The Journal of Joe The Peacock. Yay.

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6.12.2008:

The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Working Out

• You will not work out regularly and eat right until you care enough about yourself to take care of yourself. There are no shortcuts.
• To lose fat, you must burn more calories than you consume every single day.
• Although cardiovascular exercise (running, jogging, walking, skipping, the StairMaster, and others) are great ways to burn calories one day at a time, building muscle is the only way to raise your metabolism permanently. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn 24/7.
• To build muscle, you must destroy and then rebuild muscle.
• Working out is not just for muscleheads and jocks. It's a special, devoted block of time each day for you to focus solely on yourself. You are worth it.

With strength training, the goal is exactly that - to gain strength. Now, the first thing that pops into your head when you think about this is the concept of "bulking up" - gaining huge amounts of muscle. And while this is definitely a form of strength training, it's not the only form. There's training for power (short bursts of incredible effort to lift increasing amounts of weight), endurance (lifting a lighter amount of weight repeatedly for longer duration to increase long-term muscle strength), bulking (pure muscle destruction / reconstruction), and other forms. The goal - to make each muscle in your body as strong as it can be.

With cardiovascular training, the focus shifts from all of the muscles in your arms, legs, back, neck, shoulders and other places, to the one in your chest - your heart. You want to make this muscle stronger, so your body will process oxygen more efficiently and you can exert more effort for longer periods of time. There are lots of ways to train the cardiovascular system - running, jogging, walking, climbing stairs, sprints... But these are just forms of two types of training - interval and endurance. Interval cardio means bringing the heart rate up for a period of time, then resting, allowing it to settle, only to bring it back up again. This form of cardio burns a tremendous amount of calories in a short period of time. Endurance cardio focuses on being able to go at a steady pace for longer periods of time, keeping the heartrate constantly elevated. This also burns calories, however, there are some important notes on how this works that I'll cover later.

(To go ahead and get it out of the way, the absolute best way to remove fat from your body is to combine strength training with cardiovascular training. It seems like common sense... But the truth is, it is EXTREMELY easy to convince yourself each day that you've done enough after a great strength training session, or a three mile run, because both are a lot of work. But they're two individual pieces of a puzzle that, when combined, form a full picture otherwise invisible to you.)

The point of strength training is to literally destroy your muscle so that it will rebuild itself. That's how you build more muscle. It sounds horrible, right? Well, it's not that bad. It's just something you should understand going into the process - at the very least, it explains why you're sore when you start working out. Each time you perform an exercise, you are tearing muscle fibers. It's at a near-molecular level, which is why you don't feel like your arm has just torn off when you do it... But it's happening. As the body repairs the torn fibers, it uses synthesized protein that you've ingested to perform the repairs. Just like scar tissue on your skin, the area is locked and patched up with available material, forming a stronger and somewhat larger patch of muscle fiber.

Wash, rinse, repeat. The result - bigger, stronger muscles.

Now, there are three types of muscle in your body: Cardiac (which we cover in Cardiovascular training), smooth (which we probably won't go into, as it pertains to organs and blood vessels), and Skeletal (the good stuff). Strength training, as it pertains to working out, focuses almost exclusively on skeletal muscle tissue - biceps, triceps, pectorals, glutius maximus... All of these are skeletal muscles.

Inside the group of skeletal muscles, there are two types that are commonly referred to as fast twitch and slow twitch. As you can infer from the names, slow-twitch muscles are more related to endurance, whereas Fast Twitch muscles pertain more to power and speed. As such, training for strength breaks down to primarily two types of training: endurance (building and conditioning the slow twitch fibers) and power (buidling and conditioning the fast twitch fibers).

Now, I'll go ahead and tell you that, regardless of which focus you choose, you'll be working out both sets of muscle. You pretty much have no choice - when you focus on slow twitch fibers, you'll be using fast-twitch to lift the bar off the ground, or push the weight off the holds. Conversely, when you focus on fast-twitch training, you'll use slow-twitch muscles for stability in your arms and shoulders while on the bench press, or for standing upright between repititions on a squat machine.

As such, the best overall decision is to dedicate time to both groups each week. We'll go over this in more detail later, for now, the important thing to know is that you'll have a choice when you work out as to which area you want to focus on, and how "big" and / or how "toned" you wish to be when you work out.

Cardio is all about getting the heart pumping. Any sort of moment done with sufficient effort over a period of time is going to increase your heart rate. Increased heart rate directly relates to calories burned. And, as mentioned earlier, if you burn more calories than you consume, you lose fat. Pretty easy, right? Well, there's no "gotcha" here - it is. It's so simple, humans have been doing it since the species crawled out of the muck and began chasing potential food with sharpened sticks.

As mentioned before, when you engage in interval training, you're getting your heart rate to "spike" repeatedly - bringing it to an elevated state for some time, then letting it rest. One of the easiest forms of exercise to do this are "sprints" - starting at a designated point, running a set distance, and stopping, only to do it again. This form of cardio training is one of the best for losing weight, as it really forces caloric burn and, provided you're doing something that creates resistance (such as sprints, or fast push-ups), also creates strength due to resistance training.

The other form, endurance cardio, is generally what you think of when you think of running a few miles, or swimming a bunch of laps, or riding a bike for a while. Your heart rate is elevated, and then maintained at that elevated rate for a while. This burns calories as well - however, the type of caloric burn is different, due to the fact that the body "flips a switch" between regular energy consumption and the type of energy consumption that takes place when it's in a state of prolonged movement. In short, you burn more calories than you would sitting down, but your body regulates how many and how quickly. It knows it's going to be doing this a while, so it tends to conserve energy (versus interval training,where it just squirts out whatever it has right away to get you through each "spike").

1) You're not in shape. That's vital to come to terms with, because your first, oh... Week or so of training? It's not going to be fun. It's going to be uncomfortable and exhausting. And that's because you are out of shape. But - and this is the good part - the more you train, the more in shape you get, and the more in shape you get, the more fun it becomes.

Now, I know exactly what you're thinking - how the hell is it ever going to be fun? Well... What would you say that, in a few months time, there'll come a point where, if you miss even a single workout, you'll feel crappy because of it? You'll hate not being in training; you'll actually crave getting into the gym every day that you go? That you'll feel sick less often, breathe easier, need to carve new notches into your belt as your waist line gets smaller...

Yeah. You'll probably say I'm a liar. In fact, you'll probably say that for the first month and a half... But I promise you, it's true. Again, you'll just have to trust that I know this one.

Also, you may feel self conscious if you are starting your workouts for the first time at a gym or in a public place... I cannot tell you how much you shouldn't care about the thoughts of others. But you will anyway, so here's my advice: Just know that most everyone in that gym or at that park is mentally applauding you for getting out and doing something great with your body. Seriously. Sure, you'll run across the occasional dickhead who's going to whisper and say something, but honestly, those guys and girls are going to point and laugh no matter WHAT you look like. If you're stacked with muscle, they're going to call you musclehead; if you're skinny and fit, they're going to make fun of your shoes. You cannot stop them. Don't worry about them... Just let them live their shallow, miserable lives while you strengthen and empower your own.

Remember - people too weak to achieve their own goals in life will always discourage others from achieving theirs. Or, more simply... Fuck. Them. By far, the majority of people who see you at the gym are going to be proud that you're there.

2) Expect resistance from the exercises. In fact, embrace it. Weights are heavy. You'll find yourself cursing this fact. You'll be tempted to move the pin up a few notches to make the weight lighter. You'll find yourself wanting to put the bar on the rack before you've reached your set number of repetitions. You'll curse the weight for being so damn heavy.

Well, think about it this way - if it weren't heavy, it wouldn't be making you as strong as it is. That weight is not your enemy, and it's not working against you... It is your friend. To paraphrase a sentiment from Henry Rollins in a piece he wrote called "The Iron" - the weight is working WITH you to make you stronger. That one thought fundamentally changed the way I looked at working out. Every single time I touched a weight from that point forward, I did so with that one thought in mind - every ounce in that bar is making me that much stronger.

• On Monday, you will do a "back and biceps" routine - why back and biceps? Because, as you do exercises that focus on your back, you will do a lot of pulling type exercises, which also includes your biceps (this is called a "complex exercise" - something that incorporates multiple muscles). So, you will also want to focus on your biceps that day, since you're already working on them, right? Finish that with a 20 minute walk.
• So now, you've done your back and biceps - they need a rest. So Tuesday, you might do a "chest and triceps" routine. You group these together for the same reason you put back and biceps together - because as you work your chest (with a bench press, for instance), you will also work your triceps. So it makes sense to do a set of tricep-specific exercises on that day as well. Finish with a 20 minute pedal on the stationary bike.
• Wednesday, you do legs and shoudlers - now, this seems like an odd grouping, and that's because it sort-of is. I do this because the legs and the shoulders have absolutely nothing to do with any of the other exercises I've done in my back-bicep or chest-tricep routines (well, the legs part does cross a bit with the back, but not much... And shoulders can sometimes use triceps, but again, not as much as chest). Finish with a 20 minute walk.
• Thursday, you can rest.
• Friday, you can change things up a bit - take an aerobics class, or do a full round of pushup-situp-pullup-squats, for thirty minutes straight, resting a minute between each exercise. Finish this with a 20 minute bike pedal.
• Saturday, you can focus on a long cardio session - 40 minutes of walking or stationary bike or stairmaster. Set the pace to be a bit lower than you did in your 20 minute walks, put on your headphones, and enjoy the feeling of your heart beating in your chest.
• Sunday, rest.
• Monday, it starts all over.

Labels: being yourself, fitness crap, how-to, Joe's life

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The obligatory self-case study

4:26 PM

If you just stumbled upon this post, this is a self-case-study from my Absolute Beginner's Guide to Working Out. Even if you've read that, it's boring. So excuse me for that.

Here it goes.

I was athletic during high school and the one year I went to college. When I started putting my salary before my physical health, one went up as the other went down. Soon, I was topping 370 pounds (from 220 during high school / college). True, not all of that was fat... But certainly, enough of it was that I was visibly unhealthy.

I made attempts during the years to lose weight and work out. And those attempts went in fits and starts - a few weeks here, a couple months there. I made a pretty drastic change in my diet by cutting out any form of corn syrup, which resulted in a steady decline in weight over a period of years. Then, last year, I decided I wanted to play some football again. And, unlike the other iterations of wanting to be in shape, I decided this was GOING to happen.

That was the change. I decided being in shape enough to play football was worth the concessions I'd have to make in the rest of my life. I began getting up at 4:00AM to work out - every single day. I began reading up and talking to trainers about the best ways to build strength while losing fat, without sacrificing overall weight (being heavy [not fat heavy] in football is a big plus). I educated myself in ways I'd never done before. I dedicated myself to the pursuit of physical fitness.

And you know what? Nothing else in my life was sacrificed, except for the types of food I ate and the amount of television I watched. I had plenty of time to work my 50 hours a week. I was going to the gym with my wife, which turned out to be a far more fun use of our time than sitting and watching television.

When I started in July of last year, I was 29% body fat and weighed 315 lbs. Today, I am 21% body fat and weigh 310 lbs - and I am the strongest and most fit I've ever been in my life.

Ta daa.

Here's a little before-after action for you:

June 6, 2002 - 375 lbs, 53% body fat:




December 24, 2007: 308lbs, 29% body fat:



March 11, 2008: 307lbs, 22% body fat:



I'll have to get a June 2008 one at some point.

Labels: being yourself, fitness crap, Joe's life

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6.11.2008:

Why I don't keep a resume

10:27 PM

There are a number of reasons I don't actually have a resume. For instance, I don't really need one. But if I did, this is the reason I wouldn't keep one anyway:

This is an unnamed site I worked on in 2006. I did the design. I led the UI development team and the CMS development team. We did a good job - a really good job, in fact. I gave them strategy for deployment. I gave them tips on building and maintaining a community.

We handed it over to the client, and it was slick and beautiful. Two and a half years later, and... Well, let's just say that, when we finished, absolutely did NOT look like this:

click image for full-sized bashing goodness

They have completely butchered a solid design. And anyone who judged ME and MY work based on the 2008 state of this site would scoff and move on to the next resume.

And that, my friends, is why I don't keep one. The ever-changing nature of sites after I deployed them results in material that does not represent what I do. In some cases, they vary slightly. In others, it's like they took my designs and comps and handed them to 4th graders to cut-and-paste magazine clippings all over.

God.

Just... God.


**Update**

For the record, yes, there are 28 affiliate (city) sites for [UNNAMED SITE], and I did them all. They run off the same engine.

Also, those who were at the Vegas book signing and heard the "performance"... this MIGHT be the subject of the story that caused the legal hangup a few weeks back... Maybe.

Labels: Joe is a pompous ass, Joe's life, sometimes I do design work, technology

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6.10.2008:

Dreams (and a philosophical question)

11:42 AM

I just woke up from a much-needed nap.

I had a dream this nap.

It spawned a question. And now I am blogging, instead of peeing. So bear with me on this one.

The dream:

I had to screen a movie that I had written and directed before an audience of over 400 people, at some major film festival... Only I didn’t remember writing any of it or directing any of it.

Now, I should clarify that, in the dream, it wasn’t “not remembering”, where I did it and I just forgot. It was more like I wasn’t even there while it was being done, but I had done it. This is how dreams work - the actual reality of how a thing may or may not have come about is irrelevant. Maybe I was on drugs when it happened; maybe someone kidnapped me, made me make a movie, and then pulled the memory out of my head. However it came to be, I was standing there in front of an audience about to screen a film I wrote and I directed, the content of which I had absolutely no clue about. So basically, I was also screening it for myself.

So, I screen it, and it turns out the movie is about my childhood. It was during when I was living in Decatur, GA before Decatur became “Decatur” (these days, Decatur is rather hip for the most part, with condos in the downtown area routinely selling for $500,000 and houses going for that or more. When I was a kid - and this isn’t part of a dream, by the way, this is how it was - Decatur, GA wasn’t exactly the hip cultural center it is now. I was one of two white children in all five of the elementary schools I attended (I got expelled quite a lot for causing trouble), except for the one school - Hooper Alexander - where I was one of THREE white kids... And all of us - white and black - were as poor as the day is long. There were no yuppies; there were no Starbucks or art stores or neighborhood parties on the weekends. You stayed inside, unless you were actively selling drugs, or arresting those who were. It was crime infested, burnt out, and overall, the entire city amounted to some bizzaro theme park where the rides were all types of crime you might have happen to you during the day - The Car Jack, the Smash-n-Grab, the Home Burglary, and so on).

Wow, that’s a long aside. I’m going to have to start over, because trying to continue after that end parenthesis is going to result in my losing you... If I haven’t already.

Anyway. The movie in my dream was about my childhood in Decatur, particularly my 4th grade year in school. I remember smiling the entire time I was watching the movie I was screening, thinking nothing about the memories and the sentimentality of an entire childhood whose purpose was simply to learn how NOT to live like a racist dipshit. No, I was just glad that no one who was watching the screening had gotten up and left yet. The movie wasn’t terrible.

The thing is, every scene I was watching in this movie - even though it was real and based on my life, and the kid playing me WAS me at age 9 - felt completely new... Like I was watching it in the theater for the very first time. It didn’t feel like watching a memory on a screen, like movies of your life can sometimes feel in dreams. This one, and all the scenes in it, felt completely, 100% original. Which scared me, given that I was supposedly the writer and director. But at least it wasn’t bombing.

There was a point in the movie, about 30 minutes in, where I got into a “jawning” contest during recess with one of the boys who thought, because I was white, I couldn’t hang (for those of you who have no idea what “jawning” is, it’s basically a fun word meaning “put down”). And, I said a particularly nasty one during the 3rd round of insults, and every kid around me started cheering, giving the appropriate “Oh, SNAP”-s, when I suddenly woke up.

The thing is, that one line never happened in my real life. Not that I can remember, anyway. The dream produced a new piece of dialogue in an old memory, neither of which I remembered while IN the dream as having lived or created.

As happens when anyone first awakens immediately from dreaming, you first have to digest what the hell just happened, and you draw the dotted line in consciousness that separates dream from reality. What anyone does after doing that, I don’t know, except to say that I believe everyone has their own process. My personal process is to immediately begin sifting through anything behind that dotted line (that I remember) to find either a) meaning or b) usable content for a story, novel or work.

The meaning - I was displaying a creative work of mine before strangers without being aware of any of the substance of the work. This one’s easy. As everyone who’s taken Psychology 101 in college knows, It’s about having sex, as all dreams are (except for those about cigars, according to Freud).

But then the winning put-down line hit my brain, and with it, the content of the movie regarding my childhood in Decatur, and I realized I would soon have to put out a story about that stuff, because really, there’s some great stuff to talk about from that era of my life. But something kinda dawned on me - a weird philosophical question, and the purpose for this entire post:

If I use the line from the movie I screened in my dream, that I didn’t know any of the content of in advance, and didn’t remember writing in the dream - and furthermore, that line actually didn’t happen in real life - which makes it an absolutely new, externally-produced idea and piece of content to my dream self... Did I actually create it? And if I use it, am I actually plagiarizing from myself?


(Just so you know, this is the kind of shit that my wife has to put up with weekly, if not daily. Kinda makes 6 years of marriage a miracle, huh?)

Labels: plagarism, silliness, whiny bullshit

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6.07.2008:

A *NEW* for-real ransom virus - please read

3:01 PM

I'm not a tech blogger (on purpose, because god knows we have enough of them out there), but I'd be remiss if I didn't do my part to call attention to this new virus that encrypts your precious data with a 1024-bit encryption key, and demands a ransom be paid to get the decryption key.

Now, this isn't the weaksauce 128-bit version from '06, or the mediumsauce 660-bit key from last year. This one is ALL NEW for 2008, and even though the older versions could be decrypted, this one ain't quite there yet... And might not be there for a while.

Why do I say that? Well... It took Distributed.net 1,757 days across 331,252 individual computers working together to crack a 64-bit RC5 key. This is 1024-bit key on the same algorithm... So yeah. You pony up the dough, or your data's fucked.

The virus apparently infects PCs through unpatched browser exploits. The bottom line... PLEASE update your browser if you're on a PC. My suggestion, of course, is to start using FIREFOX if you're not, and keep it up to date with every new release. Trust me, if you're not using it and see changing as a big pain... It is, but within a week, you'll NEVER go back.

Please, at the very least, move from IE6 to IE7 and set up Windows Update to automatically update your machine. No matter how "evil" you see WGA as being, it's nowhere near as evil as having your sensitive data locked down with some 1024-bit encryption key and having to either a) wait or b) pay a ransom to get at it.

Just checking the stuff on my machine, if I were hit with this thing, This Is Not Art! Productions would be in a WORLD of hurt. Thankfully, with Jeremy's help, I've created a fairly fail-proof backup schema that incorporates Apple Time Machine on a remote drive, rsynch backup between the laptop and desktop, and off-site storage of all data nightly at Mozy.com. Also, thankfully, I don't use PCs anymore. But that's a whole other topic.

Seriously, update your stuff. Don't get jacked.

Labels: technology

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Six great years

11:23 AM

Six years ago today, I was conflicted. You see, I was looking forward to six years and one day from today, but I was DREADING six years and five days from today.

Tomorrow is my sixth wedding anniversary. Six years ago tomorrow, my wife made an error in judgment that resulted in my being the luckiest man on the planet. And for our honeymoon, we went to Yosemite for two weeks of camping, hiking, rafting, and generally ignoring the whole of society while we celebrated our union.

Part of that trip was a "day hike" around the multiple peaks of the multiple mountains at Yosemite - a 16 mile hike up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down the elevated areas of one of America's largest national parks.

That wouldn't have been terrible... If I didn't weigh 370 lbs.

I had completely let myself go at that point in my life. I was arguably the most unhealthy I'd ever been, barring the day I was born. That's not to say I was a walking tank of human fat - almost everyone who knows me says I didn't LOOK 370lbs. And I still made it to the gym about once a month to prove to myself I could still survive a one mile run and a bit of lifting weights. But yeah... carrying that sort of weight, while being as out of shape as I was... Well, it was hell, quite honestly.

About two miles in, I was nearly useless... I made it through the other 14 miles through sheer stubbornness and pride. I didn't want my new bride to think I was weak and couldn't hack the whole hike (which, I wasn't, and I ended up doing... But it was because of my foolish male side, not because I was actually fit enou