This time around, I’m riding the bike for 25 minutes (works out to about 7-7.5 miles) while watching episodes of Stargate SG-1 – I got the entire series from Amazon for half off during a recent sale. Generally I ride for 50 minutes (2 episodes) on evenings that I’m home, and so far we’re to episode 17 or so.

As for the diet part, we’ve been eating at home more frequently, which is a good thing from both a financial and health perspective.

I haven’t lost a whole lot of weight yet – whenever I start exercising, I lose fat and gain muscle for a while. My end goal is going to be to get to somewhere close to where I was in college, when I went to the gym every day of the week before my first 11AM class.

One of the nicest features is Triggers, which let you run commands in programs using the same set of keystrokes no matter what program you’re in. This comes in really handy when you want to control a background program like iTunes, and Quicksilver has a built in iTunes trigger module. Here’s my setup, which you can get to in Quicksilver by going to the Triggers section, and clicking on iTunes:

Under OS X, command-space (command = ⌘) takes you into Spotlight, whereas Quicksilver’s default activation key is control-space (control = ^). I picked the option key (⌥) to control iTunes, as it’s not used as much. ⌥-space starts and stops the music, ⌥-(0-5) applies a star rating, and the ⌥-arrow keys switch between songs and changes the iTunes volume.

Previously I used 3rd party software like SizzlingKeys to control iTunes, but it didn’t let me directly set a rating – I could only raise or lower an existing one. For that purpose, Quicksilver works a whole lot better.

This swimming contraption looks pretty neat – basically a rubber band that holds you back so you can swim in place. For the price I’d definitely give it a shot – if we had a pool.

I bought a new chair – it was a great deal after being on sale and having a 20% off coupon. After a few days of use, I’m quite happy with it.

And now a moment of surreal public television.

An automatic screen cleaner for your computer. Shows one of the only good uses of Flash outside of tower defense games and StrongBad.

Additionally, you’ll notice that I added last.fm support to the blog. The actual program (audioscrobber) is a bit buggy and sometimes crashes or goes into a processor sucking loop, and still won’t scrobble songs I play on my iPod, but other than that it works pretty well. I’m in the middle of a multi-day random music binge, which should explain the eclectic nature of my playlist.

1. You can upgrade your music:

2. It is 256kbps AAC, and is saved as an .m4a file:

3. It plays on a Sony PSP, so all you PSP people have a new source of music:

What I’ve been doing every other morning is loading up an episode on the TV and watching it while running on the treadmill. Each show is about 24 minutes, which is enough time to get up to quite a sweat. This morning I did a mile and a quarter at five miles an hour then slowed down to three miles hour, then did another quarter mile at six. My biggest problem previously when running was that I focused too much on my physical condition and would wimp out after 15-16 minutes.

The best thing about anime is that it is subtitled. When I watch it I don’t necessarily have to listened to the audio, which is very important when you’re pounding away on a noisy treadmill. I would assume you to do the same thing with other subtitled video.

I’m going to see how well this works – so far I’ve been very happy with my progress.

When it did work, I was quite impressed. It gives the impression of flipping through TV channels, with short commercials between segments, and sometimes popping up in the bottom right corner of the screen. The audio was quite good, but the video quality was so-so – you could tell if something came from an analog source tape, but the digitally mastered stuff looked quite solid. One a show gets started, everything ran smoothly, without much stuttering or buffering, which was probably the most impressive part of the whole thing. There are also features that let you chat with other people who are watching the same show, which may be problematic if someone is a bit further ahead, and spoilers you to what happens (I’m not sure if it works this way or not…).

There’s a good variety of content right now, with an abundance of music videos. There are some longer format videos, from National Geographic and a few “How To” programs. The program asks for your age, and on some content, you get a “Must be over 16 to view” in the upper corner (this showed up on one of the music video channels for me), so there must be some sort of content tagging for appropriateness.

It’s a toy – a very slick toy, but ultimately not as useful as other P2P apps, and wont be anywhere near the success of other video sharing methods like YouTube, etc. You can’t save content for later or offline viewing, and other than the interactive aspects of watching video together, there’s little novelty in the system. Frankly, it looks like something that bored college students will play around with when they’re bored, and nothing more.

I had a haircut in the morning, and was able to go to that without much trouble (even though I felt like crud), but when I got back, it just got worse. I think I slept for about 6 hours, and Lionel was very sweet and cuddled with me a good portion of that time.

When Amy got home (after being stuck in traffic due to a police roadblock near Miracle Mile), I felt a little bit better. She’s been bringing over movies and other stuff that’s at her parents place, and so we watched Little Women, which actually was quite good, despite being distracted by Christian Bale who I now completely associate with being Batman.

I’m feeling a bit better now, and if the headache goes away (I’m probably just dehydrated), I think today will actually be functional.

I got Amy kind of hooked a few months ago – we’ve watched Kokoro Toshyokan, Maria-sama ga Miteiru, Princess Tutu, and Rose of Versailles, and started in on Shoujo Kakumei Utena (until I ran out of DVD’s during the Black Rose arc), and some other random stuff (mainly Ghibili movies).

The new fall season is upon us, so we watched a few first episodes on fansub (links are to the japanese sites for each show):

Ginban Kaleidoscope – Figure skating girl who goes to catholic girls school has a hard fall on the ice and gets possessed by a dead Canadian boy. Go figure. It’s not as weird as it sounds. Amy and I made it all the way through this one. The animation quality is pretty poor but watchable.

Black Cat – Fighting show. Turned it off after about 30 seconds.

Aria – Sci-fi show, but very slow. Girl works for little alien, helping with a gondola business in a venice like city on a different planet. Goes faster than Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, but slower than Kokoro Toshyokan, and has a very nice color and character designs. We got about half way through before Amy decided it was too slow and I stopped it.

Prayers – Sci-fi fighting show with music. Lasted about 5 seconds longer than Black Cat.

Blood + – Watched this with Lucas a few weeks ago. It’s basically a remix of the Blood OVA, so it’s a vampiretastic mahou-shoujo horror show. The dialog needs work – if you think the main character is going to say “BLOOD”, she will. May possibly be interesting, depending on if a plot actually occurs.

Paradise Kiss – (also watched with Lucas) Studious high school girl is accosted by a bunch of fashion/design school students, and gets persuaded to model for them. Very high production values, and interesting characters. Quite possibly worth watching – I think I might try this out on Amy.

Mushishi – (watched with Lucas) Guy hunts forest spirit things called Mushishi, who only he can see. Pretty show with unusual character designs, but kind of creepy. May be interesting.

So, there you have it – a little slice of what I like and don’t like. As a note, I don’t really mind mech or fighting shows, provided they have a good plot. The problem is that’s a rare combination, found only in shows like RahXephon or Gundam 08 MS.

Overall, this season looks like it’ll be ok – 2 or 3 watchable shows is a pretty good ratio.

I soiled my armour I was so scared!

Morning Musume vs Lizard

Basically, Morning Musume is a very popular (and very generic) girl group in Japan that takes in new members and graduates the old ones. It also has some splinter groups, like MiniMoni which focuses on songs for kids (and has a really wacky movie out…).

But this… strapping meat onto their foreheads and letting a lizard loose, now that’s just cruel and unusual (for the girls or the lizard, take your pick)!

(mini Japanese lesson – “musume” (?) = daughter)

It was really Lucas who got me hooked, but that’s another story entirely.

At All Costs is the most recent book in the series (I think it’s book #17, but I’m not sure). It comes after Crown of Slaves, and happens in parallel with the events in Shadow of Saganami, which it references frequently.

For the uninitiated, the series follows Honor, who in the first book is a starship captain, through her life, being in wars, falling in love and experiencing loss, being a POW, commanding others in battle, etc. It’s “hard” sci-fi – things follow rules set out by the author (in this case, it’s mostly gravity control providing for faster than light travel and communication, and biotech advances) , and although technology progresses, they never use it as the fantasy smoke and mirrors you get in a soft sci-fi story (like most TV and movie sci-fi).

I think what keeps me reading is the characters and situations. While there is intelligent life other than humans, it isn’t done cheesily like in Star (Trek|Wars) – the species are distinctly different. The human cost of war is played up a bit, and characters on both sides of the battles are given depth. The universe is consistant an interesting, and the settings are expanded from book to book – in this sense, it’s very much like the first 4 Harry Potter book (that’s another story in it’s entirity…).

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the books is that they plays with social, religious, and political ideas in an abstracted but consistant manner. You have whole societies based on readily recognizable concepts, drawn out over time, with interesting consequences.

I enjoyed reading it. The ending was a bit abrupt (as they usually are) and leaves you wanting more, but it looks like the next book is coming out next april. I can’t wait!