« Archives in August, 2008

The whey sledgehammer

August 30, 2008 / Debo posted in Fitness / No Comments

For the past three weeks, I’ve been on a fat-loss stint so that when I start powerlifting in the fall, my lean-muscle:fat gain will be on the happier side of 1.0. Really though, this was just for fun. The plan was to go for four weeks in total. The diet looks more or less like this, on a lifting day (I lift at 6am):

1. 0.75 scoop whey + 30g dextrose + 5g creatine (Split between pre & post workout)
2. 1 cup cottage cheese + 1tbsp flax + celery
3. 0.75 scoop whey + 1 tbsp psyllium
4. 75g white or red meat (weighed cooked) + steamed broccoli
5. 75g white or red meat + steamed broccoli
6. 75g white or red meat + cucumbers + flax

Of course there are minor transgressions — adding 1 teaspoon of olive oil to some broccoli here and there, and eating an extra spoonful of cottage cheese or something — but not much beyond that. No cheat days, they don’t really work for me. On a couple of days I’ve let myself have a handful of nuts or a couple of spoonfuls of peanut butter, or just more protein. (Right now I’m getting around 0.8g/lb of bodyweight. I find that fat loss halts for me if I go 1g/lb or higher, as is usually suggested.)

Anyhow, I was getting bored of eating the same things over and over again, which was when the idea to do a mini- Velocity Diet occurred to me. In a nutshell, the V-diet is just drinking 5-6 shakes a day (w/ milled flax or other minor additives) for 28 days. It’s for hella fat people, mostly. I figured I’d just try it for a week. When I got a brief, funny scared feeling in my stomach at the thought of it, I knew I was going to have to try it. I mean, is fear not just a physiological “good idea!” signal to the mind?

Now, I’ve read about the v-diet quite a few times, and quite frankly I think it’s stupid. I think it’s stupid for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I like to eat _real_ food, not some weirdo chemical stuff that comes out of a plastic tub. But then again, so does the author of the v-diet!

But for a whole breed of people who’ve never set dietary limits on themselves, I can see why it works.

Anyhow, I’m not about to start philosophizing about this. Michael has no time for trivialities like ‘doubt’ and ‘reflection’. It seems like a fun way to end this 4-week stint, so I’m going to give it a shot. 7 days is nothing, really.

Since everyone who does the v-diet seems to feel the need to post their progress online, I figure I’ll play along. So, starting Monday, I’ll have a 7-day log of how things go.

It’s gonna be awesome.

Setting up CruiseControl.NET web dashboard on IIS 6.0

August 26, 2008 / Debo posted in Software / 3 Comments

I ran into a few gotchas trying to do this today, so I’m jotting them down here. The instructions on the ThoughtWorks site are a tad sparse, although the installer is ostensibily _supposed_ to set up the dashboard for you. I had no such luck.

Some things they don’t tell you:

In IIS Manager, you will probably have to:

  1. Click Web Service Extensions, allow things that look like they should be allowed (ASP, for one thing). I also had to add an extension for ASP.NET v2.0.50727 that linked to the same ISAPI file that they tell you to add in the configuration of the virtual directory in the ThoughtWorks instructions.
  2. Once I did that, the dashboard would at least start to render, but then it would crash while trying to write to some obscure equivalent of /tmp/ in the Microsoft Framework directory. I just right-clicked on that directory, selected Security, cursed at how useless the resulting dialog was, and then set the group IIS_WPG to have write permissions to the directory.

Happy CruiseControlling.

P.S. Thanks to Jimmy for channeling my rage and providing helpful hints here and there. Probably would have taken me a couple hours longer to bang these out if he hadn’t been online.

Notes on Hunger, by Elise Blackwell

August 24, 2008 / Debo posted in Books, Literature / No Comments

It’s strange how few novels one actually comes across that are written by people with a formal education in creative writing. (I’m not sure if this is more telling of the profession or of the mass readership.) However, it is perhaps because of this lack of popularity that they usually end up in the bargain bin. I found Hunger, by creative writing instructor and MFA Elise Blackwell, at Chapters for four dollars a few months back. The slim, sparse cover caught my eye before the price tag did. It’s quite beautiful.

Hunger is a book about newly married couple of Soviet botanists who are forced to guard the research granary from pillagers during the siege of Leningrad. The novel is short — it is more of a novella — and it is told from the perspective of the husband in sort of a continuous, rambling narrative that jumps back and forth in time. This has a touch of post-modernism to it, but is comparatively subdued and surprisingly coherent despite all of the bouncing around. There’s no gaming around with punctuation or sentence structure or anything like this.

Like most “academic” writing exercises, there are a lot of glib and pithy value statements couched as observations throughout the novel, but I can’t remember any of them feeling overbearing, excessive, or forced.

All in all, I found this to be a great read — so much so, that I am going to hunt down some more of Blackwell’s stuff. I encourage you to do the same!

More cheeky less food

August 19, 2008 / Debo posted in Fitness, Thoughts / No Comments

I’m grinding towards a kinda tough fitness goal right now, and so I’m always poking around for little reminders and galvanizers to keep me focused. Some quotes in the bank that are great to run through one’s mind while staring at the bar in the squat rack at 6am:

We improve ourselves by victories over ourself. There must be contests, and you must win.

– Edward Gibbon

Hesiod, the Greek historian, noted, “Observe due measure, moderation is best in all things.” Yeah, but what could Hesiod bench press? Plato, noted for underperforming in the squat, said, “We should pursue and practice moderation.”

– Dan John

“If you always put limits on yourself and the things you can do, physical or anything, you might as well be dead. It will spread into your work, your morality, your entire being. There are no limits, only plateaus. But then you must not stay there. You must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.”

– Bruce Lee

Inspirational? Well, I find them to be so. But of course, those aren’t reasonably what is going through my mind when I’m about to duck under a heavy-ass weight. Usually, it’s closer to something like:

WHAT A SPLENDID PIE! PIZZA PIZZA PIE!

– Serj Tankian

I mean, who really ever waxes existential before 7am? (And hell, Tankian is downright eloquent when shoved up against, say, Tom Araya. They both get the blood up, though.)

Thoughts on “Education of a Bodybuilder” by Arnold Schwarzenegger

August 19, 2008 / Debo posted in Books, Fitness / No Comments

Despite all the ribbing that Arnold takes for being a simpleminded, thick-skulled musclehead, he’s really quite a smart guy. This comes through in the sections of his bodybuilding writings that are associated with motivation, mindset, and discipline.

Education of a Bodybuilder is split into two parts, with the first ostensibly being an autobiography and the second about how to train. However, the first part of the book is really about Arnold’s ability to focus on something with such intensity and confidence that it almost inevitably comes to be. This is the meat of the book, in my opinion, and is incredibly inspiring. I’d recommend it to anyone who has a goal or two collecting dust somewhere and needs a swift kick in the turbine to get them on track.

There are some great pithy lines in there for you to throw at your friends — or in your Facebook quotes page, as you like it. (Sigh.)

Arnold on Austria:

There seemed never to be enough space. Even people’s ideas were small. There was too much contentment, too much acceptance of things as they’d always been. It was beautiful; it was a great place to be old in.

And on discipline:

Every day I hear someone say, “I’m too fat. I need to lose twenty-five pounds, but I can’t. I never seem to improve.” I’d hate myself if I had that kind of attitude, if I were that weak. I can lose ten to forty pounds rapidly, easily, painlessly, by simply setting my mind to it. By observing the principles of strict discipline that bodybuilding taught me, I can prepare myself for anything. I have developed such absolute control over my body that I can decide what body weight I want for any particular time and take myself up or down to meet it.

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