tail -f carlo.log

“I like it!” (Auto Suggestion)

After much deliberation I’ve decided to give running another shot. No, not the short “omg the bus is leaving!!1” burst-kind of running (I do that rather often), but the type where you excercise three days a week for half an hour or so.

Since I usually don’t come home before nightfall I will go with the morning routines. But I don’t want my work day schedule to change, so I’ll just get out of bed ~45 minutes earlier. At least that’s the plan.

So today I got up at 6:30, brushed my teeth, had a glass of water, got into my clothes, put on the headphones and started running to the music.

Here’s my setup:

Clothing: I don’t have any pants for sport or excercises. There, I’ve said it. My name is Carlo and I don’t “do” sport. Well. Thinking it through, I came to the following conclusions:

• I don’t know whether I will stick with it or not (I’ll try to, tho).

• I don’t like to look like a confused scuba diver with sunglasses – no black spandex.

I was afraid my amazing efficiently working subconciousness would manage to get me lost in finding the right clothes, effectively foiling my feeble attempts at doing something. Thus, I just donned an old pair of jeans, a longsleeve shirt, a down vest and sneakers.

Now imagine my surprise — I was able to exercise without spending shitloads of money on “Pro athlete”-themed sportswear. I believe the other jogging enthusiasts I’ve met probably think I am a madman.

Hi, I’m Carlo, rebel rookie runner. How you doing?

Music: I’m currently making use of Podrunner Intervals, a free podcast for running exercises. Check it out, it’s pretty sweet, even tho the parts for running are a wee bit to slow for my taste. I’m almost 2m tall, maybe my legs are too long. ;) But I’ll cope.

The single episodes are between 20 and 30 minutes long, and consist of a mix of slower and faster tracks. It’s a good mixture. Each week’s episode is going to push you a bit harder, until after 9 weeks you should be able to run 5 km in one go. We’ll see how that’ll work out.

The first run: Good! I’ve been moving for ~30 minutes. In the end I was sweating but didn’t want to kill myself, which is a big plus. Still, it wasn’t fun. Sport, for me, simply isn’t fun. At all. That said, the “I’ve done something for my body!” feeling afterwards is nice. :)

So, the sole reason I’m writing this is to keep myself from giving up prematurely. Looming shame is a powerful weapon, and this post shall be my reminder it might hit me shouldn’t I suck it up.

Mini Review: “Children of Men”

Wonderful movie that manages to be hopeful and dystopian at the same time. Great cast.The “block under siege” scenes where everyone was united in awe had me in tears.

Go buy/rent.

BetterSearch v1.19 Released

I’ve updated my Firefox addon BetterSearch to version 1.19. The update brings Firefox 3 and Flock compatibility and fixes the thumbnails for Yahoo! Search. Also, it now looks a little bit better due to new icons, c/o FamFamFam.

You remember BetterSearch, right? No? Oh, okay.

“An extension for Firefox and Flock which enhances Google (all international flavours, too), Yahoo Search, del.icio.us, MSN Search […] by adding previews (thumbnails) and Amazon product images and info (type, price, rating for US/DE/UK/CA/FR products), a quick preview feature as well as “Open in New Window”, “Site Info” and “Wayback Machine” links to the search results.”

The other changes are minor and mostly under the hood to prepare for the next major version.

Go check it out!

Next up: better thumbnails. Work, work…

Planet Yahoo! updates

Evening, y’all. This is Carlo, your friendly Planet Yahoo! maintainer, with a quick note.

A few hours ago I’ve updated the engine that aggregates all the different Yahoo! blogs into the big purple blob that is Planet Yahoo!. Said update adds better ordering of the blog entries, and the feed parsing should be more solid. Most changes are under the hood, so nothing too interesting for the end user, i.e. you.

And it’s the same as with any update: while I don’t think there’ll be problems, it might turn out I was wrong. Heh.

One minor issue: the syndication feed will be marked as “fully updated”; so a number of older entries that you’ve already marked read in your newsreader might pop up as unread again. Not to worry, this will only happen once.

The good news is that in the process I’ve decided to spend some time to build a better (pardon the audacity), yet unofficial feed for the Yahoo! Research site. Also, I’ve updated the MyBlogLog badge, even though I know that most of the readers never visit the site, but just subscribe to the feed.

And that’s it for today about PY!. Cheers!
-C.

PS: The rest of my wacky daily adventures is currently been prepared for a multi-part TV treatment over at my blog. But you might know that already.

Sky: Brought Down

This afternoon I’ve finished the first/latest Mass Effect DLC, Bring Down the Sky. It adds a new mission to the game which promises ~90 minutes of gameplay, a new location, a new race and a new XBL achievement (worth 50 gamerpoints). It costs 400 MS Points (€4.80).

The mission was nice, nothing out of the ordinary, tho. Drive around in your Mako, clean out some places, gather “leads” (if you want to call them that) and then face a boss guy. Make some Paragon/Renegade decisions, get a glimpse at a possible new story line to come and be done with it.

The aforementioned new location is an asteroid on a collision course with a colonised planet. The rock itself looks like pretty much like any of the old “lesser” planets from the main game. It’s okay, not more, not less. What makes it special (to me) is the beautiful planet looming overhead — X57, the asteroid, is heading towards Terra Nova, destined to bring doom and destruction. A grim outlook! Still pretty, tho. Seriously, it’s really shiny, but I’m a sucker for stars and planet imagery, so I might take more joy from something like this than other people.

Anyways, why is it heading there? Because of the Batarians, a race of 4-eyed humanoids. Apparently they don’t like the Humans for various historical reasons, and thus use their first on-screen appearance ever for speaking with the protagonists in a resentful manner. And for shooting at them. The audacity!

So, is “Bring Down the Sky” a perfect DLC/addon? No. Bioware’s decision to make this an “in-between mission” is questionable. I can understand it from a storyline point of view — too much is in flux after finishing the main game, what with the Council and all. But unfortunately it means I have to go back to a savegame where I could freely roam the galaxy — i.e. a save that was made prior to visiting Ilos etc. —, and for some people that might be a drawback. A co-worker of mine has no save like that left, and that means he’d have to start over, and therefore he won’t pick up the DLC. So… srsly, not a good decision. (Personally, I was lucky to still have a “good” save, tho.) But the implementation could’ve been smoother. Well, I actually expected it to be smoother.

And what’s with the silent team members? I though Garrus and Kaiden were pissed since they wouldn’t talk to me during the mission. Not even random chatter. Meh. It’s a small issue, tho. Just something I found a bit strange.

All in all, tho, it’s been a nice ride. For the average price of a Döner you get ~90 minutes of additional Mass Effect goodness. A good bargain in my book.