July 2006 Archives

I had a great run this morning as part of my ongoing fitness routine. I'm continually pushing myself a little further each time I run -- I'm still very far away from any sort of normal degree of fitness but every day is another day closer. I've given up on giving up caffeine -- at least for right now -- as I feel the more important step right now would be to get into a fitness routine that I can keep. Waking up at 5:30am will eventually start taking its toll on me but for now it seems to be working okay...

Some other stuff 'round my watercooler...

The Poster List has added a bunch of new ones to the collection; I'm still planning on buying a bunch of these and framing them all nice and stuff...

The Impulsive Buy has to be one of the funnier, well-written blogs I've ever seen. Some excerpts below...

From a review of Soda Club Energy Drink Mix...

It [mixing] was definitely easier than a simple sudoku or removing a bra using only my teeth, but not as easy as figuring out Lance Bass was gay.

From a review of Tostitos Multigrain...

If they can’t pick up salsa, how are they going to save me if I needed to rescued from a shark, bear, snake, wolf, tyrannosaurus rex, vampire, Tim Allen movie, Decepticon, black hole, or MySpace sexual predator?

In other news, I'm hitting up the Vox party tonight to schmooz with the who's-who of the Six Apart blogging world. Lots 'o FeedBurner folks will be in attendance and it should be a good time.

I got in a great run this morning -- probably one of my better ones recently -- and I'm feeling full of endorphins and metabolism today. Good stuff.

Preliminary plans for further fitnessification...

1. Run a 5K sometime in October
2. Purchase a treadmill for the winter (maybe).
3. Buy more headbands -- man I sweat a lot!
4. Keep doin' what I'm doin'

I'm getting away this weekend to Indiana; my sister-in-law owns a lakehouse that we've frequented over the past few years...

It should be fun as long as I remember to sunblock my arms a little better this time. They still look burnt from the last time I went.

When I'm there, I'm 100% disconnected from the internet and it's amazing how much that affects me nowadays. My job at FeedBurner requires me to be pretty reachable a lot of the time and Live Music Blog requires a lot of attention these days -- I'm not complaining on either front -- so it's becoming increasingly harder and harder for me to step away from my PC for a couple days.

Adding to that, when my hard drive busted out of me a week or so ago, I had to take my usually trusty PC offline and I have not felt like myself ever since.

I'll hopefully have some more photos to share soon -- it's always pretty picture-esque out there...

I had a couple great conversations around the office yesterday about my new workout routine and what my ultimate plan and goal should be.

Matt had a great idea which I think I might follow-through on -- sign up for a running race around town in the near future and train myself to tackle it --so I'll be looking into that today and tomorrow. Too bad the weather decided to not cooperate this morning and let me run. Oh well...maybe I need a treadmill...

We're at hump day already and I've already had to give up on part of my "For Real This Time" series (i.e. how I plan to get my ass back into shape)...

Part of my plan was to give up the large amounts of caffeine I consume on a day-to-day basis and try to bring that down to a normal level -- boy, did that fail miserably! I was sitting at work yesterday afternoon and I swear I couldn't see straight. I must be more addicted to crack caffeine that I originally thought.

Therefore, a revised plan of attack is in order. I'm weening myself of caffeine...slowly this time...

Hopefully that does the trick.

I have worked out two mornings this week already; I'm taking the day off from that today to let my muscles relax. Tomorrow, it's up bright and early at 5:30am to go running. Should be fun (yeah right).

I can only imagine how busy we're going to be today with the announcement that FeedBurner has acquired Blogbeat.

For those in the know, you can understand that FeedBurner expanding to include Blogbeat's statistics on blogs/sites is a very logical step in our goal to provide a one-stop-shop for stats that are useful to web publishers. How many hits does my feed have every hour? What was my most read post last month? Last year? How many people are returning daily? Weekly? Etc. etc.

For those not in the know, basically, FeedBurner is taking what they do well with RSS feeds -- providing stats on how the feed content is viewed, played-with, consumed, etc. -- and hoping to do the same thing with blogs and sites (assuming that there's a feed to go along with that there blog and/or site). Very cool stuff, in my opinion...

Read more about this on the FeedBurner blog or at Reuters or at Red Herring.

I've been thinking this to myself recently but now I'm ready to make it public...

I've got to strip some of the junk out of my system that I've been having a little too much of lately -- fried foods, caffeine, beer -- and begin working out more to try and lose some of my excess blogger weight that I've gained over the past year or so.

I really yo-yo but at least it's a slow transition from nimble and thin to slow, fat, and lazy. When I originally got to college, I gained way too much weight and then spent the next year or so trying to lose it. I need to remember the end of Super Size Me and the stats he shows for how quickly he gained his weight versus how quickly he lost it...

Scary stuff and it's been haunting me recently, so again, it's now public. Don't feed me ding-dongs. Encourage me to lose weight. It'll help. And believe me, I need a lot of that...

I just caught the fact that Rick Steves is now blogging; he sent out a little blurb on it in his monthly newsletter.

In keeping with the global perspective I like to nurture, I want to think God and Allah are the same creator--but today I'm reminded firmly via email that the Christian God is "triune" (three-in-one--father, son and holy spirit) and Allah is just one.

When my boy Andy was just 3 or 4 I taught him to finish table prayers by putting his hands straight out, bobbing them up an down and saying "Allah, Allah, Allah"...just to freak out his ethno-centric grandpa. Now I realize I may have been mixing up my Gods. Oops.

WTF.

I'm working on a new Ward-o-blog style right now, so bear with me through the changes...

This has to be a joke -- Benny the Bull, everyone's favorite Chicago Bulls mascot, got arrested this weekend.

Why, you ask?

"Benny the Bull" -- the Chicago Bulls team mascot -- was arrested Sunday afternoon for hitting an off-duty Cook County Sheriff's deputy at the Taste of Chicago, according to police.

What's next? Benny the Bull* arrested for smoking crack? Benny the Bull busted as a pimp to 10 prostitutes?

* - of course, none of this counts unless Benny is in full uniform when he commits these acts of crime.