Bootcamp pt 8

I almost skipped bootcamp today. I was so tired and the bed was so warm. Alas, I did not give in and got up. Here is what we did:

1 Mile (9min)
15 reps 2 times through

• Squat to shoulder press on upside down Bosu ball
• Rear foot on Bosu lunge w/bicep curl
• Forward food on Bosu lunge w/lat raise
• Bosu hip extensions
• Upside down Bosu push up w/Brazilian crunch
• Chest press on Bosu ball
• Bosu knee dip crunches
• Bent over row standing on Bosu ball

At the end we were supposed to "save time for a 10 min mile." I got on the treadmill and felt pretty good, so I decided to run at 9:13. At about 1/4 mile Tim came around and started increasing our incline- from 0 to 2. Although difficult, I felt that I could still handle it. It wasn't until he went from 2 to 4 that I felt that I was going to die (not in the literal sense of course). I moved the pace to 9:45 just to keep up. I did have to step off the treadmill for 10 seconds, but I got back on and finished. He waited almost another 1/4 mile before taking off all of the incline. Needless to say, I was really tired when it was all over.

Weekend Wrap up...

Sorry a head of time....this may be a little long.

Matt and I were sick most of Thursday and Friday. Yes, it was only a cold, but it was bad as we were achy and headachey and grouchy. Saturday I woke up and convinced myself to go to Bootcamp and I'm glad I did.

First a quote from Tim, our trainer: On a scale of 1-10, we are going to be doing about a 12.5. Nice!

Here is what we did:
• Ran to Washington Park
• High knee running 30 seconds
• 8 point body building move 30 seconds
• Butt kickers running 30 seconds
• 2 minutes to complete the following (we went through 2 times)

1. 10 regular push ups
2. 10 crunches
3. 10 wide shoulder push ups
4. 10 lower body crunches
5. 10 tricep push ups
6. 10 full body crunches
   

• 2 minute to complete the following (2X – second time we did 15 of each)

1. 10 squats
2. 10 lunges (per leg)
3. 10 pile squats
4. 10 curtsey lunges
   

• Half Plank (on elbows and forearms) – we held the position in a straight line and the person at the front ran and jumped over our legs, we went through two rotations
• Side Planks 30 seconds each side
• Run back to the Gym
The end.....for today :)

Nikki started Intermediate training and she did fairly well. I'm sure she will progress rapidly over the next few weeks.

We hopped over to a friends birthday party later that evening. Although we could only stay about an hour, we had a really great time. We played a game called Apples to Apples and it was a lot of fun - thinking about picking it up this week.

We then met our other friend down at Oktoberfest where we drank some biers and ate some turkey leg. Yum! We planned it out well and were able to get to bed around 12:30am.

Sunday was laid back with a small amount of shopping and driving through some neighborhoods looking at houses. As we were driving past one of the open house signs, Matt pulled over and said we were going to go look through it. It was nice...but I don't know about $850,000!!!

I dropped Matt at the airport around 4:30. He is traveling to LA for a few days. I'm sure he will post something if something interesting happens.

Today I got up and went to Bootcamp, here is what we did:

Section 1
• ¼ mile run in 2 minutes or less
• 3 sets of 30 crunches on Bosu ball
• 3 sets of 24 walking lunges
• 3 set of 15 row machine

Section 2
• ¼ mile run in 2 minutes or less
• 3 sets of 10 stabilizer squat with 1lb weight
• 3 sets of 30 seconds plank on stabilizer ball
• 3 set of 10 bicep curl on stabilizer ball

Section 3
• ¼ mile run in 2 minutes or less
• 3 sets of 12 side crunches
• 3 sets of 15 squats on upside down Bosu ball
• 3 sets of 12 push ups with Brazilian crunch

Section 4
• ¼ mile run in 2 minutes or less
• 3 sets of 15 leg lifts
• 3 set of 15 chest press
• 3 set of 15 lat pull down

Bootcamp pt 4, running group, Bootcamp pt 5....catch up

This will be a quick wrap-up of what has happened the past couple of days.

Monday morning 6am started Bootcamp pt 4. We met up at the gym again, ran a quick 1 mile and got right into the Life Fitness machines. They have about 20 different machines, which condition a large amount of muscles (quads, triceps, biceps, chest, calves, etc.). We did 2 set of 15 reps each. In between our cycle, our trainer pulled us into the "torture room" as I lovingly call the exercise room. Here he set up 3 areas: inverted leg dip on an upside down Bosu ball, jumproping, rope ladder (two steps between each rung). We did each exercise for 2 minutes.

I also participated in a Running Group on Tuesday night. We ran around the perimeter of City Park (next to the museum Matt works at). The distance is around 3 miles, and boy was I tired by the end of it.

This morning I was in the process of convincing myself to go back to sleep when the guilt set in. The Bootcamp class has only 10 sessions...I'm sure I can make it to every one of them so I got up. Today will be forever known as bands and benches. We met up at Washington Park, ran a mile and got right into the bands session. We used the bands for all sorts of exercises and then when we were tired, we used them some more wrapped around the bike rack. Finally, we headed off to run around the lake again, except this time we stopped at every bench and did 8 bench dips and 10 full body crunches. There are about 12 benches around the lake and I felt the pain at each one. All in all, I am really glad that I got up this morning. I feel great!

Bootcamp pt 3 and the rest of the weekend...

I woke up on Saturday in less pain than I had been since Wednesday, so I decided it would be ok to go to Bootcamp class, and it turned out really well. The coolness of the morning went away quite quickly as the sun came out from behind the clouds. We jogged over to Washington Park (about a mile) and set up to do circuit training in the grass. There were four areas containing one of the following items: medicine balls, dumbbells, cones, and exercise balls. We worked in each area for 2.5 minutes before moving (bear walk, crab walk, lunging, high knee run) to the next area. We all worked out and sweat furiously, with finality coming as a run back to the gym.

Later that day I met up with one of my friends Athena (no not my cat). We met up at a local place called Cafe Europa and had a great time catching up. Cleaning plagued most of the rest of the day, until I was saved by my friend Eric. He had just bought the 1st season of Mad Men and wanted to watch it. Yeah! Now I had a reason to stop cleaning....for awhile at least. We got some wine and pizza and watched two discs (7 episodes). It's a good show and I can't wait to get together with him again and watch some more.

Sunday I drove Yellow Thunder (our scooter) to Wild Oats and got some different kinds of flour in order to get my "bake-on". I ended up making a couple of different types of yeast bread, banana bread, and peach crisp. IMHO they all taste good. :)

Matt came home from the airport around 6:30pm. It's about time, seeing he was gone for a week. We had just enough time to for him to hug and kiss Nikki as well as sneak in a hug and kiss for me before we went out to dinner with our friends Krishna and Yagnesh who are visiting from Cincinnati, OH. We had some great food at Uoki and then we quickly showed them our house (and crazy dog).

All in all a great weekend!

Bootcamp pt 2

It was a bit easier getting up for bootcamp this morning, although Nikki looked pretty hung-over. Funny, I don't remember buy her any booze last night. Anyhow, this will be a short post as I am only going to document what I did.

Ran 1 mile (9:13)
60 Pull-ups
120 Push-ups
180 Squats
240 Crunches
Ran 1 mile (9:45)

My armies hurt...sigh...I am taking some Advil now.....

Bootcamp pt1

The morning was moist…no this is not another Throw Mama from the Train story, this is one of a total different caliber. This one begins a week ago where I paid money to join a month long class named Bootcamp. My thinking was that this was the class I would need to help give me the extra boost to kickn my workouts into a higher gear. My goals included increased stamina, better circulation, overall better feeling, possible weight loss, and fun. Did I say fun?!? Sorry, I am getting ahead of myself.

We met at a building at Washington Park. The sun had not risen…of course it wasn’t in the sky yet, the class starts at 6am! Anyway, I digress…we started off with 30 jumping jacks and moved into some light stretching. We did a warm-up jog/run around the little lake which is approximately 1 mile, then jumped right into the work-out….

I don’t really remember the order in which we did the exercises, after a couple of them it all became a blur. Squats, walking lunges, push-ups, step-ups, jumping side to side, jumping back and forward, plie squats, running, donkey kicks, and some more that I can’t recall at this moment.

I had a funneh thought as I was doing the last run, I actually paid someone to inflict this pain on me? Oh well, as Matt always tells me “You’re a crazy masochistic person!” I guess I will stretch out today and get ready for my next session on Wednesday.

PS Keep the donations for the Susan G Komen run coming in…thanks so much!!

Running a 5K for Susan G Komen foundation, can you help??

The company that I work for, SPECTRUM Human Resource Systems Corp has decided to sponsor a running group for the Susan G Komen Race for the Cure®. Of course I signed up as I would like to get another race under my belt, but also because I very much support the breast cancer research that this company is known for. My company is paying for my entrance fee, but I am writing to you to ask for a donation to the foundation. Please check out my "personal" page: http://www.komendenver.org/site/TR/Race/General?px=1492659&pg=personal&fr_id=1070&s_tafId=17990

The race will be held on October 5th, which is right around the corner. If you are able to donate please click on the link above and then either click on the Support Mandy! link or Make a Gift link. If you know others who may like give please feel free to forward this on.

Here is some interesting information that the foundation forwarded to me:
The Komen Race for the Cure® is the largest series of 5K runs/fitness walks in the world. In 2008, races will be held in more than 100 U.S. cities and 3 foreign countries. Over 1.3 million participants are expected to attend. These race series help fund important breast cancer research, as well as, breast health initiatives on a local level. 75% of the proceeds remain in the local communities where the race is held. 25% of the Race proceeds help fund breast cancer research.

Thanks for your support!
~Mandy


I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind.
Some come from ahead and some come from behind.
But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see.
Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!
~Dr. Seuss

Califonia Academy of Science

Back from the land of fog and crazyness. San Francisco, the odd city that it is. I will put up a few posts over the next couple of days detailing a couple of the interesting places and peeps I met. Most of the time we worked. Oh, how we worked. We worked so hard at putting together a video of how hard we worked, and worked hard at it.

Here it is! Love, and lots of it, to everyone!

The hilarious dog-ness....

Matt and I get so much entertainment from Nikki. From not being able to grip the hardwood floor to over-sized jowls flapping in the breeze, everyday is a new adventure. I have decided to share a few...

Earlier this year, I took her outside to go to the bathroom thinking that it was business as usual. As she was squatting to go potty (poo to be exact) a fly went by her which made her pinch it off and run to the other end of the yard.

A couple of months ago my mom and I were walking around the neighborhood. We stopped to let her sniff the grass. Lo' and behold another dog had been in this area and his/her owners did not pick up after them. Nikki, not paying attention as usual, stepped in the poo. Feeling this new scary thing on her foot, she leapt in the air and landed behind us on the sidewalk.

Last night Nikki and I were walking around the neighborhood, again. As we were coming up to this one yard I noticed a couple of statues in the grass. As we passed I saw that they were two dogs squatting with bubbles over their heads that said 'No poo' and 'Not here'. I thought they were cute - Nikki was terrified. I looked down and she had her eyes all bugged out and was trying to get away as quickly as possible. For the next block she kept turning back and giving them the stink eye.

Check this out...

Last night we watched a spectacular documentary named War Dance. Set in the Northern part of Uganda, it followed a group of school children who were competing in a dance/song competition. I really liked it because it was able to tell a story of the school on the way to the competition along with giving a background on three of the children without any lull points. The music and cinematography were excellent. Make sure you have tissues, this one will make you cry.

Information about the organization helping children in Northern Uganda can be found here:

Shine Global

Absolutly Bas-Ass Spaceship Blog!

Thanks to MetaFilter for this link. It's a blog of really good, high-quality scans of spaceship concept art. Bonus cool thing: It's a blogspot blog.

http://conceptships.blogspot.com/

IPS Dome Breakdown

Here's a quick video I shot and a co-worker edited detailing the company breaking down our vendor dome. Enjoy! (be careful of volume)

Hello Mr. DJ? (Pt. II)

4th of July and Travel

(One of my more successful firework pics)

I am writing to you live from San Francisco, where I have to returned to work on another planetarium. The weather here is not what I was expecting. In fact, the city itself is not what I was expecting. 'Frisco has a certain grime and dirtiness I wasn't prepared for. I guess that comes from basing all of my assumptions its various depictions in movies. It's not a bad place. There are many good restaurants and cool shops to check out, don't get me wrong. But what justifies it being one of the most expensive places in the United States to live? Is really that cool?

The visit to the homeland of Grand Rapids was wonderful. Mandy ran the Buck Creek 5K, we had a great 4th of July party (complete with a fireworks-prompted visit by the law--link to pics), a well-executed surprise party for Jess (link to pics), and many other tales of fanciful whimsy. I will try to migrate these pics over to Flickr, once it stops acting like a bitch and lets me upload again.

I left on Wednesday last week (the 9th of July) for San Fran. Mandy has stayed on a few additional days and will be leaving tomorrow with her mom and Nikki to drive back to Denver. Her mom is then flying back out to Grand Rapids at some point early next week. I will be returning home on the 23rd or 24th of July, returning just in time for a visit from Chad. Wish Mandy and family good luck on their travels.

It's been a crazy summer so far. It's been great to have so many visitors come out to Denver. It's also been equally amazing that I have found ways to be there at the same time they've come to visit. By the time I get back home, I will have been gone for over a month... a long time to be away from home. I'm looking forward to being back there for a little while before heading out again. Maybe I'll get some time to ride our new moped, an amazing 150CC monster. I will take pictures of it when I get back and write a little post on the guy who sold it to us, and why we think it's a good investment.

That's it from San Fran. Peace n' love!

Satisfied / Exhausted

I am sitting on an Amtrak train in Chicago waiting for it to depart. I am connected via a wireless cell modem that the company I work for has bought us to use around the US and in the UK. It's a nice fringe benefit for working there. It does, however, come at a cost, even if it's not a monetary one.

This past week (9 days in total) was IPS. The International Planetarium Society meeting. IPS is the single largest gathering of planetarium vendors, directors, content producers, immersive display engineers, and VR junkies in the world. It only happens every other year, and it alternates what side of the Atlantic it's held on. Next time (2010) it will be held in Egypt. Due to its size and our status as a relative new-comer to this field, it was vitally important that we showed well. In the end, I think we did that, though, and at the risk of repeating myself, it came at a cost.

We demoed two of type of ulta-black projectors (500,000 to 1 sequential contrast) that SEOS develops. These two projectors were placed in a 15' fiberglass dome and fitted with two tons (4,000 lbs) of gear shipped out from the UK at some exorbitant price. The dome assembly and subsequent fitting of gear began last week Wednesday (the 25th of June) and continued through the end of the show (July 3rd). To assemble the dome and make all of the gear function, we assembled a team of five engineers, two project managers, and a carpenter. In addition to that, we had to use union teamsters, electricians, and decorators. Apparently, this is required by law. Some of these guys were great, and I had a good time ordering them around. Others, however, were not. For example, we had to wait for 2 hours for a union decorator to arrive so he could Velcro our black curtains over the dome, a job any one of us could have completed in less than 10 minutes. The dome went up with little trouble. Since I have no experience assembling such things, I concentrated on getting the servers and projectors functioning. Here our troubles began.

I don't want to bore anyone who has read this far with all of the technical hurdles we had to overcome throughout the show, but I can at least say it was intensely frustrating. There were more times than I'd like to remember where the group of us would work for 18-20 hours straight and be worse off than we were when we started.

In spite of these difficulties (or maybe because of them) we came off as a very cohesive group. The general attitude from show-goers was that we were very professional, approachable, and technically adept. I think I'd agree with everything, but there is obviously much room left for improvement. These tradeshows need to be managed like any other project and have the same time and resources applied to them as there would be for any other project we do. If not, we're going to end up Egypt running around like headless chickens with flashlights. [Interestingly, in Egypt we will not be allowed to wear our black polos, since black is only worn by people in mourning].

Our central showpiece on the night we sponsored was a project called Space Confidential. It was sort of a contest to get teenagers to produce content using the our software. It worked really well. The two winning girls were flown out with their mothers to Chicago for the event, where they presented the space show they had created and answered questions about how they did it. It was especially good since all of the rest of the main-stage presentations were tech-demos. Ours really got to the heart of the idea that content still is king.

We finally have a new site up that goes into more detail about what we do, who we are, etc. You can check it out here. The web tester in me has already noticed a slew of grammatical errors and dead links and will be passed on to the company designing the site.

I've posted a bunch of pictures I took at the summit on our Flickr stream. The stream can be accessed by clicking on a picture on the little slideshow applet running on the right-hand navigation bar.

It's 3:30 in the morning... do you know where your geek is?

Sorry for the delay in posting. Yesterday, I worked from 7:00AM to 5:30AM, with very few breaks for eating, etc. I slept from 5:45AM until 10:00AM and have worked straight until now... 3:30AM. I don't write this to complain. In fact, I'm having a great time. It's been a little stressful with some of our preparations going awry, but everything seems to be falling in place. The light at the end of the tunnel is due, in no small part, to the amazingly diverse and flat-out brilliant peeps I work with. It's been a great ride so far, and we haven't even opened the doors to public yet.

Currently, I'm sitting in the server-room of the Adler Planetarium waiting for a cohort to return with a license dongle to activate a server we have here. I will write more about this nifty piece of hardware, but only after its unveiled. Imagine the announcement of the G3 iPhone, except for planetarium nerds. It's going to be that cool.

I have been taking lots of pics (some actually are pretty good) with my new lens, and will posting them once I've had more than 18 minutes to sleep. All is well in the Chi-Town. Peace n' love!

IPS Update 1

I think I'm going to try to do video updates while I'm here. I have the camera and I'm way too tired to do much typing, so here it is. Peace n' love from the windy city.

(Tired Matt rambling about domes and whatnot in Chicago)

On the Move

Everyone's on the move. This next month is going be crazy for all of us. Here's a quick breakdown of our travels. While reaching us here in Denver will be ny-on impossible, you can still reach us on our cells, email, text messages, twitter accounts, and blog posts. With the various modes of communication available to us now, there's no excuse to not get in touch.

I am going to bring my web cam with me. Time-permitting, I will post a few video updates on IPS in Chicago, the integration in San Francisco, and the festivities back in Grand Rapids.

Matt
San Francisco - June 22 - June 25
Chicago - June 25 - July 3
Grand Rapids - July 3 - 9
San Francisco - July 9 - 18

Mandy
On the road between Denver and Grand Rapids - June 25 - June 26
June 27 - 28
Grand Rapids - June 26 - July 14
On the road between Denver and Grand Rapids - July 14-16

Mandy's Mom
Flying from Grand Rapids to Denver - June 24th
Denver - June 24 - June 25
June 24 - 27
On the road between Denver and Grand Rapids - June 25 - June 26
June 27 - 28
Grand Rapids - June 26 - July 14
On the road between Denver and Grand Rapids - July 14-16

Jess and Mike
Flying from Denver to Grand Rapids - June 23

On the road again... just can't wait to get on the road again...

VIDEO - Surgeon Uses Robot to fold Origami

Impressive. The wingspan of the bird is less than the length of a penny. The robot arms move so fluidly, it looks like the doc is right there. Actually, he was on the other side of the country, controling the robot from over the internet. Impressive.

This is quite the toolset

This is a 1,470 piece tool set available at Sears. Insanity.