Two totally unrelated subjects in one delicious post.

I went to the recreation center today a little earlier than I have been going. As my tweet says, I’m very pleased with the range of exercises that are available. I don’t lift weights (the machines that I use make use of levels of resistance), but I nonetheless receive a considerable work out.

Since I’ve begun using the recreation facility I have noticed people doing certain sit up routines on the manual machines. By “manual machine” I’m referring to devices that do not make use of resistance nor weights, but rather it’s up to the person to do what is done.

Anyhow, I’ve copied the abdominal work outs for my own routine. That’s a good thing because I was really wanting a second work out for my abs as everything else is worked multiple times.

Basically you stand on the device, face forward, and tip the top of your head toward the ground. The actual muscular work is done when you pull yourself up and you can add resistance on the way down as well by moving slower. One has to be careful to not use momentum from the swinging motion to bring yourself up rather than using the abdominal muscles. Read the rest of this entry »

As of September 14th 2008 I have the most recent version of Firefox.

That aside, I noticed that a youtube video was jerking around despite the fact that it had been entirely downloaded. Basically my system was acting like it was trying to play a high def video and didn’t have the horsepower to do it. This prompted me to check my sidebar widget to get a glimpse of my CPU. The cores (it’s a quad core proc) were all jumping around like they were walking on hot coals.

So I pull up task manager and what do I see? Firefox going bonkers.

I don’t have a video of it unfortunately, but – and this is after having closed the Youtube tab – its processor usage was spiking to nearly max and then dropping, and its RAM usage was constantly hoppingg between about 385 MBs to 450 MBs and some change. Jeebus. O.O

This was observed for a minute or two while not interacting with the browser. In fact it was minimized. NoScript is enabled, Adblock Plus is enabled, and the only two tabs that were opened were forums.

It wouldn’t stop spazing out. After a couple of minutes I closed the browser to stop the processor spiking… this is strange to me because Firefox isn’t a multithreaded application so I don’t know how it was pegging all four cores.

Luckily Firefox doesn’t spaz out like this quite as often as it used to, but that was pretty nasty.

Anyway, this post brought to you by Chrome and by the wish that it had plugins. How do you release a browser these days that doesn’t @#%$! have plugins? ARGH >|