James Chamberlin

My workout at the gym was pretty exhausting this morning. Although I was only there for 50-55 minutes, I managed to wear myself out with those exercises I mentioned earlier.

My arms are tired, my legs are tired, and when I left the gym, my clothes looked like they were just taken out of the washing machine. There wasn’t a dry spot, from head to toe. I think this is going to be a new favorite workout in the future. I know it’s burning calories. Checking my heartrate after each set of exercises tells me how much it’s making me work.

Finding something new that works is always exciting.

Update: As the day wore on, a muscle in my leg started hurting a bit. I don’t know if it’s technically my groin muscle or something right next to it. Whatever it is, it’s hurting in my right leg.

OK, so the monitor didn’t die, but it might just as well have. I can’t turn the darn thing off now. The power button on the front doesn’t seem to work properly anymore and the monitor is stuck on.

I unplugged the monitor, but I’m not exactly loving this idea as an everyday way of using the monitor. The other option would be using the energy savings options within Vista to turn off the monitor after being inactive for a while. I’m dubious of Vista’s power saving options. Would this work?

Since the warranty on the monitor has expired, I’m thinking of just buying a new monitor. However, there isn’t anything wrong with the monitor other than the fact that I can’t turn it off… no ugly clusters of dead pixels or anything like that.

Hmmm, what to do, what to do…

Now that that one PC of mine has been cleaned out, it’s running much cooler. The fan above the heatsink has yet to spin up while doing something strenuous. In the past, anything that made the CPU work at 50% for more than a few seconds would cause the fan to spin up. It’s because the heatsink fins (or whatever you’d like to call them) were clogged with a layer of dust. Now that the dust is gone, the fan and heatsink are able to work much more efficiently at removing the heat from the CPU and I know that this will give the entire system a longer lifespan.

On the exercise front, I tried something a little different. I try to do leg workouts as often as I can because they can really get the heart racing and burn calories and fat. So the new exercise I did came from an idea I saw on TV and it’s certainly nothing revolutionary. It’s just something I’ve never tried.

There’s a padded chair intended for guys who want to do sitting shoulder presses (video) and I decided to use it as a temporary seat. I’d sit down and quickly stand up and either do a standing shoulder press or a bicep curl. Either way, I was working out my upper body, while also burning a ton of calories with the repeated sit-stand-sit-stand motion. It wore me out within an hour and I was done. Kaput. Throw my ass on a cart and wheel me out.

I intend to do this exercise more often now that I familiarized myself with it. It’s always interesting trying new exercises. Sometimes they prove to be awkward and some end up being less strenuous than you expected. This one was in fact strenuous, but I know it was good for my weight loss efforts.

One of the things, actually, the number one thing I hate about life is maintenance. I hate having to maintain everything. It doesn’t matter what it is. Something is always breaking down or getting dirty, requiring attention.

Maintaining electronics is one of those things that I’m pretty good with, but blowing the dust out of my PCs is something I don’t do often enough and I got worried when I noticed my main PC was blowing a lot of hot air out of the back. What surprised me was that it felt like it was coming exclusively out of the power supply fan and not the case fan below it.

I was instantly worried about a dead case fan because my Dell is no longer on warranty and I figured that Dell likely uses a proprietary connection to the motherboard. All of their equipment is proprietary, after all.

After taking the side panel off, I blew out all of the dust. Most of it was in the front, blocking each and every one of the holes in the front of the case, meaning little to no fresh air was coming in from the front to cool everything.

I then turned my attention to the fans in the rear of the case. All of the fans seemed to spin fine when I blew a little compressed air in them.

At this point, I turned on my PC with the side panel off to see which, if any, of my fans spun up. And to my delight, they all came on.

I’m not a very big fan of Dell’s design of this case (Inspiron 531). There is no fan in the front to suck in air. Adding a second hard drive blocks off a portion of the side panel which has holes for additional fresh air. It kind of makes those holes pointless. And then that back case fan doesn’t spin very fast. I’d rather deal with the noise than overheating issues. I haven’t gone into the BIOS to see if there is a setting for increasing the fan speed. I don’t know how much configuring Dell allows these days. If memory serves, they prefer to lock down their systems for the most part.

The power supply is still blowing fairly warm air, but it’s not as hot as it was, so I’m pleased by that. I wish Dell would spend more time and money researching case designs with good airflow.

Just when I get my blog updated, WordPress has to come out with another security release. You’d think they would learn to be a bit more thorough before putting out a release which fixes security holes.

There isn’t a whole lot of news to offer up this week. The tomatoes aren’t looking good this year. It looks like they’re suffering from some sort of blight. The plants really look sad. I don’t believe there’s any hope for them to last through the summer, sadly enough.

After dragging my feet, I upgraded my blog’s version of WordPress. It didn’t take too long, but it would have gone a little quicker if I hadn’t unnecessarily deleted the upload and theme folders. I quickly had to re-upload those. Remember, kids: back up your data.

Every now and again I fall off the wagon, so to speak. I’m not as regular with my exercising as I once was and when I do exercise, I almost end up regretting it from the pain instilled in my body afterwards.

Case in point… my feet. They’re aching tonight after a four-mile trek on an elliptical machine this morning. I also did a little weight lifting, but that won’t hurt until tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I’ll be putting my feet up if possible tonight.

I’m not a comic book reader… never really have been. I’ve only owned two comics in my life and that was when I was about seven years old. However, it’s hard for me not to notice the popularity of Comic-Con thanks to Twitter, just to start.

A web without Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace doesn’t seem like all that long ago. My, how the web has changed since I really got into it in 1998-99.

Some of the best shows on television are at Comic-Con this year and some of them are my favorites. PSYCH (USA Network) happens to be one of them and they’re giving out exclusive PSYCH comic books to a couple of lucky fans at Comic-Con.

It makes me envious.

I don’t track WordPress development very closely, but it’s annoying to have installations out of date. WordPress puts an annoying banner at the top of the Dashboard which alerts you of this fact. I find most of my installations are now three or four versions out of date thanks to the small fixes released in the last few weeks. I updated one of my blogs, but it’s something I don’t enjoy doing because I have to back up everything. Oh, how I hate backing up data. What a pain in the ass.

I don’t have any pics ready just quite yet, but the garden is doing well this year. Everything is growing well with the exception of the broccoli, which I neglected to protect early on. The birds got to it before I could cover it with netting. They won’t have such luck next year. I’ll take special note of that. They decimated my little broccoli planets. Out of the twenty plants, only one or two were left untouched. Bastards.

Everything else is doing well. The tomatoes are looking nice. The fruits (tomatoes) are small still, but the plants themselves are all nice and healthy. They’re growing bushy and tall (4 feet or better).

The peppers are also looking nice. Instead of only planting green bell peppers, I put in some banana peppers and even three jalapeno pepper plants. That should be an interesting experiment.