Traineo doesn’t quite work, so I dropped it. Assume 5+ miles/ day 5 days/ wk, & two days of 1hr karate sessions. Have lost 1+ lb & counting.

Tonight’s walking + jogging total is insane. I’m in a piss-poor mood this evening… for so many reasons.. so I had no idea that I had been gone for so long until I got back home.

Turns out I was out for just a hair under 3 hours. The entire time was spent non-stop jogging & walking around an area that could easily hold a football field. This, on top of the total 120 minutes I spent walking today outside of the 3 hour stint.

Yeah, it was a very productive night. Let me tell you, exercise is the best thing to do when you’re depressed. You’ll just keep going through the motions and have no idea what you’re doing to yourself. Heh. Is that a good thing? Well, I think so, but maybe it wouldn’t work for you..

All in all there were roughly 925 calories burned today. Sweet.

Later folks.
~Steph

Technorati Tags: weight loss, exercise, jogging, walking, work out, health, fitness

I’m now using a web service called Traineo. They’re a bit limited in that (as far as I know) you can enter data for only 3 exercises on a given day. This means that some of my exercises - especially walking - must be lumped together to get all of the day’s data into the service.

Other than this issue it seems like it could be a very useful service. It’s definitely a good idea to keep track of your fitness progress, and even though the the data is “approximate” it should be very useful.

You can see the tag from the service at the right that is currently displaying how many calories I’ve burned this week. I’m doing pretty good so far, and it’s only been a couple of days.

I look forward to seeing a month’s worth of data.

~Steph

Technorati Tags: fitness, exercise, health, weight loss, calories, walking, jogging, blarrrrgh!, so many tags so little time

Over the last few days this blog (indeed, all of my websites hosted at this service) has been intermittently unreachable. Each time that I file a support ticket with them they just respond saying to clear my browser cache.

Apparently they think that an error message saying that the server dropped the connection is somehow caused by my browser’s cache.

I would like to apologize to those affected. I have known about it and I have contacted my host about the issues. It’s not that I haven’t been trying to fix the problems, it’s that they haven’t been doing anything about it. I was lucky the other day to catch an SQL error to send them so that they couldn’t brush me off with the “browser cache” line again, but that has happened only once.

When I have the time (tomorrow?) I will begin looking into other hosts for this and my other domain names. I can’t do that now because I have to leave very, very soon for class.

Just FYI: I know about it, i’ve tried to do something about it, but it’s out of my hands.

Later folks,
~Steph

First folks, I took this photo more-or-less right out of bed. So this is bed head, unshaven, fugly morning me mmkay?

Here’s a photo of the Giovanni Navarre leather trench coat that I ordered. Would you believe that I got this for like $37 after shipping costs? As long as this thing doesn’t fall apart I’m going to be tickled silly. Oh, and in case you’re wondering where I got it from I ordered it from CKBProducts.

No, this is not a paid post thank you very much. I don’t do that anymore, I just like my new coat and the price that I paid for it.

I really like how the neck of the trench coat lays snuggly against my neck. This may be a bit cold at first, but it should be very effective at keeping the wind off of my neck. That’s a major bonus. Add in a scarf, my Isotoner gloves, a hat, and those Eddie Bauer shirts that I ordered awhile back and we’re talking some nice, comfy warm winter garb.

This thing beats my jacket hands down, no contest. I just hope that it doesn’t fall apart… of course, at this price you can understand why I’m so concerned about it!

Anyway, that is all.
~Steph

Technorati Tags: coats, winter wear, out wear, men’s coats, leather coats, trench coat, leather trench coat

I’m happy to say that I definitely got my 10,000 steps in today.

It wasn’t accomplished without a bit of random good luck. The track / basketball room was locked again today, and obviously this is going to be a reoccurring problem with those monkeys. On the bright side, I managed to bump into someone who was just getting off of their shift and the guy turned out to be a helpful, kindly gent.

He told me that he didn’t know why the door was locked and he not only opened the doors for me at each end, but he turned the lights on for me too. The latter is worth mentioning because apparently you have to flip some circuit-breaker-like switches to turn them on and I doubt that I would have gone looking there for the on switch.

Thanks to this kindly gent I was able to get my exercise of 10,000 steps today. I combined jogging and walking around the track for a total of 30 laps around the track. If my information is correct then that should be roughly equal to 5 miles, which is roughly equal to 10,000 steps.

After the 30 laps were complete I took the time to do some stretches because I’m still trying to become limber enough to do the splits (especially since I’m practicing karate now). I also done about 20 or 30 beginner push ups… I don’t remember exactly how many were done because they were an impromptu addition before leaving.

Of course, I walked to the activity center and walked back home, so that should definitely have picked up any slack in the 10,000 steps. that’s 500+ extra calories gone… huzzah!

All in all I got bloody well soaked in sweat and it was a pretty good day, as far as both fitness and health are concerned.

Oh! and of course I hit up the whey protein once I got home. I’m not sure if it makes any since to take that stuff after a simple cardio work out so I may not do that next time… that’s undecided for now.

Later folks!
~Steph

Technorati Tags: 10, 000 steps, health, fitness, weight loss, exercise, walking, jogging

Today I walked to my university to use the athletic center. After all, I’m going to have to do a lot of walking every day to meet my fitness goals. My target is five miles per day and I know exactly how many times one needs to walk around the track at the Weede to walk one mile, so that would have definitely simplified things.

Unfortunately it’s not to be. Their signs state that their facilities are open from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM on Saturday and Sunday, but I arrived at 3:30 PM to find what? Locked doors everywhere. Sure I eventually found the ONE door that gave me access to the building itself, but all but two of the rooms in the entire building were locked.

Isn’t that just peachy? It’s just so difficult to unlock doors, by golly you bet’cha! Why am I giving these jokers so much money again?

I tell you, it kind of chaps my ass.

~Steph

Technorati Tags: university, fitness, exercise, weight loss, health, walking, 10, 000 steps

This is just a quick update on my “progress” so far in trying to type in Korean.

It turns out that Windows Vista automatically installs fonts that support East Asian Languages. Thus, unlike Windows XP you do not need to install the fonts for Japanese, Korean, Chinese, or what have you if you’re running Vista.

If you’re seeing blank squares or question marks as you type in Hangul (or other East Asian languages) then you may need to change the font to Malgun Gothic.

This still does not solve the issue that I am having with the characters not arranging themselves correctly for longer words, but it may help address the problem of the Hangul not transmitting correctly in email. I have tested it over Trillian and confirmed that the characters are displaying correctly to the person receiving my IMs, so there’s that at least.

Good night folks,
~Steph / 스타ㅣ판

note: edited to rephrase a paragraph for clarity.

Technorati Tags: Korean, Hangul, 한국, Vista, Windows Vista, fonts

Some time last night the tree limb above the car snapped. As wonders would have it, it came smashing down onto the windshield directly in front of the driver’s seat.

The insurance company - the ever useless blood sucking vampires that they are -

insist that they don’t cover this sort of thing and are refusing to pay out any money to assist in replacing the broken windshield. A used one will cost $200 if you’re lucky enough to find it, but no one in town has one.

So, yes, I will be walking for awhile. Kind of ironic since I had decided to begin walking those 10,000 steps a day, but wow what a way to start.

Bleh.

Click image for larger version.

~Steph

Technorati Tags: car, cars, vehicles, glass

Today I received the results of my physical assessment. Here are some of those results:

• Blood Pressure: 120/80 - Literally right on the line between “good” and “prehypertension”
• Weight: 200lbs (200.21 pounds on the data sheet)
• Body fat percentage: 17.6%
• Waist / Hip Ratio: “At Risk” (this is what I need to work on the most. see below)
• Heart Rate: 117 beats per minute (a little below average)
• Grip Strength. Right Hand: 59lbs, Left Hand: 62lbs
• Flexibility (Trunk Flexion): 17 inches
• Number of sit ups in 1 minute: 62

What does all of this mean?

My target ideal weight is somewhere around 165 pounds. This means that I need to lose only about 8 pounds per month to reach my optimum fitness goals by the end of this semester. Doable? You bet’cha! I’m much more optimistic now about reaching my ideal fitness goal.

Now that I have a hard number to aim for it should be a lot easier to measure my progress and to develop a more effective exercise plan.

The most curious piece of information that I received from this assessment is that I was measured at 6 foot 3^1/2 inches tall. What makes this so curious is that for several years now I’ve thought of myself as 6′5″.

The same night of the assessment I used a measuring tape at home to check myself, and sure enough, it was 6′3.5″.

The height of 6′5″ was data from a nurse, and I stopped growing loooooooooong ago. This is also probably why I haven’t been measured at a doctor’s office in quite a long time; I stopped putting on height more years ago than I care to count, so there has been no reason to measure me in the last several years.

Huh, what do you know..

Anyway, I will definitely have another assessment done at the end of the semester to see what my fat percentage is then compared to now, and of course to see how the rest of the data compares.

My weight loss and fitness goals have never seemed easier.

Later folks!

~Steph

Technorati Tags: weight loss, exercise, diet, fitness, health