- RT @bargainr: Life in North Korea is absolutely dreadful http://nyti.ms/dAcL26 #
- RT @bitfs: Weekly Favorites and Gratitude!: My Favorite Posts this Week Jeff at Deliver Away Debt threw together the .. http://bit.ly/9J0gGo #
- @LiveRealNow is giving away a copy of Delivering Happiness(@dhbook). Follow and RT to enter. http://bit.ly/czd31X # #
- Baseless claims, biased assumptions, poor understanding of history. Don't bother. #AnimalSpirits #KeynesianCult #
- RT @zappos: Super exciting! "Delivering Happiness" hit #1 on NY Times Bestseller list! Thanks everyone! Details: http://bit.ly/96vEfF #
- @ericabiz Funny, we found a kitten in a box last week. Unfortunately, it was abandoned there, not playing. Now, we have a 5th cat. in reply to ericabiz #
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-10
- Happy Independence Day! Be thankful for what you've been given by those who have gone before! #
- Waiting for fireworks with the brats. Excitement is high. #
- @PhilVillarreal Amazing. I'm really Cringer. That makes me feel creepy. in reply to PhilVillarreal #
- Built a public life-maintenance calendar in GCal. https://liverealnow.net/y7ph #
- @ericabiz makes webinars fun! Even if her house didn't collapse in the middle of it. #
- BOFH + idiot = bad combination #
Stand Up For Yourself
Monday night, my son was struggling to get all of his homework done before bed. He had a 6 page packet of work from his advanced math class that he was supposed to have done over the weekend.
When I asked him why he hadn’t done it, he told me he forgot about it.
I wasn’t happy.
We’ve had a lot of conversations about responsibility and planning over the years. He knows better.
Cue Dad Lecture #26.
Towards the end, when I’m building up this rocking crescendo about how what he does now will affect him for the rest of his life, I stopped.
“Buddy, weren’t you sick on Friday?”
He didn’t get his weekend homework until Monday. Of course he didn’t do it over the weekend.
Dad Lecture #26 immediately transitioned to Ad Hoc Lecture #4, titled “Why did you let me chew you out for something you didn’t do?”
I’ve always tried to raise my kids to be independent. I’ve never stifled asking questions, and I am willing to explain my decisions to them, even if they don’t stand a chance of winning the appeal. As frustrating as independent, strong-willed children can be, I know it will serve them well as adults.
Now I’m trying to figure out why that fell apart on Monday. I wasn’t yelling at him and he doesn’t think I was. Sometimes, the perception of who’s yelling differs depending on which side of my loud voice you are on.
He doesn’t know why he sat back at took the lecture instead of explaining what happened. He apparently forgot that he was given that homework just a few hours before.
My question to all of you is how can I make my kid behave and obey when necessary, but still have enough backbone to stand up for himself when he’s not wrong? And know when each is necessary.
Walking Dead: Would You Be Ready for the Apocalypse?
Would you be ready for the apocalypse? The Walking Dead asks that question every week. There is a great deal of human intrigue in the show, but the show is always asking you, the viewer, if you would be ready to deal with an apocalypse on that order. The idea goes much farther than dealing with zombies. Truly, zombies are the easy part of the apocalypse.
Lost People
We live in a world where we are very connected. You know people from all over the world, and it the entire world has been overrun by an apocalypse at once, all the people you are connected to around the world are effectively gone. There is no chance you will ever see them again. The people on the show deal with those ideas every day. There are so many people they miss that they never go to to say goodbye to.
Insecurity
The one thing that the apocalypse creates is insecurity. You will have no idea what is going to happen the next morning. You never know when someone in your crew is going to be bitten or killed. You have no idea when you will run into other humans you cannot trust. There is not a safe place on Earth. Even if you lock down a house, there is no way to know for sure that zombies would not get in.
Violence
The Walking Dead graphically depicts the violence that is necessary to kill zombies. You would have to “kill” thousands of people who have become zombies. You can see their wedding rings. You can see them in their uniforms, and you know that they used to be somebody. However, you have to end them in order to save yourself. Many of us believe we could do that, but we need to think twice before we assume we could be that violent.
Order
The lack of order in the world is the thing that would break most of us. We can reconcile loss, but that loss is hard to reconcile when there is no order in the world. There is not one authority on the planet that is still operating. How would you be able to resolve problems without such a structure?
On the show, all these problems are handled violently. Murdering violent people is all part of the job if you want to stay alive. It is one thing to kill a zombie that is no longer a person, but it is something else to kill a real person who is simply a thieving criminal.
You might think that you would do just fine when you are watching The Walking Dead, but you would not know unless it happened in real life. The zombie apocalypse is not all fun and games. At its heart is a tense human emotion called loss that we would all have to confront head on.
100 Push-ups in 22 Days
Push-ups
One from the vault:
Last month, I set a goal to do one hundred push-ups in a single set by the end of the month. Before I started working on this, I hadn’t done a single pushup in at least 10 years. At the beginning, I didn’t know if it would be possible, or how much it would hurt. I knew it would be a challenge, and I was looking for a challenge.
Three days before the start of the month, I did one set of pushups. I wanted to find my baseline, so I could see the progress I was making, and I wanted a chance to recover, so I’d be starting from scratch on the first of the month. That day, I did 20 pushups. I pushed, but 21 wasn’t going to happen. That’s not an impressive number, but I ride a desk all day and had spent 10 years lazy. It could have been worse.
My initial plan was to do two sessions per day, morning and night. I’d be doing a total of 56 sessions. Each session would consist of 5 sets of my baseline, progressing to 100 push-ups in a set for the 56th session. That would mean I’d have to add 1.5 pushups to my sets each session. I decided to add 1 to each set in the morning and 2 in the evening sessions. My planned progression was 20, 22, 23, 25…95, 97, 98, 100 over the course of the month.
That lasted one day. February 1st, I did 100 push-ups in 5 sets of 20. That night I did 110 push-ups in 5 sets of 22. The next morning, I hurt so much I couldn’t do 10. I did something like 8/5/5/5/cry-like-a-baby. My abs were cramping and my shoulders burned. I ended the session in the fetal position, hoping all of the screaming muscles wouldn’t cramp up at the same time. If pain is weakness leaving the body, then I was making a significant contribution to the the problem of homeless weakness particles.
Plan A failed. As I waited for the pain to end, I had some time to think. In between “Please don’t cramp! Please don’t cramp! Please don’t cramp!”, I developed Plan B.
I decided to base everything on the previous session’s largest set. The largest set would set my baseline for the next session. The first set in the session would be half of the baseline. The next three sets would be 3/4 of the baseline, and the final set would be pushed until I couldn’t go any further, establishing the next session’s baseline. Starting from my newly established baseline of eight push-ups, my next session was 4/6/6/6/15. The session after that was 7/11/11/11/16, then 8/12/12/12/16.
Plan B became an aggressive, self-correcting progression. If I pushed too hard, the next session was done at a lower level, allowing me time to recover.
The first week hurt. Going from little-to-no real exercise to an aggressive exercise regimen is painful. I was stiff and sore, but I was progressing. One of the best things about Plan B: Set #1 is a good warm-up. Warming up is important.
By the end of week one, I was back to where I started, doing sets of 20. I wasn’t sure I’d make it. I had a few days in a row that didn’t improve my baseline at all. Then I skipped a day. When I came back, but baseline jumped by 10 push-ups. I had hit a small wall, gave myself a day to recover and had a 50% improvement. Guess what got incorporated into Plan B? If I had two days in a row without improvement over the four sessions, I skipped a day.
By the end of week two, my baseline was up to 60. I stopped increasing the warm-up set, so it would still be a warm-up and not create strain. I only went above 20 for the warm-up set once before I created this rule. At this point, my session was 20/45/45/45/60. That’s progress.
At the end of week three, my baseline was at 80. I took the weekend off.
On Monday, February 22nd, I decided to see where my absolute max was. I did a set of 20 to warm up. I followed up with a set of 30, to make sure I was ready. Set #3 was 100 push-ups, a full week early. I’m not going to lie and say push-up #100 was perfect, but it was done. I went from barely being able to do 20 push-ups to successfully doing 100 push-ups in 22 days. I spent the rest of the week perfecting my form. After 75-80 push-ups, it’s hard to tell exactly how straight your body is and how low you are going, without a spotter or a mirror.
Next, I’m applying Plan B to sit-ups.
Link Roundup
In an effort to make sure that both of my readers can’t possibly miss the things I think are important, I’m going to start doing a weekly roundup of the best of the internet. Judged solely, and arbitrarily, by me.
On topic:
These, naturally, are the posts that fit the theme of this site.
How To Check Your Federal IRS Tax Refund Status. When I checked a couple of days ago, they were about 2 weeks out.
TurboTax has screwed up the property tax refund form for Minnesota. Thankfully, I haven’t filed this, yet, but I did verify the problem.
Where do you want to be in 5 years? Start taking those steps, now, or you will never get there. Find something, no matter how small, and do it.
Deficit Neutrality doesn’t count, if a massive initial purchase is offset by future intentions to cut spending.
Off topic:
This is just some of the random crap I think is worth sharing.
If you’re going to argue on the internet, make sure you have your sources right. Primary sources are better than secondary.
Bring back dueling to ensure good manners.
Here’s a guide to saving water-damaged books.
I am a shameless geek and reformed DnD player, so this room was exciting to see.
