I planned on riding Apollo, my Yamaha FJR1300A, up to New York state this weekend to watch my friend Bond get married. Unfortunately the weather looks a little something like this:

I don’t mind riding in the rain, and I don’t even mind riding in a thunderstorm. However, that’s a lot of consistent rain to go through on a ten to twelve hour ride.

I’m going to try to remind myself that my Mazdaspeed3 is a fantastic car and not be too bummed out about it.

At least this way I can drink coffee while driving and experience this thing people call “air conditioning.”

With H1N1 (“swine flu”) still making the headlines, I thought it was time to write up Pandemic, a co-operative board game that pits up to four people against four diseases that threaten to take over the world.

Made by Z-Man Games, Pandemic requires at least two people to play. The game starts out with all players in Atlanta, GA (presumably at the Center of Disease Control). Twelve randomly determined cities throughout the world have been infected by the four diseases. Game setup determines what cities are “sick,” but each disease will infest three cities. One unit of disease is represented by one cube. The more cubes on a city, the more infected it is. When a city gets four infection cubes the disease jumps to a nearby city, thus spreading across the globe.

The game is lost if there are eight outbreaks, or if there are no more cards to draw, or if all of the disease cubes are used.
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Rosie had a massive cluster of seizures almost two weeks ago. After two shots of Valium, I brought her home and immediately started her on a regime of phenobarbital. I am happy to say that after some initial sluggishness and “spacey” behavior (which my vet warned me about), Rosie is back to her normal self. She stalks squirrels and birds in the back yard like an apex predator, and runs around and plays with the other dogs.

She also loves sitting on the couch with me and watching television:

She’s not out of the woods by a long shot, but it makes me happier that she hasn’t had any more seizures. I was concerned that she may have a tumor or brain injury that was sparking them; so far the phenobarbital is keeping everything under control. The next hurdle is testing her blood in a couple of weeks to make sure that her medication isn’t adversely affecting her liver and kidneys. Depending on what the doctor says, we may lower her dose a little bit. She’s in the middle of the road as far as dosage goes for her size; it would be nice to wean her off a little bit to further protect her innards.

Thanks to everyone for emailing, calling, texting, leaving messages on Facebook, and being concerned about Rosie. I love her dearly and I really appreciate folks giving her hugs, virtual or otherwise.

Call of Duty 4 is my favorite Xbox 360 game of all time, and I am anxiously awaiting the launch of Modern Warfare 2 in November. Infinity Ward, makers of the Call of Duty “even” numbered franchises, released this trailer of the upcoming Modern Warfare 2 game for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation3. Watch it and then come back.

Okay, a few thoughts:

1. The title of the trailer mentions the AC-130 gunship … but there was only a few seconds of footage of the new unlockable kill streak reward. What gives? What happens to you when you activate the AC-130 mode? Do you stand still with a lightbulb over your head, like in COD4 when calling down an airstrike? This shit’s important!
2. The game looks much better than COD4, which I thought looked pretty good when I first bought it. The biggest thing that stood out in my mind was the greenhouse scene in the trailer; the detail and lighting is a lot more vivid than the original Modern Warfare.
3. The weapons look great, does anyone know what the rifle with the radar readout on the left side is supposed to be?
4. I like that the overall team score in the lower left hand corner now has a very simple “WINNING” or “LOSING” status. It would be even better if you could customize the user interface. I don’t really care about the score, I just care about winning or losing. If I could get rid of the score altogether I’d do that in a hot second.
5. I don’t like that there are a ton of status messages that appear right in the center of the screen. Yeah, it’s cool to see that you just stopped DonkeyRapingShitEater from an 11-kill killstreak, but do I really need that flashed up in big letters in the center of my HUD?

   

6. Is it November yet? This might be the first game I’ve ever pre-ordered and scheduled a day off for.

About a month ago, my HTC Touch running Windows Mobile 6.1 on Verizon crashed while I was reading my email. I finished reading my messages when the phone rebooted, but the phone kept displaying one unread message. It bothered me, but I couldn’t find a solution online. I learned to live with it, and stopped getting excited when the Touch reported one new email. That is, until it happened again last night, but this time with text messages.

I text a lot. It’s the primary reason I own a mobile device — I don’t like talking to people I can’t see. I turn my ringer off when I am at work, so it is very important to me to have an accurate unread text message count. I searched again, but this time I found something: FixUnreadCount by R. Elmer. I am not sure how it works, but it resets the unread count for email and text messages. I am not sure if it sets them all to zero, or if it knows how many messages you’ve truly read. In my case it didn’t matter. I set off in search of the application.
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After deciding to repeat week four of the 100 Pushup Challenge, I threw in the towel. I realized that I was holding back on my “rest” days and altering my workouts too much to justify the limited gains I was making during the Challenge. Yes, the sets were difficult, and yes I was getting better at doing more pushups. However, in order to perform as well as I could, I would do limited or no ab and cardio work the day before. I did P90 Basic Phase 03 a few times, and found that it was much more difficult to perform my Challenge work out the next day.

In order to safe the village, we had to destroy it — so the 100 Pushup Challenge is over for me.

So what am I going to do instead? Until I decide on a longer-term endeavor, I am going to revisit the Great Body short workouts and the P90 Hawaii Fat Burner Express DVD. They were fun, and at this point I just need to stay active.

Two possible candidates for my next workout regime include more kettle bell training or P90X.

I saddled up my 2009 Yamaha FJR1300A and headed down to Georgia last Thursday. I needed to take a break and was anxious to meet up with some of my favorite people. I was also ready to put Apollo up to his first mid-distance road trip.

I have a rule: never install anything new or change anything a week before a motorcycle trip. I followed that rule (mostly), but did do a few upgrades before I left. The most suspicious was adding a set of auxiliary lights low on the forks. I did this well before my trip, but had finally gotten them positioned where I wanted them and secured with blue Loctite. Would the mounts hold up to over 1000 miles of highway travel? Would my ass hold up to over 1000 miles of highway travel?
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I found this linked up from the Lounge forum on Ars Technica: a lady plays popular movie soundtracks on her Yamaha Electone electric organ. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but I was blown away by the performance.

The lady performs all of the major parts of the orchestra by herself simultaneously using the Electone. By what I can tell she doesn’t have any part of the score pre-programmed into the machine. There are times in the video where she adjusts some settings, but I don’t think that makes her job any easier.

I searched for “star wars electone” on found more videos, so if you like this one give the others a try.

The end of the 100 Pushup Challenge’s Week Four is an all-out stress test to see how many pushups you can do at once without stopping. I could do forty before I started the program, and figured I was sandbagging. I was excited to do the test at the end of Week Four; after all I had been cranking out a lot of pushups and going to failure in the last two weeks. Plus, I was skeptical that I would be able to go from forty pushups to 100 in just four weeks.

I knocked out thirty without a problem. I felt strong, I felt like I had made an improvement. As I approached forty, my arms and chest started to get very weak. My rate slowed, and by forty I was creeping along. I completed forty-five reps before my arms were shaking. Done.

Yes, it’s an improvement, but a little over 10% in two weeks isn’t going to get me from forty to 100 any time soon.

However, doing forty-five at once puts me into the hardest category of Week Five. That’s nice, but I couldn’t finish Week Four’s workouts without taking extended rests or without cheating.

So I’m going back down to Week Four, and I’m going to do the middle column this time. I am going to do it all by the book and see if I can hit each rep without doing breaking pace or form.

Overall, my body feels softer than it did before the 100 Pushup Challenge. I think the total body workout I was getting from the Beach Body programs put me in better physical condition. I really want to get to 100 consecutive pushups, but at this rate I may not achieve it for another month. I don’t think I can take being off of a full-body workout for that long.

I came home early last Friday to get some work done and then start an early weekend. When I opened the door, my middle dog Rosie was convulsing on the floor. Her rear legs were fully extended and useless as she paddled towards me with her front feet. Her entire face and chest wet from drool. Whatever happened to her, it had been happening for a long time.

At first I thought she had suffered a spinal injury, but everything seemed okay when I ran my fingers down her spine. I checked her hips next, then her legs. Everything seemed okay. I made a quick sweep of the house to make sure she hadn’t gotten into anything toxic. Everything was in its proper place except for the fluffy guts of a chewtoy. I came back to my little girl and held her close to me while I thought about what to do.

I spent almost five years on a farm as a kid, and we had two dogs with epilepsy. The symptoms looked familiar, and while I was thinking about it Rosie completely stiffened up again. Her eyes dilated completely and drool was streaming from her mouth. I put her collar on and carried her out to the car.
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