. It’s not too bad, but I do wish I could get Wifi down in Portage as well.

When I began this new regimen I started out dreading my afternoons, schlepping off to the gym and huffing and puffing and sweating like a rainstorm. Now I think I might be getting addicted to working out. It’s not that I really like it, but it’s an odd sort of craving I have now. It’s good for me and is one of the reasons why I’m dropping weight so very quickly and I really don’t have a problem with that. I just wish I had more hours in the day to do the other things in my life. But if trading some fun for what I’ve been able to do for and to myself over these past few months is very much worth it.

iOS 5.0.1 / Learning My Lesson

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iOS 5.0.1 – Learning My Lesson

I was on the edge of my seat along with everyone else, there was word that Apple was going to push iOS 5.0.1 OTA to all the upgraded devices. Then TUAW made the announcement on Twitter that the upgrade was live and ready to go. I opened up my iPhone and there it was. 56MB upgrade waiting for me. I tapped the Upgrade button and off it went.

I was filled with fear when it came to my iPad First Generation device. Right after iOS 5.0 was released for my iPad and after I upgraded that device to iOS 5.0 I noticed that my iPad lacked the advertised multitasking gestures. I felt dejected so I moved along without. Shortly after that I noticed on the LifeHacker blog an article that would guide me through using the RedSn0w jailbreak tool to hack-in the multitasking gestures on my iPad. I moved ahead and applied the patch and watched with horror as my iOS device went through various cycles of rebooting and loading and one really upsetting sequence when it was just text, like it was the Linux kernel starting up. One of the reasons why I really love Apple is the insulation away from the expectant horrors of text startups. Never knowing if you are going to read “FAILURE” or “Kernel Panic” or something messy. I’d prefer to hide all of that behind helpful routines in a classical dialog box once the OS comes up and deal with it then. But I squeezed my eyes shut and when I opened them my iPad was waiting for me with the multitasking gestures enabled. I enjoyed my iPad and for a time everything was going wonderfully. Then Apple announced iOS 5.0.1.

I tried three times to upgrade my iPad, and each time there was an unknown upgrade error. I knew full well what the problem was. The hack was in the way. Apple was running a checksum on the kernel on my iPad and it was failing that check, so no upgrade for me! So I tried in vain to see if there was a way to back the hack out of my iPad and it turns out, there wasn’t one. So I meekly trudged forward, hat in my hands, head bowed and restored my iPad back to factory specifications. It erased everything off my device. Really that was okay, since the last time I did this upgrade to iOS 5 it was a loss-tastic failboat to hell. I’ve been keeping everything on my Dropbox, so losing the files on my iPad really wasn’t a risk for me anymore. When I woke my iPad up, it was as if it was fresh from the factory all over again, but this time with the self-starting parts of iOS 5 doing the lead-in with me. I set it up, and when I came across the backup/restore options I elected to restore my data from iCloud, and I had a valid backup from 8:30am this morning, so that worked well. Then it looked just like I had to start from scratch all over again for about 30 seconds and right after that iCloud came crashing down into my device – all my apps are now busy loading from iCloud. We’ll see how that turns out, but one this is for certain, I’m done with these jailbreak/hack tools. I lost an entire afternoon to the silly botch that was that hack and I can’t afford to lose time like this in the future.

At least I was able to claw victory from the gaping maw of defeat, that I am thankful for. There was a way to go back and I wasn’t trapped with a half-life-half-stuck device. I’m not going to do that ever again! Yikes! 🙂

Surprised Doctors and Busy Bees

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Surprised Doctors and Busy Bees

Two days ago I went to Sindecuse Health Center here at WMU, which for those who don’t know me very well are the “Company Docs” that provide non-urgent medical care free of charge to University employees. I went in for a blood pressure screening.

Some history is in order to explain why my blood pressure is so important to me. I have a hereditary predisposition for hypertension that I inherited from the males on both sides of my family. My father has controlled hypertension and my maternal and paternal grandfathers both died of associated circulatory failures, heart attacks and strokes. So I am very aware of my blood pressure and like to screen myself for it every once in a while. My biggest problem with it is that my blood pressure is linked to my body weight pretty much directly. I am 6 foot 3 inches and when I weighed 280 pounds (very overweight) my blood pressure was 149/93. That put me smack dab in the middle of hypertension. I am young enough where the doctors gave me an ultimatum, either address this issue now or they’ll write a perscription for me which will start me on the drug treadmill that I can never stop running on once I get started. A pretty direct message if I don’t say so myself.

The fear of the drugs, and in a way the nebulous fear of hypertension on its own was a good portion of my recent decision to finally address my weight issue. I started at 280 pounds and currently I weigh 245 pounds. I have another 45 pounds to lose, as my goal weight is 200 flat and even pounds. When I went for the screening the doctor asked me why I wanted the screening and then I informed her that I had lost a lot of weight recently and wanted to see if my blood pressure was still linked to my body weight, as I really deep-in-my-heart know it truly is. She of course went from one hot-button statement to another. Someone comes in out of the blue for a blood pressure screening is one thing, but rapid precipitous weight loss? It could have been a medical emergency, a very bad sign. She did ask, and I told her that I had simply had enough of weighing so much and being so fat and lazy. Truth to be told, it wasn’t anything really new that I have done to myself except perhaps listen. If you ask any medical or weight-conscious professional about how to lose weight they will yawn, stretch, and mutter “eat right and get plenty of exercise.” It has to be exceptionally dull for these people, they keep on saying the same thing over and over again and people don’t want to do that, they want something magical and instant. So telling her that I was working out every single day and eating better helped calm down the red-button-mashing she was on the edge of with me. My blood pressure at 245 pounds is 136/88. I have lowered both the systolic and diastolic numbers and now I am not hypertensive anymore. I found a chart that doctors use to explain to patients what their blood pressure measurements mean and this chart tells me that I am now regarded by the medical community as “high normal” when it comes to blood pressure. I used to be hypertensive, now I am not. I know that anyone can live for years in a hypertensive state, but like a machine with too little oil, eventually that condition will wear out all the parts, especially the kidneys and the blood vessels in the brain and lead to a sticky and quick end – either renal failure or a stroke, if not something else equally as hazardous and unpleasant.

While my screening was underway, the doctor asked if I had any allergies. I told her that for the past few years I have not suffered from my hayfever or my allergy to poplar-tree pollen1. She asked what I had done to do that, or if I was taking any OTC medications and I told her that I simply included local unfiltered honey as a sweetener to my breakfast in the morning. She looked at me with a curious light in her eyes, as if she had never heard anyone do this before. There is an old-wives-tale/superstition that local honey can alleviate allergies, especially if those allergies are linked to pollen. The honey I buy is from Meijer’s markets and it comes from Onsted, Michigan. It’s local enough apparently to do the trick for me. I apply one serving (21 grams) of honey to my breakfast cereal every morning. I have not had the runny eyes, the clogged nose, nor the inability to swallow properly that usually comes when I’m in the thick of my seasonal allergy attacks. It could be all a giant placebo effect, or it could actually be helping me. Either way honey is good for you, and as a replacement for table sugar it makes a great sweetener all around. Cereal, Coffee, Tea, anything really that needs some sweetening. I keep on telling people about the benefits of local unfiltered honey and every once in a while I win someone over who adopts it as their sweetener of choice. If you have a choice between table sugar and honey, one is more ‘natural’ than the other, just on that basis it makes sense to me.

So I am in the middle of losing weight and so far I’m doing quite well. I haven’t had any injuries and I blew past my old plateau of 260 pounds long ago. I feel really good, I have a lot more energy now than I did before, in so far that I don’t feel so sluggish all the time and nearly everything else in my life has improved. My mood, my digestion, and yes, all the other parts of me that we don’t talk about in pleasant conversation, those have improved as well. When people ask me what diet I’m on, I tell them it’s the oldest one in the book. The one that doctors and fitness people yawn on through when they say it, “Eat right, get plenty of exercise”. I’ll write up my “diet” in another blog entry for those that might want to try it.

  1. Poplar Tree Pollen looks a lot like loose tufts of cotton flying in the breeze. Little white fluffs of childhood terror, at least for me. ↩

Buddhify

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First Look at Buddhify

I read on, I think, LifeHacker about a new app called Buddhify and since the price was right, about $2.99 I decided to buy it and give it a go. I’ve meditated in the past, here and there in little bursts and have had a surprisingly easy way of letting go. I have to admit that I haven’t done it in a very long time and like any machine that goes too long on one path, eventually I feel all hot and dry. It’s not the pleasant meaning of hot, but a more parched and wearing-down kind of hot. So this morning I was listening to A Way With Words podcast mostly because it was in my Podcaster playlist. I paused the program and after finishing a portion of my regular morning tasks here at work I decided to open up Buddhify and give it a whirl.

I used the first program which for me was a clairity meditation that concentrated on hearing. The program is lead either with a male voice or a female voice, that is a feature I really do appreciate. Whenever I can have the option, I prefer the male voice, what a surprise. The app is written by and produced by a company in Britain so the accent follows along. I find it easy and comforting, it’s different enough to be novel and keep my attention but not jarring enough to shake me out of my meditation. I chose my first one from the home set, which you can do if you are sitting somewhere with your eyes closed. This is something that I can do relatively easily at work, as long as it doesn’t last too long and people get the wrong idea that somehow I’m napping on the job, which I am not. During the meditation I found it very easy to follow along and about three-quarters of the way through this short program I actually felt my consciousness change. It felt a fair bit like physically falling, but my body hadn’t changed state at all. Really the best way I can relate it in words was that I slipped into a really relaxed and comfortable state. It’s very much like the quietness that overcomes me in the ledge right before and right after sleep comes over me. There is this area, where I can be fully awake and aware and control myself but the “agitated mind” hasn’t woken up yet. I don’t form plans, worry, or dwell on thoughts in this state and I value that feeling. This of course would make everyone who enjoys meditation smile as I am sure they understand perfectly what I am trying to describe.

As I continue using Buddhify, which I wholly intend to do I will keep on writing down my experiences and blogging about them. If you have an iOS device, I really recommend that you plunk down the cash and buy this program. It actually does something you don’t expect and that novelty should be treasured. That you can get it for so little a price is very surprising. So far I’d rate Buddhify a 5 out of 5.

Why I Left Facebook

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Why I Left Facebook

I just logged into Facebook for the last time, at least to actually use the site for anything really constructive. I got an email from Facebook telling me I had a friend request from some stranger that I don’t recognize in the least. I logged on to kill off the friend request and then I found there were others from people I do recognize, so I accepted their requests and I wanted to add them to my NoWall group. I then started a useless trudge through Facebook’s interface looking for my Friends Lists. They were moved and so I had to search for them all over again. I lost about an hour on-and-off looking for this stupid settings page before I finally blundered into it.

I have had enough of Facebook.

Why? There are many reasons that drive me to abandon Facebook. First is the unpleasant user interface. The way that Facebook has altered their pages over the years has just gotten worse and worse. Functionality that used to make Friends Lists useful were dumped and my requests to have the old functions restored were ignored. I just don’t want to use it anymore. Every time I look at the site my head hurts. I can’t find anything worth following beyond meaningless claptrap related to all the scrobbling applications that fill up Facebook. Bits from stupid game apps that do nothing, and aren’t really games or even fun contributed a lot to this general sense of irritation. Secondly, I’m living a rather involved compartmentalized life on Facebook. I keep half of my friends list in the dark. I want to share a lot of things with my loved ones, but I want to pick and choose them. I love some of them more than I love others. Facebook used to have really easy ways of managing Friends Lists, but recently they’ve eroded a lot of that functionality away. I maintained a NoWall group and banned that group from seeing any content on my Facebook page. I then stuffed family members, friends, and people I know a little bit into that group. Partly because I don’t want to deal with them seeing all that I have to share and partly to punish some for being social twats. Finally, and probably the biggest reason why I am leaving Facebook is because the lack of controls for sharing got me into serious trouble at work.

That in the end is the biggest point of all. Share controls. I want to share different things with different people and Facebook really made a mess of things. So I left Facebook and moved to Google+. There I can control how I share very conveniently and I quite enjoy the clean wide open spaces and all the ways I can segment the social flow of information. On Google, I have placed everyone into neat little circles and that’s how I want to manage it. With Google+ I can be free to be who I am and say what I want without having to fear reprisals, retribution, or censorship. The people in the dark are happy there, and I’m happy keeping them there.

Nook Simple Touch Firmware Update 1.1.0 Review

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Barnes & Nobel Nook Firmware 1.1.0 Update

I just got an email from B&N regarding my nook, that there was a firmware update available for my device. I couldn’t help but download this update immediately and see what it was all about. The download clocks in at 110MB and takes just a few moments to copy to the Nook drive on the device once you plug it in. I was waiting in vain for the display to go to sleep so I hit the sleep button on my nook and it dutifully went to sleep. I pressed it again and the nook software update boot loader appeared. The nook took about three minutes to load the firmware update and once it was complete it went back to sleep using the default “authors” screensaver.

I woke up my device and started to poke around the edges looking for what was updated. Of course I glanced at what B&N1 was pushing:

  1. Breakthrough E Ink® display – best just-like paper reading, even in bright sun
  2. 25% faster than any other eReader ” Best-Text™ Technology for sharper, ultra-crisp fonts
  3. Longer battery life -read for over 2 months on a single charge*
  4. Ongoing enhancements and other performance improvements

As I was playing around with the device it struck me just how fast everything was responding to my touch. In previous firmware iterations I would have to tap several times for the interface to respond to my touch. Now it is much more crisp and fast. Another thing that has markedly improved is the speed with which pages are painted on the eInk display.

From the points above, some of them are new features, some aren’t. #1 is just what the device has already, so the firmware didn’t deliver anything for that. #2 is very subjective, I wasn’t expecting the update to the nook firmware so I didn’t spend any time eyeballing the fonts. On my nook the only font I use is Helvetica Neue, after falling in love with it from my exposure to people who were mad about typography here at work. The speed of the text, which is the other part of #2 was patently obvious. The speedup is very noticeable and very welcome. Point #3 is generally true, my nook simple touch has a kick ass battery life, perhaps the update will lengthen the battery performance but I haven’t been using it long enough to judge that point yet. And of course, there is #4, which apparently hides a whole host of interesting mystery items. I have to imagine that somewhere there is a technical document that details all of these updates that were glossed over in point #4. Perhaps if someone from B&N reads this, they could comment. That would be nice.

In the end I think that B&N should apply this patch to all the nook simple touch devices they have on display in their stores and they have done a really great job addressing things that at first you didn’t think you had a problem with, but once addressed you find you really appreciate. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a review unit of the new nook tablet and then I can write up a review of that. It should be a lot of fun, as I can compare it to the iPad and the original nook color tablet. I’m looking forward to it! 🙂

  1. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/Software-Updates-NOOK-Simple-Touch/379003175 ↩

New Drying Machine

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This past weekend my very old Kenmore Clothes Dryer died. It was showing distinct pangs of death during the Halloween Movie Marathon of course but I ignored those. I couldn’t ignore the hum, no start, and hot electrical smell. When the machine had well and truly died I figured I would go out and get a replacement machine.

I started looking at Sears. They had a Whirlpool, pretty much an updated replacement for what just died on sale for $404 bucks. Before plunking down my cash to buy it, I thought I would wait for Black Friday sales to begin. Then everyone pretty much joined the same chorus together and said it was silly to wait and that those sorts of things aren’t usually included in Black Friday sales. Of course I was also a little irked by Sears because they wouldn’t haul the old machine away for free, they charged $10 for that.

I went to Lowes and found they had the same machine, same price, and they had free delivery and free take-away. Already a better deal than Sears. Of course while we were looking at machines we noticed one for sale that had more bells and whistles than the one we were looking at first. Another Whirlpool of course, but bigger and more eco-friendly. The list price on this new one was $699 but since it was the last one Lowes had, it it was “Last Years Model” they knocked the price to $491. I added a 4-year warranty to the mix for $99 and bought a 3-wire electrical hookup to boot.

Before the new dryer arrived I decided that I should pull the old one out and tear into it to see how it was set up. The vent came right off the back, as I half-expected it to, and I was able to clean the 40 pounds of lint-bunnies out of it. I then tore the electrical panel off (unscrewed it, there wasn’t any tearing really) and it was the same industry standard block there that was on every other dryer I looked at. Altogether a very dull arrangement, anyone with eyes and hands could do this work. This thing required absolutely zero skill.

There are some oddities in my home, the laundry service has a breaker and a fusebox. It’s overkill. But there it is. The wires are directly tied in, there isn’t a plug at all anywhere for “plugging the dryer in” to, so I took the wiring off the old dryer and simply re-attached it to the new dryer. I have to return the plug-bit for a refund later today. So when they dropped the dryer off they offered to set it up for me and I declined. When they got into my basement, they saw why I was willing to do it myself, mostly because of the wiring and vent and nodded and left. I popped the vent on, moved it back to where it belonged and assembled the wiring. I screwed it all together, screwed on the service entrance shield and that was that. I turned on the breaker and I closed the fusebox control so it was on as well. I turned on the dryer and the lights came on, the chime sounded, and I ran some clothes in it just to see and the drum went around.

All in all a very exciting and then very dull thing altogether. Upon reflection I could have probably hauled the dryer home all by myself in the Santa Fe and done all this work on Saturday, but at least this way I don’t have to deal with the dead dryer and have it clogging everything up or have to haul it somewhere to get rid of it. Lowes took it away, and frankly, for all the rigamarole I had to go through, it was worth it just for that.

The one thing I did learn was that buying new hookup wiring for these devices is dumb. Just unscrew the old stuff, pull it out, and then put it back together afterwards. Save yourself an easy $20. It’s not like old copper wire is somehow less worthy than brand new copper wire. If it was aluminum, then fine, yes, but copper? Come on.