Like the satisfying sound a can of soda makes when you pop the top, or the thunderous crack of a strike, or being able to easily open your car door.

I took some time away from the computer (and the TV) this weekend and repaired my beloved ‘Rolla. I was afraid that dismantling the door was going to be more difficult than it actually was. A few years back I had tried to take the inside door panel off a few year back, but was thwarted by the manual window handle, just could not get it to come off.

So a while back, when I had some time to kill, I found myself at AutoZone, in doing so I found there there is a special tool you need to be able to remove the little metal clip that holds the window handle on. I bought it, and some extra metal clips, assuming that I would end up destroying or losing the ones I would be removing.

Needless to say, I am glad I bought the clips, as when I used the tool, I promptly lost the metal clip. Not to mention that it shot off the handle at such a speed that I was glad I wasn’t in it’s path.

The hardest part of reassembling everything was getting the door lock back in the right spot. I had to basically get my arm inside the door frame to move the piece into place, to get a better hold on it all, I had to take a cross bear off, thankfully I remembered to put it back on.

The new door handle is working great, I do think I must have messed something up with the lock mechanism though, as I can unlock the door, but I cannot lock the door (from the outside with the key). Not a HUGE deal, so no worries.

Well I need to get back to coding, I am excited about next weekend, as I will be replacing the front door speakers, given that I now own a soldering iron.

Given the DIY repair projects of the last two weekends, I am also faced with the notion that our culture these days (prepare for gross generalization) is more likely to purchase entire replacement items vs repair a piece of technology or whatever the item may be.

Many appliances, furniture and items of consumer tech are no longer designed to be repaired, particularly not by the owner. Sometimes this is for their own good, BIG capacitors can kill, so I totally get that.

I hadn’t really thought much about this type of stuff until a few years back, I witnessed my father-in-law replacing the ‘fabric’ strips on a beach/lawn chair. The chairs were what one might call ‘vintage’, as they had seen quite a few seasons up at the cottage.

He had the roll of needed plastic fabric and the necessary tools to detach the old strips and secure the new strips. My first thought was, “Wow, I wonder how much a new chair costs vs the materials needed to repair?” eg, is it worth the effort to repair something like that. My next thought was ‘You know, I don’t think I have ever seen a lawn chair repair kit. Do you have to find a specialty store on the Internet?”

Needless to say, I was too scared to ask those questions, I didn’t want to insult my father-in-law or anything, not knowing how he might take those kinds of questions. (to which I am sure my mother-in-law, will let him know I said these things on my blog, so for the record, I think it is cool to repair stuff vs just buy a new one. Hello Brenda and Tom!!!)

But yeah, the thought of just repairing something vs getting a new one is I definitely think something we as a whole consumer culture don’t really do these days. We return it and get a new one, they might fix it back at the factory, but that is all “black-box” to us, “out-of-sight, out-of-mind”.

And, I totally forgot to post an update, the Samsung TV is working GREAT!!!

Gina took some pics of me and John working on the TV last weekend, many thanks to John he did pretty much all the soldering work, I tried to desolder the first capacitor for about 3-4 minutes with no real progress made. Apparently, they offered an electronics course at his High School. I remember taking electricity in Middle School and I think they offered a similar class at Sexton High School, but I don’t remember anyone mentioning an electronics course in the Lansing School District. (If they did offer on, I really regret not taking it.)

Back to the coding grind.

laterz

bdbenner corolla, diy car repair, door handle, repair, toyota

Say that three times fast.

I had been wanting to check out the new “Coworking” space, Cospace,  here in North Austin (Eryn, Kevin and I have decided that they are in North Austin, which I am sure many of people will agree, vs saying they are in Central Austin, or for those few ‘folks up der in Leander’, who might feel like this area is in Downtown Austin, to which, well they are WRONG.)

Anyway, due to a series of odd events, Eryn, Kevin and I ended up here at Cospace. Coworking is a new concept to most, I was introduced to it by the good folks that run Conjunctured, another Coworking space here in Austin.

Basically, the thing is there are plenty of places for freelancers to work, not many of them are very conducive to working and most lack the feel of working with people, because even the most anti-social of us are still, well social creatures, we just hate being social, but eventually miss people.

So the idea is to get folks out of coffee shops and out of their home offices and into a shared environment, where they will be able to have sort of ‘normal’ work environment and be with people, yet without ‘working for da man’.

I know quite a few freelancers that are always looking for a coffee shop that is conducive to work on projects, unfortunately I would say the majority of them are not remotely conducive. I most definitely recommend a Coworking facility, and given that it is closer to my own home I would say that Cospace is a great place.

I neglected to take any photos of Eryn and Kevin (and I ) working here, ummm, too busy working I guess. But I think the general feel was that the space was good, Kevin recommended that they maybe have some mouse-pads to loan out, or even add them to the vending machine that was joked about when we first arrived.

Speaking of arrival, the reason we ended up here was that our real office (Jaduka/NetworkIP) was experiencing bad smells, not the kind that one would expect after say egg salad sandwiches or burritos for lunch, but more of the kind of bad smell that makes you wonder if you are living in New Jersey, eg chemicals. Apparently some contractors had done some work in the building over the weekend and apparently they didn’t handle their fumes properly.

The fumes were stronger in some parts of the office than other, but regardless I was getting light headed and decided to come on over to Cospace.

I talked with Kirtus Dixon, one of the owners of Cospace on Saturday. Jeremy had mentioned me during one of their conversations last week, as Jeremy (who currently is a freelancer of sorts) has been hanging here at Cospace.

My conversation with Kirtus revolved around what they want to accomplish and what I could possibly contribute to some of their ideas for building a community. I have to say that I am very interested in some of the items we discussed, particularly the hackathon.

Well, I need to wrap up this post as they are putting up the balloons and I hear something about bringing out the food.

I’ll make another post later, with pics from the party.

laterz

bdbenner cospace, eryn, kevin cospace, coworking, freelancing

For those that haven’t heard yet, my beloved ‘Rolla has crossed the 200k mark. I had been thinking that as soon as I passed the 200k mark the tires would fall off. To my surprise, nothing bad happened as I crossed over that 200k milestone.

However, apparently 200,110 miles, my ‘Rolla decided to have a little bit of a breakdown.

Any idea what this is?

If you guessed ‘Driver’s Side Door Handle’ you are RIGHT!

After having dinner with some friends, I had opened the door to the ‘Rolla and we were chatting in the parking lot, a bit of time had gone by, so I decided that I should close the door. After some more chatting, we decided to take off, and I went to open the door and heard a ‘SNAP’ and the door handle FLEW through the air, in my mind I think back and see it flying high through the air in slow motion. However, given that I was able to pick it up off the ground only about two feet from the ‘Rolla, clearly this is just the dramatic moment playing tricks on my mind.

So, ummm yeah. Hey Toyota, any chance there are some outstanding recalls on the 1994 Toyota Corolla? Specifically a recall on the driver side door handle?

I am hoping i can simply order a part from AutoZone, but I suspect I might have to hit up eBay or a local ‘Pick-a-part’. I can see that I am not necessarily looking forward to dismantling whatever parts of the driver’s side door that I need to, in order to replace the broken door handle.

Needless to say, I feel that the ‘Ghetto Sled’ has truly earned it’s name. As I may seriously have to start opening my door by leaning over the passenger seat, I really do not want to do that. So in addition to working on some code, I will be endeavoring to repair the ‘Rolla.

I mean, the car is a 1994, that is 16 years. If the car was only used to go to and from somewhere, once a day, that would mean the door handle was used at a minimum 11,680 times. Figure that it was used for two trips a day, this would mean, 23,360 times.

<pause while I look up some stuff on AutoZone.com>

Looky, Looky… $41.99 and I can have a fixed ‘Rolla, well $41.99 and a few hours for me to figure it out.

<pause while I searched for the part cheaper somewhere else>

I found it at O’Reilly AutoParts, $46.39 with delivery. The AutoZone one was going to be like $53. I didn’t pop for the 2 day delivery, as their delivery estimate showed that both options would arrive on Weds the 24th. So looks like, I am going to be trying to fix the ‘Rolla next Weds night or Thursday morning.

Well, it is late and need to get to bed. On a side note, I now have a similar setup at home as I do at the office, in terms of having a laptop stand for my mac book.

In other news, I am still doing Camp Gladiator, I will be definitely be doing it three times a week. Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The workouts are intense and having my coworkers there is a good motivation to keep going. I haven’t really started weighing myself regularly, but I did last night for the first time in a few weeks and it looks like I lost about six pounds. Right now, I am more so interested in improving my stamina, as each workout is getting a little bit easier and easier.

Night.

Laterz

bdbenner corolla car repair, corolla, repairs, toyota

Even though my desk is not but 10 feet away, I find that one of the best ways to keep up with Kevin is via RSS.

I caught this yesterday and decided I would try to help him out. Downside is, I haven’t installed any photo editing software on the Mac yet. (partial truth, I installed Gimp, but don’t like it).

The other day, Kevin asked on his Tumblr to have someone update his blog to say 26.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner kevin blogging, kevin, rss, tumblr

For the few folks that read my blog, I would like to announce that a friend of mine, Audrey Montgomery, recently asked me on Facebook to become a fan of her Pampered Chef consulting.

I did that and will do one better, I will link to her Pampered Chef site from my blog here. Yup leveraging the potentially dozens of folks that read this.

Sarcasm aside, I have been blessed with the opportunity to attend some parties where Audrey has performed her magic using the Pampered Chef accessories and her cooking skillz.

While, I tend to get my supplies from the Mission Restaurant Supply company here in town, I took a look through her wares and saw a few items that I may purchase.

Stackable Cooling Rack

Pastry Cutter

Measure-All Cup (like Alton Brown’s)

For those too lazy to click through to her site, here are some quick links.

Contact Audrey

News (recipes too)

New Products

I will go ahead and throw out my professional 2 cents (in terms of web stuff).

I think that it is very cool that The Pampered Chef company enables their agents/consultants with a relatively customizable site that they can personalize and brand a little bit. I would say that anyone doing any sort of reseller/agent type business model needs to be able to offer out that type of functionality.

That would be the good part of the critique, the bad part is that the application that their developers put together is in my opinion not ready for the ‘public web’. The URL structure that they use has query string data (being the stuff after the ‘?’). The first thing that you should learn these days about the query string is that indexing robots typically do not like URLs that have that, so using ModRewrite or what not to create clean URLs will greatly help with that kind of thing.

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey?page=products-category&categoryId=22

With a little bit of reworking of their code they could use a structure like

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey/products/category/22

or even a little bit more coding, they could give category 22 a name

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey/products/category/new

Now for me. I am a HUGE fan of sub-domains. Though, I will admit the general public find these confusing, but there are tricks to get around that (little bit of header redirecting after the .com/, will make it easy for folks to be sent to the proper subdomain). The link could look like.

cookingwithaudrey.pamperedchef.biz/products/category/new

While, I am not sure if The Pampered Chef application knows to detect if it is being executed in an iframe, there are things that consultants, like Audry can do to add their own branding to these types of sites.

Register the domain ‘CookingWithAudrey.com’, setup a GoDaddy hosting account (the cheap one). Setup a simple HTML page that does an <iframe> and is set to pull up http://www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey?page=home

That would would allow you to go to the CookingWithAudrey.com and keep her private URL in the address bar. Would have to test it to see if there are any warnings that come up from the SSL layer when you try to do a checkout. If there are, then rather than doing an <iframe> the CookingWithAudrey.com domain name can do a simple redirect to her Pampered Chef site.

I would probably say that she might want to try and do a splash page, that has some photos of some of the stuff she has cooked and then has a graphic/button/link to take the user to her Pampered Chef site.

So ends my professional 2 cents bit.

Again, congrats to Audrey on the Facebook fan stuff and The Pampered Chef site.

back to the grind.

laterz

bdbenner business, coding, friends Cooking, friend, programming

Not sure which title is more appropriate.

Let’s recap.

On Monday, I felt fine. I didn’t get to sleep quite as early as I wanted to on Sunday night and therefore was feeling just great for Camp Gladiator on Monday night. The workout at camp was great. I felt like I had made some progress and that the workout was good stuff.

I took a long hot bath to relax my muscles, during the bath I managed to get water up my nose. I felt it go through my sinuses, the feeling honestly made my nose feel like it does when I have a cold. I cleared out my sinuses the best I could and got ready for bed. I was beat.

So I crawled into bed to rest for a bit and woke up a couple of hours later. Still felt OK, so I fed the dogs and got ready for bed.

Then came the morning, overall I felt fine. But my through felt like sand paper. And my nose was a bit runny. As the day progressed my nose ran more and more. I had been hoping it was just allergies, as reports from everywhere seemed to indicate that cedar pollen was at an all time high.

By the end of the day I started to feel like it was more than just allergies. I headed home, took care of the dogs. I cut-up some pineapple, had some soup and then decided to get to bed early (took some nyquil before retiring).

I woke up several times during the night and found it difficult to get back to sleep.

All of this sounds pretty pathetic and whiny, right? Well, yup that is how I felt.

I called in sick on Wednesday. However, I did spend the morning looking into a few different errors. I had gone through about 1/3 a box of Puffs Plus (notably, the lotion is all that has kept my nose from looking as red as Rudolph’s). After getting things settled, I went back to bed and slept until about 8pm.

Gina’s plane was due to get in at 10:10. I figured this gave me enough time to get ready, do a little bit of cleaning and then get out of the house by about 9:00.

I was feeling pretty decent, in terms of having slept the entire day away, you know sick.

I got to the airport about 9:50 or so. As I walked in, I looked at the ‘Arrivals’ section of the monitors, looking for Gina’s flight. And there it was delayed until 10:20. OK, no biggie, 10 minutes.

Then after about 5 minutes, the board changed to say 10:35.

Awesome, my original plan was to grab her, head home, hitting HEB or something on the way as to grab some soup, cough drops, DayQuil, OJ and Vernors. Gina was exhausted by the time she got in and was not looking forward to my little excursion.

Gina surprised me when we pulled into the Randall’s parking lot. She informed me that she didn’t want me taking forever and to be quick about it.

As I got ready for bed I wondered if I was going to be well enough in the morning to go to work. Part of me thought that I might be, given that my nose wasn’t running nearly as much as it had been.

However, when I awoke, I realized that I was going to be staying home once again. Following the same routine as the day before, I answered email, took care of a few things and before I knew it the clock read 11:50am.

I took some more NyQuil and went to bed.

I woke up about 40 minutes ago and heated up some soup, then started this post.

Needless to say, an exciting time right?

For a brief moment when I woke up I thought, ‘Pizza sounds really good, I should go start some pizza dough.’ About 5 minutes later all I could think about was laying back down.

That brings us to me closing out this whiny post.

Laterz

bdbenner Personal cold, funk, sick

I think that there are some songs that I like from the 1970s, but the title of this post is in reference to my Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ queue. I have been loading my queue with Doctor Who, a series near and dear to my heart.

I have mainly been focusing on the Tom Baker years, which were filmed between 1974-1981. I am not entirely sure why some of them are available via streaming and some are not. I mean, it seems like everything that old should be available, but who knows, maybe someone’s estate is refusing to allow the content to be streamed due to royalties or something.

I have found that I need to have the TV on in the background when I am coding at home. There are times when I prefer to just have music, but it is just not the same. I have been trying to figure it out, I know that I am more productive without TV, but only from the standpoint of me not occasionally looking up at the screen. Without some sort of  background noise, I cannot focus.

When I am here at the office, I find that the listening to music is the perfect thing. But when I am at home, I prefer the TV. Not sure what it is, but unless Gina is home, then listening to music and coding just feels, I don’t know how else to put it but, lonely.

Anyway, the streaming quality of Netflix on the (xbox) 360 is superb.

In terms of this weekend though, it was not just coding and watching Doctor Who. I also had to clean-up the kitchen. As usual, I started falling back into my bachelor tendencies and not cleaning up all of the dishes I had used the day before. After that was done, it came time to mop up. I want to try and make sure that the house is clean for when Gina returns for Florida.

Let it be known that little dogs, have little bladders. And that while I do take them outside regularly (or leave the dog door open, provided the neighbor dog is inside), they occasionally make a mess. I had spot cleaned these messes, but it was time to mop the floor. I mopped, the kitchen, dining room and the living room. One of the benefits of having mostly tile, is that provided your back is strong, cleanup is easy.

I also did what Gina would normally start doing on a Sunday, dog laundry. Our dogs have an assortment of dog beds (many of which have been recently constructed by Gina herself), blankets, sweaters/shirts and what not. I am thinking that tomorrow night (because I will be too sore from Camp Gladiator tonight) the dogs will be getting bathes.

Another thing I did was cook dinner. Yup, amazing feat right?

I bring this particular cooking experience up, because I tried out a couple of new things.

1. I used our small Dutch Oven for the first time, I think Gina might have used it before, but I myself, had not. My in-laws have been giving us Le Creueset for Christmas the last couple of years.

2. I braised some beef short ribs. Never done that before. We buy them all the time to feed to the dogs, I had bought two packs of them and decided that I would cook and eat the second set myself.

3. I followed the recipe that came on the meat packaging. I think the recipe on the meat packaging is fairly universal and not just HEB. But they usually have some sort of recipe / cooking instructions on the sticker that tells you the price and weight. I followed the recipe and it turned out OK. In retrospect, I should have tasted the sauce/gravy that I made out of the broth before applying it to the meat, it could have used a little bit of salt.

I took the meat off the ribs, which was not a hard feat at all, they had cooked long enough that it fell off the bones. The carrots that I had put into the dutch oven with them turned out great. To be honest, it was kind of like pot-roast, but with short ribs.

I never remember how long to cook the Brussels sprouts for, so I had to call Gina. Afterward, when everything was plated up, I sent Gina a picture of what I had made. I opted not to put it up on Twitter, maybe I will post it up here later.

Unfortunately, the whole cleaning the kitchen, dog laundry, etc cost me a few more hours than I had wanted to, as I didn’t complete all of the coding that I had been planning to do this weekend. But I did manage to get a significant portion of what I am working on done. To which, there were a number of things that I was not familiar with how to make the framework do what I wanted to, but after a few hits with the sonic screwdriver, everything started to work just fine.

I hope to be able to do some more coding after I get done with Camp Gladiator. But, honestly I will likely end up eating dinner, taking a hot bath and passing out.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner XBox360, coding, tv cleaning, coding, doctor who, Dogs, netflix, xbox

I am having trouble getting to sleep tonight, so I figured I would knock out a quick blog post. I would be coding, but I just cannot for the life of me focus enough to code. So hopefully I can focus enough to write a little bit.

I mixed up some honey wheat bread the a couple of days ago. The bread didn’t get as good a proofing as I would have hoped for, it didn’t get as tall as I would have liked. The actual proofing of the bread I think was good, in that when it was baked it did not bust open. Bread that hasn’t proofed long enough will “explode” when baking, still edible, but ugly.

Now, let me try to explain the title of this post a little bit. I think I have come up with a decent recipe for Honey Wheat bread. I made the first version of this bread in mid December. I believe that had the desire to try and make a Honey Wheat bread because of the Brioche bread that I had made earlier in the month.

I wanted to add something else to the bread, in part to add some flavor and make it look prettier, but also to help clear out some of the spices I bought previously. I settled on adding some black sesame seeds to the bread. I think it would likely work well with poppy-seeds as well, but I haven’t had the chance to buy any.

I baked the Honey Wheat in a loaf pan instead of on the baking stone. It was tasty, but the bread didn’t quite have enough of a honey flavor for me. I augmented the recipe the second go-around, I doubled the amount of honey that I had put in the first time.

Here is the recipe (as best as I can remember it, really need to start writing these down).

Honey Wheat With Black Sesame Seeds

• 1.5 Cups of lukewarm water
• 1 Cup of Whole Wheat Flour (unbleached)
• 2 Cups of All-Purpose Flour (unbleached)
• 1.5 Tbl Active Yeast (I believe this to be a 1.5 packets)
• 1.5 Tbl Kosher Salt
• 2 Tbl Spoons of Black Sesame Seeds
• 1.5 Cups of Honey

You can mix by hand or with a stand mixer. I mix all of the wet ingredients with the salt and yeast and allow it to site for about 5 minutes. I then mix in the whole wheat flour, after the flour has been mixed into something that can only be described as ‘gruel’, mix in the all-purpose flour, I did it one cup at a time.

If you are mixing by hand, then mix until it feels like you cannot mix it any more and when you see that all of the flour has been mixed in. If you are doing it in the stand mixer, make sure to use the dough hook and stop it when it looks like all the dough has pulled away from the side of the bowl.

Allow the bread about two hours for it’s first rise. You can bake the bread after the first rise, but as I have said before, I really believe that the bread needs to ferment in the fridge over night at least, possibly two nights even.

On baking day, take out the dough and roll it out with a rolling pin, all the while dusting with whole wheat flour to avoid the dough sticking. I like to do a three fold of the rolled dough, folding the two outer edges towards the middle. Then tuck the edges of the bread underneath and place into a greased baking pan.

If your kitchen is fairly warm 70-80 degrees, then you might want to try and break the above recipe into two pieces. If your kitchen is cooler, more like mine is at the moment, then you will likely want to keep this as a single loaf of bread. You can improve the rise of your bread by allowing your bread to rise near the oven, which you should have started preheating to 400 degrees.

Allow your bread to proof for at least 40 minutes, if your kitchen is cooler, then you will want to allow it to proof longer. Bake the bread for about 20 minutes. If the crust has turned a nice brown, then you should lower the temp to 350. If not, then allow your bread to bake for another 5 minutes and check again. After the crust has reached a nice color, bake on 350 for another 15 minutes or so. (might want to check on it 10 minutes in)

Remove the bread from the oven and place on a cooling rack, as soon as the pan is cool to the touch, remove the bread from the pan and place on the cooling rack.

In recent discussion the subject of a ‘proofing box’ came up. I am going to look into the subject some more, as one of the aspects about my bread that I wish to improve is the rise of my bread, my bread tends to be very flat.

Note: Both my first and second batches of this bread were stated to be good. I had at least one co-worker inform me that he thought it was my best bread yet.

Ok, I am not finally sleepy.

Laterz

bdbenner baking baking, bread, bread recipe, honey wheat, recipe

I mean not to get all morbid, but everyone dies sometime.

However, my use of that particular saying, “Not dead, yet!” in regards to what I shouted (or at least I meant for it to come out as a shout, might have sounded a bit more raspy and with a slight hint of wheezing.

(note: when I yelled out ‘Not dead, yet!’ I was half imagining myself on a cart of dead folks from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”)

I made it through my 2nd night of Gladiator Bootcamp. My poor aching body is wishing that I had taken a nice hot bath on Monday and Tuesday night, instead of only just having taken one tonight (Wednesday).

I am sore, I mean to some degree that doesn’t begin to describe the pains I have discovered in my muscles (and my right knee). In terms of my right knee, that one I know exactly what happened there, I tripped and fell last Friday.

I tripped over the gate that we have separating the living room and the kitchen. I don’t know exactly why I tripped, I remember my right shoe catching the top of the gate and me thinking ‘Crap, this is gonna hurt, A LOT.’

I think I was able to cushion the blow with my knee mostly, but I also landed on my right hand (and arm). The pain from that was pretty intense for a few minutes. But once I was able to get up from the floor to a seated position, I figured I wouldn’t need to call anyone for help. After another few minutes, I got myself up onto my feet and didn’t falter.

So, umm I “walked it off” and went about the rest of my day, thinking to myself, “I wonder how bad this is going to effect my performance on the first night of camp gladiator?”

Answer: Not at all really. My knee is sore, but by Monday night, it wasn’t bugging me enough to interfere with the exercises they had us doing.

However, the real question I should have been asking myself was “How would an intense 1 hour work-out effect my body, given that I spend the VAST majority of my time seated at a desk, typing on a keyboard?”

Answer: A LOT!

The pain I feel, is only when I move around, not while just sitting here, which I think is a good thing. Cuz, if I hurt as much as I do when I go up and down stairs, I might have to start drinking at the office.

Anyway, I think you get the point, I am EXTREMELY out-of-shape and have managed to overdue it, a little bit.

I did my best tonight at bootcamp and made my way through all the exercises they threw at us. I will openly admit that I did not complete all of the ‘mountain climber’ sets and that my push-ups look more like I am just holding myself up and moving about what I imagine is like 15cm, maybe 15mm, it’s the metric system and I went to public school in Michigan, you do the math, as I might be a little challenged.

(Just kidding, I actually think my public education was pretty good. It would have been better, had I attended classes more regularly, but that is a post for another time.)

In regards to the push-ups, to me the few centimeters (or millimeters) that I managed to move my body up and down via my chest muscles were like me going through a full-range of motion with what felt like an elephant on my back.

Given that my chest muscles twinge a little bit when I wash my hand vigorously at this point, I am going to say that I am definitely getting a work out, even if I am unable to complete a full push-up.

But this is only the first week. And I am already getting the crazy notion into my head that I might be able to go and do the 5:30am Friday bootcamp. Maybe, possibly, no promises.

I definitely think I will be doing three bootcamps next week, this week might be pushing myself a little bit too much.

In terms of tonight, it was a series of sprints (which due to the my performance on Monday night, I did my best to jog), followed by 50 of each of the following exercises: push-ups, alternating lunges (or ’scissor lunges’), bicycle sit-ups, squats (I did the rowing squats that I have been doing on Wii Fit, just felt more familiar to me), and finally ‘mountain climbers’ (which I cannot do properly, yet).

After doing 50 of each exercise, you had to do two laps around the field, returning to your exercise mat for a set of 24 of each of those same exercises that you just got done doing 50 of. Following your set of 5×25, you doing 1 lap around the field and then take a break.

I finished in 30 minutes and like 5 seconds (might have been 15 seconds, honestly at that point I was proud to be standing under my own power).

I give many props to Kevin, Daniel, Jeremy and Eryn, all of them finished before I did.

The instructor stated that we will be doing that same ‘assessment’ at the end of bootcamp. Provided that I can keep my legs from feeling like they are made of rusty metal, I think I will be able to shave several minutes off my overall time.

The one thing I will say about bootcamp day/night #2. I feel better than I did after night #1.

Don’t get me wrong, I still ache (all over, speaking of, time for more advil), but I honestly at the end of tonight felt my muscles loosening up. I really, really need to get to the field like 10 minutes earlier, and do some good stretches and walk around the field a few times, get limbered up.

At this exact moment, I feel almost normal. Of course soaking in a tub of hot water that has been laced with epsom salt for about 45 minutes does wonders for those aching muscles.

But I might also be feeling good, because apparently Chocolate Milk can aid in recovery after a hard work-out. I have Daniel to thank for this tip, I stated on Twitter that he might be lying to me. And he told me to Google it, to which I found he wasn’t making it up. Check out the search results for yourself.

Ok, the maintenance has been over for a bit and my blog post here is finished up, I need to go and get some sleep.

Laterz

PS. Thanks to everyone running and attending the Camp Gladiator. Everyone is very supportive and it makes pushing yourself to do exercises that I don’t necessarily want to do, easier, keep in mind I paid money for this, so the encouragement is very helpful.

bdbenner Uncategorized austin, bootcamp, bootcamp gladiator, daniel, eryn, exercise, gladiator, jeremy, kevin

(figured I would follow-up the Time Lord post with a similar sounding title)

So let me first start off by saying, I managed to get myself over to the soccer field for Camp Gladiator #7 about 10 minutes later than I had wanted. Honestly though, from the looks of it the folks in charge there I think must have started a little bit before 6:10, because everyone was already doing some serious exercises. That our I mistook the warm-ups for part of the serious workout.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I think it was on Wednesday, one of my coworkers, Eryn Chandler, was mentioning that she went to high school with a friend who’s cousin won the last American Gladiator contest, or something like that. Regardless, of the six-degrees of gladiator separation, I have signed up for Cam Gladiator (#7).

Eryn was talking about how she was thinking about signing up. I heard her asking Kevin if he would do it and he sounded interested at the time. The next day there was much chatter in the office about Camp Gladiator. There was chatter about referrals and how much money you can get for referring someone, I remember hearing Daniel mention that he was going. That is when right about the same time they asked me if I would do it. I had looked the site over the previous day and thought to myself that I didn’t think I was physically fit enough to get $160 worth of exercise (4 weeks of sessions, as many sessions as I want to attend).

Then came the Camp Gladiator Groupon, this is a new thing to me, but Groupon is this sort of weird group coupon system (Group + Coupon = Groupon). I like to think of it as Woot! + Local Business. There is one special a day and they eventually run out of Groupons. The Groupon lowered the price to $70. So that combined with the fact that Kevin said that Jeremy was thinking about doing it, I succumbed to the peer pressure of exercise.

I stated that I would do the camp if Jeremy would. However, Kevin managed to finish talking me into it, not that he was hard selling me on it, but at this point Eryn, Kevin, and Daniel were all signed up. So I figured, heck I will sign-up. I am not saying that Jeremy signed up because I did, but I did sign-up before he did.

The first session (for us) was last night, 6:10p - 7:10p, out at a soccer field near the intersection of Braker and Mopac.

It was chilly when we started and proceeded to get COLD. I will definitely need to wear a sweatshirt next time around.

We did sprints, push-ups, jumping jacks, ’sexy spiders’, ‘crab walks’, ‘crab shuffles’ (think that was the name), ’super-mans’, ‘bananas’, and some sort of weird V-shaped sit-up thing. It was very intense.

As previously posted, I am trying to get into better shape. I can honestly say that if I had not been doing a bit of the Wii Fit every night, then I would most likely have not been able to do as many of the exercises that everyone was doing at Camp Gladiator last night. I mean don’t get me wrong, I got winded very early-on and had to slow down my pace, but every time I felt that I was recovered, I ‘kicked the intensity back up’ as to try and get the most out of my $70.

I am not sure if I will do another Camp Gladiator or not. I think I will need to see how I am feeling by the end of these four weeks. One personal goal that I have for week three and week four, is to do three sessions a week. These first two weeks I think are going to really kick my ass.

I am going to try and alternate the Wii Fit with the Camp Gladiator nights. I have the Camp Gladiator session in my Google Calendar, thus allowing them show-up on my iPhone. Mondays and Wednesday nights. I think I am going to try and hit up a Friday session on weeks three and four.

Anyway, I need to finish my lunch and get back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner cam gladiator, daniel, eryn, exercise, friends, jeremy, kevin, wii fit bootcamp, camp gladiator, eryn wii fit, excercise, jeremy, kevin