Greetings! It was a tough decision but I have moved my blog to bargelt.com. Thanks for visiting!
Did two three workouts yesterday neither none of which were on a bicycle. *waits for faithful readers to get up off of the floor*
The first was a Crossfit workout. Crossfit is an evil spawn of Satan workout regime. From the Crossfit wikipedia entry:
CrossFit workouts typically call for athletes to work hard and fast, often with no rest. Many CrossFit gyms use scoring and ranking systems, transforming workouts into sport. Many CrossFit athletes and trainers see themselves as part of a contrarian insurgent movement that questions conventional fitness wisdom
Our workout yesterday was:
Five rounds for time of:
15 pound barbell Overhead walking lunges, 50 feet
21 burpees
Time of 21:30 Jeremy did 4 rounds, Ryan and I did 3 rounds. It sucked. Bad. I don't think I could have done any more 'burpees' without really hurting myself. I was dizzy, my face was numb, I was getting a headache, my back hurt, I felt like I was going to puke. So we will have to work up to doing as many sets as the site suggests but wow still a killer workout in 21 minutes. I can barely move today… you all know the feeling, where you can’t shampoo your hair very well because raising your arms above your head is almost impossible.
The second was yoga. Our normal Tuesday night class. It was great, as usual, but really tough considering how bad my legs and arms were hurting. The class was packed which made it very warm in the studio no not quite hot yoga warm but I was sweating up a storm! The GREAT part is that I felt better after class than before.
I’m glad yoga helped me to stretch and loosen up because my third workout of the night was the BEST workout I can imagine!
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Fit Club
Greetings! It was a tough decision but I have moved my blog to bargelt.com. Thanks for visiting!
In my previous Getting Healthy post I mentioned that "You have to be willing to challenge the status-quo even when you skinny friends look at you like you're stupid (I have a story about this but I'll save it for a future installment)." Well I suppose this is that future installment. It’s only been like 13 months… gimme a break!
By challenging the status-quo I was specifically referring to the fact that I eat six times per day. Unless of course my girlfriend and I are away for the weekend then we typically eat one meal, usually at about 2PM, usually consisting of a huge chunk of animal flesh and lots of carbohydrates! We’re just so… AHEM busy AHEM that we forget to eat. Last trip that we took I think I lost 7 pounds in three days. I digress, I’m sorry. So I was saying that typically I eat six times per day. I have found that this keeps me a lot more satisfied and I’m a lot less likely to pig out at lunch or dinner or after dinner.
I have lost a lot of weight but I’m still a big guy (6’3”, 245). I can eat roughly 2400 calories per day and still get rid of about two pounds per week depending on my activity level. That means I can eat meals of 300, 300, 600, 300, 600, 300 every day and still lose weight. I have this on a yellow-sticky on my monitor at work.
So what is the problem? I can’t tell you how many times my skinny co-workers look at me as I eat my 3PM Zone Perfect Bar and give me this look that says, “jeez that's why he's fat... he eats all damned day long."
It would be easy to get embarrassed and stop this habit... but you know what. Screw them! I've shed a little over 70 pounds this way and I'm not going to stop! Bite my ass skinny boy! You might be skinny but I bet I can bench press your body weight PLUS your max bench press weight. Probably several times! AND I bet I can ride a bike faster than you. And for longer (time or distance) than you. Deep breath – no, I’m not bitter. So please if you are fighting this battle like I am, figure out what works and stick with it. No matter what people say. Unless they are trying to talk you out of a fad diet… then listen to them!
I won’t even talk about how much crap I’ve taken for starting Yoga!
So dear readers has peer pressure ever made you change your health or fitness routine? Is there anything in your health and fitness routine that other people laugh at? If so how do you deal with the criticism?
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Fit Club
Greetings! It was a tough decision but I have moved my blog to bargelt.com. Thanks for visiting!
I recently purchased a Blu-Ray drive for my media center PC I couldn’t resists as they are now under $100 shipped. As an self-respecting geek would do I immediately searched for the best most efficient way to play Blu-Ray discs (BDs) or BD rips on my sub $500 Home Theater PC. I read the post entitled Easy, Efficient Hi-Def Video Playback by Jeff Atwood in it he says:
- download the standalone MPC-HC filters.
- Extract
MPCVideoDec.ax and copy it into c:\windows\system32\ - Open a command prompt, navigate to
c:\windows\system32\, and run regsvr32 MPCVideoDec.ax
Be sure you don't have any other video codecs registered, as the MPC-HC filter can handle everything. Once you register this magical codec, Windows Media Player (and thus, Windows Media Center) will use hardware accelerated high definition video playback. It's amazing.
Oh Jeff I wish it would have been that easy for me! At this point I’ve spent WAY too many hours (40? 60? kind of defeats the “best most efficient assertion above, huh?) on this. I thought since I spent so many hours working through these issues that I should share my pain experiences. These are my experiences and of course YMMV… this is on the aforementioned sub $500 HTPC with Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit installed.
I do agree with Jeff that AnyDVD HD is a VERY cool application. Yes I buy and own legitimate copies of every Blu-Ray disc and DVD that I rip but I LOVE the convenience of looking at a menu in Vista Media Center (VMC), selecting a movie and pressing play. No misplaced cases, nothing to put away when you are done, no kid fingerprints on my discs! Simple and easy! Plus I’m a TOTAL geek and love a challenge! AnyDVD really makes ripping BDs easy:
- Right click the SlySoft Fox task bar icon; choose "Rip Video DVD to Harddisk"
- Choose a path (I rip mine directly to my Windows Home Server)
- Click "Copy DVD"
- Wait 30 – 45 minutes
So far, so good! I ripped the few Blu-Ray Discs (BDs) that I own to my Windows Home Server. The best part is that usually (and yes there are exceptions) you can reduce the rip to one single file. Find the largest file in the \BDMV\STREAM folder and that is your movie. Delete all the other files. No I don’t want the extras and don’t even get me started on useless DVD and BD menus! I HATE nothing more than waiting for some college student’s crappy video project menu-intro thing to “play” when all I want to so is watch a flippin’ movie!
My first step was to try to get my ripped BDs to play well in MPC-HC even in this magical stand-alone application it wasn’t as simple as Mr. Atwood led me to believe. I was still seeing upwards of 90% CPU utilization until I enabled the “EMC Custom” under output. That got my CPU utilization down to around 30% from 90% - 100% when playing a ripped BD. Cool. Only took me like 10 hours of experimentation to figure THAT out! Yes I KNOW, Steve, RTFM! Now to translate that into WMP and ultimately VMC.
Next, I took Jeff’s advice and uninstalled all CODEC packages I had installed on my HTPC and registered the MPCVideoDec.ax file. I opened the .mt2s file in Media Center and… nothing. So this DID NOT work for me. I’m glad it was so simple and it worked for him! Since the BD rip is just the one file video, sound and all is does seem to make sense that JUST registering a video decoder would NOT allow the file to play. Since the mt2s file is a container with audio and video streams it must be split apart so it seems that you do NEED a splitter installed. Uninstalling all of my CODEC paks uninstalled all of my splitters. So when I tried to play the .mt2s files in Media Center I got nothing except a major case of frustration! After a TON more research (few more hours) I finally found this Vista Codec Package... Shark007’s goal is to have one CODEC install that "just works" for every possible video and audio file out there. Lofty goal and I commend the dude. Didn’t work for my purposes though! Of course not! To get it to work for me though... I had to do a custom install:
- Remove ffdshow
- Remove DirectVOBSub
- Add AC3Filter
Simple, huh? Well yeah I went through 40 or 50 configurations to figure that out! I’ll spare you EVERY detail but I guess in a way I was lucky two of my first rips were very different. The Blu-Ray spec allows for a few different video and audio encoding standards:
For video, all players are required to support MPEG-2, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and SMPTE VC-1… For audio, BD-ROM players are required to support Dolby Digital, DTS, and linear PCM.
The first .mt2s file I was using as a test subject had an AVC video stream and DTS audio and the second had a VC-1 video stream and a Dolby Digital Audio stream so when testing sometimes the DTS audio would disappear, sometimes the DD audio would disappear. Sometimes the video would not play, sometimes the audio and/or video would stutter.
So After running through many, many configurations, my BD rips play perfectly -- both AVC and VC1 at 10 - 30% processor utilization (down from 90 to 100%)!!! Also MKV files play perfectly as well. I remind you that this is on a VERY modest system. TO answer your next question, yes yes they stream FINE off of my WHS!
So, yeah, there is probably another solution... like install the 'magical' video decoder, install a splitter, install AC3 - but at this point I'm DONE. DONE I tell you! Well until I decide that I can do better! LOL!
ON A SIDE NOTE: I setup my Xbox 360 to stream from Netflix. What a cool system! I walked up to my desktop PC, added a few titles to my "Watch Now" queue and boom they showed up on my 360. Watched a couple movies this way. Flawless.