Relay run preparation

This week so far has been a very lazy week. I had the very first training session for the relay run in July and I went swimming on Wednesday.

I had this wicked plan for today’s early morning to go for a jog in the park nearby, but firstly my bed was holding me really, really tight and secondly I made a mistake the day before. I ate a cheeseburger with french fries. My stomach was aching and sounded for some periods like a chemistry lab.

I switched my jogging dates to the weekend and will hopefully be in a better condition without having to fear the revenge of fast food debauchery.

My suffering with my heel spur is still going on. After the relay training I once again felt a pain under my foot and I had problems to correctly step on the ground. I’m thinking about getting some insoles for my shoes to absorb some of the pressure that pushes on my heel.

On the other hand, I’m very happy to announce that I had no serious problem to run the whole distance that is given. And I was also able to keep up the pace with the other runners who were running with me.

I’m also keeping an eye on the scale and like I expected, the weight is dropping slowly but it drops. It’s something around 3 kilograms since I started with a more intense training. I still haven’t changed my nutrition that much, because the past showed me that the final results will turn into something totally different and unexpected. I’ll change my nutrition in two or three weeks and even then not too drastically.

Lowered expectations… or the lack of time

It’s a cross. I overslept like three times this week. Firstly, I missed gym two times in a row. Ya, I know that four o’clock in the morning is a terrible time to get off for some training. Anyhow, I feel good with and I’ll stay with it (if I can make it out of bed). Whatsoever, I also missed my regular alarm clock for work today. It rang, I noticed it and fell asleep again. Luckily the loss of time wasn’t that huge so I can get back home pretty early.

I took a training session the day before and, well, my overall condition was not that bad. Okay, okay, I just missed one week but I was actually expecting the worst. Maybe I’ll be able to throw some loops this weekend and get a little boost on my stamina.

The Sony network is back online and Sony’s offering lots of free stuff and compensations and all kinds of shit. I’ve got another 45 days left to play the “DC Universe Online” and hopefully Sony will come up with a lowered subscription fee as well. I was totally fine with 24 Euros for three month but unfortunately did I have some issues with one of my credit cards and they put me back on normal rate. Life’s tough sometimes, you know?

It’s floating away

There’s this strange, weird phenomenon I’ve recently discovered in my life. Everytime I start something with a special goal in a creative matter, it’s no longer coming to an end. When I was younger, like years ago, I finished so many art projects like solo album (which was more a compilation of some tunes of mine). I did some nice stuff with the band I once had and so on. Nowadays everything gets a start and right after beginning the whole thing is stuck or abandoned. I was working on my second solo album and it didn’t make any progress. I wanted to dig a little deeper into the Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop workflow to improve my exposure with these tools. I wanted to do much more photography and it stucked as well. I feel more and more as if time is slipping away. Actually, time is always floating away and barely able to grab, but why do I have this immense lack of time? Probably because I’m working too much. Work is wasting like eight and a half hour a day and it feels like an eternity or two till it’s over, so one reason for this time lack seems to be my daily work. For the love of God, I can’t quit because I need the financial income. Damn it.

time

Sleep might be a reason but I cut down the time for daily sleep to something around five to six hours, which has to be enough. Sleep is for the weak, never forget that. One thing that was sucking time like a blood-thirsty vampire during the last month was the need for technical maintenance on my PCs. Changes to another operating system. Service pack crashes. Raid crashes. Hardware exchanges. All this cost a lot of time and most the invested time was wasted, because it mostly led to another maintenance or repair. Right now, I finishing working on my PCs so that I can go by and work with them instead of on them. PC number four is still in queue, but it’ll stay there for a while because I simply don’t have the delight to build up another machine that wastes time.

I actually forgot what I wanted to say in this particular post, because I’m pretty tired and exhausted today and today’s gym session will be horrible I guess. Anyhow, I’ll continue unveiling the time killers in my life and hopefully get back to more creativity or other kind of ways to spent my rare free time.

Slightly getting back to basics

There’s something wrong in the state of Denmark… not that I know, but I just wanted to start the post with a sentence that does not start with “I was blabla…”

Actually, I’m a little pissed by myself because I simply don’t feel like I should. No, I’m sick in any kinda way, but it’s my whole condition that bothers me. I’ve got a hell too much weight hanging on my bones, I’m once again unsatisfied with my job and I haven’t found the time to actually follow up some of my hobbies. But first things first. The whole weight thing is going to change, definately. I just ordered new tires and flexible tubes for my bicycle to get mobile again, because I’m so nerved of walking. Getting me back on the road also means that I personally will get a little bit more “sportish”. I just love to cruise around with my bike around the city without any specific destination. Most importantly, I’m going to grab my photo camera to catch some fine moments while being on the road. I miss shooting with my and even though I don’t have the real talent to be a great photographer I’ll keep on doing this, because this is giving the relaxation I actually need in my daily life.

Over the last couple of days and weeks I had to struggle with lots of system and hardware crashes at home (that’s the curse of having so many PCs) that I had to fix that I had a massive lack of free time actually. First it was my gaming system that died while upgrading to Windows 7 SP1. I fixed this issue to about 90 per cent. After having solved this particular problem, the raid system in my HTPC started having issues as well and one hard drive wasn’t running as stable as I would like it to be. I replaced the hard drives, cloned the whole system, rescued the data and installed a fresh, new system which isn’t finished yet already. I’m not in a hurry with that one and I’m not going to stress me with that one. As long as the XBMC is running, everything is fine.

Bicyclet

There’s a trip to London coming up within the next two weeks and right after that I’ll restart doing early sessions at the gym again. I’m stressed and nerved and bothered with the packed gym right after work and I’m sure to gain much more when I’ll go to gym pretty early. I’ll also change my nutrition as well and get back to the healthy way of life. To get the facts straight, I’m going back the roots of my personal straight edge project. It’s clear for me, that I don’t want to live the way how I live at the moment because it’s simply not good for me. I’m doing fine when it comes to points like stamina but I completely fail meanwhile due to things like pure strength.

Anyhow, it’s curious to see how everything goes down the drain when my bike’s broke. It’s always the same, the tires burst and I gain pounds and pounds and pounds. There seems to be some kind of an invisible band between me and my bike. Like it was between Elliot and E.T. in the movie of the same title. If my bike’s doing well, I’m doing well. If my bike’s getting sick, I’m doing sick.

Till my short vacation I’ll keep my gym schedule as it is now and I’ll do some slight changes to my nutrition. The tough break is going to be right after the vacation which leads me back to no sweets and candy. I’ll also reduce the amount of coffee per day, which is now at an average of four to five huge cups a day. I’ll also reduce the consumption of Diet Coke for one simple reason, Diet Coke causes hunger and hunger finally leads me to eating and eating causes weight. Well, there are tons of things that will change all with this one particular goal to get back to a healthier nutrition, but one the other hand I’m not going to live like monk in a monastery. I still want to get a little bit of fun out of life.

PS: If you want to ask about the pic in this post, well, I just thought “Sex Sells”

In seach of…

Once again and nearly one year after first time seeing them a Fu Manchu concert was on my plan. If there’s one band I like, it’s Fu Manchu. There are always favourite bands but this particular one survived all these years with being nearly untouched in my personal hall of fame. I’ve also been a huge fan of bands like Sepultura or Slayer, but with the years the interest faded and nowadays they are just bands I revisit sometimes to remember “the old days”. Fu Manchu is more rock solid and they were able to resist all kinds of trends I personally had and I was always listening to them. The point is simple, you know what you can expect from a band like them and you sure will get what you expect. Even though they are categorized as a Stoner band I’d rather say that they’re just a rock band with a fine California attitude, a passion for sun and muscle cars and they actually seem to care about no trend. Their sound is desert dusty, their riffs just grooving and their rhythm catchy.

So, this time I saw them once again in Berlin’s club called the “C-Club” which was previously known as the Columbia Club and Fu Manchu was offering something special. Playing the whole “In search of…” album from the first to the last track. YES! One of my faves with one of my favourite songs, “The Falcon Has Landed” The band started the gig with ass kicking songs like “Hell on wheels” or “Mongoose” and started with the “In search of…” after, I guess, the fourth song of the show. I always love it when a band goes by and plays one particular album in complete. Some songs of the album were played in a kind of extended versions and reminded me a little of a jam session. Well, this what you can call jam session considering that you’re watching Fu Manchu and not King Crimson. Like mentioned before, Fu Manchu is pretty basic, but that’s what’s charming about them and what I really like. Finally, after finishing the complete album they also played some most wanted songs like “Weird beard” and “California crossing”. This band is truely, honestly rocking the stage and I’ll visit their concerts again and again and again. You simply get what you want, rock’n’roll to the face.

Lazy edging

Seriously, I became pretty lazy within the last days after my vacation. Though I am glad that I can keep my new “low” weight and I am willed to do everything in a sports way to hold it that way I wasn’t able to trick my inner ratfink and make it off to gym for a nice training session or to the park to do a jog. I awoke everyday since Monday at 04:00am to the ring of my alarm clock and I really wanted to go to gym BUT I was actually too tired to do so. Well, I guess I just need one normal session at the gym in the evening, just to lick some sweat and blood and I’ll be able to kick off in the very early morning.

Well, finally I can say at least that everything else in project “Straight edge 2.0” works perfectly fine and there were no rule breaks until now. Okay, okay, okay, okay… there was  this small cupcake this one day but though it was extremely sweet and felt like it holds galleons of calories it wasn’t such a serious sin like the ones in the past. You might remember the two beers right after the start of the first straight edge project. So, this week will pass without sports BUT I promise to do better in the future, next week to be exact.

And then there was darkness

There’s something like a curse on me when it comes to Linux installations because nearly every setup I have done in the nearby past was made twice by me. The same happens to my media center. As you may know I was searching for a solution with my vsync problem while watching movies and other videos. After hours of research and being pretty hopeless and without any other idea for soluting my problem I decided to uninstall the Nvidia graphics driver and rebooting the system. I guess you know what happened next – RIGHT – NOTHING. I got a simple black screen.

Lost in a bouquet

According to the fact that it was a kind of late and I didn’t wanted to search the root of the problem I decided to reinstall the whole system by using my old /home partition. Well, well, well, that thought was nice but Linux Mint thought differently. First of all the install routine was not able to write into the existing partitions so I had to rearrange the whole system disk with a third-party software. After that the installer told me that he still was not able to write or delete conflicting system files. The solution was to format my old home directory (d’oh). Now the installer was able to start and run the setup routine. The previous problem solving took me nearly one and a half hour. So, the setup was running until the progress bar showed me 93% and then it told me that it was unable to write GRUB into /dev/sda. Actually I don’t have a /dev/sda or a /dev/sdb neither. The solution was to delete /dev/sda and /dev/sdb before running the whole setup routine in a terminal session, the installer was then able to see the correct order and names of my hard drives. Yep, another hour wasted…

Finally I made it to get the whole system running again and the system is running a way better then it was before. nvidia-settings will be applied automatically on startup, I can use screenlets and the whole booting progress is much faster (don’t know what was wrong before). I also decided to let the system install the nvidia proprietary driver and not to install it manually with a “whatever-setting”. So vsync is now enabled by default BUT it still does not work in video playback, but it’s only a matter of time until I find a solution for that problem.