Another day another workout. I slacked off a bit there for E3 and the couple weeks afterwards, getting only a handful of workouts in. but I'm back in full force now.

I have a new enemy too, Squats with calf raises. They really take it out of my upper legs. But I trust that they too will get easier with time. And no, Jumping Lunges are not "easy" now, though I can get through one set of them at least.

Time for shower.

It was my birthday today.

After a small gathering last night for some Carcasonne and Boom Blox Blast Party with really heavy Chocolate Cake from Costco, I brought in colossal Costco cupcakes to work for people to munch on.

"Woah" is the proper response, or at least the one I heard all day today. Have plenty left over for tomorrow too...

Glad I did my EA Sports Active this morning.

The presents:
1 Sonoma shirt outfit combo thing from sister, very snazzy, I like when others dress me since I suck at it.
1 100$ gift card to Younkers/Boston Store. Very nice, though since I'm bad at dressing me, I will have to take my Mom's advice and buy "some sandals and shorts."
and finally...
1 Phone call from my parents at The Cheesecake Factory in Omaha, NE to me at my house in Madison, WI telling me they were ordering Godiva Chocolate Cheesecake to celebrate my birthday.

Grrrr, so jealous.

Okay this is sweet. I just found out my picture gallery supports Cooliris (formerly Piclens). Go to http://www.cooliris.com/. Install the plugin and restart firefox/IE/Safari. Then go to one of my photo albums at http://gallery.figarocastle.org, like this one. Then either click "view slideshow" on the left of the page or hover over a thumbnail till you get the arrow icon to pop up and click that. Voila, pretty sweet.

Slow computers may not like it so much.

So it claims I'm on day 19, but that's not entirely true since I just had a week away for E3 2009! Look at all that stuff we posted. I am especially proud of this video. Mikel will never forgive me for getting it.

Anyway, back to my workouts. it's good to be back in the saddle again. And it doesn't seem like I lost too much by missing a week. My weight hasn't gone up any, and I was able to finish everything today. Though I must say, the game must have been upset I was gone, as it gave me more of those evil squat jumps today. I struggled through them, and the game thinks I completed them. I think it was one of the sloppiest attempts at squat jumps that has likely ever been attempted on this planet...but at least I didn't skip the exercise this time.

Other than that, this weekend has been about publishing a glut of stuff on RPGamer that I got from E3. Videos, impressions, podcast wrap-up, all that. Please do check it out and let me know if it was any good. :)

I'm also completely off schedule and way overslept for church today, silly time zones. Oh well, time to get a healthy lunch and scan through a bunch of that E3 coverage I DVR'd off of G4 this past week.

Oh! I also need to watch some of the Conan O'Brien episodes from this past week. Was his debut good?

I tried a high intensity work out today. I believe I may have been pusing a bit too hard in it. I finally had to skip exercises. They had these jumping squats which were rather intense, but then they followed it up with something that seemed downright dangerous--the jumping lunge.

In the jumping lunge you put a foot in front of you and kneel forward, your front leg is making a nice right angle with the floor and your rear shin is nearly parallel to the floor. Your front foot is flat and the rear foot is on the ball of the foot. Fine, just a normal lunge, right? Then you are supposed to jump into air from this position, switch your legs and land with the other foot forward, completing a crouch back into the original lunge position. Only now your legs are opposite they way you started. Oh and do it slowly to help work the muscles.

Yeah, I don't know how to land that slowly, or even safely. I tried like four of them and felt like my leg muscles were going to end up getting ripped off of my bones. Not to mention the game was complaining that I was doing it too fast, even when I waited for the little animated guy before doing it, apparently I needed to control my landing and do it slower. No idea how that's supposed to work.

So I skipped the jumping lunges, and am going to go back down to a medium intensity workout next time.

Other than that, I'm still really enjoying doing the workouts. I really hope this continues. :)

Oh and I'm now wondering if anyone at EA actually tried wearing the strap and completing a workout. I cannot understand how it can stay on for anybody at this point, I have it fall off 3 or 4 times a session.

Yes, there's no day 1 cause I didn't think to do this until day two.

First off, I've been twittering a lot, as it's faster, easier, and less time consuming than bloggin, so most of my updates can be found at http://www.twitter.com/sabin1001. You can watch what I"m doing without having an account, though it's much more fun to join in and post as well. I'll spare you by not reposting tweets on my blog as I'm not sure of anyone who actually likes to see those.

So onto the Wii, on Tuesday Nintendo made out rather well from me. I picked up Big Bang Mini (a shoot 'em up for the DS), Punch Out! (I'm a minor circuit champion!) for the Wii, a Wii Fit, and EA Sports Active. While the first two games are fun, I'm most excited about Active, as it's my new plan to lose some weight. I was down to ~170lbs after an initial cholesterol scare in 2004, but now I'm back up to 220, so I need to cut some weight again and this looks like a better way to do it than DDR.

I'm done with the first two days where I burned around 500 calories in the two "medium intensity" (I'm really scared to try the high intensity option) workouts I've had so far. And I hurt all over, especially my legs. They burnses, they do. SIlly fat hobbit legs...okay so maybe gollum isn't the best workout motivator but still.

Mikel tells me I should work out in the evenings too to help loosen up the muscles. I just wish the game would affirm that as well, as I was kind of hoping it'd be taking the full on "I'm your personal trainer" roll. Nevertheless, I will definitely keep going with this, it's fun, I know it's working cause of all the sweat, and most importantly--it has me doing excercise. Hard to have a more successful fitness product than the one that actually gets you to do work. More posts to come.

Oh, and if anyone else who has the game can figure out what I need to do to make it recognize lunges with my left leg better (like...at all) and get the strap to stay on my right leg better, please let me know.

So my latest obsession is with live streaming. I'm playing with stickam and am going to try to start streaming the RPGCast live when we record it on Saturdays. I'm excited to get user feedback while we're doing the show and I think it'll help the show feel bigger and more interactive. Kind of an experiment right now, but hey, anything that works for TWiT should work for me.

The live stream is available here: http://www.stickam.com/sabin1001

Note that it's not going to be up all the time, usually just Saturday's from 11AM - 1PM Central time.

New Sneakers
Socks
Candy
Two new button up shirts
Pair of Jeans
Pair of black khakis
Pajamas
Xbox live points
Check from grandparents A
Check from grandparents B

So I was at Target the other night and I saw this while walking into the store. I think some employees were having some fun.

Also, I posted all of my pics from my trip to Seattle this year. Included are my pics of the Weird Al concert I went to. Unfortunately I was a bit far to get really good pictures, but c'est la vie.

http://figarocastle.org/gallery/v/seattle08/

Okay yesterday we hit up the fair again, this time to see Weird Al. It was awesome, of course. It was raining during the entire concert (the concert was in an outdoor grandstand), and it completely didn't matter.

I was surprised at one part, usually the Star Wars songs come at the end, I thought. They make up a great encore. But not this time, they were in the middle. At the end was Albuquerque. All like 11 minutes of it, with two minutes extra in the middle there where Al came up with new donut flavors. You have to know the song to understand...

Anyway, that was yesterday. Today we went to dinner at our favorite restaurant that we found last year. Nishino. We had the Exclusive Omakase. Oh. My. Gosh. A flavor explosion. For 75$ (you can get the normal omakase for 60$, but I mean come on, this was exclusive) they put together an 8 course meal for you consisting of the chef's choice from all over the menu. It was fantastic.

Mikel and I's favorite was the Miso marinated black broiled cod. It was like butter. So tender, so juicy, so wonderful. Honorable mention goes to the succulent salmon in the sashimi salad and the ice cream thing that I can't describe.

Tomorrow the food adventure continues. A couple days ago we hit up Kidd Valley for a good burger, and tomorrow we'll compare that to Red Mill. Yummy burgers for the win.

I'm vacationing in Seattle again this year. Spending a week with Mikel (Firemyst) before going to PAX.

I arrived on Saturday evening and after a good night's sleep we headed out to the Evergreen State Fair (named after Washington being the Evergreen State, it's not actually the State Fair---I know, confusing).

Blah blah blah, fair, booths, vendors, rides, good food. Here's the pics. LOOK AT THE CUTE CHILD. HER NAME IS VIVIAN AND SHE WILL RUN THIS WORLD.

Those of you who interact with me on a regular basis know I've been battling with Persona 3 for...a long time. This game has been not ending and not ending and still going and getting put off and getting picked up and so on since like at least last September if not earlier. So it makes me quite happy to announce, that finally.

Persona 3 is completed.

Now, I just have to get through "The Answer" expansion disc....it's never going to end.

Oh and no, I have no interest at this time in the upcoming Persona 4. No more > 100 hour RPGs for me. I have better things to do.

Just a quick update to folks that I'm out at E3 2008 all this week. I'm putting up podcasts almost every day, so you can check for those here: http://www.rpgamer.com/rpgcast

So many games, so many appointments, so much to post. :) That said, I'm really having fun using my new Nikon D60 and Zoom H4 to pick up pictures and audio to post. It's a great time and I hope everyone is enjoying RPGamer's coverage.

So I got up early this morning so I could wait in a line. Yes, the line for the iPhone 3G. So yeah, I got one, white 16GB. Everyone else seemed to want the black one, so I got the white just to stand out that much more.

Anyway, figured I live in freaking Madison, WI, so while there are surely some iPhone fanatics, it wouldn't be something I have to worry about. So I set my alarm for 6:30 am, showered and drove down to the mall to get in line. I was probably behind like a hundred people or something when I arrived near 7:00AM. Whatever, we waited and had fun talking about apple and iphones and stuff till 8 AM when the doors open and they slowly started taking people into the store.

And then took more people in.

And then took more in.

Half an hour later, no one had left the store yet...Eventually the first guy came out and it was clear something was wrong. The iTunes activation servers were not working. Ouch. But that wasn't all, the AT&T activation purchasing servers, where they set your plan and sign you up for a contract before checking you out, were going abysmally slow. Eventually, they had to give upon the iTunes activation and just tell people to activate the phone at home. But even so, the AT&T/purchasing part of the process was still taking over 20 minutes per person... and that was only after they decided what they wanted and got their credit checked if they were a new account. So I got to wait and wait and wait until around 10:30AM, when I was finally able to get into the store.

Of course, around that exact moment, the AT&T servers started working properly again, and the iTunes activation started working again. So the guy who checked me out praised me for being the fastest guy to get through the process so far (it helped that I had a current iPhone, apparently upgrading from one iPhone to the other is a simpler process), I was done in like 10 minutes.

I felt bad for being so late for work, but by the time it was clear I'd be late, there were a couple hundred people behind me in line, so I knew I either had to tough it out or wait until sometime next week for a new shipment of phones to arrive... So far, everyone at work has been pretty understanding. But if someone isn't, I'll just have to flash the new phone at them and hope it distracts them long enough to change the topic.

So, any of you out there who read my blog regularly...do you twitter? If so, do you want to email me your twitter account so I can follow you? Or just send me a message on twitter itself. My twitter account is, unsurprisingly:

sabin1001

Also, I picked up the Final Fantasy XI Premium Box Collection and a couple of other soundtracks I didn't have from Square Enix's online store for the US (http://www.cdjapan.co.uk I love you, but if I can buy domestically and save money, I will). This box is huge. Like, really really huge. Here's a photo:

Oh, and first photo I took with my new camera is like my favorite photo of my cat Simon ever:

Yay, it's my birthday today. Had some people come over and play some Mario Kart Wii and Raving Rabbids 2. Real fun, then of course came the requisite cake and ice cream.

Present roundup:
Fun and good times
50$ Best Buy gift card from parents
Nikon D60 Digital SLR camera from myself to me

So that makes today a good day. Though pulling the trigger on that camera was pretty hard to do. See my current camera stopped working all of a sudden, and basically I could pay to have Canon repair it, or buy a new one. I've wanted a real nice camera for so long, that I think this is the right thing to do, rather than throw more money into cameras that can't do what I really want to do. That said, still hard to do.

Anyway, I should have more pictures up soon from new camera.

Oh, here's my full album of Vegas pictures:
http://figarocastle.org/gallery/v/emcworld08/

Quick update, was in Atlanta, Georgia (well technically Duluth, but everyone assumes that's Minnesota) this past week for a training class. Class went well (was for doing performance analysis and troubleshooting of an EMC Symmetrix disk array), but the flight back on Thursday did not.

I had to wait like 4 hours at the airport due to the class being over basically half a day early. That was fine, I caught up on some podcasts and videos on my iPhone. Yay iPhone. So I finally get to leave at 8:55 and we fly to Milwaukee where we come upon some thunderstorms. That was the worst turbulence I've ever experienced. It was very scary and we had to attempt to land three times before we finally did. Apparently wind shear is bad. Oh but the worst was not over.

Then we (me and the others going to Madison) have to wait over an hour for the flight to Madison due to continuing thunderstorms and lightning keeping the planes on the ground. Okay...no problem, I can wait, more iPhone. Finally get on the plane and off the ground and fly the 16 minutes it takes to get to Madison...and then we hit the worst turbulence I've ever experienced. Yes, this flight one-upped the previous one. It was sickening and even scarier. Then the pilot comes on, Madison is surrounded by storms and we're returning to Milwaukee.

Fail.

More turbulence and we land. No details on what's next, we deplane to find details at the counter. But thank goodness, someone had a good idea, they arranged a bus and set us up to drive back to Madison (only like an hour and twenty minutes, so really the best option at this point). So I arrive to the airport and wearily walk to my car since it's 2:30 AM at this point.

The battery was dead.

One jump start from a parking lot worker and i get home at like 3:30 AM and pass out and have to take a sick day due to exhaustion and allergies.

It was not a good day.

Finishing off my stay in Vegas today. I was able to cram two separate events into my time after the work conference today.

First up was the thing any self-respecting geek has to do while in Vegas. The Star Trek experience. This was a lot smaller than I expected it to be. In fact I didn't even bother spending time in the "museum." Which is more like a glorified hallway with Star Trek pictures and facts printed in various displays along it.

I did get to go on the two rides they have, though. Those were pretty fun. They maintain a good suspension of disbelief and actually the way the Klingon attack ride works, you really are surprised at the start. They do a great job of setting you up and getting you into the events of the ride.

Beyond the rides, all there really is is a nice gift shop with tribbles and expensive autograph photos and stuff. And then there's Quark's bar. I would have liked to stop in and see if they had any Gagh, but I didn't have time. I had to be on my way to the next show.

Which was the Tournament of Kings at The Excalibur. If you've ever been to Medieval Times, you've basically seen this show. It's pretty much the same thing. Each audience section has a knight (in this case, a King) representing them, they fight for a while, there's comedy, a lot of cheering and booing, and a dramatic fight scene. I got to be in the Dragon section, which means we all got to cheer for the bad guys, which is great fun.

However, I have to say, the French section right next to us stole the show for me. They were far and away the section that was the most into it. They cheered loudest, booed other Kings loudest, and generally played up to the performers the best. It was laughable how crazy they would go when the French King was nearby or acknowledged them or anything. And he should get some credit too, as he was the best performer in my opinion, playing up to his crowd in a way no one else was able to. Lots of nice subtlety. Oh and the Spanish King made a rude gesture to the French (who of course were booing him already) during his introduction on his way in down to his section. Nice touch.

That's it for Vegas though. Gonna get an milk shake sent up to my room, pack, and then get to bed so I can be ready for my flight in the morning. I'm sure to miss it, but looking back at the week, there's really only one or two things I didn't see that I feel like I missed out on (like that darn M&M shop that I can't find). All in all it was a pretty cool week.

Oh, and the lions at the MGM Grand were out today.