Mike Pirnat

Back in the summer of 2007, I was doing an okay job of getting back into a decent exercise habit, motivated largely by the impending arrival of our first child–knowing that once she arrived, I was going to have to massively reprioritize my time. Between the day-to-day parenting existence and my wildly see-sawing work schedule, I pretty much haven’t worked out at all in almost two years. The effects are written all over my body, and to my chagrin I have to confront them every day. I could really stand to lose 20 (okay, fine, 25) pounds, if only I could figure out how to get off my lazy ass and get moving.

I thought I might break out of my “need to work out/don’t want to work out” spiral with the arrival of Wii Fit in our house. Hooray, I thought, this will give us a fun way to get some physical activity throughout the long, dark Cleveland winter! While that was a nice idea, it quickly fizzled out (for reasons I’ll rant about in a moment), and the Fit board mostly gathered dust.

What might actually do the trick for me is the new EA Sports Active, which I bought for Liz as a belated Mother’s Day present once I realized that enough hints had been dropped about it. After watching her go through her first workout with it, I figured I would give it a try; I’m now three workouts in and am overall much more optimistic about it than I ever was about Wii Fit.

Wii Fit, Wii Fit… Where to begin? It had such noble intentions, but was a dismal failure in our house. Maybe it was the vast array of tedious mini-games that I got worse at the more I tried them (oh boy, I get to pick between so many things I hate to do!). Maybe it’s the mini-game structure, where minor slip-ups terminate the game and cut short your physical activity. Maybe it was the physical discomfort of many of the “exercise” mini-games; really, I am a lot happier doing push-ups when my hands aren’t pressed into the pointy, textured surface of the Fit board. Maybe it’s the unhealthy obsession with BMI, which is surely not a one-size-fits-all metric of health.

More than anything else, though, I think it’s Wii Fit’s attitude, its saccharine-coated condescension. After inviting you to step on, it emits a gasp of shock and dismay, a cutesy little “oh!” that is silently followed by “my gosh you’re uncomfortably heavy.” If you play in the evening it’ll scold you about your sleep habits. If you don’t play for a while, it mockingly chides you for your inattention–or worse, asks other, more regular players if you’re still there. And if you do try to get back into the habit after a period of being away, Wii Fit will ask with sneering faux-innocence if maybe you shouldn’t “set a goal that’s easier to achieve.” Fuck you, Wii Fit, I don’t need that shit.

EA Sports Active, by stark contrast, is all about blowing sunshine up your ass. It’s hard to go more than five seconds without it spouting compliments like “you’re showing me great dedication today,” “you’re grace in motion,” and “work it!” I’m trying the 30-day challenge, in which the game crafts workouts of escalating intensity and challenge for me, and during each workout there’s already a fixed set of exercises you’ll be doing, so there’s no wasting time figuring out which mini-game to do next–your virtual trainer is going to give you what it’s going to give you, and you’d better learn to like it. (This may also be why the iTunes Genius feature is so appealing to me–I have too many choices in life, so it’s nice for something else to make the trivial ones for me.) It’s smart about working different parts of your body, so you’ll come away from each workout feeling like you’ve done something. The leg strap for the nunchuck, though not perfect, is a welcome relief from having to just “put the controllers in your pockets” as Wii Fit suggests for many of its exercises. I really like that you can work out with a buddy–an impossibility with Wii Fit. And in the trophy system, EA’s done a great job mimicking the Xbox 360’s achievements; they’re strangely motivating in a way that getting high scores or star ratings on Wii Fit never was.

But EA Sports Active isn’t without frustration. The resistance band that comes with the game doesn’t offer nearly enough tension for an effective workout, and using a real resistance band (ours have their own rubber handles to grip) means that you’ll have a hard time holding on to it and the Wii controllers at the same time. And that effusive praise is quickly replaced with polite but annoying reminders to “slow down and watch how I do it” or concerns that “you don’t seem to be doing it right” whenever one of the controllers isn’t held exactly right. Tonight it stopped me in mid-curl for two minutes while it lost track of the controllers and kept insisting that I needed to hold the nunchuck perfectly still. Timing in general seems to be a problem–it won’t recognize a move until the trainer avatar starts to do it, and then your personal onscreen avatar lags noticeably behind your own motions, never quite exactly matching up with what you’re doing. It’s like watching yourself on tape delay. These minor timing problems add up too, as the start of your next rep is delayed by your onscreen persona’s laggy completion (plus some fudge factor while the game decides if you’ve actually completed the rep correctly); I got pretty steamed at my virtual trainer when she scolded me for not keeping the correct rhythm, when the game itself was altering that rhythm by taking too long to realize I’d finished a rep. I think most of the blame can be laid on the Wii hardware itself, which for me has always had some severe weakness when it comes to figuring out the controller position and orientation; I think EA Sports Active pushes the envelope a little too far and exposes how imperfect the Wii controls really are. If Microsoft is able to really deliver on the promise of the (admittedly horribly-named, OMG what were they thinking?!) Project Natal, they’ll be poised to annihilate the Wii in this space. (Honestly, I’m not sure how much longer I can tolerate that pesky nunchuck cord.)

With only three workouts down, I’ve got quite a ways to go before I know if this will really get me over my motivation problems and help shrink my “computer science tummy,” but so far I’m a lot more optimistic about EA Sports Active than I ever was with Wii Fit. Given my similar lack of blogging motivation over the past 24 months or so, it’s probably a good sign that it’s prompted over a thousand words here. If only typing burned more calories…

health, life, naughty-words, video-games ea sports active, project natal, wii, wii fit, xbox 360

I spent the better part of a week in bed with a nasty case of influenza–chills, aches, sweats, nausea, digestive “issues”, 102.9 degree fever–the works. And once again, everyone in my family had the great taste to all get sick at the exact same time, so you can imagine the fun that Liz and I had trying to comfort and care for Claire while we were clobbered by the bug.

But! Surprise, surprise! It turns out that even influenza can have a silver lining or two.

First, I lost six pounds, which is nice in the wake of holiday indulgence and a baby-driven complete lack of regular exercise routine.

More importantly, I now know what’s happening to my sock drawer.

About once a week, I find my sock drawer in disarray, half-open and mixed-up, with two or three pairs on the floor in front of the dresser. I’d been wondering why and how for a while. Luckily, when one spends a week in bed with said dresser in direct view, one gets a chance to observe the cause and culprit first-hand–namely, Valentine the cat. She’s figured out how to open the drawer, then jumps up onto the dresser and starts digging in the socks until she’s satisfied with the disaster she’s caused. I watched her steal four pairs of socks before she finally got bored and dashed off to chase her sister. I just about died laughing.

I know I sound like a broken record–but I’d really love to have a couple weeks or even a month of 2008 in which I’m not being devastated by the illness of the week.

cats, claire, health, humor, liz

I was really looking forward to writing some more about our “first Christmas” experiences, or of our post-Christmas road trip to Chicago for a Boyd-side reunion of sorts, or Liz’s 30th birthday festivities (oh, the wine!), the exciting new year to come, but instead I’ve been absolutely annihilated by some sort of mutant cold virus that’s busy devastating our house.

I’m sick. Liz is sick. Worst of all, Claire is sick.

Normally I’m content to lie in bed and feel awful until I’ve kicked whatever I’ve come down with, but when the baby is sick, that hide-in-the-covers-and-pretend-to-be-dead time evaporates. She wants hands-on attention whenever she’s awake, won’t sleep for more than an hour at a time, and largely refuses to sleep if she’s not being rocked to sleep in one’s arms. It’s hard to get healthy when you’re trying to be a good parent, and hard to be a good parent if you aren’t healthy enough to stand up.

So it’s a tricky game around here, and not a lot of fun. Hopefully 2008 starts to improve soon…

children, claire, health

Dad got through his surgery okay, and should (hopefully) be coming home by the end of the week (maybe today).

Let me back up.

Last Wednesday, while eating dinner at I Trulli in New York, my cell phone did something it never does, especially when I’m sitting next to Liz–it rang. Mom was calling to let me know that Dad had slipped on an embankment while taking pictures of a train, and the resulting spill had broken his ankle in at least three places. They got him splinted, stabilized (and loaded up on happy meds) and planned to take him back to the other side of the mountains since he preferred to have the obviously necessary surgery performed by Durango colleagues that he knew well.

Tuesday’s surgery took an extra hour (clocking in at close to three hours) because they found more breaks than the X-rays indicated. Something about the fibia being in five pieces when they expected three, and that’s not even the whole of it. Mom says he’s got a plate and about twelve pins in him now to try to get everything reassembled correctly. For various reasons, they had him on a spinal anesthetic rather than general, so he got to watch the whole thing on a monitor. Ordinary folks would probably go mad from the trauma, but, doctor and stoic that he is, he described it as alternating between “interesting” and “tedious.”

He’s doing relatively well, all things considered, and seems to have gotten the message that he needs to take this seriously and obey orders. We’re not sure how long he’s going to be away from work, but the prognosis so far is at least six weeks of no weight-bearing activity whatsoever, and a minimum of six weeks of physical therapy after that. Thankfully, northawke’s parents have been very kind in helping get the house set up for him and have been a huge help to my mom as well. We’re not sure what this will do to their plans to visit this fall–and even if they do come out, they should have plenty of fun with the TSA as he’ll be setting off the metal detector for some months to come.

“At least,” I told him after the surgery, “you should be thankful you aren’t a horse.” He laughed and agreed.

family, health

As of today, I can finally stop beating around the bush about the Giant Scary Project Which Ate My Life, and declare to all the world (or at least that infinitesimal small fraction that reads my blog) that the new AG.com reminders site is live! We saw all those little web-twenny startups having so much fun making AJAXy calendaring apps that we just couldn’t resist… It’s a huge step up over our previous offering, a third-party system that I had the privilege of maintaining, and it gives us a great opportunity for future cycles of growth and improvement.

It’s fair to say that there are probably a few strange little niggling issues that we didn’t uncover during our testing, so be gentle with it, and bear with us as we patch the things that crop up. Pretend it’s one of those sites that says “beta” on it for years at a time (thus ensuring that all is forgiven no matter what goes wrong). Only prettier.

Kudos and thanks to everybody on my team — especially Cory Sitko and David Noyes, who, in addition to kicking ass above and beyond the call of duty, had to put up with me going quite crazy as we approached our launch.

…

And from the serendipitous timing department, I am very pleased to announce that my season in goopy-eyed allergy hell seems to be at an end at long last. It’s a lot easier to run around smashing code bugs when I can see the darn things.

health, work

Bleah. Totally run down. Stressed out, burned out, and all-around fried. But still clinging desperately to life in the hopes that it might all settle down at some point. (It has to settle down, right?)

Thanks to a bumper crop of ragweed, I have spent the last two weeks wanting to claw my eyes out. Puffy. Sore. Goopy. Crusted over when I wake up. I feel like someone has scraped sandpaper over my corneas. I feel like I haven’t slept since the allergies really kicked in.

Work is a super giant happy fun ball of stress as I attempt to coordinate a lot of last-minute things, deal with incomprehensible bug reports, and generally attempt to save the world. So far… meh… I think the world’s still in trouble. It’s taken me until today to start working on the things I was supposed to be doing on Monday. I guess it would help if I could get more than five minutes of uninterrupted time, but apparently that’s out of the question at this point. *sigh*

I’m way behind on dealing with some vaguely important email for Clepy. I have had a tiff with DirecTV over their habit of failing to send me a bill and then charging me lots of late fees. (Surprisingly, not the first time they’ve done that to me…)

And it doesn’t help that I’ve had things to do every night this week: Clepy (and post-Clepy festivities) on Monday, wine group Tuesday, German class Wednesday, and an appointment tonight. Tomorrow, I expect I’ll probably just stay late at work, except that the parts for the new closet organizer system thing have arrived and I want to get started on that too.

Good lord, it’s Thursday, and I still haven’t picked up the new Star Wars DVD’s, with the Han-shoots-first-thank-you-very-much original cut. For those that know me, that should give you an indication of what a general shitstorm it’s been lately.

On the plus side, I finished The Confusion over Labor Day weekend. On the minus side, I still have about a thousand pages (hardback!) of The System of the World still to go… by which point I suspect that I will need to re-read Cryptonomicon since it has enough bits that tie in with the other books. It’d be easier if my eyes didn’t feel like they were about to explode out of my head (see above).

…And I think I might have finally hit the point where Gentoo in particular, and Linux in general, is dead to me, the way someone who crosses Tony Soprano ends up in the deli slicer, or taken out to the Pine Barrens and disappeared. Midway through my third (fourth?) day of trying to get the emerge -eav world step of the upgrade to gcc-4.1, I am just about at the end of my geek rope. I fell in love with Gentoo because its packaging and update system “just worked”, freeing me up to waste my time configuring and tweaking everything else to be just so. But this update is just insultingly murderous, as all kinds of supposedly stable things just won’t fucking build right–because, y’know, that would be too easy. So, even if I have to turn in my geek badge and live life as a lesser mortal, beholden to the software update whims of Apple, I think that’d be okay with me, because this kind of time-waste is something I simply cannot allow in my life any longer.

Grr. Argh!

books, clepy, computers, geekery, gentoo, health, house, life, linux, naughty-words, rants, work

Okay, I surrender. Life has officially kicked my ass, culminating in a spectacular, week-long coup de gras involving crazy cat Julia, Liz’s Powerbook, and my now thoroughly bandaged right arm.

In general, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy, too crappy to even whine about things on LiveJournal. Work has been extraordinarily stressful–it’s been “crunch time” since early March, and I’ve lost count of the nights, weekends, and extra hours I’ve put in. To make things even better, I’ve had an especially difficult cycle of depression, much, much worse than the occasional gloomy day or down week that I get every six months or so. Nosiree, I’ve been having a soul-crushing feeling of complete emptiness, which, let me tell you, is a huge productivity boost. Liz has been a saint in putting up with me, but I’ve finally gotten it through my head that a patient wife alone won’t fix my issues, so I think it’s time for me to find some form of professional help to get my metaphorical shit together. Of course, that means I have to figure out when I will be able to do that, but at least it’s a start.

Back to this week… Last Friday I started getting a sore throat. It was worse on Saturday, but I still went into the office for our scheduled “I need you to come in this weekend, mm’kay” day. I spent most of Sunday in bed, my head spinning and full of goo, so that I could be rested enough to go to work on Monday… where my Monday to-do’s kept getting interrupted by more pressing matters. I was still feeling dead enough Monday night that I decided to ditch Clepy and come home to rest more; and it’s a good thing I did, because I was able to be home to play every home owner’s favorite game, “Why Is My Kitchen Ceiling Dripping?” I managed to find and shut off the source of the leak, but now we’ve got more unexpected action items on the “fix the stupid house” list. On Tuesday my cold started to shift out of my head and into my chest, and my still-unfulfilled Monday tasks lost out to again more immediate issues. When I woke up on Wednesday morning, I was coughing in great, uncontrollable fits, and I’d managed to wrench my neck and upper back such that normal motion wasn’t going to happen. Still, I had spillover work from Tuesday’s schedule-derailments, which I then spent most of the day fighting with from home. Yesterday I felt decent enough to go to work, where unplanned spillover from Tuesday and Wednesday’s unplanned work occupied most of the day.

Today, I am mostly recovered from the cold, though still a bit phlegmy, but my neck and back are worse than ever. Liz procured heat wraps and I downed a bunch of Advil; the plan was that I’d spend the day sprawled on my back on the couch, working from home with her laptop. It was a great plan until the cats decided that it was Thunderdome time, and Julia came rocketing onto me at top speed, leaving my arm torn and bleeding and exploding keys off of Liz’s Powerbook.

Liz got me bandaged up, and I managed to get everything reattached except for the “J” key, whose little grabby teeth had been snapped off by the force of the feline impact. She’s off to the Apple Store to see if they stock spare J’s at the Genius Bar, and I’m here waving the white flag at life.

You hear me life? You can let up now. Uncle. UNCLE!!!

clepy, health, house, life, liz, naughty-words, photos, work

PyCon is drawing to a close; our fellow sprinters trickle away to the airport or the highways in little groups of one and two. So it’s time to reflect briefly on the experience (or something). So, what have I learned this year? Let’s break it down, unordered-list style:

• Speaking in front of a huge crowd is a rush. It’s even better when they laugh at proper places (which they did). Proper preparation definitely pays (and paid) off!
• A two-man presentation is doable, but has some logistical difficulties. Next time, we should try to do separate one-man gigs. Time to start figuring out what to talk about!
• Never assume that just because the hotel offers wireless network access, it will be any good.
• Kid is all kinds of wacky inside. But it’s getting better.
• Recursive generator functions are fun!
• Speed tests are a great idea… except when they take too long to run.
• A head cold is a sneaky bugger. Bring tissues from your hotel room when you’re going to be sitting in the language creator’s keynote for 90 minutes, because otherwise your head will become an embarassing fountain of snot. (Whee, boogers everywhere!!)
• A whole lot of stuff seems funny after a couple rounds of sangria.
• It is possible to assassinate a vacuum. And to be 10,000 percent positive about it. Who knew?
  
• Hacking on IM chatter bots is fun too.
• The temperature at a conference is a fickle thing, capable of flip-flopping from ice planet to geek sauna and back again throughout the course of the day. When your mom said to dress in layers, she knew what she was talking about.
• “Those hacker people are scary.”
  
• They do, in fact, make cheese spicy enough to cure a head cold.
• The American Airlines fax-yourself-a-boarding-pass is a great idea, and could only be better if it actually printed the all-important bar code rather than the little red “x” of IE broken image sorrow.
• It is vitally important to run alsamixer and mute all your sound channels before sending a birthday e-card to your mom. You will not be able to click through before the flash loader starts making noise.
• NerdBooks.com is really cool, and potentially very dangerous.
• If you’re catering a convention of laptop-toting computer geeks, it’s probably a good idea to avoid serving things like soup and saucy pasta.
• “Healthier Burger” is pretty good, but it’s not $9 good.
• Don’t park your BMW under the trees in Addison. Just trust me.
  
• No matter how much my desk job might frustrate, at least I’m not pressure-washing the bird crap off of the parking lot every night at 1 AM.
• Last year I was always looking in from the outside at the little Cheerio-like clusters of people who already knew each other; this year I’m part of one. Acceptance rocks.
• Getting paid to have this much fun is damn nice.
• Beware inebriated Python programmers with overdeveloped senses of humor…

This would be where I offer some sort of deeply insightful conclusion that transforms the way you perceive the world around you and is a turning point in your journey toward greater enlightenment… But I’m too lazy, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

food, geekery, health, photos, pycon, python, travel

Having (finally) had some success with Twisted and Jabber, I am taking a moment to celebrate with a bottle of Harp. The NerdBooks.com party was pretty cool, though mellow. They have an insane selection of books — everything from animation to signal processing. As it turns out, they have insanely great prices on things too, and I only now realized that books purchased on premises would ring up at their online prices rather than their cover prices. Argh!! On the plus side, they also seem to have surprisingly reasonable shipping rates too, so maybe I’ll pick up a few things as early birthday presents for myself. They put out a nice spread of food, and the extremely hot pepperjack cheese has enabled me to breathe freely once again.

Beyond that, it’s been a nice evening of chilling in the hotel lobby, taking advantage of the comfy chairs, interesting company, and the conference’s free wireless. Met a nice chap from Slovenia; chatted with Kevin Dangoor for a bit; tinkered with code; shot the proverbial breeze with fellow Clevelanders David Stanek and Ian Maurer.

Overheard in the lobby: “Is it a convention of Laptop People or something?”

My most quotable utterance of the evening: “We need something like WSGI, but for management.” (You kind of had to be there.)

Yep…. Good times. Definitely good times.

beer, geekery, health, humor, photos, pycon, python, twisted

My head is full of drippy goo, and the wireless network keeps flaking out on me; this combination makes it really hard to focus on getting anything done. In Twisted terms, getting dog-ass sick was a Deferred, and I’m now living through the callback.

Joy.

Small victories today…

• Got ahold of Paul McGuire during brief periods when wireless worked for both of us, and he was kind enough to share his adventureEngine.py with me; its command parser/handler seems like a great fit for what I want to do with my silly Twisted bot (to make it simultaneously less and more silly than it already is).
• Discovered that there is, in fact, an example Jabber client in the Twisted docs–it’s just not linked to on their web site. (D’oh.) I’ve managed to get it to auth (or at least it claims to have authed), but I can’t seem to get it to “hear” anything else, which it probably needs to be able to do at some point. Think my next step is to just try running a Jabber server on my laptop and see if that helps things work any better.
• Note to self: one of the lightning talk speakers today is building an all-Python Z-machine interpreter. w00t! I definitely need to chat him up at some point, as I have a deep and abiding affection for all things text adventurey.

Heading out to the NerdBooks.com party to partake in free pizza and to pick up the new edition of Python: Essential Reference. And hopefully will start feeling better at some point.

geekery, health, pycon, python, twisted